Macedonia and Identity Politics After the Prespa Agreement 0367407299, 9780367407292

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MACEDONIA AND IDENTITY POLITICS AFTER THE PRESPA AGREEMENT Edited by Vasiliki P. Neofotistos

Macedonia and Identity Politics After the Prespa Agreement

This book explores issues of national identity, history, and language in light of the 2018 Prespa Agreement. Designed to resolve a protracted and bit­ ter dispute, the agreement signed by the Macedonian and Greek foreign ministers on the banks of the Prespa Lake stipulated that the Republic of Macedonia change its name to the Republic of North Macedonia. The chapters examine the social, political, and economic conditions and events that led to the agreement and the implications and consequences for identity politics in the region. Consideration is given to the ways in which, and the reasons why, identity/identities, difference/differences, modes of belonging, and experiences of injustice and discrimination have been mobilized. By focusing on the Prespa Agreement, the collection also offers valuable insight into the processes involved in (re)making boundaries, (re)defining ethnic and national identities, (re)inventing citizenship, and (re) writing national histories. Bringing together expert contributors with intimate knowledge of, and long-term engagement with, the region, this volume will be of interest to scholars and students of anthropology, Slavic and East European studies, history, and international relations. Vasiliki P. Neofotistos is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Univer­ sity at Buffalo, The State University of New York, USA.

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Macedonia and Identity Politics After the Prespa Agreement

Edited by Vasiliki P. Neofotistos

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First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Vasiliki P. Neofotistos; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Vasiliki P. Neofotistos to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Neofotistos, Vasiliki P., editor. Title: Macedonia and identity politics after the Prespa Agreement / [edited by] Vasiliki P. Neofotistos. Description: London ; New York, NY : Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020029489 (print) | LCCN 2020029490 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367407292 (hb) | ISBN 9780367808761 (eb) Subjects: LCSH: North Macedonia–Politics and government–21st century. | Final Agreement for the Settlement of the Differences as Described in the United Nations Security Council Resolutions 817 (1993) and 845 (1993), the Termination of the Interim Accord of 1995, and the Establishment of a Strategic Partnership between the Parties (2018 June 17) | North Macedonia–Foreign relations--Greece. | Greece–Foreign relations–North Macedonia. | National characteristics, Macedonian. | Macedonian question. | North Macedonia–Name. Classification: LCC DR2253 .M325 2020 (print) | LCC DR2253 (ebook) | DDC 949.7603–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020029489 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020029490 ISBN: 978-0-367-40729-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-80876-1 (ebk) Typeset in Times by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

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To Tarun

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Contents

List of figures List of tables List of contributors Acknowledgments

Introduction: Macedonia: what’s in a name?

ix xi xii xiii

1

VASILIKI P. NEOFOTISTOS

1 “Three Countries, Two Lakes, One Future”: the Prespa Lakes and the Signing of the Prespa Agreement

28

LORING M. DANFORTH

2 The hollow signifier “PRESPA”: some reflections on the lake, the Agreement, and the state

51

ROZITA DIMOVA

3 A glass half full or a poisoned chalice? The Prespa Agreement and the modern Macedonian language

75

VICTOR A. FRIEDMAN

4 When the ethnographic field gets unfriendly: identity politics and censorship in the Greek region of Macedonia in light of the Prespa Agreement

93

MARICA ROMBOU-LEVIDI

5 Voters and clients: elections in Florina before and after the Prespa Accord

121

ANASTASIA KARAKASIDOU

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viii

Contents

6 The Agreement that brought the nation to completion and extinction: Macedonian political parties and the framing of the Prespa Agreement

147

ALEKSANDAR TAKOVSKI

7 Seeing double: political polarization and identity politics in Macedonia, before and after the Prespa Agreement

173

ANDREW GRAAN

8 Innovation after Prespa

206

FABIO MATTIOLI

9 Fantasies of citizenship: post-territorial nationalism and Macedonian emigrants in Turkey

227

BURCU AKAN ELLIS

Appendix 1: Full Text of the Prespa Agreement Appendix 2: Dialect Atlases Index

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250 268 284

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Figures

1.1 Map of Prespa 2.1 Google’s map of Prespa 2.2 Dupeni Beach near Markova Noga where the water

withdrawal created small islands 2.3 The dilapidated Hotel Evropa in Oteševo 7.1 A stenciled graffito of the anti-Prespa Agreement slogan,

“The name is the identity.” 7.2 Macedonia’s “Star of Vergina” flag, used from 1992 to 1995 7.3 The current flag of Macedonia 7.4 A view of some of the neoclassical structures built as part

of the Skopje 2014 project 7.5 A poster by Zoran Cardula featuring the Skopje Post Office

building, constructed in 1974. In the wake of the Skopje

2014 project, celebrations of Skopje’s modernist architecture

spiked both inside and outside of Macedonia 7.6 A still taken from the mock reality TV show “Mešan Brak,”

which was featured as a skit on the Macedonian comedy

program, Fčerasni Novosti. The skit humorously depicts

a Macedonian family “torn apart” by the referendum on

the Prespa Agreement 7.7 A still taken from the mock reality TV show “Mešan Brak.”

The parents have divided their living room, and even the

coffee table, to reflect their stances on the Prespa Agreement 7.8 A still taken from the mock reality TV show “Mešan Brak.”

The family’s adult son pleas for his parents to end their

political feud 7.9 The logo for the independent news outlet, Nova TV 7.10 A billboard featuring the logo of TV Nova, a now defunct

news outlet that was friendly to the Gruevski regime 7.11 The logo of the VMRO friendly, Radio Free Macedonia 7.12 The logo of the US-funded, Radio Free Europe

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29

53

58

68

175

175

176

176

177

179

180

180

188

189

190

190

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x

Figures

7.13 A sticker featuring the #protestiram slogan, which was used in protests against Gruevski in 2015 and 2016 7.14 A banner featuring the #bojkotiram slogan, which was used to protest the 2018 Prespa Agreement 7.15 A 2018 billboard promoting a referendum vote for the Prespa Agreement. The sign declares, “The EU will help us to build the rule of law.” 7.16 A 2018 poster decrying the Prespa Agreement. It states, “Who gave you the right to negotiate about my name and identity? #Our Name is Macedonia.” 7.17 The early phase of the pro-referendum rally held in the yard of the Government Building. In the background, videos of 1950s Skopje are projected against a screen 7.18 The flag procession that was part of the September 8th #bojkotiram rally. Here the flag bearers shake an unfurled “Star of Vergina” flag before the statue of Alexander the Great A2.1 OLA map of “Lips” (Králik and Waniakowa 2009, 67) A2.2 OLA data “Lips” (Králik and Waniakowa 2009, 66) A2.3 OLA data points (Siatkowski and Waniakowa 2009, 19–24) A2.4 OLA-MDA map “Lips” (Markovikj (2020, Map 43) A2.5 OLA-MDA data “Lips” (Markovikj 2020, Map 43) A2.6 OLA-MDA data points based on Markovikj (2020, 1) A2.7 MDA basic map Gajdarova (2008, 40) A2.8 MDA data points based on Gajdarova (2008, 33–39) A2.9 (a) MDA “ugly” detailed (Markovikj 2018) (b) MDA “ugly” generalized black and white (Markovikj 2018) (c) MDA “ugly” generalized color (Markovikj 2018)

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195 195 196 197 198

199 269 270 271 276 277 278 279 280 281

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Tables

5.1 European election results for the Florina Prefecture at large

and the three electoral districts (Florina, Amindeo, Prespa) 5.2 July 7, 2019, national elections results in Florina Prefecture

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128

139

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Contributors

Loring M. Danforth  is Charles A. Dana Professor of Anthropology, Bates College. Rozita Dimova  is Associate Professor of Southeast European Studies, Department of Languages and Cultures, Ghent University. Burcu Akan Ellis  is Professor of International Relations, San Francisco State University. Victor A. Friedman  is Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Humanities, University of Chicago and Honorary Associate, La Trobe University. Andrew Graan  is Researcher in Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Helsinki. Anastasia Karakasidou is Professor of Anthropology, Wellesley College. Fabio Mattioli  is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne. Vasiliki P. Neofotistos  is Associate Professor of Anthropology, The State University of New York at Buffalo (SUNY-Buffalo). Marica Rombou-Levidi is a Social Anthropology and History post-doctoral researcher at the University of the Aegean. Aleksandar Takovski  is Assistant Professor, Faculty of English Language, AAB College, Kosovo.

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Acknowledgments

It has been my great privilege to collaborate with scholars whose work has inspired me for years and has taught me so much about people in lands close to my heart. My deepest thanks go to all the contributing authors for their collegiality, kindness, punctuality, and patience. Without them, this volume would not exist. Special thanks go to Loring M. Danforth, who read the introduction and four chapters, generously contributed his copyediting skills, and offered comments that helped the authors clarify some ideas. My warmest thanks go to my parents, Niki and Panagioti Neofotistos, who have always been a never-ending source of love, encouragement, wis­ dom, and guidance. I am so very lucky to have them. My son Akhilles has opened up a whole new world I never knew existed, and warms my heart every single day. Watching him grow is one of the big­ gest joys of my life. He has generously provided the diversions, laughter, and play needed to help make me a more focused writer and a better-rounded person. My husband Tarunraj Singh has been my biggest cheerleader and fan. His matter-of-fact approach to life and hard work ethnic are a source of inspiration. In the final stages of putting this book together, the COVID-19 pandemic broke out and upended everyone's lives. During this challenging time, he gave me the precious time I needed to focus all my attention on this project while juggling his own academic responsibilities and taking care of our son. To him, in deepest appreciation for his support and strength, and in gratitude for all the cups of coffee he has been making me every single morning over the years, I dedicate this book.

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Introduction Macedonia: what’s in a name? Vasiliki P. Neofotistos

On June 17, 2018 the Greek and Macedonian foreign ministers, Nikos Kotzias and Nikola Dimitrov respectively, signed a landmark agreement whereby the constitutional name of Macedonia (the Republic of Macedonia) and the official name under which the country was admitted to the United Nations in 1993 and the Council of Europe in 1995 (the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, or FYROM) would change to North Macedonia (the Republic of North Macedonia). The agreement, widely known as the Prespa Agreement (Συμφωνία των Πρεσπών/Преспанскиот Договор in Greek and Macedonian, respectively), was signed on the Greek side of Greater Prespa Lake, which is shared by Greece, Macedonia, and Albania, in the village of Psarades in a ceremony attended by Macedonian Prime Minister Zoran Zaev, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, and foreign dignitaries, including the European Union’s Foreign Affairs and Security Policy High Representative, Federica Mogherini, and Commissioner for European Neighbourhood Policy and Enlargement Negotiations, Johannes Hahn.1 In January 2019, Macedonia’s parliament passed an amendment to the constitution to rename the country to Republic of North Macedonia and shortly thereafter the Greek Parliament ratified the Prespa Agreement. A decades-long acrimonious dispute, rooted in 19th-century nationalist struggles, between the two countries over the use of the name “Macedonia” thus came to an official end, altering North Macedonia’s geopolitical sta­ tus and opening up the way for the country’s accession to NATO and the European Union. This edited collection brings together the critical voices of junior, midlevel, and senior scholars who have a steadfast engagement with Greece and the country now known as North Macedonia—mainly anthropologists, but also two linguists. Our central objectives are threefold. First, we aim to explore and analyze the social, political, and economic conditions and events that led to the signing of the Prespa Agreement. Second, we seek to investigate and interrogate the implications and consequences of the Agreement for identity politics in Greece and North Macedonia, but also in Turkey and also in Bulgaria. As such, this collection is not addressing a new topic (see, for example, Antonov et al. 2012, Cowan 2000, de Munck

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Vasiliki P. Neofotistos

and Risteski 2013, Pettifer 1999, Roudometof 2000), but rather a new devel­ opment and the themes arising therefrom that can shed new light—uncov­ ering new aspects and revealing new tensions—on a topic of long-standing interest to scholars of the Balkan region and to a wider audience across a spectrum of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, a topic that has also profoundly affected the everyday lives of the citizens of what is now North Macedonia. We use the term “identity politics” to refer to the ways in which, and the reasons why, people have mobilized identity/identities, difference/differences, modes of belonging, and experiences of injustice and discrimination. Third, borrowing Clifford Geertz’s thesis that “small facts speak to large issues” (1973, 23), we treat the Prespa Agreement as a small fact that lends vital insight into the processes involved in (re)making bound­ aries, (re)defining ethnic and national identities, (re)inventing citizenship, and (re)writing national histories.

The Prespa Agreement and the Macedonian Question The Prespa Agreement is but the latest chapter in a long and vehement struggle that became known as the Macedonian Question in the late 19th century, as the Ottoman Empire lost control of its territories in the Balkans and nationalist movements emerged. The Macedonian Question involved Greece, Bulgaria, and Serbia, and centered on conflicting claims and counterclaims over the people and the territory of Macedonia, which had been part of the Ottoman Empire from the late 14th century. Geographic Macedonia, according to a generally accepted definition that has informed the debate about Macedonia’s physical geography since the 19th century, is bounded by the Šar and Osogovo Mountains to the north, the western mountains of Rhodope and the lower course of the river Mesta (Greek Nestos) to the east, the Aegean sea, Mount Olympus and the Pindus range to the south, and mounts Jablanica and Korab to the west (see Wilkinson 1951, 4–5; Poulton 2000, 1; Rossos 2008, 1). The diversity of the population in 19th century Macedonia was so complex that it gave rise to the French culinary term “Macédoine,” indicating a salad mixture composed of fruits or vege­ tables in small pieces. As Rossos notes (2008, 61), the controversy over the people and the territory of Macedonia began as “a war of propagandas,” produced and disseminated by nationalists in the neighboring countries of Greece, Bulgaria, and Serbia, which had been created as independent states out of territory of the Ottoman Empire with the support of the European Great Powers. These newly independent states (and likewise Romania) used their educational institutions to maintain schools in Macedonia, reli­ gious and monastic institutions, and cultural organizations with a view toward advancing nationalist policies and claims and toward eradicating Macedonian consciousness and identity, whose formation had already been evident by the 1860s (Rossos 2008, 61). The production of maps by the three countries played an important role in this regard. In his study of the

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Introduction

3

ethnographic cartography of Macedonia between 1730 and 1950, Wilkinson (1951) illustrates the lack of consensus concerning the representation of the population’s size, composition, and distribution. The propaganda and counter-propaganda campaigns turned into “a war of armed bands” before 1900, providing the background against which the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO, or VMRO in Macedonian), an organ­ ization founded in 1893 by a small group of educated men, emerged. The rallying cry of IMRO “Macedonia for the Macedonians” (Makedonija na Makedoncite) was favored by speakers of what today we call (and what then many of them called) Macedonian, but it also included speakers of other, non-Slavic, languages, such as Aromanian and Albanian.2 IMRO organized in 1903 an uprising against Ottoman rule, known as the Ilinden or St. Elias Uprising because it started on Prophet Elijah Day (July 20 in the Orthodox liturgical calendar/August 2 in the Gregorian calendar), with the aim of establishing an independent Macedonian state.3 The apex of the uprising was the establishment of a revolutionary government in the mountain town of Kruševo—the so-called Kruševo Republic—that lasted for ten days before the Ottomans recaptured the town and suppressed the uprising.4 The Macedonian Question during the early 20th century revolved around whether the inhabitants of the geographical territory of Macedonia were Greeks, Bulgarians, or Serbs and around vigorous and even violent efforts in Greece, Bulgaria, and Serbia to bring this population into their respective national folds and thereby lay claim to the territory of geographic Macedonia. Families and even individuals within families inhabiting this territory frequently shifted loyalties depending on their experiences, inter­ ests, and priorities (see Gounaris 1996). The struggle among armed bands, coupled with the mobilization of public opinion (see Brown 2003, 40), culminated into “a war of stand­ ing armies” during the Balkan Wars of 1912–13 (Rossos 2008, 61). After the Second Balkan War, the territory of Macedonia was forcefully parti­ tioned by the Treaty of Bucharest in 1913. Greece acquired the southern portion of Macedonia (often referred to as Aegean Macedonia, especially by ethnic Macedonians), Serbia gained control over most of the northern portion (often called Vardar Macedonia), and Bulgaria acquired the north­ east portion (often called Pirin Macedonia). At the end of the First World War the national borders were redrawn, whereby Greece retained the part of Macedonia it had acquired by the Treaty of Bucharest, Bulgaria lost Thrace, and Serbia as part of the newly formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (renamed Yugoslavia in 1929) acquired control over approxi­ mately 40% (see Brown 2003, 41) of the territory of geographic Macedonia. Importantly, the Macedonian Question was transformed after the First World War and during the interwar years 1918–39. In Aegean Macedonia, campaigns of forced assimilation, aimed at forging the area’s diverse pop­ ulation into a homogeneous population comprising only Greeks, unfolded and conformed with the Greek nation-building project. Strategies included

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the settlement of Orthodox Christian refugees from Asia Minor, following the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1922–23, and the subsequent change in the composition of the region’s population, as well as the prohibition of the use of “Bulgarian”—a term often used in Greece to categorize all the Slavic languages spoken in Greece’s northern region (Karakasidou 1997, 187)—or any other language (Aromanian, Arvanitika [Albanian]), other than Greek in public. The latter strategy intensified greatly especially in the north and in the Arvanitika-speaking regions in central Greece and the Peloponnese during the dictatorial regime of Ioannis Metaxas (1936–41). Jane Cowan (1990, 43), for example, notes that in the market town of Sohos, people who did not conform to the directive concern­ ing the exclusive use of Greek were forced to drink castor oil and were put in jail. As a result of the policy of Hellenization and the intense acculturation campaign, some members of the Slavic-speaking populations of northern Greece—if they had not already done so—developed a Macedonian national identity and came to identify themselves as Macedonians, not Greeks, and as members of the Macedonian minority in Greece (see Danforth 2003, 215), while others embraced the “amalgamation of local identities under the encompassing rubric of Greek national identity” (Karakasidou 1997, 23).5 The Slavic-speakers in the geographical territory of Macedonia that was by now controlled by the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes—what the Serb authorities declared to be “Southern Serbia”—were exposed to a similar campaign of assimilation, albeit unsuccessfully given that those Slavic-speakers who did not identify as Macedonians tended to define them­ selves as Bulgarians (see Danforth 1995, 39).6 Moreover, unlike in Greece, Macedonian was permitted in public performances as a Serbian dialect. In Bulgaria, after the ultimate failure of the Ilinden uprising, IMRO split into two rival factions. The first faction was under the leadership of Ivan Mihailov. Until about the late 1920s, it aligned closely with the irredentist aims of Bulgaria, favoring the incorporation of Macedonia in Bulgaria, but by the early 1930s it called for the unification of the geographical territory of Macedonia prior to its partition in 1913 into a single, independent state (see Rossos 2008, 162). The second faction, often referred to as the Federalist camp, was under the leadership of Aleksandar Protogerov and in favor of autonomy within Yugoslavia. In 1928, Mihailov’s Bulgaria-based faction assassinated Protogerov, leading to bitter infighting between the two fac­ tions of IMRO. The organization under Mihailov’s leadership moved to the far right, allying with Mussolini’s Italy and intensely cooperating with the Croatian fascist organization Ustaše in terrorist activities. IMRO, in addi­ tion, since 1920 often carried out raids into Yugoslav territory in reaction to Serb paramilitary bands’ cracking down on Bulgarian religious and cul­ tural institutions (see Mulligan 2014, 312). The organization was eventually disbanded by the Bulgarian army in 1934, but not before an IMRO member assassinated King Alexander of Yugoslavia.

