Long read on the Macedonian name issue

Everybody is so hung up over the Alexander the Great monument in downtown Skopje, but in my opinion two other monuments at the same square explain the argument of the Macedonian name better. Visitors there can see two similar, marble throned statues of Byzantine Emperor Iustinian and King Samuil. Justinian, the law giver and partial restorer of the Roman Empire, is honored in Macedonia given that he was born in the ancient city of Taurisium (now a hamlet called Taor in a gorge on the Vardar river just south of Skopje). Samuil, (who is also claimed by Bulgaria, but I won’t be going into that this time, or ever) was a warrior king who ruled a medieval kingdom from the Macedonian lakeside city of Ohrid at the turn of the first and second millenium and is best known for his bloody wars with Byzantium, including the battle on Mt. Belasica (1014). After the battle, the victorius Byzantine emperor Basil II perpetrated an act of such cruelty that he shocked even the medieval world, when he blinded the 15.000 captured Macedonian soldiers, leaving only one of a hundred with one eye, so he could lead the rest of the soldiers home.
So, clearly Macedonians and Byzantines were not friends. Samuil ruled a Slavic speaking kingdom built on the ruins of Byzantium. Why then are Samuil and Justinian honored in similar style in the capital of modern day Macedonia? The answer is that (warning to Greek visitors — if you read further I will not be held liable for your aneurism) modern day Macedonians are not exclusively Slavic, or exclusively descendent from the ancient Macedonian stock, but are a mix of the two (and of a bunch of other, possibly lesser elements).
The essence of the name issue on the Greek side is that, because the Macedonians clearly speak a Slavic language, and the Slavs are believed to have moved in the Balkans in the 5th, 6th century AD (practically yesterday in Balkan terms!) then they have no connection to the glorious Classical period. No such stark divide exists on this side of the border. Yes, we speak a Slavic language. And roughly a third of our names are Slavic, a third are Biblical, but a solid third are from the Classical period. We wouldn’t think twice about naming a child Dimitar or Sofia or Katerina, just as we would name it a Slavic Goran or Vladimir or a Biblical Ana or Petar. Actually, I would venture that the concentration of Alexanders (and especially Philips) is much higher in the Republic of Macedonia than in Greece, where the two warrior kings ostensibly belong). If you observe the broader culture, the similarities between Macedonians and Greeks are startling. Chain smoking men who get homicidal behind the wheel, fast talking women who will give you a piece of their minds (and then some), Macedonian and Greek weddings, wedding dances and drinks are copy/pasted affairs, our approach to love, life, politics, economics, corruption and penchant for conspiracy theories clearly show that we belong to a same culture, despite the different languages. The same, I would say, applies to the Turks, Serbs, Bulgarians and Albanians — if anything, the hatreds between our peoples are not based on some major differences such as existed between the whites and blacks in the American South, but on the narcissism of small differences.
