North Macedonia: A Name Agreement in the Age of Nationalism?

Valbona Zeneli

Security, Europe

The end of the name dispute between Skopje and Athens is victory for NATO but also for the European Union.

NATO kept its promise to keep the door open. Since yesterday, the small country in the Western Balkans, North Macedonia was formally invited to become its thirtieth member. This historical decision bears tremendous importance for the Republic of North Macedonia and its Euro-Atlantic path, for the future of the Western Balkans, but also for NATO itself and the strained transatlantic relations.

The accession protocol signed by all twenty-nine NATO members will be sent to the country’s parliaments for approval, a process that everyone is hoping to be finished by the end of 2019. Greece will be the first country to proceed with ratification tomorrow, a strong signal of political will and good neighborly relations, a sign that could be positively turn the tide in the much-troubled region of the Western Balkans. The Greek ratification of the protocol would signal the formal entry into force of the new name, and from that moment the “Republic of North Macedonia” will be used.

The End of a Twenty-Seven-Year-Old Dispute

What to many may rightly seem as a petty issue, the decision to change the name from “Macedonia” to “North Macedonia” involved a twenty-seven-year-old name dispute between Skopje and Athens. At the heart of this dispute lay the common questions of modern European history, nationalism, and difficult neighborhood relations.

When Macedonia declared independence 1991, the breakup of Yugoslavia was accompanied with a high surge of nationalism in the Balkans. Greeks fiercely objected to its neighbor’s use of Macedonia, worrying that the newly born country was appropriating Greek history going back to Alexander the Great, and claiming relations to the ancient Greek civilization of Macedonia, implying territorial ambitions over the northern region of Greece, fueled by the sort of nationalist claim of the first Macedonian constitution that the newly independent country was “a nation for all Macedonians.”