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5

During World War II, the geographic territory of Macedonia was par­ titioned anew. Bulgaria declared all Slavic-speaking residents of the lands it came to occupy (all of Yugoslav Macedonia except Struga, Debar, and Polog, which were assigned to Albania, and the bigger part of eastern and parts of central Greek Macedonia as well as southeastern Serbia) to be Bulgarians and undertook a policy of forced Bulgarization with varying success depending on geographical location. Albania, which was occupied by Italy, engaged in a similar policy of forced Albanization in the western region of Yugoslav Macedonia it then controlled. In the regions of Greek Macedonia that were under German (central regions) and Italian (west­ ern regions) control, there was comparatively greater tolerance toward the Macedonian population. According to Rossos, many Macedonians pre­ tended they had adapted to their new situation—a survival tactic Rossos (2008, 186) describes as “hostile neutrality”—when interacting with the occupation authorities, and in general they accepted occupation passively, avoiding collaboration with the occupiers.7 According to other accounts, some dopii—speakers of Slavic dialects identified in linguistic scholarship as belonging to the Southeastern Slavic dialect continuum—in Bulgarianoccupied territories on the east side of the river Strymon in Greek Macedonia registered as Bulgarians either because they self-identified as such or because they could get food coupons.8 The Greek Civil War of 1946–49 between right-wing monarchist forces and left-wing anti-monarchist (communist) forces in the aftermath of World War II played a key role in the formation and maintenance of Macedonian national identity (see Danforth 1995, 75), especially in the western parts of Greek Macedonia.9 During the war, many Slavic-speaking Christians who came or had already come to self-identify as Macedonians joined the left-wing resistance movement because the Greek Communist Party recog­ nized the existence of a separate Macedonian identity in Greece and prom­ ised them equal rights after the war. A chapter in the history of the Greek Civil War that remains beset with controversy is the forcible evacuation of children, known as “refugee children” (deca begalci in Macedonian), who self-identified as Macedonians and Greeks, from their homes in northern Greece to children’s homes in Eastern Europe because of a well-founded fear of persecution (see Danforth and Van Boeschoten 2012). After the monar­ chist forces prevailed and the war ended, tens of thousands of Macedonians fled Greece and settled in the neighboring People’s Republic of Macedonia (established in 1944) and other countries of eastern Europe as well as Canada, Australia, and the United States, forming a Macedonian transna­ tional community. Based on a probably conservative estimate by Evangelos Kofos, a historian who, like other “sacred scholars” (see Karakasidou 1994), has used his work to further the Greek nationalist historiography of the Macedonian Question, 42,000 Slavic-speaking people remained in north­ ern Greece (Kofos 1964, 187).10 They were subjected to severe persecution

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Vasiliki P. Neofotistos

because they continued to expose the limits of Greek nationalism, namely, the equation of Greek citizenship with Greek cultural heritage and Greek national identity. The Greek Civil War left a legacy of bitterness and suspi­ cion that infused political life with tension for many decades to come.11 In the early 1950s, laws were passed depriving people who had fought alongside the communists in the civil war of their Greek citizenship and stipulating that the property of those who had lost their citizenship or had left Greece illegally could be confiscated without recompense. Over the decades that followed, the question of refugee return and land reclamation remained of paramount importance for the Macedonian-speaking inhabitants of north­ ern Greece who had fled Greece during the civil war (see Karakasidou 1993). In 1944, the People’s Republic of Macedonia (renamed to the Socialist Republic of Macedonia in 1963) was proclaimed at the first session of the Antifascist Assembly for the National Liberation of Macedonia (Antifašističko Sobranie na Narodnoto Osloboduvanje na Makedonija, or ASNOM) as one of the six republics constituting the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. While during the interwar period, the Serb author­ ities declared that the geographical territory of Macedonia controlled by the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes was “Southern Serbia” and that the Slavic-speakers inhabiting this territory were “South Serbs,” the Communist party of Yugoslavia recognized, while pursuing its own polit­ ical interests (see, for example, Danforth 1995, 66–67), Macedonians as a nation (narod). Standard literary Macedonian, based on the west-central Macedonian dialects (see Lunt 1959), was established as the official language of the People’s Republic of Macedonia. The Republic included roughly the geographical region south of mountains Shar and Osogovo that was part of the territory annexed by Serbia in the aftermath of the Second Balkan War in addition to the Strumica valley, ceded by Bulgaria after its defeat in World War I. According to the 1971 census (see Friedman 1996, 90), it had 1,647,308 inhabitants: 69.3% Macedonians, 17% Albanians, 6.6% Turks, 2.8% Serbs, 1.5% Roms, 0.6% Vlachs, 0.2% Bulgarians, 0.2% Yugoslav, 0.1% Muslims, and 1.7% “other.” In the post-1945 period, the Macedonian Question was thus trans­ formed. Serbia abandoned its claims to the territory and inhabitants of Macedonia. The Serbian Patriarchate, however, has denied the existence of the Macedonian Orthodox Church since the declaration of autoceph­ aly in 1967, alluding to a dispute over the disposition of church property prior to 1967, when between 1919 and 1941 Serbia controlled the territory in which present-day North Macedonia is located (Brown 1998, 75; see also Risteski 2009). The Bulgarian government, from 1948 onward, has denied the existence of a distinctive Macedonian nation and its own Macedonian minority, and claimed that Macedonians who live in (the formerly called) Macedonia, and also Macedonians in Albania and Greece and, eventu­ ally, the Slavic-speaking Muslims of Gora, in Kosovo and Albania, are Bulgarians and Macedonian is a dialect of Bulgarian.12 Greece continued

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to implement a policy of persecution and harassment of Macedonians who resided in Greece until democracy was restored in 1974, and thereafter it pursued a policy of discrimination while officially denying the existence of a Macedonian minority in Greece. Importantly, the Macedonian transna­ tional community has cast the geographical region of Macedonia, consist­ ing of Vardar, Pirin, and Aegean Macedonia, as its “imagined homeland” (see Gupta and Ferguson 1992, 39) and the nationalist conflict between Greeks and Macedonians over who has the right to identify as Macedonian has unfolded—with much greater intensity over the post-independence period—not only in the Balkans but also in Canada and Australia (see Danforth 1995).

The road to Prespa: post-independence developments The question regarding the nationality of the inhabitants of Macedonia acquired renewed importance in the wake of Yugoslavia’s violent breakup and Macedonia’s adoption of its Founding Constitution in November 1991. Specifically, Macedonian lawmakers, following the Yugoslav tradition and like most other statehoods in the region and in Europe, defined in the Constitution’s Preamble Macedonia as “a national state of the Macedonian people.” They also instituted a sharp distinction between the Macedonian people/ethnically defined nation, or narod, who “owned” the state and reserved the right to regulate its internal and external affairs, and other nationalities, or nacionalnosti, who did not have the narod status. Macedonia’s declaration of independence stimulated strong reac­ tions from neighboring countries. The Greek right-wing government of Constantine Mitsotakis refused to recognize the newly independent coun­ try on the grounds that the use of the name “Macedonia” was an attempt to steal the heritage of ancient Macedonia, which allegedly belonged to Greece, and also expressed a territorial claim on Greece’s northern region. In a conciliatory move, the Macedonian Parliament ratified constitutional amendments declaring that Macedonia had no territorial pretensions toward any neighboring state and would not interfere in the sovereign rights or internal affairs of other states. Greece, nonetheless, did not change its position: it continued to deny recognition to the republic; and by extension, to Macedonian national identity, the Macedonian nation, and hence the Macedonian minority in Greece. As a result, the European Community (EC, now EU, European Union), in which Greece is a member, and the United States as well as NATO did not extend recognition to Macedonia, and Macedonia could neither establish diplomatic relations with the EC and its member states, nor could it be eligible for much-needed financial assis­ tance from international financial institutions. The already dire socioeco­ nomic situation in the country was exacerbated by the imposition of a Greek embargo in 1992, and then again in 1994 by the new socialist government of Andreas Papandreou. Massive demonstrations proclaiming “Macedonia is

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Greek” took place in Greece’s major cities, Athens and Thessaloniki, in the early 1990s. The demonstration campaign was even promoted in the United States, with banners reading “Macedonia is Greece” on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. Around the same time, according to Greek journalist Takis Michas (2002, 48), there was “much hard evidence indicating that politi­ cal leaders in Athens and Belgrade seriously entertained [the] adventurous scenario [involving the partition of the newly independent republic between Greece and Serbia]” in a broader context of Greek support for Slobodan Milošević’s Serbia from the outbreak of war in the former Yugoslavia in 1991 onward and the rise of Christian Orthodox militant nationalism in the Balkan region. It was the circulation of such reports, suggesting the pos­ sibility of regional destabilization that prompted the EC and the United States to rein in Greece’s demands that Macedonia change its name. In April 1993, Macedonia was thus admitted to the United Nations (UN) not under its constitutional name but rather under the name “The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia,” or FYROM, and still more degrad­ ingly it was listed alphabetically under “T” (for “The”). On September 13, 1995, the two neighboring countries signed a UN-brokered Interim Accord, whereby Greece recognized so-called FYROM as an independent and sov­ ereign state, agreed to lift the trade embargo, and assured that it would not object to Macedonia’s application for membership in international, multilateral and regional organizations and institutions unless Macedonia applied using a name different from FYROM. Still, many Greeks referred demeaningly to Macedonia as “Skopje,” after the name of its capital, or “the Skopjan statelet” and its citizens as “Skopjans,” a practice that has its origins in the 1950s. For its part, Macedonia agreed to remove from its flag the so-called sun or star of Vergina, a symbol of ancient Macedonian civ­ ilization Greece claimed as part of its own cultural heritage, and replaced it with a sun with rays in red and yellow stretching out to the edges of the flag.13 During the same year, Greece registered with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a specialized agency of the UN, the 16-, 12-, and 8-ray Vergina Sun/Star as state emblems. While the two countries agreed to establish diplomatic relations, the controversy over the use of the name “Macedonia” remained unresolved throughout the 1990s and the 2000s. In 1993, Cyrus Vance, Personal Envoy of the UN Secretary-General, and Lord David Owen, European Community mediator, proposed the names “New Macedonia” and “Upper Macedonia,” but their proposals were not successful. Various proposals were also put forward by Vance’s successor, Matthew Nimetz—including in 2005 “Republika Makedonija-Skopje,” and also “Republika Makedonija” for use in international organizations and institutions and “Republika MakedonijaSkopje” for use by Greece—but to no avail. Negotiations reached a dead end after the Macedonian government led by Nikola Gruevski’s VMRO­ DPMNE renamed in 2006 the capital’s Petrovec airport (located near the village of Petrovec) “Skopje International Alexander the Great Airport,”

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Skopje’s stadium “Philip II Arena,” and the main highway E75, which runs north south through the country from Serbia to Greece, “Alexander of Macedon.” These decisions popularized and officially validated a version of national history that had steadily gained traction since independence in 1991, mainly through the writings of right-wing Macedonian national historians (see, for example, Popovski and Kosturski 2000; Donski 2004). Specifically, Macedonian nationalists, as has often been the case in postso­ cialist countries (see, for example, Kuzio 2002), denied what they claimed was the socialist regime’s position that present-day Macedonian language is of Slavic origin and thus that modern Macedonian is a Slavic language. While Macedonian linguists valiantly opposed such controversial—or, put less generously and more accurately, nonsensical and pseudoscientific— claims (for example, Ilievski 1997), Macedonian mathematicians and engi­ neers generated a narrative to support them. Macedonian nationalists also proposed that present-day Macedonians were descended from the ancient Macedonians, especially Alexander the Great, and that the cultural heritage of ancient Macedonia belonged to the then called Republic of Macedonia— not to Greece, as Greece has historically claimed. The sense that there were no prospects of resolving the name dispute anytime soon became intensi­ fied in 2008 when Greece vetoed Macedonia’s bid to join NATO even under the name FYROM—in violation of the UN agreement—citing the fact that the difference over the use of the name “Macedonia” remained unre­ solved. Macedonia instituted proceedings before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against Greece in November 2018, contending that Greece had violated its obligations to Macedonia under Article 11 of the 1995 Interim Agreement, and requesting the Court to order Greece to comply with its obli­ gations and to desist from objecting to Macedonia’s membership of NATO and/or other organizations and institutions of which Greece is a member. The ICJ indeed found that Greece had breached its obligation under Article 11, paragraph 1 of the 1995 Interim Accord. The Court, however, deter­ mined that its finding “constitute[d] appropriate satisfaction” and did not impose further remedies.14 The Greek officials’ recalcitrance, which was allowed to pass unpunished, further antagonized Macedonians. This served as fuel for Gruevski’s campaign of nationalist sentiment, whereby there was only one “correct” national past, identity, and heritage to celebrate in the country—and, it was the pseudoscientific version that his right-wing party supported. In a more concerted effort to erase ties to the Slavic past and advance a national narrative anchored in the legacy of Alexander the Great and the ancient Macedonian past, the government announced in 2009 a pro­ ject that included the construction of buildings in baroque or neoclassical styles as well as the placement of bronze and marble statues of controversial historical figures, including Alexander the Great, in and around Skopje’s main square—the so-called Skopje 2014 project. The “antiquization” (see Vangeli 2011) frenzy had already reached new heights in 2006 when two engineers, one a member of the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts

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(MANU), Tome Boševski, and the other Professor Aristotel Tentov, made the false claim that the middle text of the Rosetta Stone, which has long been recognized as Demotic Egyptian, was written in Ancient Macedonian; and moreover, that this language was the same as an Aegean dialect of Modern Macedonian.15 The results of their research were published in the journal Prilozi (Contributions) of the Mathematics and Engineering section of MANU (see Boševski and Tentov 2005). The linguists at MANU issued a reasoned rebuttal in the Prilozi of the Linguistics and Literature section of MANU (for example, Ilievski 2008). Claims regarding links with ancient Macedonian and the ancient Macedonians were also disseminated by other right-wing organizations. Noteworthy in this regard are also private, yet government-endorsed, initiatives, mirroring similar state-sponsored initi­ atives in Greece, to establish kinship ties with tribal groups who live on the remote Hindu Kush Mountains in Pakistan and claim to be descend­ ants from the soldiers in the army of Alexander the Great (see Neofotistos 2011). Gruevski’s historical revisionism throughout his ten-year rule gen­ erated sharp divisions within the Macedonian community between those who endorsed and those who opposed the myth of national origin stretching into antiquity prior to the Slavic migrations to the Balkans in the sixth and seventh centuries CE. Equally importantly, Gruevski’s actions seemed to cement the political impasse between the two neighboring countries. A turnover of power occurred in 2017, after the center-left opposition party Social Democratic Union (SDSM) demonstrated in Spring 2015 that Gruevski (with his first cousin, Sašo Mijalkov, head of the Administration for Security and Counter-Intelligence) had instigated a mass illegal wiretapping and published transcripts of wiretapped conversations (in a series of press releases titled “The Truth about Macedonia” [Vistinata za Makedonija] and popularly referred to as bombi or “bombs”) of 20,000 people in Macedonia, including Gruevski himself and other senior officials. Gruevski denied any wrongdoing, and alleged that the tapes had been doctored and that the opposition illegally obtained them from unnamed foreign secret services to destabilize the country. Following Gruevski’s resignation as Prime Minister against the background of large anti-government protests and amid pres­ sure from the US and Europe, general elections were held in December 2016.16 Gruevski’s ruling party won 51 of the 120 seats in parliament and the opposition won 49. SDSM leader Zoran Zaev was nonetheless able to form a coalition government with two Albanian parties, Democratic Union for Integration (which had also collaborated with Gruevski during his cor­ rupt rule and formed a governing coalition with VMRO-DPMNE) and the Alliance for Albanians, requiring that the official use of the Albanian lan­ guage in Macedonia be expanded beyond areas where the Albanian popu­ lation made up at the minimum 20% of the population and that Albanian become the second official language in the country.17 The political turmoil that resurfaced in April 2017 highlights how clash­ ing visions of Macedonian national identity have grown more entrenched.

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When on April 27 an ethnic Albanian MP, Talat Xhaferi, was elected as parliament speaker, VMRO-DPMNE supporters, including members of recently established, self-proclaimed patriotic associations (patriotski združenija), stormed the Parliament building in Skopje and inflicted bodily harm on numerous SDSM and other representatives.18 A former high-ranking officer in the Macedonian army, Xhaferi had deserted the army and joined the Albanian National Liberation Army (NLA) during a sixmonth long insurgency instigated by the NLA to achieve so-called greater rights for Macedonia’s Albanians, who, according to the last census in 2002, make up 509,083 (25.17%) of the country’s total population of approximately two million.19 As parliament speaker, Xhaferi’s duties included petitioning Macedonia’s President Gjorge Ivanov to ask SDSM leader Zoran Zaev to form a government. As shown in videos that went viral, protestors threw chairs, tripods, and punches at lawmakers, bloodying Zaev, dragging Radmila Shekerinska by her hair, and injuring dozens of others. The leader of the Alliance for Albanians party Ziadin Sela was beaten up and knocked unconscious. When he came to in a more secluded office in the Parliament building a few hours later, the people who had tried to save him from the angry crowd disguised him as a wounded police officer and thus managed to get him out of the building.20 Protesters also waved Macedonian flags and shouted “traitors” (predavnici) at the lawmakers, thus implying that the Macedonian lawmakers were reputedly eager to compromise Macedonian national interests and state sovereignty and allow an MP from the Albanian minority, and former NLA insurgent at that, to be at the helm of state affairs. According to informed confidential sources, former Albanian insurgents with entrenched and vested interests in keeping DUI in power and covering up for corruption in government were gathered in the mainly Albanian-populated neighborhood of Čair, north of Parliament, and were ready to attack the Parliament building had VMRO-DPMNE supporters continued the attack. Rumors circulated that some of the former insurgents were ready to initiate civil war.21 According to the same sources, after word got out that Sela was unconscious, perhaps dead, some of his supporters from Struga, Skopje, and Kumanovo also mobilized in the streets of the capital and they too were preparing to attack the Parliament. They abandoned their plans, however, as soon as news spread by word of mouth that Sela had regained consciousness. Violence and political volatility intensified pressure by European Union and American officials on President Ivanov, who had long refused to issue a man­ date allowing Zaev to form a government on grounds that the new coali­ tion’s platform was made by a foreign state (i.e. Albania) and it jeopardized Macedonia’s sovereignty and unity.22 After Zaev’s written guarantee that the coalition would protect the unitary character of the state and Macedonia’s territorial integrity and national sovereignty, President Ivanov gave Zaev the mandate to form a government in May 2017. In a decisive move to resolve the longstanding name dispute, Zaev reached out to officials in the Greek government, led by Alexis Tsipras. In many

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ways, Zaev and Tsipras shared an ideological affinity that likely facilitated the rapprochement between the two countries. Zaev’s SDSM and Tsipras’s Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA) are left-wing parties that came to power opposing the “old establishment” and focusing on the issue of cor­ ruption.23 In the summer of 2017, Zaev dispatched Macedonian foreign min­ ister Nikola Dimitrov to Athens for talks with his Greek counterpart, Nikos Kotzias. The latter made a return visit to Skopje a couple of months later. Mediator Matthew Nimetz also intensified his mediation effort with the two governments. The resumed talks sparked mass rallies in Thessaloniki and Athens against the inclusion of the word “Macedonia” in the name of Greece’s northern neighbor. The rallies brought together hardline national­ ists, Orthodox faithful for whom a specifically Greek version of the Eastern Orthodox Christian religion was deeply interwoven with national identity, and groups who opposed the foreign policy but also the austerity policies of Greece’s Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. Rallies also took place in Skopje after the signing of the Agreement and ahead of the change to the republic’s constitutional name (Republic of Macedonia). Nonetheless, encouraged by the EU and US, Zaev and Tsipras concluded a deal in June 2018, when they signed the Prespa Agreement, whose terms will be discussed below. Official Bulgarian reactions to Macedonia’s declaration of independ­ ence were also stern, consistent with its own politics, though perhaps less marked than Greece’s reactions. While Bulgaria promptly recognized the newly independent country as Macedonia, it continued to deny the exist­ ence of a distinctive Macedonian nation and language and argue that Macedonians were Bulgarians who speak Bulgarian. Bulgarian claims on Macedonian identity precluded meaningful cooperation between the two states. It was not until February 1999 that Macedonian Prime Minister Ljubčo Georgievski and Bulgarian Prime Minister Ivan Kostov signed in Sofia a joint declaration in two originals, containing the formulation that the agreement was signed in two original copies in the “Bulgarian lan­ guage, in accordance with the Constitution of the Republic of Bulgaria, and Macedonian language, in accordance with the Constitution of the Republic of Macedonia, each text being equally authentic.” This formulation did not indicate that Bulgaria recognized the existence of the Macedonian language (to the contrary, to this day Bulgaria claims all Macedonian dia­ lects as Bulgarian), but the joint declaration facilitated the signing of fur­ ther bilateral agreements. After Bulgaria became a member of the EU in 2007, it instituted a passport scheme whereby thousands of Macedonians instrumentalized Bulgarian claims on their Macedonian identity to obtain Bulgarian citizenship in order to gain freedom of travel and work without a visa in the EU and thus to access socio-economic opportunities available to citizens of EU member states (see Neofotistos 2009). The relative ease of gaining Bulgarian citizenship stimulated much speculation about a revival of Bulgarian territorial expansionism. The relations between the two coun­ tries took a turn for the worse after the Macedonian VMRO-DPMNE-led

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government announced “Skopje 2014,” a project that, as mentioned above, involved the placement of statues of highly contested historical figures in and around Skopje’s main square. Among the statues were Goce Delčev and Samuil, figures who are claimed as national heroes by both Macedonia and Bulgaria. In 2012, Bulgaria vetoed the opening of EU accession nego­ tiations with Macedonia and relations thereafter remained aloof. In 2016, the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences published the third volume of a Dialect Atlas of the Bulgarian language that included all of Macedonian (and south­ east Serbian) dialects (see Friedman, this volume).24 Relations continued to be strained until a breakthrough occurred in August 2017. Macedonia’s new premier Zoran Zaev and his Bulgarian counterpart Boyko Borisov signed in Skopje a treaty on friendship, good neighborly relations and cooperation, whereby the two countries agreed to form a joint history commission tasked with reviewing contentious historical topics, bridging disagreements, and aligning divergent interpretations of past events and matters in history text­ books. Also, Bulgaria pledged to support Macedonia’s efforts to join the EU and NATO. Both parties ratified the treaty in 2018. Unfortunately, the treaty did not include a recognition of the Macedonian language and its dialects, and Bulgaria continues to dispute the existence of Macedonian to this day. The slow progress of the work of the joint history commission has raised Bulgarian discontent. Especially after the signing of the Prespa Agreement, as Macedonian hopes for the opening of EU accession nego­ tiations have been high, Bulgarian officials intensified their criticisms of Macedonia’s alleged unwillingness to “compromise,” including renouncing leading figures in the anti-Ottoman Ilinden uprising in 1903 as Macedonian and denying that Macedonian identity predates Tito.25 In October 2019, the Bulgarian government announced a so-called Framework Position on its neighbor’s EU accession aspirations, whereby it set the terms North Macedonia had to satisfy before Bulgaria could ratify its neighbor’s EU accession protocol.

The terms of Agreement Under the Prespa agreement, the “Second Party” would change its consti­ tutional name to “Republic of North Macedonia,” or “North Macedonia” for short—a name that would be used “erga omnes,” that is to say, “domes­ tically, in all bilateral relations, and in all regional and international Organizations and institutions” (Article 1, paragraph 8).26 In exchange, the “First Party,” Greece, agreed not to object to Macedonia’s application to join, or to Macedonia’s membership in, international organizations and institutions of which Greece is a member. In effect, Greece agreed to approve its neighbor’s bid to join NATO and become a member state of the EU. The Agreement also stipulated in Article 1, paragraph 3(b) that the national­ ity of what is now North Macedonia shall be “Macedonian/citizen of the Republic of North Macedonia” and in Article 1, paragraph 3(c) that the

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official language of the republic shall be “the Macedonian language.” The meanings of the terms “Macedonia” and “Macedonian” were fully specified in the acknowledgment that the two parties understood the terms to refer to “a different historical context and cultural heritage” (Article 7, paragraph 1)—an acknowledgment that for all intents and purposes meant that the two parties could endow the terms with different meanings and use the terms to refer to their own histories, cultures, and heritages. At the same time, the Agreement stated that “the Macedonian language is within the group of South Slavic languages” and that “the official language and other attributes of the Second Party are not related to the ancient Hellenic civilization, his­ tory, culture and heritage of the northern region of the First Party” (Article 7, paragraph 4). All Macedonian claims to the legacy of ancient Macedonia and its leaders, Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander the Great, were thus rendered invalid. At the same time, all Macedonian claims to speaking the Macedonian language, being Macedonians, and having a Macedonian nationality were declared valid. Article 1, paragraph 3(b), which discusses nationality (ethnikotita/nacion­ alnost in Greek and Macedonian, respectively) and citizenship (upikootita/ gragjanstvo), deserves special attention. The forward slash “/” in the for­ mulation, “The nationality of the Second Party shall be Macedonian/ citizen of the Republic of North Macedonia, as it will be registered in all travel documents” could be interpreted in various ways. One could go so far as to say this is precisely the point of the forward slash: to generate ambiguity, leaving room for multiple understandings concerning the official acknowledgment of the existence of Macedonian nationality. For me, the forward slash “/” stands for the word “or” and stipulates that those citizens of the country who claim their national identity is not Macedonian—namely, Albanians and also others—should be issued travel documents describing them, if they so choose, as citizens of North Macedonia.27 The processes through which national identities are construed and acquire political signif­ icance have been the subject of much scholarly investigation. To name but a few illustrative classic studies, Benedict Anderson (1983) defined the nation as an imagined political community and argued that nationality is a cul­ tural artifact that was created through, among other processes, the spread of print-capitalism. Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) suggested that repetitive practices seeking to instill certain values and behavioral norms—what they refer to as invented traditions—create bonds of loyalty. Herzfeld (1982) ana­ lyzed the role of folklore in the making of national ideology and the devel­ opment of nationalist ideology. Verdery (1991) argued that national identity is an integral part of cultural politics, or more specifically of the practice of cultural production in which intellectuals engage. Chatterjee (1993) exam­ ined how the discourse of marginalized groups, what he calls “fragments” of the nation, influences the creation of nationalist ideology. Despite their different foci, scholarly works on nationality are not concerned with cit­ izenship, or the relationship between individuals and the sovereign state.