Nikola Mladenov, a late, great conservative Macedonian journalist, used to explain the story of the Slavic conquest thusly (I quote from memory) “Ok, let’s say that the Slavs came in the 6th century AD and killed all the real Macedonian men. Surely, I mean SURELY they didn’t kill all the women! *wink wink*”. Of course that when the Slavs came they didn’t possess the technology necessary for mass extermination of the conquered peoples — they had no gas chambers or machine guns. They could expel some, they could kill, rape, enslave others, but the carricatural portrayal that exists in the Greek consciousness, that the Byzantine lands that were taken by Slavic tribes went through a clean sweep and an entirely new civilization was built from scratch is hogwash. Slavs settled in towns and villages, farmed the land, lived among remaining citizens from the Byzantine Empire, adopted their religion, gave them their language, learnt from them how to build churches and waterworks, taught them how to free their slaves and advance from slavery to feudalism…. As the shrines of Zeus were turned into shrines of St. Elijah, so the Pagan Slavic gods and godesses were transformed into Christian saints and the old customs were given a new, monotheical robe. In a word, we are an omelette which was scrambled and rescrambled many times through the millenia, with the Persian, Celtic, Roman, Hun invasions, the Gothic, Kuman, Avar inroads, the Turkish occupation, the advance of Christianity, the attempts to reform it, then shield it from the Muslim overlords, and yet, the name of the country remained — Macedonia. The omelette can’t be unscrabled now in a purely Slavic yolk and a purely ancient Macedonian egg white. This is not an uncommon situation. A friend of mine from the States, who originated from the deepest, darkest Peru (h/t Paddington bear) spoke Spanish at home, with his family, but one look at his facial features would tell you that he is not a descendent from Spanish colonists, but originates from the Incan Empire. Macedonians, Greeks, Turks, Serbs, Bulgarians, Albanians.. do not have the distinct facial features or color of skin that would help us differentiate one from the other, but as the example of the remnants of the Spanish Empire shows us, it is possible for the conquered native people to fully adopt the language of numerically quite inferior invaders. If you visit Rome, you will see men dressed as gladiators or legionaries in front of the Coloseum, but they will not speak Latin. They will speak a Romanized version of the language of the Germanic invaders who overran Rome. Does it mean that the people living in Rome today have no right to the heritage of the Classical Rome, or that the Arabic speaking camel renters in Cairo do not have the right to show you the ruins of Ozymandias? If we extend the Greek logic in the Macedonian name issue, that we mere Slavic speakers have no right to show off the rich artifacts that we unearth almost daily, it is precisely what it means.
Observe, for a moment, the Greek position in the name issue. If I understand it correctly, uniquely in all of history, modern Greeks are the unspoilt, unmixed descendents of the ingenious race of Pericles and Achilles. The centuries of Roman or Turkish occupation just deflected off them, with no in-breeding. Sure, they threw away their old Gods for Christianity, and can barely recognize the ancient Greek language, but they are pure-blooded members of the Greek nation which recognizes no ethnic or religious minorities (an unsustainable proposition given their deathbed demographics and open borders policy toward the Middle East). In reality, in Classical times the Greek nation did not exist — it was a patchwork of warring city states, whose conflicts, including with the Kingdom of Macedon, helped write some of the glorious pages of peoplekinds (thanks Justin) literature. They had a common culture, and Macedon clearly belonged to it then, just as today, as I see it, Macedonia, Greece and the rest of the Balkans also share a common culture. Normal people would be glad to share a common culture with a linguistically different nation. In fact, Greece itself, or rather Byzantium, had a pro-active approach when it helped prepare the mission of St. Cyril and Methodius, to translate the Bible into the Church Slavonic and to eventually bring Christianity all the way to Vladivostok. That is how a mature and culturally confident country behaves — it sees the neighboring nations as an opportunity, as people you can turn into your own corner. Modern Greece hysterically insists at NATO and EU summits that tiny and poor Macedonia has designs on Greek territory!? It’s pityful and pathetic, a miserable excuse for a regional power.
And, seriously, if the Greeks are the pure-blooded descendants of Achilles, where are their equivalent accomplishments today? Where are the genius Greek writers and musicians? Where are their thousand ship fleets being launched to subdue a rebellious city somewhere? Where is their economic empire? The only thing that makes the Greeks notable today is that their welfare state collapsed before the other similar European welfare states and they compete with outrank Japan in their debt to GDP ratio. Otherwise, it’s a small to mid sized chronically corrupt and dysfunctional Mediterranean state, which managed to win a European football cup once.