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Instead, they help us understand how exactly people create collective social ties and come to imagine themselves as one people, an ethnos, a nation. By not elaborating on nationality, the Prespa Agreement thus accommodates various understandings of what Macedonian nationality means and who belongs to the Macedonian ethnos (nation). Moreover, by directing atten­ tion to nationality and citizenship, the Agreement describes two possible relationships of individuals in North Macedonia with the state (a citizen of North Macedonia with Macedonian national identity and a citizen of North Macedonia with a national identity other than Macedonian) in a way that Greece itself does not permit. That is to say, in Greece all citizens sup­ posedly de facto maintain a sense of Greek national identity and they are officially considered “Greek,” not “citizens of the Hellenic Republic.” The international reaction to the signing of the Prespa Agreement was overwhelmingly positive. Federica Mogherini’s remarks at the signing cer­ emony are indicative of the significance with which leaders of countries in the EU and NATO imbued the Agreement: “We are here today, first of all to thank the two sides, because they make us all Europeans proud of the capac­ ity to find—through diplomacy, through dialogue—a win-win solution for a problem that was long-standing for too many decades. It makes Europe more peaceful, more united and that also opens the way for the entire region of the Balkans to live in a different kind of atmosphere.”28 The letter to the newspaper The Guardian by internationally prominent scholars, including Etienne Balibar and Judith Butler, is also indicative in this regard: “In these critical times, when Europe faces the rise of extreme rightwing nationalism and racism, and dangerous revisionisms are resurfacing in the Balkans and Europe dividing people into ‘traitors’ and ‘patriots,’ it is more important than ever to support those who take risks for reconciliation. We support this fair agreement and call on all parties to fulfill their end of the bargain.”29 Days after the signing of the Agreement, EU member states agreed to open the path for Macedonia (and also Albania) to start accession negotiations in June 2019, provided that the country would meet conditions on rule of law, crime and corruption. These conditions were set to alleviate reservations by some EU member states, including France, regarding EU enlargement. In July 2018, NATO leaders invited Macedonia to begin accession talks to join the alliance, provided that Macedonia would implement the Agreement with Greece. While the Agreement received favorable international responses, some domestic actors—all associated with right-wing parties—in both countries reacted with fierce resistance, taking part in widespread demonstrations and, in Greece, riots. On September 30, 2018, a referendum to assess public opinion regarding the name change was held in Macedonia and it was a major test of the Agreement’s viability. The question the Macedonian peo­ ple were asked was, “Are you in favor of EU and NATO membership by accepting the deal between the Republic of Macedonia and the Republic of Greece?” The wording emphasized EU and NATO membership rather

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16 Vasiliki P. Neofotistos than the name change, which was not even mentioned. The referendum took place against the background of a massive boycott campaign, Bojkotiram (“I Boycott”), which was dominated by conservative voices and involved protests, graffiti, and the use of social media to promote the slogan “Nikogaš Severna, Sekogaš Makedonija” (Never North, Always Macedonia). The voter turnout reportedly stood at around 37% of the total population, thus falling below the 50% minimum requirement set by the Macedonian Constitution for any referendum to be legally binding. At the same time, over 90% of those who voted were in favor of the Agreement.30 There are various reasons behind the low voter turnout. According to the Statement of Preliminary Findings and Conclusions of the International Referendum Observation Mission in the Republic of Macedonia in September 2018, “longstanding issues related to the accuracy of the voter lists and struc­ tural deficiencies (…) remain[ed] unaddressed” at the time of the referen­ dum.31 Also, my understanding, based on conversations I have had with members of the Albanian community, is that many Albanians chose not to vote. Some wanted to register their deep discontent with the government’s clientelistic practices and patronage politics. Others strategically sought to see the referendum fail either because they felt future elections would help them consolidate their grip on power and their personal interests; or, because they at that time still entertained hopes of Macedonia’s territorial division. Regardless of the reasons behind the low voter turnout, both sides in Macedonia, those who were against and those who were in favor of the Agreement, claimed victory. Despite sharp controversy over whether or not the referendum was “a success,” Zoran Zaev began the constitutional pro­ cess to ratify the Prespa Agreement. On January 11, 2019, the Macedonian Parliament voted to amend the Constitution according to the stipulations of the Agreement and change the country’s name to North Macedonia. The Greek Parliament ratified the Agreement on January 25. Polarization in both countries became especially acute, with political parties and their supporters in favor of the Agreement being described as “traitors” by selfidentified “patriots.” Against a background of political and social turmoil, on February 12, UN Secretary-General António Guterres received notifica­ tion of the entry into force of the Prespa Agreement and North Macedonia’s name change was officially promulgated. With Greece having committed to lift its objections against North Macedonia’s EU and NATO membership, a clear path toward European and Euro-Atlantic integration seemed to lie ahead. On February 6, 2019, the NATO member states signed North Macedonia’s accession protocol and about a year later, on March 27, 2020, North Macedonia became NATO’s newest member country. The road to EU membership, however, has not been as smooth thus far. In October 2019, French President Emmanuel Macron blocked the start of accession negotiations with North Macedonia (and also Albania) and thus contributed to a climate of frustration and discontent in the country, even among those who had not opposed the Prespa Agreement.

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After sharp criticism from other EU leaders, including president of the exec­ utive European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker who described France’s decision as a “major historic mistake,” and rumors about the possibility of growing Russian influence in the Balkans, the European Council decided in March 2020 to open the accession negotiations. As of this writing, no specific date has yet been set.32

The chapters The essays collected in this volume analyze how various social actors have mobilized concepts of identity and difference, modes of belonging, and expe­ riences of injustice and discrimination in the tumultuous period preceding and following the signing of the Prespa Agreement on June 17, 2018. The authors interrogate the complexities surrounding identity politics in the geographic territory of Macedonia that is now Greece, and in the country whose constitutional name was Republic of Macedonia up until January 11, 2019, when its name was changed to Republic of North Macedonia, but also in Turkey and Bulgaria. The word “Macedonia” is used in this book to refer either to the geo­ graphic area in the Balkans, which has been part of various empires throughout history, or to the country whose constitutional name was Republic of Macedonia prior to the country’s official name change, or to the geographical region in northern Greece. In accordance with the longstanding premise in anthropology, whereby the terms used to refer to the people constituting the researcher’s field of investigation are the terms that people use in identifying themselves, the word “Macedonians” is used in this book to refer to the citizens of either Greece or North Macedonia who choose to self-identify as ethnically or nationally Macedonian and call themselves Macedonian. Additionally, two of the contributors to this volume choose to use the abbreviation RN Macedonia instead of the name Republic of North Macedonia, or North Macedonia, and give varied reasons for their choice. Rozita Dimova in Chapter 2 explains that her use of RN Macedonia is a matter of both practicality and also consistency with her earlier work, where she has used abbreviated names for the country, such as SR Macedonia (Socialist Republic of Macedonia) and FYR Macedonia (Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia). Aleksandar Takovski in Chapter 6 uses the abbre­ viated name RN Macedonia to express his dissatisfaction with what he sees as Greece’s imposition, and EU’s legitimization, of a new name eth­ nic Macedonians have to endure. Personally speaking, as the editor to this volume I have sought to uphold respect for academic freedom and provide a forum for the (re)presentation of diverse perspectives. My own usage of the name North Macedonia in this introduction to the volume reflects my long-standing preference for the constitutional name of the country where I have conducted field research since the early 2000s (see, for example, Neofotistos 2012). To avoid any potential misunderstandings, it is important

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to underscore that, irrespective of whether they use the constitutional, full country name Republic of North Macedonia, or North Macedonia, or the abbreviated country name, RN Macedonia, all contributors to this volume wholeheartedly support all efforts to resolve the conflict over the use of the name Macedonia and to enhance regional stability and cooperation. A few words about the organization and contents of the chapters are now in order. The first chapter, by Loring Danforth, recovers the symbolic geog­ raphy and history of the Prespa Lakes region, where the borders of the coun­ try known as Greece and the country now known as North Macedonia (and also the country known as Albania) meet. He demonstrates how at various points throughout history—the tenth century, when it served as the capital of the First Bulgarian Empire; the period after World War I, when the national boundaries of three Balkan states were drawn through a disputed border­ land; the Greek Civil War, when the headquarters of the communist-led Provisional Democratic Government of Greece were located there; the Cold War, when, in Greece, it was an isolated “border zone” subject to strict mil­ itary surveillance33; and the early 21st century, when the area became a sym­ bol of cooperation and unity with the establishment of the Transboundary Prespa Park—the Prespa Lakes region has embodied the contradictions, tensions, and possibilities surrounding Macedonian identity. In the next chapter, Rozita Dimova focuses her analytical lens on the Greek fishing village of Psarades (Nivitsi, in Macedonian), where the Agreement was signed, and the villages of Oteševo, Dolno Dupeni, and Ljubojno across the Greater Prespa Lake on the Macedonian side. She argues that the importance of the Agreement for people living in these vil­ lages pales in comparison to the fact that the Prespa Lakes are disappearing from the global map of natural lakes. Dimova suggests that the local popu­ lation is deeply disappointed with politicians, who have capitalized on the symbolic geography of the Prespa Lakes region to serve their own interests and needs and yet have done nothing to improve water quality and protect the locals’ right to live in a healthy environment. “Prespa” thus emerges as a hollow signifier. Dimova points to a pervading sense of abandonment and an atmosphere of distrust toward the state and its institutions on both sides of the border. Victor A. Friedman takes a close look at the Prespa Agreement’s wording pertaining to the Macedonian language. He discusses extensively the clauses stating that the official language of the so-called second party under the terms of the Agreement is the Macedonian language and is a South Slavic language, the formulations in the Agreement that render invisible multilin­ gualism in Greece and North Macedonia, and a clause that does not men­ tion language per se and yet could have a damaging impact on Macedonian scholarship both on the representation of Macedonian dialects spoken on territory that is now Greece and also on the Macedonian versions of topo­ nyms in Greece. What is more, Friedman illuminates Bulgarian contesta­ tions over Macedonian identity and shows how the Prespa Agreement does

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not put to rest Bulgarian linguistic claims to Macedonian and has contrib­ uted to the exacerbation of Bulgarian nationalism. Marica Rombou-Levidi’s chapter focuses on Greek Macedonia. The author shares some of her personal experiences, resulting from the publica­ tion in 2016 of her ethnography of state surveillance and its implications for everyday life among self-identified dopii in 25 Greek villages along the border with Bulgaria between 2000 and 2008, to analyze extreme nationalist sensi­ tivities in the period leading up to the signing of the Prespa Agreement. The author deftly documents the sharp criticism her book has met with and the underhanded personal attacks from the Federation of Macedonian People’s Cultural Associations on the alleged grounds of creating out of thin air a Macedonian minority in Greece, and also a trial in April 2019 involving the association “Brotherhood of Serres Dopii Cyril and Methodius.” Against the background of these events, and in light of the renewed international negoti­ ations over the so-called name issue, the resulting political strife in Greece, and a socio-political climate predisposed against acknowledgment of ethno­ cultural differences within Greece’s national borders, Rombou-Levidi notes that her interlocutors, while once welcoming, became unfriendly and hostile. She also argues that local actors have not healed from the trauma of subjec­ tification, caused by the régime of surveillance and the production of ethno­ cultural difference as an alleged threat to Greek national interests during the Metaxas dictatorship (1936–41). Rather, the fear of difference revived within dopii, and the years-long silence regarding the experience of surveillance resurfaced and became more absolute, extending even to the ethnographer. The next chapter, by Anastasia Karakasidou, focuses on the Florina (Lerin, in Macedonian) region in Greek Macedonia (northwest Greece). Based on ethnographic research among the Macedonian-speaking inhab­ itants of the region both prior to and following the July 2019 national elec­ tions in Greece, Karakasidou traces Florina’s electoral results since the first national elections in 1915 and interrogates the electoral culture in the area. Karakasidou highlights a decades-long conspiracy of silence surrounding Macedonian otherness in Greece, and aims to provide a comprehensive understanding as to how the issue of Macedonian identity featured in the campaigns of two SYRIZA candidates, Kostas Seltsas and Theopisti (Peti) Perka, and in turn how it informed voter decision making following the signing of the Prespa Agreement. The author notes that Seltsas, fervently outspoken in promoting the recognition of Macedonian language and cul­ ture in the area, was outvoted by mainstream candidate Perka. These elec­ toral results reflected a long-term trend, whereby local Macedonians, as a strategy for survival, vote for mainstream candidates who promise financial security and they relegate their Macedonian identity to the background in the public realm. For their part, political parties tend to promote candidates who do not put at risk the area’s ethnic balance of power. The analysis of linguist Aleksandar Takovski focuses on identifying the discursive strategies that representatives of the two main longstanding rival

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parties in North Macedonia, SDSM and VMRO-DPMNE, have used to legitimate and delegitimate the Prespa Agreement according to their own political needs and interests. He examines the press statements issued by politicians and high-profile intellectuals, and shows how national identity was instrumentalized by both parties in radically different ways. SDSM promoted a flexible understanding of Macedonian national identity and, what is more, portrayed the Agreement as a necessary means to protect it by focusing on the prospect of a positive outcome, namely, EU membership. VMRO-DPMNE, on the other hand, advocated for a comparatively more rigid understanding of national identity and presented the Agreement as a severe threat to it. Takovski poignantly points to the role international power hierarchies played in the change to his native country’s name. Andrew Graan illuminates how mutually opposed and mutually exclu­ sive claims to “true” and “real” Macedonian identity and belonging have emerged in the country now known as North Macedonia in the years preceding the Prespa Agreement and in the period following the signing of the Agreement. Such claims reflect and are consistent with competing understandings and visions, which are found at the opposite ends of the political spectrum, of the international order and North Macedonia’s place in it. Graan argues that political polarization in North Macedonia is an eloquent example of a new variety of identity politics, a polarized politics of identity, whereby intense rival efforts to represent the nation unfold and dis­ tinct claims of representativeness emerge. These struggles over representa­ tion are articulated through various media, from state-sponsored urban renovation projects to protests, and are still yet to be resolved. Fabio Mattioli discusses some of the social and economic impacts of the Agreement, focusing on the innovation ecosystem—the dynamic processes, evolving over time, through which social actors as innovators interact— in Skopje. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among startup founders both before and after the signing of the Prespa Agreement, Mattioli argues that, although Zoran Zaev promised the Agreement would be instrumental in bringing foreign investments in the domestic market and in raising the coun­ try’s profile as a “startup nation,” many startup founders now consider their labor and themselves backward. Specifically, Mattioli’s interlocutors have gained a sharp sense of the hierarchical difference between their startup practices, such as improvisation and pleasurable, slow-paced social inter­ actions on the one hand, and so-called proper Western European startup practices, such as design thinking and fast-paced competitive collabora­ tion. What is more, as matters currently stand, the innovation landscape in North Macedonia has generated new inequalities between those who are knowledgeable about business practices in Western Europe because they had worked abroad and built international connections with powerful part­ ners, on the one hand, and those who are not, on the other. In the final chapter, Burcu Akan Ellis critically examines the nuances of identity politics, such as property restitution claims and dual citizenship

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claims, in the context of Turkey’s reinvigorated post-territorial nationalism before and after the signing of the Prespa Agreement. Akan Ellis analyzes how Muslim migrants, who were forced to depart from the (then called) Republic of Macedonia following the Balkan wars and due to political pres­ sure in the 1950s, and who then settled in Turkey, use a rights-based dis­ course to mend past wrongs and reclaim “their right to rights” in order to pursue property restitution claims and claims of Macedonian citizenship, in addition to Turkish citizenship, in view of North Macedonia’s prospects for EU membership. Based on field research, spanning two decades of inter­ actions with Muslim emigrants from the Republic of Macedonia and mem­ bers of Balkan immigrant association in Istanbul and Izmir, Akan Ellis argues that these claims must be understood against the background of a sense of discrimination that has persisted from the early days of Yugoslavia among Muslim emigrants to Turkey, of legislation in North Macedonia that does not make provisions for restitution of land claims by those who had to renounce Yugoslav or Macedonian citizenship when they fled Yugoslavia, and of Turkey’s expansion of post-territorial nationalism to include the pro­ motion of dual-citizenship among Turkish citizens and the encouragement of citizens to settle as Turks in Europe. The chapters thus reveal new aspects of the issue of identity politics in the long-contested territory of Macedonia against a backdrop of socio-political turmoil; and additionally, lend insights into the larger project of political self-presentation and representation. We appreciate the symbolic impor­ tance, accrued throughout history, of geographic locality in the attempt to legitimize political action. We find out that such an attempt does not neces­ sarily gain the favor of public opinion when the quality of the environment and the survival of life are at stake. In Greece, we uncover the long-lasting implications of a state-imposed silence, surveillance, and censorship of nonGreek “otherness.” In North Macedonia, we discover sharp political polar­ ization and exclusive claims over one, true Macedonian identity as well as tensions generated among the population by the possibility of European Union membership. We also look into the sharpened tensions between Bulgaria and North Macedonia as the former tries to solidify its grip on a narrative of national identity and history that antagonizes Macedonian national sensibilities. Furthermore, in Turkey, we witness how the revival of felt experiences of injustice and discrimination creates space for new inven­ tions of citizenship, sustained by imaginings of Europe as an ideal locality.

Acknowledgments I am profoundly indebted to Loring Danforth and Victor Friedman, both of whom eagerly and promptly read various drafts of the introduction, offered constructive comments and suggestions, and encouraged me to con­ sider various issues from multiple viewpoints. They both generously made time to discuss with me, and multiple times at that, the complex history of

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Macedonia, the articles of the Prespa Agreement, the intricacies surround­ ing the signing of the Agreement and its implications, and so many details that went into writing this introduction. Sincere thanks also go to Marica Rombou-Levidi for her kind help in fine-tuning some of the details concern­ ing material about Greece. I alone am responsible for the views articulated here and for any shortcomings the reader may detect.

Notes 1 The official name of the Agreement is “Final Agreement for the Settlement of the Differences as Described in the United Nations Security Council Resolu­ tions 817 (1993) and 845 (1993), the Termination of the Interim Accord of 1995, and the Establishment of a Strategic Partnership between the Parties”. For reasons of brevity, we will use the name “Prespa Agreement” throughout this book. The two Prespa Lakes are known by various names. Greater Prespa is also known as Big Prespa and Great Prespa; Голема Преспа in Macedonian; Μεγάλη Πρέσπα in Greek; Prespa e Madhe in Albanian. Lesser Prespa is also known as Small Prespa and Little Prespa; Мала Преспа in Macedonian; Μικρή Πρέσπα in Greek; Prespa e Vogël in Albanian. 2 Evidence to support this claim is found in the Aromanian and Albanian names, which were recorded in the Ellis Island archives, of people who identified them­ selves as “Macedonian” when they reached America at the beginning of the twentieth century (Victor Friedman, personal communication). On this point, also see Brown (2015). On the distinctiveness of the Macedonian language since the 19th century and on the relationship between the modern development of the Macedonian literary language and nationalism, see the work of Friedman, especially 1975, 1985, 1986. The most famous IMRO member whose first lan­ guage was not Macedonian is Pitu Guli, an Aromanian whose name is men­ tioned in the national anthem of the Republic of North Macedonia. 3 The acronym VMRO stands for Vnatrešna Makedonska Revolucionerna Organ­ izacija. On the importance of the Ilinden Uprising for national historiography in post-Yugoslav Macedonia, see Brown (2000): 143–72. For a comprehensive study of late-19th/early-20th century Macedonian revolutionary activism, see Perry 1988. With regard to the two ecclesiastical calendars followed in Orthodox churches, some Orthodox Churches, including the Macedonian Church, follow the Julian (old) calendar, while others, including the Greek Orthodox Church, have adopted the Gregorian (new) calendar. This explains why the Macedonian and Greek Churches celebrate Prophet Elijah Day on different days. 4 Keith Brown (2003) traces different approaches, employed by a wide range of actors, to coming to terms with the events of 1903 in what was at the time of his publication the Republic of Macedonia. 5 As Boškovska (2017, 1–22) shows, by 1920 at the latest, the majority of the Christian Slav population in the Greek, as well as in the Yugoslav, part of Macedonia self-described as “Macedonian.” On the varying degrees of suc­ cess of efforts to acculturate and assimilate the inhabitants of Greek Macedo­ nia into the Greek nation since 1912, see Mackridge and Yannakakis (1997). 6 Ivo Banac (1984, 327), discussing Macedonian intellectuals of the 1930s, argues that “they were Bulgars in struggles against Serbian and Greek hegem­ onism, but within the Bulgar world, they were increasingly becoming exclusive Macedonians.” But, see above footnote 5 as an example of the many different perspectives about exactly when and under what circumstances Macedonian national identity emerged. On this point, see also Danforth (1995): 56–78.

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7 A notable exception, according to Rossos’ account (2008, 187), was Albanians in Italian-occupied western Yugoslav Macedonia, who collaborated with the occupation authorities and were eager to eradicate Macedonians from that area. 8 Loring Dandorth, and Marica Rombou-Levidi; personal communication. 9 In the eastern parts of Greek Macedonia, as Karakasidou points out, the civil war “was expressed largely in terms of a struggle between social groups divided along lines of local political alliances and class identities, rather than in terms of ethnicity or nationality” (1997, 203–4). 10 To mention but one example, Kofos, as Danforth points out (1995, 33), has misappropriated Anderson’s term “imagined communities” and argued that Greek national identity is so-called real whereas Macedonian national iden­ tity is so-called imagined (see Kofos 1989). Compare with Michailidis 2000. For additional examples of scholars who have claimed that the Republic of Macedonia was an invention of Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito, see Andri­ otes (1957, 1960), Martis (1983), among others. For an overview, see Gounaris and Mihailidis (2000). For the counter-narrative demonstrating that Tito har­ nessed already existing Macedonian identity, see Friedman (1985), Rossos (2008). 11 The legacy of bitterness and suspicion left behind by the Greek civil war con­ tinued to manifest itself in an intense manner under the junta regime (1967­ 1974) and past it until at least 1981, when the Panhellenian Socialist Movement (PASOK) won the national elections. In 1982, the Greek Parliament passed Law 1285/1982, which officially recognized the resistance to the German occu­ pation in the period from 1941 to 1944 as “national resistance.” The PASOK government also allowed some refugees of the civil war to return to Greece, as long as they declared themselves “Greek by race” (Έλληνες το γένος). On an insightful analysis of how the Greek state has constituted the Greek Left as a zone of danger and how the specter of civil war has haunted Greek life up until recently, see Panourgiá (2009). 12 On the Slavic-speaking Muslims, known as Gorans, see Friedman (2006, 2007). 13 The sun/star of Vergina is named after the village of Vergina (in today’s Greece) where it was found adorning the royal tomb of Philip of Macedon— father of Alexander the Great. 14 The ICJ Press release is available at https://www.icj-cij.org/files/case-re­ lated/142/16841.pdf (Accessed March 5, 2020). 15 Victor Friedman (personal communication). 16 Following Zaev’s allegations of illegal wiretapping against Gruevski’s administration, protests erupted on April 12, 2016 when President Gjorge Ivanov issued pardons to people charged with crimes or under criminal investigation by the Special Prosecution Office (SPO), established by EU mediators in 2015. The protests were dubbed “Colorful Revolution” (Šarena Revolucija) because protesters threw paintballs of different colors at gov­ ernment buildings, and also monuments and statues that were part of the Skopje 2014 project. Yielding to pressure exerted by the protesters, President Ivanov revoked his pardons. By 2018, the SPO had used the leaked wire­ taps, and brought a complex of cases against Gruevski and some of his clos­ est associates. On May of that same year, he was charged with abusing his official position and unlawful influence in the process of purchasing a new armored Mercedes Benz worth approximately 600,000 Euros, and he was sentenced to two years in prison. Subsequently, Gruevski fled to Hungary, where Prime Minister Orban granted his request for asylum and has served as his host ever since.

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17 The Ohrid Framework Agreement, which put an official end to the armed conflict between Macedonian security forces and the Albanian National Lib­ eration Army in 2001, instituted extensive amendments to Macedonia’s 1991 Founding Constitution. According to the amended law on the use of language, in areas where any language other than Macedonian is spoken by at least 20% of the population that language and its alphabet will be used as an official language in addition to the Macedonian language and the Cyrillic alphabet. 18 Many self-proclaimed patriotic associations from various towns across the Republic of Macedonia were added to the country’s national registry of non-governmental organizations in the spring of 2017. On the emergence of these associations and the reshaping of civil society in the country, see Neofo­ tistos (2019). 19 On the practice of everyday life in Skopje during the 2001 armed conflict, see Neofotistos 2012. The most recent population census was carried out in 2002; census data are available on the State Statistical Office website. http://www .stat.gov.mk/Publikacii/knigaXIII.pdf 20 Ziadin Sela remained hospitalized for ten days and barely escaped with his life. 21 Victor A. Friedman (personal communication). 22 President Ivanov referred to a joint declaration, signed by Macedonia’s Albanian parties in consultation with Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama, in January 2017. The declaration served as a bargaining platform three of the four Albanian parties in Macedonia used during the process of negotiating the formation of a coalition government. 23 For a discussion of Syriza’s ideological profile from opposition to power, see Katsambekis 2019. 24 http://ibl.bas.bg/lib/bda4/#page/2/mode/2up 25 On the place Ilinden occupies in the Macedonian national imagination, see Brown 2003. 26 For the full text of the Prespa Agreement, please see Appendix 1. 27 I am grateful to Loring M. Danforth and Victor A. Friedman for talking this point over with me and helping me arrive at this understanding. 28 See https://eeas.europa.eu/headquarters/headquarters-homepage/46649/ remarks-high-representativevice-president-federica-mogherini-signing-cere­ mony-agreement-name_az (Accessed March 10, 2020). 29 The letter, titled “Historic Deal on Shared Macedonian Identity Must be Honored,” is available at https://www.theguardian.com/global/2018/jul/20/ historic-deal-on-shared-macedonian-identity-must-be-honoured (Accessed March 10, 2020). In response to the letter in The Guardian, a group consisting of academics, writers, poets, journalists, former diplomats, and NGO activ­ ists from different national backgrounds penned a letter to the editor for the portal Balkan Insider, titled “Letter to the Editor: Academics Take Issue with Prespa Agreement.” The letter writers opined, among other things, that the Agreement was an “asymmetrical ‘deal’,” which denied Macedonia’s consti­ tutional sovereignty. The letter is available at https://www.balkaninsider.com/ letter-to-the-editor-academics-take-issue-with-prespa-agreement/ (Accessed March 10, 2020). 30 See https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/30/world/europe/macedonia-greece-ref­ erendum.html 31 The Statement, however, mentions that IROM interlocutors did not cite the accuracy of the voter lists as “a major concern” (p. 6). See https://www.osce .org/odihr/elections/fyrom/398210?download=true (Accessed May 25, 2020). 32 See https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50100201 (Accessed April 2, 2020).

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33 It is important to note that only the Greek side of the Prespa border region was militarized at the time. The objective was to control the ethnic Macedo­ nian villages, and also the Pomak villages along the border with Bulgaria in Eastern Thrace (Victor A. Friedman, personal communication).

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Mackridge, Peter and Eleni Yannakakis, eds. 1997. Ourselves and Others: The Development of a Greek Macedonian Cultural Identity Since 1912. Oxford, NY: Berg. Martis, Nicolaos. 1983. The Falsification of the Macedonian History. Athens: Graphic Arts of Athanassiades Bros. Michailidis, Iakovos D. 2000. “On the Other Side of the River. The Defeated Slavophones and Greek History.” In Macedonia: The Politics of Identity and Difference, edited by Jane K. Cowan, 68–84. London: Pluto Press. Michas, Takis. 2002. Unholy Alliance: Greece and Milosevic’s Serbia. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press. Mulligan, William. 2014. The Great War for Peace. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Neofotistos, Vasiliki P. 2009. “Bulgarian passports, Macedonian identity: The inven­ tion of EU Citizenship in the Republic of Macedonia.” Anthropology Today 25, no. 4: 19–22 ———. 2011. “Going Home to Pakistan: Identity and Its Discontents in Southeastern Europe.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 18, no. 4: 291–316. ———. 2012. The Risk of War: Everyday Sociality in the Republic of Macedonia. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 2019. “The Rhetoric of War and the Reshaping of Civil Society in the Republic of Macedonia.” Slavic Review 78, no. 2: 357–64. Panourgiá, Neni. 2009. Dangerous Citizens: The Greek Left and the Terror of the State. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Perry, Duncan. 1998. The Politics of Terror: The Macedonian Revolutionary Movements, 1893-1903. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pettifer, James, ed. 1999. The New Macedonian Question. Palgrave MacMillan. Popovski, Risto and Pandil Kosturski. 2000. Alexandar Makedonski: Makedonizam [Alexander the Macedonian: Macedonism]. Skopje, Macedonia: P. Kosturski. Poulton, Hugh. 2000 [1995]. Who Are the Macedonians? Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Risteski, Ljupčo. 2009. “Recognition of the Independence of the Macedonian Orthodox Church (MOC) as an Issue Concerning Macedonian National Identity.” EthnoAnthropoZoom 6: 145–85. Rossos, Andrew. 2008. Macedonia and the Macedonians: A History. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. Roudometof, Victor, ed. 2000. The Macedonian Question: Culture, Historiography, Politics. Boulder, CO: Columbia University Press, East European Monographs. ———. 2002. Collective Memory, National Identity, and Ethnic Conflict: Greece, Bulgaria, and the Macedonian Question. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers. Vangeli, Anastas. 2011. “Nation-Building Ancient Macedonian Style: The Origins and the Effects of the So-called Antiquization in Macedonia.” Nationalities Papers 39, no. 1: 13–32. Wilkinson, Henry Robert. 1951. Maps and Politics: A Review of the Ethnographic Cartography of Macedonia. Liverpool: University Press of Liverpool.

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1

“Three Countries, Two

Lakes, One Future”

The Prespa Lakes and the Signing

of the Prespa Agreement

Loring M. Danforth

From the crest of the ridge at the high point of the only road access from the rest of Greece, the view over the Prespa Lakes opens suddenly in one stunning panorama. Dense forests of beech and oak in the immediate fore­ ground slope down to the open fields and small villages that surround Lesser Prespa Lake. To the west across its shimmering blue water, dark mountains rise along the Albanian frontier. To the north, a narrow isthmus of reeds and sand separates Lesser Prespa from the much larger Greater Prespa Lake. Greater Prespa is bisected by two invisible perpendicular lines: run­ ning east-west is the border between Greece and the Republic of North Macedonia; running north-south is the border between these two countries and Albania. The borders of all three countries meet at a singular point in the southwest corner of the lake. Beyond Greater Prespa, fading into the distant haze, are the often snow-capped mountains of North Macedonia (see Figure 1.1). The Prespa Lakes are among the oldest in Europe. They lie in a long trench-like basin created some five million years ago with the formation of a series of faults striking in a northeast-southwest direction. During the Pliocene Epoch, the two lakes were part of one much larger lake whose surface lay some 80 meters higher than that of the present lakes. Greater Prespa, which reaches a depth of 55 meters, covers an area of 250 square kilometers, 65% of which lies in the Republic of North Macedonia, 18% in Albania, and 17% in Greece. Lesser Prespa, which reaches a depth of only eight meters, covers an area of about 50 square kilometers, 90% of it lies in Greece, with only the southwestern corner extending into Albanian terri­ tory. Water from Lesser Prespa flows into Greater Prespa through a small stream, while Greater Prespa drains into Lake Ohrid to the north by a series of underground channels. The entire Prespa basin is known worldwide as a center of endemism and exceptional biodiversity.1 On June 17, 2018, the Prime Ministers of Greece and the Republic of Macedonia met to finalize an agreement to end the bitter dispute that has dominated the relationship between their two countries for almost 30 years. This dispute has centered on the name, “the Republic of Macedonia,” which the newly independent country adopted after the breakup of the former

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Figure 1.1 Map of Prespa Source: Nat Case, INCase LLC. Road and water data (c) OpenStreetMap contributors.

Yugoslavia in 1991. It is, however, part of a much larger historical con­ flict, known as the Macedonian Question or the Macedonian Issue, which extends back over a century through the Greek Civil War, both World Wars, the Balkan Wars, the Ilinden Uprising, and the Macedonian Struggle.2 With the signing of the Prespa Agreement, leaders of the Republic of Macedonia agreed to change the name of their country to the Republic of North Macedonia. In exchange, Greek leaders agreed to drop their gov­ ernment’s veto of the Republic’s applications to join NATO, the European Union, and other international organizations. This agreement, therefore, holds the promise of transforming the relationship between the two coun­ tries from one of hostility and conflict into one of good will and coopera­ tion. The choice of location for the signing ceremony—in Greece, on the

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shore of Greater Prespa, in the village of Psarades, just a few kilometers south of what Eleni Myrivili (2004 and 2019) has called “the liquid border” between the two countries—was highly symbolic. In this essay, I examine the history of the meaning of Prespa as a place in order to understand its significance as the site for the signing of the agree­ ment that bears its name. I offer a “biography of a place,” a biography of Prespa, by presenting a series of historical accounts that convey the meaning that Prespa as a place has had at various points in time.3 More specifically, I consider Prespa as the capital of the Bulgarian Empire of Tsar Samuel in the tenth century, the site of the highly contested process of defining the borders of the new Balkan states after World War I, the location of the headquarters of the Provisional Democratic Government of Greece and the capital of “Free Greece” during the Greek Civil War, the site of the Transboundary Prespa Park, which was established in 2001, and finally the place where the Prespa Agreement between Greece and the Republic of Macedonia was signed on June 17, 2018.4 During certain points in its long history, Prespa has occupied positions of political importance and seemed to lie at the center of major histori­ cal events. During others, it has seemed to lie forgotten and isolated at the periphery, at the margins, of the Balkans. On the one hand, the Prespa basin is a single, unified ecosystem of worldwide importance because of its incred­ ible biological diversity; on the other, it is a place that is fragmented by the closed borders of countries whose relationships have often been hostile. The Prespa Lakes have been the scene of terrible conflict and violence, but they are also a place of peace and natural beauty. Prespa may seem like the end of the world. It is located, as its residents say, “at the end of Greece.” But it is also located at the center of Macedonia.5

The capital of the Bulgarian Empire During the Byzantine era, the Prespa region was an important center of Orthodox Christianity. From the tenth through the sixteenth centuries, many significant monuments were built there in testament to the vital role the Orthodox Church has played in the lives of the people of Macedonia. Hermitages, churches, monasteries, and a great basilica—many in ruins, some still in use—can be found on the islands and along the shores of the two lakes. The Via Egnatia, the main land route linking Rome and Constantinople, passed nearby.6 In the last quarter of the tenth century (ca. 976), Tsar Samuel ascended to the throne of the First Bulgarian Empire, a Christian Empire engaged in a fierce struggle with the Byzantine Empire for hegemony over the cen­ tral Balkans. One of Samuel’s first acts as emperor was to establish a new imperial capital on a small peninsula (now an island) in Lesser Prespa Lake. Here Samuel built fortifications, a palace, and an immense basil­ ica that was intended to serve as the seat of an autocephalous Bulgarian

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Patriarch. At the height of its power, Samuel’s empire, with its capital in Prespa, controlled a vast area extending from the Danube River in the north to the Aegean Sea in the south and from the Black Sea in the east to the Adriatic in the west.7 In 986, as part of his efforts to expand his empire, Samuel captured the city of Larissa in Central Greece. In addition to taking captive thousands of the city’s inhabitants and bringing them to Prespa to help build his new capital, Samuel took the holy relics of St. Achilleios from the metropolitan church of Larissa and “translated” them to his new capital, where he placed them in the basilica he had just built. According to one Byzantine chron­ icler, this basilica, the Basilica of St. Achilleios on the island of the same name, was “a building of the greatest size and beauty” (Skylitzes 2010, 313). In 1014, the Byzantine army under Emperor Basil II inflicted a devastat­ ing defeat on Samuel’s forces in what is now Southwestern Bulgaria. During the battle, Basil captured Samuel’s entire army—some 15,000 men—and proceeded to blind them all, leaving one of every hundred men with sight in one eye so they could lead the defeated army home. As a result, Basil II came to be known throughout the Byzantine world as “Basil the Bulgar­ slayer.” According to tradition, Tsar Samuel died soon after his defeat and was buried in the Basilica of St. Achilleios. For the next 200 years, the Prespa region enjoyed great prosperity, but by the end of the 11th century, the major buildings of the area had been destroyed by Latin mercenaries. Over the following centuries, Prespa fell successively under the control of the Second Bulgarian Empire, the restored Byzantine Empire, the Serbian Empire, and finally the Ottoman Empire. Then, after World War I, the Great Powers drew the present national bor­ ders in the area, borders that divided the two Prespa Lakes among Greece, Albania, and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, which later became the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and still later the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The history of Tsar Samuel in the Prespa region took on national sig­ nificance for the countries involved in the Macedonian Conflict in the second half of the 20th century. In 1965, during the first systematic exca­ vations of the Basilica of St. Achilleios, the Greek archaeologist Nikos K. Moutsopoulos of the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki discovered a sarcophagus containing a partial skeleton and a small horde of Byzantine coins. After years of careful analysis by what Moutsopoulos refers to as a “scientific committee” of professors and priests, the Greek Orthodox Church officially recognized the remains as those of St. Achilleios. On the eve of May 15, 1981, these sacred relics, vested now with national signifi­ cance, were “retranslated” from Prespa back to Larissa in a Greek military helicopter. The next day, the patron saint of Larissa was received in a special ceremony held in the city’s soccer stadium in the presence of the Archbishop of Athens and the Holy Synod of the Church of Greece. Today the relics of Larissa’s “unsleeping and loving shepherd” lie encased in a silver chest

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that rests in an elaborately carved bier in the city’s metropolitan cathedral (Moutsopoulos 1999, 131). During further excavations of the basilica, Moutsopoulos discovered a grave that would prove even more noteworthy than that of Saint Achilleios, a grave containing a complete skeleton covered with a fragment of cloth woven from gold and silk threads. After the skeleton was examined at the Laboratory of Comparative Anatomy at the Medical School of the University of Thessaloniki, Moutsopoulos announced that he had discov­ ered the body of Tsar Samuel himself. His conclusion was based on the cor­ respondence between two sets of “facts:” physical attributes of the remains, on the one hand, and historical accounts of Samuel’s ancestry, on the other. The skeleton exhibited slight prognathism of the face, which was “a Mongoloid trait” indicating “traces of proto-Bulgarian ancestry,” while the great height of the nasal bone was a clear sign of “Armenian racial admix­ ture” (Moutsopoulos 1999, 182). According to one Byzantine chronicler, Samuel was the son of a Bulgarian count and his wife, who had the common Armenian name Ripsime (Skylitzes 2010, 312). More cautious scholars hesi­ tated to accept Moutsopoulos’ identification of the remains.8 On October 6, 2014, the 1000th anniversary of the death of Tsar Samuel, celebrations were held throughout Bulgaria to honor the death of the “father of the Bulgarian nation.” The same day a formal ceremony took place at the Museum of Byzantine Culture in Thessaloniki. “Samuel’s remains” were removed from storage and put on display so that the President of Bulgaria and Simeon Saxecoburggotski, the last King of Bulgaria, could pay their respects. In the preceding months, Greek and Bulgarian officials had worked hard to negotiate an agreement by which this “national treasure” (which had been “imprisoned” in Thessaloniki) could be “returned” to Bulgaria. In the end, the negotiations were unsuccessful, as difficult memories of past conflicts prevented from taking place what the President of Bulgaria called “a symbolic act of historic reconciliation between the Bulgarian and Greek people” (Leviev-Sawyer 2015).9 It is not just Bulgarians, however, who claim Tsar Samuel as their illustri­ ous ancestor. In an effort to assert their existence as a nation distinct from the Bulgarians, the Greeks, and the Serbs, Macedonians have constructed a canon of national heroes that also includes Samuel. Macedonian nation­ alists claim that he was the leader of a Macedonian, not a Bulgarian, empire both because of its geographical location and its supposed linguistic and cultural distinctiveness.10 Speaking to a Bulgarian reporter, Moutsopoulos dismissed these Macedonian claims out of hand. “Macedonians,” he said, “have nothing else to prove their existence” (Dobrev 2007). Moutsopoulos presents a more formal refutation of Macedonian claims to Tsar Samuel in the epilogue of his 1999 monograph on the Basilica of St. Achilleios. He explicitly describes his archaeological excavations in Prespa as a service to the Greek nation and claims that they demonstrate the Greekness of the inhabitants of the Prespa during Samuel’s reign. In

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his conclusion, Moutsopoulos draws parallels between the conflict between the Byzantine Empire and Samuel’s Bulgarian Empire in the tenth century, on the one hand, and the conflicts between Greece and its Slavic neigh­ bors to the north in the 20th century, on the other. Moutsopoulos ends his monograph with a description of Prespa as “the most beautiful Greek landscape,” adding “just like its population, its customs, and its soul; it is Greece” (Moutsopoulos 1999, 327).11

Delimiting the borders of the Balkans After World War I, the process of imposing national borders on the Prespa region and Macedonia more generally was complicated, protracted, and highly contested. The Treaty of London, signed in May 1913 at the conclu­ sion of the First Balkan War, committed the Great Powers of Europe to the establishment of an Albanian state, but it left the borders of the new state undefined. The task of drawing these borders was delegated to a Conference of Ambassadors, which on December 13, 1913, with the Protocol of Florence, proposed a tentative solution to the competing claims of Greece, Albania, and Serbia over territory in central Macedonia. Even at this stage of the negotiations, however, the Conference of Ambassadors was unable to agree on the location of the proposed borders in the Prespa region at the south­ eastern corner of the new Albanian state because all three Balkan countries were making conflicting territorial claims in the area. All three sought to include the Prespa Lakes within their own boundaries.12 Because of the ethnic and linguistic complexity of the area’s inhabitants and their conflicting national loyalties (a literal “salad Macédoine”), and because of the fierce counterclaims presented by Greece, Albania, and Serbia, the Conference of Ambassadors decided to adopt a “lacustrine solu­ tion” and divide the Prespa Lakes among all three states in order to share among them the important economic resources the lakes provided. The two Prespa Lakes, therefore, became “frontier lakes;” lakes, in other words, that formed the international border between two or more states. As a result of the outbreak of World War I, however, the final determination of the bor­ ders of Albania was delayed for many years, On July 1, 1919, three days after the signing of the Versailles Treaty that marked the end of World War I, the Great Powers appointed another Conference of Ambassadors to determine the southern borders of Albania. This second conference was heavily lobbied by ministers and chargés d’af­ faires from Greece, Albania, and Serbia to incorporate particular villages, monasteries, and lakes within their respective territories. The Albanians, supported by the Italians, charged the Serbians with atrocities, the French and the British exchanged memoranda, and all three Balkan states were instructed to withdraw their troops from the contested zone. This second Conference of Ambassadors established a Delimitation Commission, whose charge was to physically demarcate the southern border