VUKOJEBINA NATION STATES

The modern national identity of the Greeks, Macedonians, Serbians, Bulgarians.. is not derived from the Classical period. Then, economic situation dictated that a political organizational unit is a city state with the surrounding villages, and if a city state would be especially blessed (Rome with its laws and legions, Constantinople with its strategic position) it could elevate itself above other city states. The concept of national identity belongs to the 19th century, when industry and railroads made it possible to expand the economic, and with it the political reality, from the feudal fiefdoms into larger associations of several or more cities or regions into a nation state. This brought about a particular set of tragedies to the Balkans, where ethnically mixed feudal empires (Austro-Hungary, the Ottoman empire) vommited out “pure” nation states with much accompanying carnage. Some of these nation states have particulary drunken, mythical origin stories, the Serbs with their battle for Kosovo, Albanians see themselves as heirs to the ancient Illyrians and the Christian warrior king Skenderbeg, and let’s not even get started with the Greek myths. I like to see it as a case of geopolitics rather than mythical blood and soil predetermination of a particular tribe to have an independent nation state. We saw two historic collapses of empires in the Balkans, which have certain similarities. Both the collapse of the Byzantine Empire at the turn of the millenia and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, began at the fringes and spread to the core. Byzantium lost its outermost provinces first — northern Illyrian provinces became independent kingdoms, their Middle Eastern provinces followed, and naturally, an empire based in Constantinople would first lose a border city on the Danube, like Belgrade, or the northern Bulgarian swamps, than a core province like Macedonia, based around its second city — Solun (Thessaloniki). Similarly, when the Ottoman Empire collapsed, it was a particular case of peeling an imperial onion. Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia all came to existance in about the same time, in the outermost parts of their current territory — Greece in the Peloponesus, Serbia in the region around Belgrade and Bulgaria in the northern provinces on the Danube. As a bigger feudal beast such as Russia or smaller but industrial, richer and better armed Austro-Hungary or Britain would fight the Ottomans, of course that the first Ottoman provinces they peeled away are the ones who were farthest away from Istanbul. A tweep from the West somewhere recently found it very amusing that there is a word in the Slavic languages for a very remote, desolate place. The word is vukojebina, and it roughtly translates as “the place where the wolves go to..” um, copulate? The Peloponesus in the 19th century was a vukojebina, population 500 people and 5.000 goats. Heck, Athens was a vukojebina back then. Montenegro, which famously held off the Ottomans and preserved its independence, was a vukojebina. It was not worth taking or holding. By contrast, the region of Macedonia, with its rich arable land and large industrial cities and, of course, Solun, was a core part of the Empire. The fact that, aided by Russia or Austria, Serbia or Bulgaria were the first to declare independence in the Balkans, doesn’t speak about the natural inclination or God given right of these peoples to have a nation state. It tells us that their remotest parts were vukojebini, as seen from Istanbul, while Macedonia was not. If you go to Kriva Palanka, the last Macedonian city on the Bulgarian border, or if you go to Kustendil (named after Justinian) the first city on the Bulgarian side of the border, the people are the same. Similarly, if you go to Kumanovo, or Vranje, the two cities on the Macedonian and the Serbian sides of our border, the people are, again, the same. In the Slavic ocean, the nations blend into each other, there are no stark linguistic distinctions as there are between Macedonians and Albanians or Greeks. So, if the Russian army that helped Bulgaria declare independence, was a bit more trigger happy on a given day as one of the many armistices with the Turks was being negotiated behind the scenes, Kriva Palanka could easily have been a Bulgarian city today. Or, if the Cossack commanders got drunk and failed to capture Kustendil before the armistice was signed, it would have been a Macedonian city today. There is no reason to elevate the Bulgarian or Greek or Serbian right to nationhood in the Balkans, other than their relative distance from Istanbul. The process which appeared during the long decline and fall of Byzantium, when the farthermost provinces declared independence first replicated itself in the bloody national struggles in the 19th and early 20th century and geopolitics, not actual cultural or ethnic distinction, determined which nation stated appeared first and expanded the most.