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of Albania from the Prespa region to the coast of the Adriatic near Corfu. The Commission, which arrived in the area in 1922 and worked steadily for three years, was made up of several hundred people. It was led by delegates from Italy, England, and France and included representatives from Greece and Albania. In addition to diplomats, civil servants, and military officers, the Commission was also staffed by a variety of people with specific techni­ cal skills—drivers, typists, interpreters, and surveyors. While the Commission had been instructed to follow as closely as possible the boundary line that had been proposed by the original 1913 Protocol of Florence, it was granted leeway to deviate from this line in light of circum­ stances arising on the ground. The Commission consulted old tax records and maps to determine the administrative boundaries of old Ottoman kazas and sanjaks.13 It also took into consideration the preferences of local inhabitants in an effort to give them the right to determine their own future. Mother tongue, religion, incipient national identity, proximity to the cities of Korçë (in Albania), Bitola (in Yugoslavia), and Florina (in Greece), as well as the location of the fields and pastures of specific villages all entered into the Commission’s decisions. The work of the Commission staff was extremely challenging. They used theodolites, plane tables, and steel tapes to survey the difficult terrain. In creating borders where none had existed before, they cut down trees to open boundary lanes through forests, and they constructed pillars or pyramids out of concrete mixed on the spot. The side of the marker facing each coun­ try was inscribed with its initials in the appropriate alphabet; the other two sides were marked with a unique serial number. When the entire boundary had been demarcated in this way, the Commission prepared detailed maps and descriptions indicating the loca­ tion and elevation of each border marker and the distance between them. These documents, printed in triplicate at the Geographical Institute of Florence, were then formally submitted to the Conference of Ambassadors. The final instrument of demarcation of the borders of Albania, Yugoslavia, and Greece was signed in Paris on July 30, 1926.14 In this way, the Prespa Lakes were divided among three countries. What is known as the “tripoint” or “trijunction” (where the border running eastwest between Greece and what is now the Republic of North Macedonia meets the border running north-south between these two countries and Albania) is located at 40°51′ N latitude, 20°59′ E longitude in the southwest corner of Greater Prespa Lake. Twenty kilometers south of this “tripoint,” the border between Greece and Albania cuts across the western arm of Lesser Prespa. For much of the 20th century, Greece’s border with the former Yugoslavia across the Prespa basin was clearly marked both on land and on the sur­ face of Greater Prespa Lake. A line of white concrete pillars still runs from the wooded slopes of Mt. Varnoundas down a ridge between the villages of Dupeni to the north and Ayios Yermanos to the south. In the past, a lighted

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signal marked where the Greek-Yugoslav border reached the eastern shore of Greater Prespa, and a row of 18 white, cone-shaped buoys over a meter and a half tall and held in place by cement anchors, one every 600 meters, extended for over 11 kilometers from the eastern shore of the lake to the “tripoint” (Pondaven 1972, 83). With the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, this border was demil­ itarized. Guardhouses fell into ruin, dirt roads along the border became overgrown, and the line of buoys marking the border across the lake was no longer maintained. In an abandoned field near Koula, a small settlement at the western end of the narrow isthmus that separates the two Prespa Lakes, lies a cone of rusted sheet metal with blocks of wood fastened around its base, which is attached to a short length of chain. The number “7” painted in blue and some patches of white have survived the years of neglect. Out on the surface of Greater Prespa, the border between Greece and the Republic of North Macedonia still exists, but it is nowhere to be seen. It is an invisible line that blocks all legal human traffic, but presents no obstacle to the huge pelicans soaring through the air above.

Ground zero of the Greek Civil War Hitler’s army invaded Greece on April 6, 1941, and in a matter of weeks com­ pletely overwhelmed the Greek and British troops defending the country. The Axis occupation of Greece that followed was a period of great depriva­ tion and hardship throughout the country. Many social and political divi­ sions, exacerbated by the occupation, contributed directly to the outbreak of the Civil War in 1946, waged between the Democratic Army of Greece under the control of the Greek Communist Party, on the one hand, and the Greek National Army under the authority of the right-wing Greek government, on the other. The Democratic Army enjoyed some success on the battlefield early in the war, particularly in the mountainous regions near Greece’s northern border, but the tide soon turned in favor of the Greek army. On October 16, 1949, the Democratic Army Radio announced a “temporary end” to hostili­ ties, and over 140,000 refugees left Greece for exile in Eastern Europe. With that the Greek Civil War came to a bitter conclusion.15 During the early years of World War II, when the Prespa region was occupied by the Italian forces, their headquarters were located at Koula.16 Because they had experienced severe discrimination during the Metaxas dictatorship in the late 1930s, many Slavic-speaking “local Macedonians” in the Prespa region registered with the occupying forces as Bulgarians. They were then issued identification cards that entitled them to receive rations of soap, sugar, flour, and bread. After the war, many of these “Bulgarians” fled to Bulgaria; of those who remained many were imprisoned by the Greek government. In September 1943, with the fall of Mussolini and the withdrawal of the Italians, Prespa fell under German occupation. As the Civil War intensified,

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fighting increased between government forces based in towns and commu­ nist fighters in the surrounding mountains. The most important Greek Army post in Prespa was located in the village of Mikrolimni on the east­ ern shore of Lesser Prespa. On June 8, 1947, when communists attacked the police station there, government troops were prevented from sending rein­ forcements because of well-planned guerilla ambushes that blocked their way. Despite cement machine gun nests along the lakeshore manned by the Greek army, the communists came down from the hills above the village and captured the post, killing 11 of the 12 soldiers defending it. For the rest of the Civil War, Prespa remained fully under the control of the Democratic Army. The communists established the headquarters of the Provisional Democratic Government of Greece in the village of Ayios Yermanos in the hills above the eastern end of the isthmus between the two lakes. They opened a school there to prepare Macedonian language teachers to work in elementary schools in Slavic-speaking areas of Greek Macedonia. They also built training camps, prisons, machine shops, and hospitals; they even planned to build an airport for planes promised by the government of the Soviet Union, but never actually sent. Living conditions in Prespa were difficult. Food was scarce, with daily rations of 250 grams of corn and no salt or olive oil. Villagers were forced to boil weeds and grind corncobs into flour to survive. Frequent bombing raids by the Greek Air Force destroyed churches and schools; they also killed and wounded many children. One woman from Mikrolimni I spoke with described napalm bombs as “bottles of gasoline falling like chains.” During this time, Prespa, the capital of what Greek communists referred to as “Free Greece,” was ground zero of the Greek Civil War. The final battles of the war were contested in the mountains of Grammos and Vitsi to the south and west of Prespa. In August 1949, the defeated communist forces were forced to flee into Albania along the isthmus between the two lakes and then across the stream at Koula. At the height of this retreat, on August 14, 1948, Douglas C-47 Dakotas of the Greek Air Force attacked the isthmus with 155 sorties, during which they dropped thousands of kilograms of ordnance. A Macedonian from Kastoria I spoke with in Toronto, who participated in the retreat, remembers the planes crushing guerrillas with their tires, the wooden bridge across the stream being destroyed by bombs, communist soldiers drowning from the weight of their heavy packs, and the water, full of corpses, turning red with blood. For many years after the military conflict itself was over, the traumatic impact of the Civil War continued to polarize Greek society. For three dec­ ades, Greece was ruled by a succession of right-wing governments—some democratically elected, some not—whose anticommunist policies and Cold War rhetoric led to the persecution of a whole generation of leftists. A pro­ cess of liberalization and political reconciliation that began after the fall of the military dictatorship in 1974 continued when the Panhellenic Socialist

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Movement (PASOK) came to power in 1981. Nevertheless, memories of the Greek Civil War remain a powerful divisive force in Greece to this day. The impact of the Civil War on the villages of Prespa was devastating. Churches, schools, and houses were destroyed; whole villages abandoned; fields left uncultivated; roads badly damaged; and mountainsides scarred with pillboxes, trenches, and landmines. While the population of Greek Prespa had stood at over 10,000 in 1940, by 1951, two years after the war, it had fallen to under 3,000 (Papadopoulos 2016, 634). More than half of the inhabitants of Prespa had fled to Yugoslavia and other countries in Eastern Europe. Many others scattered to Thessaloniki and Athens, Canada and Australia, in search of better lives, leaving behind only the elderly to carry on the burden of daily life in what had truly become a deserted place. During the Cold War, Prespa was declared a “border zone” by the Greek government and placed under a strict regime of military surveillance and control, whose goal was to protect a politically sensitive area, impose national purity on an ideologically and ethnically “polluted” region, and ensure its full incorporation into the Greek state. Political refugees who had been born in Prespa and who were visiting Greece from abroad required special permits to visit the villages of their birth. Even local residents needed to show white identity cards at each one of the military checkpoints located within the Prespa basin. In the decades after the Civil War, depopulated Prespa villages were either left to fall into ruin or resettled by Vlachs and refugees from Asia Minor, who were considered “loyal Greeks” by the government. Within the Prespa basin, the borders with Albania and Yugoslavia were tightly closed. In addition, “internal borders” were created between Prespa and the rest of Greece, between a dangerous, marginal, and not fully Greek, border zone that required special monitoring and surveillance and what was considered safely and unambiguously Greece.17 After the fall of the right-wing military dictatorship in 1974, restrictions on entering the Prespa basin were relaxed, and the military presence there reduced. In the 1980s under the socialist government of PASOK, these restrictions were lifted entirely. As the Cold War came to an end, Prespa became less isolated, and its prospects for economic development grew more likely.18

The transboundary Prespa Park:

“Three Countries, Two Lakes, One Future”

The traditional farming, fishing, and grazing practices that characterized vil­ lage life in the Prespa basin through the 1960s coexisted in relative harmony with the natural environment. The ecological health and the attendant bio­ diversity of Prespa were generally compatible with the subsistence-based economy of the human population of the area. During this period, the

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relationship between “man and nature” was a stable and positive one (Catsadorakis 1999). In the late 1960s, the ornithological significance of the Prespa Lakes drew the attention of European naturalists, and in the early 1970s steps were taken at the national and international levels to protect and preserve the natural environment of the region. In 1971, the Greek government desig­ nated the Prespa Lakes as a Wetland of International Importance under the Ramsar Convention, and in 1974, by presidential decree, the Greek portion of the basin was declared a National Forest.19 For several reasons, however, these initial efforts at environmental protection proved largely ineffective. Environmental regulations were not enforced, funding for necessary pro­ jects was completely inadequate, local residents and regional government agencies were not consulted, and relevant environmental laws did not apply well to a region with a substantial human population. In the mid-1980s, a pilot project of the Integrated Mediterranean Programmes sponsored by the European Economic Community was car­ ried out in Prespa. Its goal was “to improve the socioeconomic conditions and infrastructure in an isolated and under-developed area” of Greece (Pyrovetsi 1989, 203). The project funded the completion of an extensive irrigation network, as well as the construction of a fish-breeding station and a fish-canning factory, both of which were unsuccessful and soon closed. During this period, the cultivation of beans in the region was intensified to the point where it became a monoculture. All these developments had a neg­ ative impact on the ecology of the region and severely threatened the biodi­ versity of the area. Irrigation led to a lowering of the level of Lesser Prespa Lake, the use of fertilizer led to its eutrophication, and the steep decline in the extent of wet meadows surrounding it destroyed a crucial environment necessary for the health of populations of a variety of endangered species of birds, fish, and plants.20 One of the most significant events in the on-going efforts to protect the nat­ ural environment of the Prespa basin was the 1991 founding of the Society for the Protection of Prespa (SPP). The SPP was created with the participa­ tion of a variety of Greek and international environmental organizations, including the World Wildlife Fund, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and the Hellenic Ornithological Society. The mission of the SPP has been twofold: to protect the biodiversity of the Prespa Lakes and to improve the standard of living and preserve the cultural heritage of area residents. The SPP succeeded in overcoming the hostility many local residents felt toward “the ecologists” and eventually persuaded them to adopt more environmentally friendly agricultural practices. The SPP also constructed visitors’ centers in the park, carried out educational and public awareness campaigns for residents and visitors, and conducted much-needed monitor­ ing projects and scientific studies. In addition, the SPP carried out manage­ ment programs to monitor the level of Lesser Prespa Lake, to increase the area of wet meadows around it, to reduce illegal hunting and logging in the

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park, and to protect the endangered species of birds, mammals, fish, and plants that lived there.21 The fact that the Prespa basin was divided among three countries whose relationships for over a century have been characterized by national, reli­ gious, and ethnic conflicts presented particular challenges to the ecologists interested in protecting the environment of the region. Since the Prespa basin is obviously one ecological unit in which national boundaries— whether over land or water—were completely irrelevant, any serious steps to protect the biodiversity of the region had to be carried out at a transna­ tional level and involve the participation of all three states among which the basin was shared. A second major step in the preservation of the environment of the Prespa region was, therefore, the joint declaration by the Prime Ministers of Albania, the Republic of Macedonia, and Greece of the Transboundary Prespa Park, which took place in Ayios Yermanos on February 2, 2001, World Wetlands Day. This declaration recognized that “the Prespa Lakes and their surrounding catchment are unique for their geomorphology, their ecological wealth, and their biodiversity, which gives the area signifi­ cant international importance.” It acknowledged that “individual national activities should be complemented by international collaboration,” and it proclaimed “the ‘Prespa Park’ as the first transboundary protected area in South Eastern Europe.” The declaration also stated that it would secure “the conservation of the world’s most important biological resources and ecosystems into the next millennium.” Finally, it promised the “enhanced cooperation” among the three countries in order to: a) maintain and protect the unique ecological values of the “Prespa Park,” b) prevent and/or reverse the causes of its habitat degradation, c) explore appropriate management methods for the sustainable use of the Prespa Lakes waters and d) spare no efforts so that the “Prespa Park” become and remain a model of its kind as well as an additional refer­ ence to the peaceful collaboration among our countries.22 The motto of the Transboundary Prespa Park came to be “Three Countries, Two Lakes, One Future.” (Papadopoulos 2010, 187). In 2004, another development took place that further established the Transboundary Prespa Park as a symbol of transnational cooperation in the field of environmental protection. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature established the Balkan Green Belt along the north­ ern border of Greece. It passes right through the park. The goal of the Balkan Green Belt was to transform what had previously been a no-man’s land running along the Iron Curtain (broadly defined) into a protected transboundary natural area that would serve as an example of “conserva­ tion without frontiers” and provide “a new image for the Balkans” (Terry, Ullrich, and Riecken 2006, 61). The Balkan Green Belt is part of a much

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larger project, the European Green Belt, which runs from the Barents Sea at the Russian-Norwegian border in the north, through Central Europe, to the Balkans in the south. The establishment of the European Green Belt was intended to serve as “a global symbol of transboundary cooperation in nature conservation and sustainable development” (Terry, Ullrich, and Riecken 2006, viii). One of the main reasons the Transboundary Prespa Park contains such an impressive degree of biodiversity is its location at the intersection of geo­ logical, climatological, and biological borders. Unlike the political bounda­ ries between states that the park is better known for crossing, these natural borders mark transitions from one environmental zone or region to another. The Prespa Park is, therefore, a transboundary park not only in a political sense, but in an ecological sense as well. The geological substratum to the west and south of Lesser Prespa Lake is composed of sedimentary limestones from the Mesozoic era. The soil in this area is alkaline and gray in color. To the east of the lake, the sub­ stratum is composed of older igneous granites from the Paleozoic era. The soil in this area is acidic and reddish-brown in color. These two soil types, both found in the Prespa Park, support two very different plant com­ munities. Another natural boundary spanned by the Prespa Park is that between the Mediterranean and European climate zones. According to George Catsadorakis, a leading expert on the natural history of Prespa, the park “occupies a frontier and intermediate position” between the warm, dry Mediterranean and the more temperate climate of central Europe (Catsadorakis 1999, 94).23 The wet meadows around Lesser Prespa constitute by far the richest biome in the park. These meadows, which are located at the edge of the lake—right at the boundary between water and land—were once much more widespread than they are now because villagers no longer burn and cut the dense reed beds that grow along the lakeshore as they once did. As a result, these reed beds have largely replaced the environmentally more val­ uable wet meadows. Characterized by shallow water, short vegetation, and seasonal flooding, these wet meadows are the most fertile and productive habitat in the park. This is where large numbers of fish spawn and water birds feed. Julian Hoffman, who has written sensitively about the natural history of the Prespa region, tells a story that perfectly captures the ease with which the natural world transcends political boundaries. Walking along the southern shore of Greater Prespa Lake, he noticed an irregular line of apple trees growing in the sandy soil parallel to the edge of the lake. Apple growing was, and still is, a major agricultural enterprise on the north side of the lake in the Republic of Macedonia. Surplus apples were often dumped into the lake, where winds and currents carried them south across the border into Greece. When conditions were right, apples from the Republic of Macedonia produced trees growing in Greece. “Immigrant

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apple trees,” Hoffman writes, “now flower and fruit along parts of Greek coast, the land having held on to the cargo of seeds, rooting the unregu­ lated arrivals” (Hoffman 2013, 23).

Prespa: “The Lake of Reconciliation”24 Inhabitants of the Greek part of the Prespa basin sometimes refer to Psarades as “the last village in Greece.” Beyond it lie the open waters of Greater Prespa Lake and in the distance the shores of Albania and North Macedonia. The village of Psarades—Nivitsa in Macedonian—is situated at the head of a deep inlet that cuts sharply into a mountainous peninsula at the southern end of the lake. This peninsula, known locally as “Africa” for reasons that are not entirely clear, projects out from Albanian territory between the two Prespa Lakes. Psarades is tenuously linked to the rest of Greece by a small bridge at Koula across the stream that joins the two lakes. Painted on the limestone cliffs across the inlet from the village is a fresco of the All Holy Virgin Mary. Further along the shore, small Byzantine chap­ els stand in shaded clefts in the rocks high over the lake. Above the inlet, backed up against the Albanian border, rises Mt. Devas, the site of the last desperate battles of the Greek Civil War. Although Psarades now has fewer than 100 permanent residents, its pop­ ulation swells in the summer with the return of villagers and their families from as far away as Canada and Australia. Some villagers still work as fish­ ermen, the profession from which the village takes its Greek name, but most of them earn a living from the many tourists who arrive by bus for an after­ noon meal or who stay longer to enjoy the beauty of the park. At the edge of the village, houses and stables stand in ruin, roofs buckled and balconies collapsed. Along the shore runs a paved promenade bordered on one side with fish restaurants, tavernas, and small hotels. On the other, green reed beds extend out to the blue waters of the inlet. At the entrance to the village stands a small monument in the shape of an ancient Greek funerary stele. Beneath a small triangular pediment, carved in low relief is the Star of Vergina, one of the most contested symbols in the Macedonian Conflict given its association with Alexander the Great, Phillip of Macedon, and the ancient Macedonians.25 Inscribed below it is a message from a Greek Macedonian organization in Chicago: “Heroic border guards of Psarades, worthy Hellenes, sentries at the borders of our Fatherland, we, your brothers, send you a message of love and solidarity in the sacred struggle you are waging for Macedonia, July 1993.” Next to this reminder of the role that Prespa has played in the painful history of war and nationalist conflict that has characterized the relation­ ship between Greece and her northern neighbor for over a century, stands a sign attesting to the more positive role Prespa has begun to play in the region. This sign promotes the environmental programs the Society for the Protection of Prespa conducts in the Transboundary Prespa Park.

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On the morning of June 17, 2018, the villagers of Psarades witnessed something most of them had never before seen in their lives—a motorboat approached the village from the north, crossed the invisible “liquid border,” and landed at the jetty in front of the village, a jetty that had been enlarged especially for the occasion. When Zoran Zaev and Nikola Dimitrov, Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of the Republic of Macedonia, respectively, stepped ashore, they were greeted warmly by their Greek counterparts, Alexis Tsipras and Nikos Kotzias. In a large white tent setup nearby, sev­ eral hundred dignitaries including UN Special Representative, Matthew Nimitz, and high-ranking EU officials awaited the start of the formalities. The celebratory climax of the signing of the Prespa Agreement was cap­ tured in still photographs and videos that accompanied media reports of the event. The two Foreign Ministers exchanged leather bound copies of the agreement. Behind them, stood the two Prime Ministers flanked by their countries’ flags, and in the background the blue surface of Greater Prespa Lake. In his speech, Prime Minister Zaev called on the leaders of both coun­ tries to move past “all the issues that divided” them and “stay as united forever as we are on this day.” He praised the signing of the agreement as a “historic victory” that signified “eternal peace and progress in the Balkans.” Prime Minister Tsipras in turn described the agreement as an opportunity “to heal the wounds of time, to open a path for peace and brotherhood and growth for our countries.” He went on to decry “the poison of chauvinism and the divisions of nationalist hatred” that for too long had characterized the relationships between the two Balkan neighbors (Clarke 2018). At the conclusion of the ceremony, the two Prime Ministers and the two Foreign Ministers returned by boat across the lake—across the invisible, liquid border between their two countries—for a celebratory lunch in the Macedonian resort of Osteshevo. This was the first time a Greek Prime Minister had visited the Republic of Macedonia since its independence in 1991. Prime Minister Tsipras later told a reporter that the atmosphere at the lunch was “very good … almost like a wedding reception.”26 Responses to the signing of the Prespa Agreement have varied tremen­ dously. The Greek Minister of Tourism proclaimed: “The two lakes of Prespa are a source of life and of natural and cultural wealth of immeasur­ able value,” while the Governor of Western Macedonia described Prespa as “a blessed place within the Balkans, with great responsibility for the peoples coexisting there …. The lake waters must be united rather than divided” (Athens News Agency 2018). Many commentators expressed the hope that in the near future both the land and the water borders in and around the lakes would be opened in order to promote the economic development of the area. As one resident of Psarades told a reporter, “This lake unites us; it doesn’t separate us. We’ve been waiting a half a century for this moment.”27 Locally, nationally, and internationally, however, there has been a great deal of opposition to the Prespa Agreement. Nationalists on each side have vilified the agreement as an act of treason and a betrayal of their country’s

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national interests. In Psarades itself, the church bell—draped in a Greek flag—rang in mourning throughout the signing ceremony. The village priest said, “Something died today in Greece …. They are taking from us our soul, our name” (Kantouris and Kironski 2018). On the day of the signing, Greek police cordoned off all approaches to Psarades, forcing several thou­ sand demonstrators to protest the agreement in the village of Pisoderi 40 kilometers away. Some protesters carried banners that read: “Macedonian identity can’t be given away” and “There is only one Macedonia and it is Greek.” Others threw rocks at the police, who responded with tear gas and stun grenades, injuring both police and demonstrators. In the months that followed, Greeks staged protests against the Prespa Agreement in Athens, Thessaloniki, and at the main border crossing from Greece into the Republic of North Macedonia. Macedonians staged protests in Skopje and Bitola, some of which also turned violent (Tagaris and Vasovic 2018). In addition, there was significant hostility to the Prespa Agreement in both Greek and Macedonian diaspora communities in Australia, Canada, and the United States. On the one-year anniversary of the signing of the Agreement, the Federation of World Pan Macedonian Associations (a Greek Macedonian organization) held its annual convention in Psarades. Several hundred people gathered on the lakeshore in front of the village; many were wearing traditional Greek national costumes and carrying Greek flags and flags depicting the Star of Vergina. They sang the Greek national anthem and then danced to patriotic Greek music. Nina Gatzoulis, Supreme President of the Pan Macedonian Association USA, and other officials announced their intention “to invalidate the treasonous Prespa Agreement” and “begin a new Macedonian Struggle” (Tarakoulas 2019).

Conclusion: Macedonia as a transboundary place I have often stood on the sandy shore of the isthmus between the two Prespa Lakes near the stream at Koula and gazed out at the “tripoint” and the “liquid borders” that meet there. I find the place uncanny—both fascinating and frightening—a mysterious point where the territories of three countries meet, two invisible lines across the unbroken surface of a lake that define borders that people cannot cross. The Prespa region with these uncanny borders has intrigued other anthropologists as well. Eleni Myrivili (2004, 2019) writes about these bor­ ders as “ghosts” or “specters” that “haunt” the present with memories of a more violent past. Sarah Green (2005, 2019) uses other equally suggestive metaphors to convey the significance of these borders. They are “traces,” whose location, form, and meaning change through time; they are “tide­ marks,” lines left by the water on the shore indicating a former boundary between sea and land. A “tidemark” is a particularly appropriate image for the Prespa border, evoking as it does the lines running along the lime­ stone cliffs of Greater Prespa Lake that have been left not by the tides, but

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by the higher levels of the lake that existed at earlier points in time. Olga Demetriou (2013) writes about the “capriciousness,” the unstable and “slip­ pery” quality of another border, the Greek-Turkish border in Thrace, while she and Rozita Dimova (2019b) focus on the “material and non-material” aspects of borders in general and the apparatus—guards, checkpoints, fences, barriers, and walls—that often accompanies them.28 The invisible point that marks the coming together, the confluence, of national borders in the middle of Greater Prespa Lake lies, it seems to me, at the heart of the Macedonian Conflict. Macedonia has long been a contested place, a place where nation-states, particularly Greece and its northern neighbor of many names, have unsuccessfully attempted to lay mutually exclusive claim to everything Macedonian—not only the territory of Macedonia, but the name, the identity, the history, the language, the cul­ ture, and the people of Macedonia. George, a good friend of mine, was born in a village near Florina. He identified as Greek (he had a Greek national identity) until he migrated to Melbourne, Australia, and realized he was actually Macedonian and not Greek (he developed a Macedonian national identity). George loved nothing more than to argue about Macedonia, at soccer matches, at village dances and picnics, and at construction sites where he worked. George always claimed that at the Niki-Medzitlija border crossing near Florina there were signs on both sides of the border that read: “Welcome to Macedonia.” He jokingly dismissed the whole concept of a border there, saying, “It’s a bor­ der between Macedonia and Macedonia. It’s Macedonia on both sides; it doesn’t separate anything at all.” George is right. In Prespa, on both sides of the border, lies Greater Prespa Lake; on both sides of the border lies the Transboundary Prespa Park; and on both sides of the border lies Macedonia. One could object, of course, that to the south of the border lies what could be called “South Macedonia” (but which is actually known as Aegean Macedonia or more widely Greek Macedonia), while to the north of the border lies “North Macedonia” (which has also been known as Vardar Macedonia, Yugoslav Macedonia, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, the Republic of Macedonia, and which now has been officially designated the Republic of North Macedonia). In the last analysis, however, it’s all Macedonia. In a more serious vein, following Demetriou and Dimova’s suggestion that we explore the concept of “remaking borders” (2019a, xi), I would like to propose that we reimagine the border between Greece and the Republic of North Macedonia by transforming its meaning, its significance, from what has been a negative sense of separation, partition, and conflict, into what could in the future be a positive sense of connection, harmony, and reconciliation. By adopting metaphors from the Transboundary Prespa Park and its ecological unity and integrity, it would be possible to remake the borders of northern Greece so that they are no longer a place of fear and violence, but rather a place of natural beauty and peace.

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It is my hope that the Prespa Agreement will help realize the full promise of the Transboundary Prespa Park by serving as a model for future coop­ eration between Greece and the Republic of North Macedonia. It is my hope that this agreement will mark the end of a long period of nationalist conflict involving mutually exclusive claims to the territory, the heritage, and the name of Macedonia; that it will initiate a period in which instead pluralism and multiculturalism predominate. In this way, the historical and cultural complexity of Macedonia—like the biological diversity of the Transboundary Prespa Park—can be recognized as the common legacy of all the peoples of the southern Balkans. In this way, the borders between Macedonian national history and culture, on the one hand, and Greek national history and culture, on the other, would be washed away like tide­ marks, like traces in the sand. They would become invisible like lines drawn on water. Just as the Prespa Lakes with their endangered species of pelicans and trout are the shared natural heritage of both countries, so figures like Alexander the Great and Tsar Samuel and symbols like the Star of Vergina, would be accepted as the shared heritage of both nations, rather than the exclusive property of one or the other. If the border between the histories and cultures of North Macedonia and Greece, the border between the definitions of what is Macedonian and what is Greek, were to become as invisible, as immaterial, as the border between the two countries that runs across the surface of Greater Prespa Lake, then it would be possible to recognize Alexander the Great and Tsar Samuel as transboundary historical figures, the Star of Vergina as a transboundary symbol and the Macedonian language as a transboundary language. And finally it would be possible to recognize Macedonia itself as a transbound­ ary place.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Vasiliki Neofotistos and Julian Hoffman for their help­ ful comments on an earlier draft of this essay. I would also like to thank the inhabitants of Ayios Yermanos for the hospitality they offered me during my stay there. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to the staff of the Society for the Protection of Prespa and the Transboundary Prespa Park for their cooperation, and more importantly for their dedication to the preser­ vation of the natural and human communities of the Prespa region.

Notes 1 For additional information on the natural history of the Prespa Lakes, see Catsadorakis (1999), Crivelli and Catsadorakis (1997), and Standring (2009). 2 On the Macedonian Question generally, see Cowan (2000), Danforth (1995), Karakasidou (1997), Mackridge and Yannakakis (1997), and Roudometoff (2000 and 2002). 3 On the biography of place, see Kate Brown (2004).

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4 This chapter is based on short periods of fieldwork carried out in the Greek part of the Prespa basin over the past 30 years, as well as a longer period of fieldwork conducted in the summer of 2017. 5 I am referring here generally to the geographical region of Macedonia. 6 The two important islands in the lakes are Golem Grad, located in the southwest corner of Greater Prespa Lake in the Republic of North Macedo­ nia, and St. Achilleios, located at the northern end of Lesser Prespa Lake in Greece. The island of St. Achilleios is now accessible from the mainland by footbridge. 7 This account of the history of the Bulgarian Empire and the life of Tsar Sam­ uel draws on the work of Fine (1983), Runciman (1939), and Vacalopoulos (1973). 8 See Fine (1983, 189) and Stephenson (2003, 13). 9 For other examples of the political significance of the remains of national heroes, see Katherine Verdery’s The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (1999). 10 See, for example, Dimevski (1973), Tashkovski (1973), and Embassy of the Republic of Macedonia (nd). 11 For the role archaeology has played in the Macedonian Conflict and in Greek nationalist discourse more generally, see Danforth (1995, 163–174, 2003, and 2010) and Hamilakis (2007). 12 The following account of the construction of these borders is based on the work of Dimitrakopoulos (1991), Dipla (1981), Papadopoulos (2010 and 2016), and Pondaven (1972). 13 Kazas and sanjaks were administrative divisions used in the Ottoman Empire. A kaza was a subdivision of a sanjak. 14 See Barros (1965), Giles (1930), and United States Department of State (1968 and 1971a and b). 15 Valuable sources on the Greek Civil War in English include Baerentzen et al. (1987), Carabott and Sfikas (2004), Clogg (1979: 133-165), Close (1993 and 1995), Collard (1990), Iatrides (1981a and b), Iatrides and Wrigley (1995), Kalyvas (2006), Loulis (1982), Mazower (2000), Panourgiá (2009), Vlavianos (1992), and Voglis (2002). For valuable sources in Greek, see Fleischer (2003), Iliou (2004), Koutsoukis and Sakkas (2000), Margaritis (2000 and 2001), Nikolakopoulos et al. (2002), Van Boeschoten (1997), Van Boeschoten et al. (2008), and Voutira et al. (2005). 16 During World War II, other parts of Greece were occupied by Bulgarian and German forces. 17 See Rombou-Levidi (2016). 18 This account of Prespa during the Cold War draws on Koliopoulos (1999), Myrivili (2004), and Papadopoulos (2010). 19 In 1984, the Prespa National Forest became the Prespa National Park. 20 See Catsadorakis and Malakou (1997) and Catsadorakis (1999). 21 For more information on the Society for the Protection of Prespa and the natural history of the region, see: https://www.spp.gr/index.php?option=com_ content&view=article&id=5&Itemid=5&lang=en (Accessed August 19, 2019). 22 For the text of the full declaration, see https://www.spp.gr/declaration_en.pdf (Accessed August 19, 2019). 23 See also Standring (2009:13–19). 24 See Athens News Agency (2018). 25 On the Star of Vergina, see Keith Brown (1994) and Danforth (1995, 63–66). 26 See https://int.ert.gr/there-was-a-very-good-atmosphere-at-the-dinner-in-otesevo­ with-zaev-pm-tsipras-reports/ (Accessed August 19, 2019).

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27 See http://www.efsyn.gr:10080/arthro/eimai-40-hronon-kai-proti-fora-vlepo­ skafos-na-erhetai-apo-tin-apenanti-ohthi/ (Accessed August 1, 2018). 28 Other anthropologists who have worked in Prespa include Hart (1999), Papa­ dopoulos (2010 and 2016), and Rombou-Levidi (2017).

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Iliou, F. 2004. O ellinikos emfilios polemos: I embloki tou KKE. Athens: Themelio. Kalyvas, Stathis. 2006. The Logic of Violence in Civil War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kantouris, Kostas and Jasmina Kironski. 2018. “Border Lake Backdrops Sealing of Greece, Macedonia Name Deal.” Associated Press. June 17, 2018. https://www .apnews.com/a6695cce48464403b1ac0686d22de451 (Accessed August 19, 2019). Karakasidou, Anastasia. 1997. Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood: Passages to Nationhood in Greek Macedonia, 1870-1990. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Koliopoulos, Giannes. 1999. Plundered Loyalties: World War II and Civil War in Greek West Macedonia. New York, NY: New York University Press. Koutsoukis, K., and I. Sakkas, eds. 2000. Ptihes tou emfiliou polemou: 1946-49. Athens: Filistor. Leviev-Sawyer, Clive. 2015. “Plevneliev: Bulgaria Should Not Rest until Getting Tsar Samuil’s Bones from Greece.” Independent Balkan News Agency. August 6, 2015. https://balkaneu.com/plevneliev-bulgaria-rest-tsar-samuils-bones-greece/ (Accessed August 19, 2019). Loulis, John C. 1982. The Greek Communist Party: 1940-44. London: Groom Helm.

Mackridge, Peter and Eleni Yannakakis, eds. 1997. Ourselves and Others: The

Development of a Greek Macedonian Cultural Identity Since 1912. Oxford: Berg.

Margaritis, Yiorgos. 2000. Istoria tou ellinikou emfiliou, 1946-49. Vol. I. Athens: Vivliorama. __________. 2001. Istoria tou ellinikou emfiliou, 1946-49. Vol. II. Athens: Vivliorama. Mazower, Mark, ed. 2000. After the War Was Over: Reconstructing the Family, Nation, and State in Greece, 1943-60. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Moutsopoulos, N. K. 1999. I Vasiliki tou Ayiou Achilleiou stin Prespa: Ena mnimeio kivotos tis topikis istorias. Thessaloniki: Paratiritis. Myrivili, Eleni. 2004. “The Liquid Border: Subjectivity at the Limits of the NationState in Southeast Europe.” PhD diss., Columbia University. __________. 2019. “Borders as Ghosts.” In The Political Materialities of Borders: New Theoretical Directions, edited by Olga Demetriou and Rozita Dimova, 103–15. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Nikolakopoulos, I., A. Rigos, and G. Psallidas, eds. 2002. O emfilios polemos apo ti Varkiza sto Grammo, Fevrouarios 1945—Avgoustos 1949. Athens: Themelio. Panourgiá, Neni. 2009. Dangerous Citizens. The Greek Left and the Terror of the State. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Papadopoulos, Dimitris C. 2010. “Shimatizontas ti Limni.” PhD diss., University of the Aegean. __________ 2016. “Ecologies of Ruin: (Re)bordering, Ruination, and Internal Colonialism in Greek Macedonia, 1913–2013.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 20: 627–40. Pondaven, Philippe. 1972. Les Lacs-Frontière. Paris: Pedone. Pyrovetsi, Myrto. 1989. “Integrated Mediterranean Programmmes and the Natural Environment: A Case Study in Greece.” Environmentalist 9, no. 3: 209–10. Rombou-Levidi, Marica. 2016. Epitiroumenes zoes: Mousiki, horos, kai diamorphosi tis ipokeimenikotitas sti Makedonia. Athens: Alexandreia Publications. __________2017. “Edho kapout:”I via tou synorou: Metanastevsi, ethnikophrosyni, kai phylo stin EllinoAlvaniki methorio. Athens: Alexandria Publications. Roudometoff, Victor, ed. 2000. The Macedonian Question: Culture, Historiography, Politics. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

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__________. 2002. Collective Memory, National Identity, and Ethnic Conflict: Greece, Bulgaria, and the Macedonian Question. London: Praeger. Runciman, Steven. 1939. A History of the First Bulgarian Empire. London: Bell and Sons. Skylitzes, John. 2010. A Synopsis of Byzantine History, 811-1057. Introduction, text, and notes translated by John Wortley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Standring, Kevin. 2009. Prespa Walking Guide. Society for the Protection of Prespa. Stephenson, Paul. 2003. The Legend of Basil the Bulgar-Slayer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tagaris, Karolina, and Aleksandar Vasovic. 2018. “Greece, Macedonia Sign Pact to Change Ex-Yugoslav Republic’s Name.” Reuters. June 17, 2018. https://www.reuters. com/article/us-greece-macedonia-name-pms/greece-macedonia-sign-pact­ to-change-ex-yugoslav-republics-name-idUSKBN1JD06D (Accessed August 19, 2019). Tarakoulas, Giorgos. 2019. “Prespa-Psarades-Sunday 16-6-2019.” https://www.you­ tube.com/watch?v=scwusXjZOx8&fbclid=IwAR2Is4SKLuPQ7Ru9g25tXnPqM­ HwO1GbhyBz6wQeF51cppVjhdjqAFlfp_-w&app=desktop (Accessed August 19, 2019). Tashkovski, Dragan. 1973. “Samuel’s Empire.” Macedonian Review 3:34–38. Terry, Andrew, Karin Ullrich, and Uwe Riecken. 2006. The Green Belt of Europe: From Vision to Reality. Cambridge: International Union for Conservation of Nature. United States Department of State. 1968. “Greece – Yugoslavia Boundary.” International Boundary Study. No. 79. https://fall.fsulawrc.com/collection/ LimitsinSeas/IBS079.pdf (Accessed August 19, 2019). __________ 1971a. “Albania – Greece Boundary.” International Boundary Study. No. 113. https://fall.fsulawrc.com/collection/LimitsinSeas/IBS113.pdf (Accessed August 19, 2019). __________ 1971b. “Albania–Yugoslavia Boundary.” International Boundary Study. No. 116. https://fall.fsulawrc.com/collection/LimitsinSeas/IBS116.pdf (Accessed August 19, 2019). Vacalopoulos, A. E. 1973. The History of Macedonia: 1354–1833. Thessaloniki: The Institute of Balkan Studies. Van Boeschoten, Riki. 1997. Anapoda hronia. Silloyiki mnimi kai istoria sto Ziaka Grevenon (1900-1950). Athens: Plethron. Van Boeschoten, Riki, E. Voutira, T. Vervenioti, V. Dalkavoukis, and K. Bada, eds. 2008. Mnimi kai lithi tou ellinikou emfiliou polemou. Thessaloniki: Epikentro. Verdery, Katherine. 1999. The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Vlavianos, Haris. 1992. Greece, 1941-94: From Resistance to Civil War: The Strategy of the Greek Communist Party. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press. Voglis, Polymeris. 2002. Becoming a Subject: Political Prisoners during the Greek Civil War. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Voutira, E., Dalkavoukis, V., Marandzidis, N., and Bondila, M., eds. 2005. ‘Ta opla para poda,’ Oi politikoi prosfiyes tou ellinikou emfiliou polemou stin anatoliki Evropi. Thessaloniki: Panepistimio Makedonias.

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The hollow signifier “PRESPA” Some reflections on the lake, the Agreement, and the state Rozita Dimova

Under the Ottomans, Prespa fell within the agrapha, the “unrecorded lands” too rugged for imperial tax collectors. The expulsion of the Turks in the early 20th century from Prespa brought nation-states—Greece, Albania, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia—and with them, bureaucratic procedures that, although brought few discernible improvements to the lives of the locals on all three sides of the borders, also relied on an historical amnesia in order to convince the Prespians that they were Greek or Albanian or Yugoslav. Those nation-states had to insist that they were nothing like their neighbors—that their pasts were distinct, their identities utterly different. Prespa is swiftly being destroyed. Less and less snowmelt each year has reduced its depths by 5 meters in the last two decades. Its fish population has been heavily depleted. Its bird population, among the largest and most exotic in all of Europe, has decimated vast acreage of fir trees with their excrement. When I asked Prespians why a common effort was not made to help enforce environmental regulations, they pinned the blame on their neighbors in a litany of clichés. The Greeks littered; the Albanians fished with dynamite; the Macedonians used the lake as a septic tank (Alexander Clapp, Letter from Prespa 2016).1

Introduction The groundbreaking publication of Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza in 1987 introduced a new way of how to think and talk about borders (Anzaldúa 2007). By stressing that ambiguity and uncertainty, rather than being viewed as predicaments, can actually become assets, Anzaldua argues that “[the new mestiza] has discovered that she can’t hold concepts or ideas in rigid boundaries. The borders and walls that are sup­ posed to keep the undesirable ideas out are entrenched habits and patterns of behavior; these habits and patterns are the enemy within. Rigidity means death [.]. The new mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity” (Anzaldúa 2007, 79). Although acknowledging the violence and “linguistic terrorism” inflicted on Mexicans or MexicanAmerican people, Anzaldua moves away from the narrative of victimhood

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and brings agency, empowerment, and political struggle into the picture. With this, she has opened up the possibility for the rise of border studies that followed the trajectories of “race” and “gender,” and then “nation” and “sexuality” (Michaelsen and Johnson 1997; Anzaldúa 2007). Many of the border works that drew on this influential work analyzing the US-Mexico border region have insisted that borders produce politically exciting hybrid­ ity, intellectual creativity, and moral possibilities. The borderlands, in other words, become the locus of struggle and hope for a better world where “not only does she [the new mestiza] sustain contradictions, she turns the ambiv­ alence into something else” (Anzaldúa 2007, 79). The project that I have been working on intermittently between 2010 and 2017 in the border region between Greece and what is now called Republic of North Macedonia (hereinafter RN Macedonia) has relied strongly on the approach of the productive aspect of the border by incorporating Anzaldua’s reflection on empowerment and hybridity. In this chapter, I choose to use the abbreviation RN Macedonia just as many scholars, myself included, have done earlier with earlier names, for example, SR Macedonia (Socialist Republic) and FYR Macedonia (Former Yugoslav Republic). For both practicality and consistency, the new name is similarly abbreviated. The 271 km border between Greece and RN Macedonia was estab­ lished in 1913 when the Bucharest Treaty divided the Ottoman region of Macedonia between Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria (Hall 2000). Prior to the treaty, this region was part of the larger unit governed by the Ottomans named Rumelia, and spread over the territory of Southeast Europe while the border between Greece and Serbia ran through the two Vilayets, Selânik and Manastir. The border assigned the northern Sandzak to Serbia and the southern ones to Greece (Stoianovic 1994; Mazower 2000). During my research, I crossed this border at the three official checkpoints on a regular basis. The Bogorodica-Evzoni (Mačukovo in Macedonian) check-point is the largest, while Medžitlija/Niki (Negočani in Macedonian) and Dojran/Dojrani are significantly smaller with less traffic frequency. The research on the contemporary border between the two countries has given me the conceptual and technical vocabulary to understand that Greece and RN Macedonia have been struggling with what is, according to some, the most trivial; and for others, the most existential battle, defending “the very core” of the Greek or Macedonian national identities. Since 1991 and the outset of the name dispute, each side has been using inflammatory rhetoric in accusing the other of irredentism, appropriation, historical falsification, negation, and dismissal. And yet, the recent efforts (2017–18) undertaken by the leftist governments, SYRIZA (The Coalition of the Radical Left) under Alexis Tsipras’s leadership in Greece, and SDSM (Social-Democratic Alliance of Macedonia) under Zoran Zaev’s leadership in RN Macedonia, formally put an end to this conflict with the Prespa Agreement. The ques­ tion remains whether this Agreement would bring RN Macedonia closer to becoming an EU member. Would it contribute towards resolving the major

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concern that affects the lives of people in the border area such as protection of the Prespa Lake and water management of the lake involving Greece, RN Macedonia and Albania? Despite my frequent visits and stopovers in the border areas around the official border crossings, the Prespa region stayed outside of my research routes. As many people pointed in Bitola, the region is like a slepo crevo (an appendix). The first research visit to this region therefore was in December 2019 when I and a research assistant spent a week travelling around the area and having informal conversations with the villagers from the Psarades (Nivitsi in Macedonian) on the Greek side, and Ljubojno, Dolno Dupeni, Oteševo, and Resen on the Macedonian side (see Figure 2.1). The main aim of this visit was to document people’s reactions to the Agreement after the signing of the Prespa Agreement on June 17, 2018. My inquiries addressed the effects of the Agreement, ethno-national feelings of loss or achievement due to the Agreement’s interventions with the name change, and the recognition of Macedonian identity and lan­ guage. I gathered a variety of responses from 11 people on both sides of the border ranging from optimistic about future prospects between the two countries to overt discontent about “stealing history and obvious historical facts” or “humiliation and force that are unfair and make the weaker give up.” Regardless of the positive or negative reaction to the Prespa Agreement, I was struck by a recurring theme that came up with most of the locals I talked to, namely the Prespa Lake and the fall in its water level. These past several years, the Prespa Lake has withdrawn by more than 10 meters from its average level. This water fall appeared to be by far more

Figure 2.1 Google’s map of Prespa Source: Google and the Google logo are registered trademarks of Google LLC, used with permission.