Once these big three nation states (Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia) got established in the Balkans, they expanded exponentially on the ruins of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, built their nation-state myths and tried to suppress the other ethnic and religious identities within their borders. Bulgaria was soon beaten in the struggle for Macedonia by Serbia and Greece, so we should see these two as principal winners of the scramble for the Balkans in the early 20th century. Serbia went to a myriad of wars in the late stages of the century to try to keep its enormous conquests (Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo..). The Serbian kings came up with the concept of a South Slavic nation — Yugoslavia — to justify their expansion, and it was later perpetuated by Tito who wanted to preserve this state. This is where Greeks get the Macedonian national story exactly backwards. Greeks insist that “Tito invented the Macedonian national identity” to attack the part of Macedonia which Greece took over in 1913. In fact, Tito was pushing the Yugoslav national identity against the Macedonian identity. Macedonian nationalist movements were pushing for an independent nation state since the first half of the 19th century, along side the similar Greek, Serbian, Bulgarian and Albanian movements. Like these other movements, our movement also borrowed historic symbols from whatever period or story seemed the most epic or romantic at the moment, but it was clearly meant to have a state, based in Solun, with a majority Macedonian population. It was only after the protracted struggle for Macedonia and the settlement of many thousands of Greek refugees from the Ionian and Black Sea provinces, and then a strict policy of assimilation and another wave of expulsions following the Second World War, that the ethnic composition of the region of Macedonia changed and what is today Greek Macedonia became, well, Greek. In the part of Macedonia that was taken over by Serbia (which is now the Republic of Macedonia), Tito supressed the movement for an independent and united Macedonia, in its borders before the First Balkan War of 1912, and throughout the existence of Yugoslavia, the secret police would detain and kill proponents of independent Macedonia. So, not only that it didn’t promote the Macedonian national identity, Tito’s Yugoslav state tried to replace it with a Slavic centered, Yugoslav identity.
True, Yugoslavia took an active role in the Greek Civil War, until Tito’s split with Stalin. After the war, Macedonians wanted nothing more than to unite with Macedonians living in Greek occupied lands. Tito didn’t care about this, but he wanted to expand Communism in Greece. Yugoslavia helped both Greek Communists and Macedonian guerrillas in Greece, until the fight with Stalin, when these units sided with the USSR, and Tito ordered his subordinate Macedonian leaders to stop helping their brethren in Greek Macedonia, and the rebel movement was crushed with the help of the British and American armies. This is something that is deeply engraved in the minds of the Greek military and diplomatic elite, and you can often hear them see Macedonia in the light of a northern aggressor. But, in 1991, when Yugoslavia collapsed and Macedonia declared independence, it was the utmost expression of defeat for the Communist side and ultimate victory for Greece and the West. Newly independent Macedonia rejected Communism and began asking where to apply for membership in NATO. The Greek response was hysterical. We were applying to become their allies and trade partners, which is surely the surest guarantee against any future aggression. Greece responded with childish insults and spreading paranoid fears and domestic consumption nationalism. I’ll try to explain it as I see it. Besides the ideological struggle, which is now turned on its head, there is a strong ethnic and status quo element in our dispute. Greece was Serbia’s ally in the period of the Ottoman collapse. It concluded that if Serbia can lose its gains from the Balkan wars and the First World War, then, maybe Greece can too. This is the main reason for the name issue. It’s not the name. It’s an attempt by Greece to prevent the creation of a new nation state on its border and to maintain the 1913/1918 partition of the Balkans. It would rather have Macedonia under Serbia than independent. Greek nationalist leader Antonis Samaras negotiated with Milosevic over this, and later, shortly before he became Prime Minister of Greece, went on the record saying that the best option for Greece is if Macedonia collapses in ethnic strife between Macedonians and Albanians. That was the leader of an EU and NATO member state, openly wishing ethnic war on its northern border. The fact that Greeks sent out volunteers in Bosnia or still refuse to recognize Kosovo are similar residual effects of this fear to upset the order of 1913/1918. On the other hand, Turkey, the Albanians, Croatia, Bulgaria to some extent, want to overturn this order, but at the same time there are division along religious lines and competing interests. In my opinion, the cause of regional stability would be best served by a proud Macedonia that has a strong, pronounced national identity, which will help discourage competing nationalisms in the region. A weak Macedonia, one where a person like Zoran Zaev is openly, daily undermining the Macedonian national identity, will only invite more aggression. People in Brussels may say that it is the culture of compromise or the closing of open issues, but in fact it is exhibiting weakness in a region here weakness is not seen as a friendly gesture and is not responded to with kindness.