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significant for the local population than the Prespa Agreement itself. Many of them shared the disturbing news that the beaches along the lake have been covered by the reed beds. The lake coast has showcased rocks and weed that used to be underwater while most of the local docks have been swallowed by sand. The central argument of this chapter is that the Prespa Agreement has brought a new form of state presence in this area that, to many locals, has corroborated the marginal position this region has had. As a borderzone, the Prespa region is famous for the ubiquitous presence of the lake. The Agreement has put the region on the political map of the world, but instead of bringing empowerment and emancipatory changes, many of the local people felt betrayed by the one-day attention during the sign­ ing of the Agreement and the downright neglect in the upcoming months and years. While acknowledging the symbolism of the Prespa region as site for the ceremonial signing of the Agreement (see Danforth’s chapter in this volume), this chapter highlights the expectations that the locals had from the politicians and the Agreement in protecting the lake. These reactions show that the lake and its waters are conceptualized and con­ stituted through complex social, environmental, economic and political processes.

Anatomy of the Prespa Agreement On June 17, 2018, the Macedonian and Greek Foreign Ministers, Nikola Dimitrov and Nikos Kotzias, respectively, in the presence of their countries’ Prime Ministers, Zoran Zaev and Alexis Tsipras, respectively, signed a his­ toric agreement aimed at ending the long dispute over Macedonia’s name. This was a big international event: the UN mediator, Matthew Nimetz, as well as other ministers from both countries, attended the signing ceremony. The EU Enlargement Commissioner, Johannes Hahn; the EU Foreign Policy Chief, Federica Mogherini along with the UN’s Under-SecretaryGeneral for Political Affairs, Rosemary DiCarlo also attended the signing ceremony that took place in the border region of Lake Prespa, in the Greek village of Psarades. Ten years after the NATO Bucharest summit in November 2008, when Greece vetoed the country’s membership under the name Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), the resolution of this conflict seemed almost impossible. The veto propelled the Macedonian government, led by the conservative VMRO-DPMNE and its leader Nikola Gruevski who was in power from 2006 until 2017, to adopt a more radical approach and demonstrate the historical “right” to the name Macedonia.2 What followed was an open challenge to Greece’s exclusive appropriation of antiquity. The naming of the airport in Skopje “Alexander the Great” in 2007 and the main freeway running through Macedonia “Alexander of Macedon,” and espe­ cially, the construction of the project “Skopje 2014” in 2009–10 marked the

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turning points in Macedonia’s response to Greece’s exclusive appropriation of antiquity. The change in government in May 2017, when the Social Democrats came into power, marked yet another turning point. One of the first initiatives as a good-will gesture towards resolving the conflict was to rename the airport and the central freeway: the airport became International Airport Skopje, and the freeway was renamed as “Friendship Freeway.” There are ongo­ ing discussions on how to treat the Skopje 2014 monuments “Warrior on a Horse” (representing Alexander the Great) and the statue of Philip II situ­ ated in central Skopje. According to Article 8 paragraph 2 of the Agreement, all monuments referring to antiquity should receive new plaques that will declare their connection to Hellenic ancient history. On August 15, 2019, for instance, the 28-meter monument on the central square Macedonia in the capital Skopje received a new plaque in place of the old “Warrior on the Horse” which now is stating: In honor of Alexander the Great, a historic figure belonging to ancient Hellenic history and civilization and to world cultural and historical heritage. Here he is presented as equestrian warrior. The same was done with the monuments and fountain to Philip II and Olympia, the father and mother of Alexander the Great. The earlier plaque simply stated “Warrior.” Now they have new plaques that read: In honor of Philip the Second, a historical figure belonging to ancient Hellenic history and civilization and to world cultural and historical heritage. In honor of Olympia, a historical figure belonging to ancient Hellenic history and civilization and to world cultural and historical heritage. The new plaques were repeatedly vandalized in the days that followed their replacement on August 15, 2019. The new copper plaques were placed under constant video surveillance and attendant service.3 With the Prespa Agreement, Greece and RN Macedonia terminated the previous Interim Accord of 1995 and also the earlier Final Agreement for the Settlement of the Differences as Described in the United Nations Security Council resolutions 817 (1993) and 845 (1993). As the main interna­ tional acts mediating and regulating the conflict between the two countries since 1993, these agreements were not specific and left space for different interpretations. The Prespa Agreement, in contrast, defined precise obliga­ tions with specific timelines for their realization. Evidently, the Prespa Agreement signed in June 2018 brought in many obligations for both sides. The Macedonian government agreed to name the country Republic of North Macedonia; in return, the Greek represent­ atives agreed to recognize distinct features (language, territory, history and

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culture) of Macedonians and also to enable RN Macedonia’s NATO and EU membership and accession. Moreover, there was a commitment that Greece would be one of the main supporters of these accession processes and with its planes would protect the Macedonian sky. The erga omnes principle required a two third majority in the parliament to amend the constitution and also to allow for the change of the name from Republic of Macedonia into Republic of North Macedonia. This majority was achieved by persuading eight members of parliament from the opposi­ tional party VMRO-DPMNE to vote for the changes. Officially, the eight MPs argued that the main incentive for agreeing to vote for the changes was their support for the EU and NATO integration processes which, without amending the constitution, could allegedly never be achieved. Suspicions circulated that each one of these eight MPs or their close relatives were embroiled in legal procedures for different legal offenses committed during the VMRO-DPMNE rule from 2006 to 2017, as were many other VMRO­ DPMNE politicians. For instance, Krsto Mukoski was one of these MPs, also involved in the violent attack on the parliament on April 27, 2017 and faced charges but was later acquitted with the Amnesty Law that was passed on December 20, 2018. Rumors spread that every single MP of those eight who agreed to vote for the constitutional changes received a prom­ ise that the convictions would be vacated if they voted for the constitu­ tional changes. Despite the prime minister’s reassurance that the rule of law remained intact, and the government did not meddle or influence court decisions, the fact that most of the legal cases against these MPs were dismissed, corroborates the wide suspicion of the deal struck between the government and the oppositional MPs at the expense of independent court proceedings and effective rule of law. For many Macedonians, this was an act of suspension of the rule of law, and betrayal of the main tenets of the 2016 Colorful Revolution, its main slogan Nema Pravda, Nema Mir (No Justice, No Peace) that motivated thousands to march on the streets to protests in support of the rule of law and against the previous government embroiled in the eavesdropping scandal that revealed close ties between judges and politicians.4

The Prespa Lake between nature, politics, and history The location where the Agreement was signed was carefully selected, so was the location of the lunch after the singing when the international guests crossed over the Prespa Lake border to the Macedonian side at the village of Oteševo. This crossing was a highly symbolic move that marked the first entry of a Greek Prime Minister into the Republic of Macedonia since it declared independence in 1991 (see Danforth this volume). The village Psarades (Nivitsi) has occupied a significant place in the history of this region and it had its name changed by the Greek govern­ ment to Psarades in 1927. Situated 36 kilometers northwest of the town

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of Florina (Lerin in Macedonian), the village is spread at the northern most part of the area on the south bank of the Prespa Lake 903 meters above sea level.5 In Kancov’s census from 1878, Nivitsi had 30 houses and it was inhabited by 92 people, while in 1900 there were 400 residents with Slavic background (Kancov 1900).6 According to an 1878 study, at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, Nivitsi was consid­ ered a “purely” Bulgarian village with 1873 male population, as at that time “Macedonians” did not count as a separate group.7 After the Ilinden Uprising in 1903, the village passed under the jurisdiction of the Bulgarian Exarchate. The 1927 Greek Government Legislative Edict declared in its official Gazette that there were not any non-Greek people in Greece. Hence, 804 names of Macedonian villages, towns, regions, and so on were changed, together with the surnames of ethnic Macedonians, into Greek versions. The Greek state has systematically replaced geographical and topographic names of non-Greek origin with Greek names as part of a policy and ideol­ ogy of Hellenization. The main objective of the initiative has been to assim­ ilate or hide geographical or topographical names that were considered foreign and divisive toward Greek unity or indicative of a “bad Greek.” The names regarded foreign were usually of Turkish, Albanian, and Slavic origin. Most of the name changes occurred in the ethnically heterogeneous north­ ern Greece and the Arvanite settlements in central Greece (Karakasidou 1993; Bintliff 2003). Before the start of the Greek Civil War in 1946, about 770 residents of Macedonian background lived in the village. They were employed in rais­ ing livestock, fishing, agriculture and other important activities (Richter 2015). In the period of the Greek Civil War between 1946 and 1949, the residents actively took part in the National Liberation Front (NOF). The 2nd NOF Congress on March 25 and 26, 1949 took place in the church of St. Mary, built in 1893, when 700 representatives came together in the village church of Psarades (Richter 2015). With the participation of party leader Nikolaos Zachariadis of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE), a resolution was announced: “… the unification of Macedonia with a united, independent and equal Macedonian nation within a people’s dem­ ocratic federation of the Balkan peoples” (Richter 2015, 36). In his speech, Zachariadis referred to the achievements of the Macedonian people and pointed to the need for NOF’s coherence and for the preservation of the unity among the Greek and the Macedonian people for the common vic­ tory, which he described as difficult. Moreover, the congress explicitly underlined the unity of the Greek people with the “Macedonian” people (Sfetas 2003–2004, 240). After the Greek Civil War in 1949, and intensive emigration from the vil­ lage and expulsion of villagers who were associated with the Communist Party, the number of residents fell significantly. The census in Greece in 1991 recorded only 144 residents in the village (Synvet 1878, online edition).

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The materiality of the lake My visits to the Greek border village, Psarades where the Prespa Agreement was signed, and the neighboring villages of Oteševo, Dolno Dupeni and Ljubojno across the lake on the Macedonian side, revealed that for the vil­ lagers on both sides something else was at stake. The topic that kept coming up during my conversations with the villagers, despite my insistence to keep the Prespa Agreement and the future at the center of our talks, was the dra­ matic change of the Prespa Lake water level (see Figure 2.2). This is a major cause of concern for the locals on both sides of the lake. I heard numerous “blame stories” on the Macedonian side in which the locals blamed the Greek side for lack of care in using the lake water for agricul­ ture, while on the Greek side the blame went for overfishing. Evidently, the fact that the Prespa Lake was shared by three countries created conditions for producing alterity and phantasmic stories whereby the other was always the culprit for the negative condition. I also considered these stories as part of the popular repertoire of stereotyping the other as the remarks were gen­ eral and brief. The majority of villagers have expressed stern criticisms of politicians from both Greece and RN Macedonia blaming them for avoiding to protect the lake and also to provide for the villagers’ subsistence. Having identified the centrality of the environmental aspect for the border population and their identities, I steered my research towards the environmental dimension. I was propelled to plunge into literature addressing hydrology and lake fluc­ tuation, as well as to interview a climatologist and several natural scientists

Figure 2.2 Dupeni Beach near Markova Noga where the water withdrawal created small islands Source: SDK.MK.

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dealing with this topic, and connect this to issues of national and interna­ tional politics. Invoking Marcel Mauss’ classical notion of water as a “total social fact,” Orlove and Caton (2010, 402) suggests that water is all encompassing and prone to taking multiple social forms. While certainly “natural” (albeit in different ways), it is also very much material, political, and bio-political. As such water challenges the very nature/society binary (Hastrup 2013, 60). Moreover, the physical and natural properties of water as something that inevitably crosses boundaries makes it a perfect vehicle for thinking about local, national, and global processes. As a peculiar substance shared among people and among localities, water’s central feature certainly is connectiv­ ity. Its connectivity means that whatever happens in the upper part of a watershed will affect both the quantity and the quality of water in the lower parts of the watershed (Orlove and Caton 2010, 403; see also Orlove and Rasmunssen 2015). Situated at an altitude of 849 meters, Lake Prespa is sur­ rounded to the east and west by up to 2000 meters high mountains. The total area of the lake is between 254–285 km square with an average depth of 30 meters with a few local deeper holes. To the south, Lake Prespa is connected to Small Lake Prespa by a controllable man-made channel with a current hydraulic head of 3 m. Human activities in the area have had a massive impact on the natural characteristics of the Prespa biosystem (Krstić 2012). The water resources of the entire water catchment (exploited, for exam­ ple, for tourism, agriculture, hydro-energy, and urban and industrial use) of the Prespa Lake are of great socio-economic importance to all three lake-sharing countries. As already suggested, this system is threatened by the dramatic fall in water level, which is related to either climate change, water abstraction, or earthquake-induced changes to underground karst drainage channels. It is evident from the dramatic change in the level of the lake that if future climate changes lead to an accelerated water-level fall and a reduction in lake volume, then there will be substantial negative con­ sequences for regional water resources and global biodiversity (Matzinger et al. 2006). Furthermore, a reduction in lake volume will immediately lead to an increase in pollutant concentrations and intensify the on-going disap­ pearance of the Prespa Lake (ibid.) Recent events in its environmental history on the Greek side have been marked by forest clearings and human depopulation in the period of the Civil War (1944–49), irrigation system construction in the 1960s, its discovery by ornithologists in the late 1960s, the high emigration rates of 1960–80, its designation as a National Park in 1974, the destructive development works of 1984–86 after Greece’s entry to the European Economic Community (later renamed the European Community and then the European Union) and the conversion to intensive bean cultivation in the mid-1980s (Catsadorakis and Malakou 1997, 175). As an illustration, the human population of a 7000 at the start of the 20th century suffered an almost 80% decrease after the Greek Civil War in

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1949. A resettlement in the mid-1950s increased the population by 40% but in the 1970s emigration reduced it to its previous size of around 1500 people (Catsadorakis and Malakou 1997, 175). The extensive and diverse farming systems of previous centuries changed gradually after the construction of an irrigation network in the 1960s. Nowadays this region is dominated by bean monoculture within irrigated croplands with increased energy inputs, mechanization and use of chemicals (ibid.). The fluctuation of the water level in Prespa Lake is nothing new: during the last century, the lake experienced a significant water level fluctuation. After its last peak (1963) and after the separation of the Small Lake Prespa in 1975, the level generally dropped by approximately 8 m. (2002). This resulted to a loss in water volume and even more significant, a loss of water surface (Popovska 2016, 279). The changes in the water levels of the Prespa Lake as well as in its socio-economic and political developments only corroborate what anthro­ pologists have shown a while ago, with their works on water (see for instance Mead 1943; Geertz 1972). The liquidity of water—“its very materiality, its propensity to flow, and the ways in which it is both part of and constitu­ tive of social contexts also allows it to serve as a connector of themes” (Rasmussen 2015, 180). Climate change likewise challenges the connectivity and the flows. Water regimes are never about just the physical properties of the flow of water as it would have been in its original, hydrological sense. As a sociological term, “water regimes” implies institutions and legislations as well as customs and traditions and individual actors (Rasmussen 2015, 81). This connectivity has been recognized as an important factor by the sci­ entists from all three countries surrounding the Prespa Lake whose research has been based upon hydroclimatic data from all three lake-sharing coun­ tries (Greece, Albania and RN Macedonia). In addition to stressing the connectivity of the lake-sharing countries, the research has also highlighted that the Prespa-Ohrid lake system is closely connected and is a global hotspot of biodiversity and endemism in the southwest Balkan. To assess the connectivity between the two lakes, and especially the role of the upstream Lake Prespa in the ongoing eutrophication of Lake Ohrid, a group of scien­ tists tried to disentangle the close connectivity of the two lakes. They have shown that almost the entire outflow from Lake Prespa flows into Lake Ohrid through karst channels. With these flows, Prespa Lake feeds as it also transports many of the pollutants into the Ohrid Lake. Sixty-five percent of the transported phosphorus however is retained within the aquifer or the underground layer of water-bearing permeable rock, rock fractures or unconsolidated materials. Thanks to this natural filter, Lake Prespa does not pose an immediate threat to Lake Ohrid. Potential future increase of the phosphorus load from Lake Prespa would lead to a 20% increase in the current phosphorus content of Lake Ohrid, which could jeopardize its fragile ecosystem. So, on the one hand, the fact that the Lake Prespa is 150 meter higher than the Ohrid Lake allows the Ohrid Lake to be continuously

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replenished. On the other hand, this tight link between the two lakes poses a future danger to the Ohird Lake due to the possibility for phosphorus leakage (Stankovic 1960). Undoubtedly, Lake Ohrid and Lake Prespa form a very unusual lake system—they are both of tectonic origin with an esti­ mated age between 2 and 35 million years (Matzinger et al. 2006). According to Stankovic (1960), the two lakes formed one lake at their earliest stages of their existence. Today, however, Lake Prespa lies about 150 m higher than Lake Ohrid and the two are separated by the Galicica mountain range, which consists of karst rock structures (Stankovic 1960, 356). It is evident from the above that the Prespa eco-system has been threat­ ened by the combined effects of climate change and intense water exploita­ tion. These occurrences are due to climate change but also due to intense human impacts (such as water abstraction, wetland drainage, and water storage). A 2011 study shows that in the case of Prespa Lake, humans started to alter the environmental properties in its catchment more than 1000 years ago by intensive forest clearings that have resulted in accelerated phospho­ rus leaching.8 Moreover, to prevent further deterioration of the water quality in the watershed, substantial efforts have to be made and many water pollution prevention measures implemented. Even if these activities are fully imple­ mented and operational, the timeframe for full recovery of the ecosystem could be long, since the accumulated quantities of harmful substances are in the range of highly elevated levels. Nevertheless, scientists and non­ scientists alike are in agreement that if no measures are initiated and imple­ mented in the area, the overall environmental quality in Prespa Lake water will become much more degraded. This is especially important for the Prespa Lake since it has already started to show clear signs of becoming eutrophic throughout the year. Scientists warn that if the turnover towards a fully eutrophic system is completed, the activities to restore and improve its water quality in that situation will be much more difficult or even impos­ sible, thus rendering Prespa Lake unsafe and unusable for future genera­ tions (Popovska and Sekovski 2011). Despite these occurrences, it was surprising to learn that until 2014 there was not a common project or even an effort by the three countries to carry out a scientifically based analysis that would identify the reasons behind the significant water fall and create a plan of the lake’s preservation.9 The project CLIM-HYDROLAKE supported by the European Union under a Marie Curie Career Integration Grant, used data collected from the Society for the Protection of Prespa.10 The first project of its kind in Lake Prespa was based on using regression analysis. The research has shown that the main factor for the lake water level decline is due to reduced rainfall at lake level and rainfall in the mountains, as well as catchment snowfall (collecting snowfall water in the lake basin). The impact of agriculture, overfishing, or earthquakes was less significant when compared to the late-autumn to earlyspring precipitation (Schriek van der and Giannakopoulos 2011, 2014). The

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results of this project therefore challenge the popular perceptions and blame that people across the border have had for each other in relation to the water fall of the lake. As the project recognized the urgent need to establish the major causes of lake level changes, the key research relied on analyzing hydro-meteorological data from all three lake-sharing countries using basic statistical methods and spreadsheet-based calculations. The research group paid particular attention to lake hydrological responses to climate change, water extrac­ tion, and episodic earthquake-induced changes to the underground karst drainage system. The project provided hydro-climatic data that checked the main causes for the water fall for an impressively long period, namely 1957–2006 and in some cases up to 2011 (Matzinger et al. 2006). These scientific conclusions explaining the water level drop and stressing the urgency for a well-developed protection program were recognized by the locals as well. The locals I talked to have hoped that since the signing of the Agreement two years ago, there would have been formulation and imple­ mentation of sound decisions regarding integrated water resources man­ agement of the Prespa Lake across the state borders, which in turn depends upon the understanding of the basin’s hydrological features. The basin’s hydrology and hydrogeology; however, are poorly investigated undoubtedly due to the cross-border character of the area but also partly because of the complexity of the runoff processes. The 2011 study has shown that strategies for development that ignore the dynamics of the broader social-ecological system may push people into vulnerable situations and persistent traps, and undermine the capacity to sustain human wellbeing in the long-term in this region. The researchers conducting research on the Lakes Prespa, Ohrid, and Dojran agree that science has the responsibility to provide a better understanding of the challenges facing humanity and to explore pathways toward a sustaina­ ble world bypassing borders and national divisions. Global and regional scale integrated assessments, inclusive, transparent, and founded on an understanding of social-ecological interactions play a central role in build­ ing momentum for the protection of the Lake Prespa too (Popovska and Sekovski 2011). The lack of serious projects across borders in the three coun­ tries; however, reveals the neglect these eco-systems have had on the politi­ cal but also on the scientific level. The lingering question therefore remains: what will happen to Prespa Lake? This question brings us back to the Prespa Agreement and its failure, as seen in the eyes of the locals, to formulate and implement specific policies related to the Prespa Lake basin. This failure has revealed an absence of a state policy that will take care of this place and the people. While the name “Prespa” gives the Agreement its brand, to the locals the brand appears empty and detached from the actual place. The state absence brings us back to the notion of connectivity that spreads across different scales and involves different actors (Wateau 2011). This is an important question for