Macedonia responded to the Greek blockade in NATO and the EU realizing that it needs to have a two-pronged approach. One is to assert itself as an independent, sovereign reality in the Balkans and the other, to see that the Greek blockade doesn’t affect the core of its movement toward the West. We can’t sacrifice one for the other. We can’t accept abject humiliation to join EU and NATO because that undermines our sovereignty. And we can’t sacrifice pro-Western alignment on the altar of national pride. So, mostly under the VMRO party, which is the one true expression of Macedonian nationhood and also of pro-Western alignment (the other major party are the former Communists) we worked to achieve the core of the EU and NATO alignment without formal membership. We have fully free trade with the EU and free travel, and we gladly join NATO in their missions, but at the same time we made no concessions on matters of national pride. I personally believe that the Greek position, that we should cotton swab all Macedonains to DNA test them and see if they are truly the rightful heirs to ancient Macedon, is extremely nationalist, Nazi even, and Nazis should not be appeased, they need to be confronted, mocked and beaten down. This was the goal of the push to promote the full spectrum of the Macedonian heritage. This was not meant to be a substitute for pro-Western reforms, and after 10 years of VMRO we have a far more deregulated and lower-taxed economy than Greece, which is currently led by a Maoist who believes his country should leave NATO and whose foreign minister is friends with Alexander Dugin. So, the Cold War partition is largely turned on its head. Still, and this should be a matter for an equally long article, so I won’t go into it too far and wide, in the past three years we had a push in which diplomats from the US and the EU, mostly from the left wing parties, allied with the former Communist party of Macedonia to bring down the VMRO. The goal is clearly to have Macedonia as a full EU and NATO memmber. The result, especially after the ethnic Albanian parties were recruited for the goal, is that Macedonians who before supported EU and NATO with more than 90 percent, are now deeply distrustful of the West and feel badly humiliated. Macedonian sovereignty is undermined, all neighboring states are muscling in to take advantage of the situation, Russia sees an opening as well, and we might exchange an informal but happy and productive relationship with the West with a loveless and frustrated forced marriage (and even this outcome is in doubt as nationalist movements are mobilizing in Greece). I don’t think we should seek a solution to the name issue. We should agree to disagree on the name. We should use the 1995 Interim Accord to have Macedonia as a full or some sort of associate member of NATO (I’m not so hot on EU membership anymore and I believe that our current level of association is satisfactory, but if the majority of Macedonians opt for EU membership, I also believe that Greece should not have the right to oppose it). All Greeks of good will need to understand that, if they truly believe that their exclusive claim on the name and the heritage of ancient Macedonia is fact based, they destroy their own argument when they use blackmail to try to win it. If we disagree over facts, we need to have experts in the field discuss it. Once you resort to the argument of force — “if you don’t accept our position we will keep you out of NATO and that may lead to ethnic war in your country” — you admit that the facts you state to support your claim are not strong enought to win the argument. You can take out a gun and force me to say that 2+2=5. Or even if you are right. We are arguing about a matter of personal and national self-determination and I don’t think there is a right or a wrong, you either feel as a Macedonian or you don’t, but let’s say you are right and I’m wrong, and I falsely insist that 2+2=5. You can take a gun and force me to say that 2+2=4, but you don’t win a factual argument that way — you’re just being a thug. Ultimately, the historic heritage of the Balkans in the Classical period is so enormous, it was such a Golden Age for the peoplekind (hi Justin) that it can’t belong to just one nation. I laughed a few years ago when I saw the Greek Ambassador in the U.S. praise how D.C. is built with Greek style temples and with ample use of the meander and other Hellenic symbols. There was a Greek expressing pride that a city of Anglo-Saxon settlers, half way across the globe, on the land of the Powhatan Indians from the swamps of Virginia, built mostly by using African slave labor, looks like an idealized version of Athens. But, that same Greek diplomat gets into a raging fit if a similarly styled budiling is built in a city just a few hours drive north along Alexander the Great highway? Grow up.