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the locals in the Prespa region but also for the Balkans and the wider area. Rasmussen (2015) insists that climate change has a certain scale-changing quality to it: local events can have global causes and global impacts. While analyzing the Andean waterways in Peru, he shows that “the local embed­ dedness of climate change that becomes obvious when the peasants them­ selves not only point to the big economic potencies, the pollution, but also to their own practices of throwing plastic bottles into the river” (Rasmussen 2015: 180). In this vein, villagers in Psarades, but also in Dolno Dupeni and Ljubojno, criticize politicians for their lack of attention to the preservation of the lake and the implementation of environmental protection. Many also point out that the local population has also treated the Lake Prespa without respect. Sectoral planning, inadequate cooperation between the littoral countries, unsustainable practices in key productive sectors across the basin, strongly linked to the prevailing socio-economic situation in the region, have impacted the Prespa Lake (Popovska 2016). The majority of pollution sources are located within the catchment basin, although metal pollution comes from the large thermal power stations of Ptolemais, a city in northern Greece via atmospheric transport and deposi­ tions. In addition to this, large sections of the reed beds have been destroyed in the Macedonian part of the lake to improve access to beaches. The man­ agement of reed beds is also an issue in the Greek part of the Lake (Malakou 2000; Faloutsos, Constantianos, and Scoullos 2006). Abandonment of tra­ ditional activities led to an expansion of the reed beds resulting in the dis­ appearance of wet meadows that are currently restored through reed bed management and water level regulation in the context of an ongoing pres­ ervation project. In many cases, wetlands were drained to be used as farm­ land (Malakou 2000; Faloutsos et al. 2006).Extensive forest destruction and subsequent erosion along the Albanian side, along with the diversion of the Devolli River into Mikri Prespa, form additional reasons for the destruc­ tion of the wetland (Malakou 2000). During socialist times, the Prespa Lake on the Macedonian side was gov­ erned by a strong presence of the socialist state. The water level was meticu­ lously measured as hydrological stations for measuring the water level in the lake were established at the villages Asamati (1948) and Nakolec (1954). All stations were equipped with water level recorders and water level gauges. In addition, there were three stations on the main rivers in the watershed: on Golema River in Resen (1947), Leva River (1986) and Brajchinska in Brajchino (1964) (Popovska 2016). Also, during socialism seven shallow wells were constructed at Krani, Asamati, Resen, Krushje, Carev Dvor, Preljublje, and Stenje for agricultural purposes that intended to protect the lake water from draining (Popovska 2016). A local apple producer in Resen drew my attention to the role the socialist state played for the pollution of the lake as well. As it was in charge of the agricultural production of the famous Prespa apple, the centralized govern­ ment prescribed usage of high doses of phosphorus-based pesticides. The

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large apple orchards in the Resen area were heavily sprayed with pesticides that were responsible for the aforementioned phosphorus pollution of the Prespa Lake and the porosity of the phosphorus to the Ohrid Lake.11 With the dissolution of the Yugoslav Federation in 1991, the new inde­ pendent Macedonian state was not able to resume the roles that were once regulated by the centralized planning of the socialist authorities. This dereg­ ulation and disappearance of state polices has been complicit with the lack of strategic planning to combat the current water fall and endangerment of the Prespa Lake.12 The projects funded by the EU and UNDP and conducted by interna­ tional teams rightly emphasize the need for establishing the foundations of good lake basin governance that would regulate the management, legisla­ tion, market-based approaches, community and private sector participation of the Prespa Lake basin (ILEC 2005). While the hopes of the locals were high at the time of the signing of the Prespa Agreement that Greek and Macedonian governments would finally develop a sustainable lake basin governance and would address the issue of water fall, three years later many of them feel disappointed and abandoned. Unsustainable fishing practices (over-fishing, usage of dynamite dur­ ing spawning season) in the past have also resulted into the degradation of the ecosystem.13 During my conversation with the villagers in Psarades, I learned about “Pelaizia”—the local Greek name for an ancient fishing method used by the fishermen in Psarades—whereby in autumn, fisher­ men cut branches of juniper.14 This traditional fishery only takes place in January-February, just after melting of the ice, the fish having spent the winter within the tangle of branches, sheltered from the frost. The fishermen encircle the pelaizia with a net 3–4 meters high, firmly fixed into the mud at the bottom and reaching to above the water surface. The net has an opening ending in a pocket. Fishing involves scaring the fish using long sticks han­ dled from boats, those fish that try to escape going straight into the trap. In the best years, fishermen could thus catch up to 200 tons of fish, especially small fry known as “tsironia.” Most are now sold as fish food to trout farms, but at one time tsironia from Prespa were exported to France. In the 1970s, these fish were also cooked and canned on the spot. Nowadays, they go to fish farms of Epirus and Greek Macedonia. This traditional fishery is now almost extinct. Before the 1940s, pelaizias could be seen in the bay facing the village of Psarades and opposite the village of Mikrolimni at the Small Prespa Lake. In 1997, in the Greek part of the Prespa Lake, there were only 45 actively used pelaizias in the area between the island of Agios Achillios and Koula (Crivelli and Catsadorakis 1997, 109). In sum, in the three countries of focus, the national policies have been formulated in an evolving environment at national and regional levels, guided mainly by political and socio-economic factors. The pressing needs and problems, such as poverty and unemployment, have dictated strategic choices and decisions in terms of both formulation of policies and setting

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of priorities for their implementation. As an outcome, sustainable manage­ ment has been absent from the agenda. For instance, the need to maximize the agricultural production and the income of the inhabitants has led in the past to the implementation of policies that resulted in the deterioration of natural resources (Faloutsos et al. 2006). Often decisions were made following development policies for agricul­ tural growth or energy production but at the expense of the health of the lake system, affecting on many occasions water quality and/or its biological diversity. The drainage of wetlands was done for several purposes: tourism, using the soil as arable land, was a practice followed by all three countries. A local businessman in the town of Resen in RN Macedonia pointed out that unless the European Union gets involved in the protection of the Prespa Lake, the local “corrupt politicians and governments would never be able to accomplish a comprehensive plan implemented in all three coun­ tries.” According to him, the value of the Prespa Agreement is primarily in this—to enable RN Macedonia to join the European Union, which would introduce laws and legislation forcing the countries to protect the lake. As a matter of fact, the strategic direction of water resources and water related sectors policy in the countries of the South East European region is guided mainly by the EU accession prospect and the Stabilisation and Association Process (SAP). EU accession is a strategic choice of these countries as both RN Macedonia and Albania are candidates that have received dates for beginning of the negotiations. In this respect, the SAP launched in 1999 by the European Commission between the countries of the Western Balkans and the EU Member States is crucial as it foresees the establishment of bilateral agreements with neighboring countries in the region, covering environmental and transboundary water issues. Prespa Lake and the environment with its natural endemic life are not only well-known in Europe for its birdlife, but also for its flora. Within the catchment area of Lakes Prespa or its immediate vicinity, three National Parks (Small Prespa, Greece, since 1974; Pelister, RN Macedonia since 1948; and Galichica, RN Macedonia since 1958) exist, a fact clearly indicat­ ing the high biological, ecological and aesthetic value of this region. And yet, Prespa is presently facing a difficult problem: how to be devel­ oped socio-economically for the welfare of its people, without jeopardiz­ ing its tremendous natural and cultural assets. Not only Scientists, but also locals, agree that whatever the solution is, it cannot be achieved without close international collaboration of the three countries sharing this ecosys­ tem (Crivelli and Catsadorakis 1997). It is evident that in addition to the managers and scientists who are tackling the problems of restoration, man­ agement and conservation, the politicians have to take the center stage as there are many tangible things that must be resolved by the Greek and the Macedonian states (Catsadorakis and Malakou 1997, 195). Being in a border area, the Prespa area has obviously suffered repeat­ edly from international political ambiguities and conflicts. Consequently,

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66 Rozita Dimova this remote area remains relatively underdeveloped depending on tradi­ tional agriculture and fisheries as the main economic activities. For many of the local villagers, the Prespa Agreement is important precisely in this respect—the possibility to protect the lake, the natural diversity, and not so much with regard to the question of identity. While prior to my visit to the Prespa region, I had expected that the ethno-national and historical issues would steer my conversation with the locals towards the issue of identity. Certainly, there were reactions to the Agreement. On the Macedonian side, it was mostly along the lines: “we’ll see what happens” and uncertainty if RN Macedonia would join NATO and the EU despite the Agreement and the name change. On both sides there was a major distrust of politicians and distance from “politika” along the lines described by Kolind (2007). He argues that the Muslims in Stolac when referring to politika were moving beyond the common understanding of politics as ‘realpolitik’ and “using it as a category of moral action in order to resist the invasion into everyday life of ethnic categories, and to account for ungraspable aspects of life pro­ duced by the war” (Kolind 2007: 125). The locals in the Prespa region on both sides of the border did not believe that politicians were oblivious to their interests and the empowerment of the Prespa region. And yet, none of the people I talked to participated in the demonstrations that took place against the signing of the Agreement. The protests were “too political and manipulative” while the organizers were seen as indifferent to the lake and the region. These reactions reflected mistrust in the state and the authorities behind the Prespa Agreement and revealed disappointment as people com­ pared the expectations at the time of the signing of the agreement and three years later when the Prespa region remained marginalized while the lake’s water continued to fall.15 What came out strong and decisive was the reac­ tion of the locals towards the lake and their future. For those I had talked to, the environmental conditions and the withdrawal of the lake water were a matter of life and future endurance.

Conclusion: Prespa between the lake, the Agreement, and the place of abandonment In his analysis of the waterways of two rivers and several canals in the Peruvian Andes, Rasmussen (2015) reveals how the local rural communities have coined the term “water is life.” Marcel Mauss recognized this back in 1950 when he emphasized that water “is a total social fact—a social phe­ nomenon that cuts across virtually all domains of society” (Mauss quoted from Orlove and Caton 2010, 402). According to Hastrup (2013), water is all encompassing, and takes mul­ tiple social forms. “While certainly ‘natural’ (albeit in different ways), it is also very much material, political, and bio-political; as such water chal­ lenges the very nature/society binary” (Hastrup 2013, 60). By coining the term waterworlds, Hastrup insists that water has agentive power that makes

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life possible as it blurs the boundary between nature and infrastructure. Moreover, water also has deep imaginative implications as “it carries peo­ ple’s thoughts towards other shores, farther horizons, deeper meanings, and existential questions. As such, it has spurred multitudes of travelers to set out and discover new lands, and once again, new imaginative horizons” (Hastrup 2013, 60). It should not be surprising then why for the people in the Prespa region, the lake and its vanishing water have had a priority in their social landscape. Isolated in the border zone with weak infrastructure and no border cross­ ings, locals in the Prespa area view the Agreement through the lens of the withdrawal of the lake’s water. As Rasmussen points out, local politics on the margins of the state do not exist outside the state, “but is shaped by its present-absence, its momen­ tous appearance, and its inherent promise that things could be different” (Rasmussen 2015, 408). This “state of abandonment” actually represents the relationship between water and the state among the villagers in the Peruvian Andes. The people in the Prespa region on both sides of the border have also felt abandoned as they witness the drop of the lake water, along with delay in the opening of the border crossing Markova Noga with Greece that was promised to be opened a while ago. Although the sense of abandonment was more pronounced on the Macedonian side as many of the locals felt that trading with the name without ensuring EU and NATO membership first was too risky, I was struck by the feeling of marginalization and aban­ donment of the people in the Prespa region on both Greek and Macedonian sides. The best example to illustrate that “state of abandonment” was given by Trajche, a 60 years old farmer who was one of my interlocutors in Resen, as he talked about hotel Evropa in Oteševo. What once was one of the most impressive hotels not only in Prespa but in Macedonia in general, now is a ruin with pillaged rooms, shattered windows, and robbed furniture (see Figure 2.3). Built in 1984, during socialism, the hotel became a resort hotel and reached a 4-star rank. The hotel remained popular and fully active in the first half of the 1990s. Although throughout the 1990s the hotel showed signs of decay, it was still active with different sport activities for young­ sters, especially in the weekends. In 2005, however, a big fire destroyed the hotel. The period after the fire was followed by a complete devastation of the hotel by thieves who stole everything available. In 2006, the ruling SDSM as part of its election campaign in Resen Municipality (the largest town in the Prespa Lake on the Macedonian side) sold the hotel to a Portuguese investor for 1 euro per meter. The investor promised 50 million euros to rebuild the hotel to its former glory; it argued that the superb location of the hotel, nestled on the very shore of the lake and the mountain Galichica, would bring tourists and provide an exceptional experience. As the gov­ ernment changed at the 2006 elections, the investor complained that they

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Figure 2.3 The dilapidated Hotel Evropa in Oteševo Source: SDK.MK.

encountered unforeseen administrative and technical obstacles to proceed with the renovations, hence the contract was cancelled. In the summer of 2016, the hotel was purchased by the company “Global Investment Fund” from the United Arab Emirates for 400,000 euros. Despite their investment plans, the new owners have not done anything to the hotel to this day. This investor has also complained that the change of government in 2017 at the local elections has affected their renovation plans. For many people in the Prespa region, the hotels Evropa and Yugoslavia are reminders of the socialist times when Prespa Lake resorts were alive and full of visitors while the villages Stenje, Asamati and Pretor were popular destinations for many citizens from Macedonia and other Yugoslav republics. Like Prespa Lake, the Gevgelija-Valandovo-Dojran border region on the Macedonian side has posed a main environmental concern for the local population, while the construction of the copper and gold open-pit mines funded by foreign investors, the extraction of minerals was supposed to be done by using sulfuric and cyanide acid. In 2016 and 2017, the public in RN Macedonia witnessed massive protests in the southern border region organized by citizens’ initiatives against the open-pit mines. The protests against the international companies that have raced to exploit minerals in the cheapest possible way, thereby disregarding the impact on the envi­ ronment and the local ways of life where these mines operate, has brought together the local population—but especially activists—on both sides of

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the border, making the ethno-national issues and the Prespa Agreement almost irrelevant vis-à-vis the immediate danger threatening the right of the local population to live in a clean and healthy environment (for more, see Dimova 2021, forthcoming). Pijpers and Eriksen remind us that the “mining encounters” unfold in, or generate, spaces of accelerated change; “spaces where power relations are destabilized, new livelihood activities develop, existing livelihoods are challenged, new inequalities are created and the lure of fast money in large quantities is omnipresent” (Pijpers and Eriksen 2018, 24). Arguably, the signing of the Prespa Agreement has had major political impact: it was one of the factors that resulted in Tsipras’ loss of power at the elections in July 2019 in Greece. Zoran Zaev similarly is facing many prob­ lems in RN Macedonia as the opposition attempts to portray him as a trai­ tor of the Macedonian national core, selling out the country to Greece and Bulgaria (see Takovski’s chapter in this volume). Although the signing of the Prespa Agreement has promised a resolution of the almost three-decade conflict, the opposition in RN Macedonia appears to be gaining grounds and are able to mobilize crowds. The popular reactions against the Prespa Agreement grew stronger as France vetoed the beginning of the accession negotiations for Albania and RN Macedonia at the EU leaders’ summit in Brussels on October 22–23, 2019. The main reason for the veto, according to Macron’s explanation at the summit, was the necessary reforms within the EU before taking in new members. One day after the veto, the opposition party in RN Macedonia demanded early elections that should take in the summer of 2020. And yet, for the people in the border region the most significant issues are those related to their natural environment. For those living around the Prespa Lake on both sides of the border, the main concern is that the lake is disappearing from the map of natural lakes. Parts of the lake that in 2017 were underwater now are dry and have turned into wetlands. The natu­ ral significance of this region is huge on a global scale. In 2014, UNESCO declared the Prespa-Ohrid region as the 14th Transboundary Biosphere Reserve in the world with exceptional value. The fact that there are only 14 such regions in the word, makes this region a major national and interna­ tional spot of unique bio-diversity. The fact that the lake is disappearing, and the governments of the three countries (Greece, RN Macedonia, and Albania) are unable to initiate an effective transboundary project for salvation of the lake, creates a shared sense of loss and helplessness for many of the local people on both sides of the border. For many, the pomp created around the signing of the Prespa Agreement that put the lake on the center stage only for a short time, was especially painful in the years thereafter creating a “bitter sense of neglect and marginalization,” as one of the locals in Resen explained. The fact that around the time of the signing of the Agreement, the lake reached its record lowest level in its history remains unmentioned by the politicians in

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both countries. According to one of the local mayors, some politicians have been mentioning a possibility of a donor conference for introducing transboundary water management of the Prespa Lake, and introducing concrete measures to adapt to climate change. So far, however, such a conference remains only a mention without any tangible plans. In the meantime, the Prespa Agreement continues to be utilized by the political parties for their political purposes. The toponym Prespa circulates as a geo-political desig­ nator of the Agreement while it remains in use completely detached from the actual place and the ominous circumstances of the lake. Evidently, the topic of water has shifted its place in anthropological studies—from being viewed as a context of cultural practices to being an object in itself worthy of anthropological analyses. Moreover, the properties of water, especially its ability to move across political boundaries, reveals the disconnectivity between formal political agreements and their translation into localized landscapes where the lake rather than politika creates a universe of life, future and endurance.

Notes 1 https://www.calvertjournal.com/articles/show/7394/letter-from-prespa-balkan­ hinterland. 2 The name VMRO-DPMNE was initially used for the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization-Democratic Party for National Unity—a party founded in 1893 in Thessaloniki with an agenda to fight for independent Macedonia from the Ottoman rule. On June 17, 1990, with the dissolution of Socialist Yugoslavia and Macedonia’s independence, VMRO-DPMNE was founded as a new political player in the newly multi-party political scene in Macedonia, claiming legacy from the historical VMRO, and adopting pro­ nounced ethno-nationalist ideology. For more on the history of VMRO (see Катарџиев 1985, 2000; Пачемска, 1985; Пандевски, 1993; Тодоровски, 2014). 3 https://english.republika.mk/news/macedonia/warrior-on-a-horse-becomes­ a-hellenic-monument/ (Accessed September 12, 2019). 4 For more on this see: http://vistinomer.mk/site-prislushuvani-razgovori-obja­ veni-od-opozitsijata-video-audio-transkripti/ https://prizma.mk/kompleten­ materijal-od-site-bombi-na-opozitsijata/ 5 A Greek travel website describes natural and carved cavities in the rocks surrounding Psarades that were often used as hermitages and retreats, with frescos painted on the rocks and two churches. The first one is “Metamor­ phosis” (Transfiguration), which dates from the early 13th c. The other is only reachable by boat “Panayia Eleoussa” (The Virgin of Charity), dating to the end of the 14th c. characterized by remarkable wall paintings and dedicated to Agios Petros (Saint Peter). Between these two monuments, is the hermitage of the Mikri Analipsi located high up in a small cavity in the rocks, dating to the 15th c. Kape Roti is at the end of a picturesque footpath beginning from Psarades and heading north. This is the point when one stands directly at the borders with Albania and RN Macedonia that are intersecting into the lake and above the deepest point of the Lake Prespa. https://www.gtp.gr/LocPage .asp?id=13602 6 It is important to note that at that time the Bulgarian side considered all Slavicspeaking Macedonians to be Bulgarians.

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7 “Етнографија на вилаетите Адријанопол, Монастир и Салоника.” The book was published in 1878 in French and was prepared by the intellectu­ als Methodi Kusev and Georgi Gruev with an intention to promote the Bulgarian roots of the population in the regions of Adrianapole, Thessalon­ iki and Bitola (Monastir). Also known as Exarchist Statistics, this survey appeared as a reaction to Alexander Synvet’s book “Les Grecs de l’Empire Ottoman. Etude Statistique et Ethnographique“(Greeks in the Ottoman Empire. Statistical and Ethnographic Examination) published in 1878. Syn­ vet was accused by many Bulgarian historians for intentionally exaggerated the number of Greeks in the Ottoman Empire. https://anemi.lib.uoc.gr/php/ pdf_pager.php?rec=/metadata/8/e/b/metadata-388-0000002.tkl&do=121610 .pdf&pageno=3&width=841&height=595&maxpage=42&lang=en 8 This process has become even more intensified in the past 100-150 years through untreated wastewaters inflow into the system and intensive agricul­ ture. The final observed outcomes have been the full turnover of the dominant algae in the plankton towards cyanobacterial “water blooms” during summer periods which have also proven to be toxic for microcystins (Popovska and Sekovski 2011). 9 A notable exception is the Eleni Myrivili’s work on borders in the Prespa Lake (2004, 2019). 10 The full title of the project is “Improving future projections of climate change induced hydrological responses by looking into the past: the Lake Prespa/Ali­ akmonas River case study in Greece.” 11 Agriculture has continued to be by far the major water consumer in the Prespa region. Water abstraction for irrigation purposes is uncontrolled in RN Mac­ edonia resulting in significant pressure in the lake basin water system, and it is thought to contribute to localized water shortages and dry streambeds during summer. The annual water use for irrigation is estimated to be 7 times the water used by industry (Ganoulis and Zinke, 2004). Water abstraction for irrigation exceeds the actual needs also in Greece: in the period between 1987 and 1997 the amount of water used was two times the irrigation needs (Malakou 2000). 12 A United Nations Development Programme-sponsored project revealed that farming is mainly organic in Albania since farmers for a long time could not afford pesticide and fertilizer use. Herbicides and pesticides use on the Greek and Macedonian side of the basin; however, is substantial. In the lat­ ter, pesticides seem to be overused as much as 50%, mainly at the Golema River sub-watershed affecting both the river and the northern end of the Prespa Lake (Malakou 2000). Inappropriate types of pesticides and practices of their application along with the overuse of fertilizers aggravate the situa­ tion. Agricultural runoff—mostly from the Macedonian part of the Lake—is one of the major pollution sources. Agriculture land washout combined with the discharge of waste (such as apple pulp from food processing plants) and untreated domestic and industrial wastewaters contributes to the alteration of the nutrient levels of the Greater Prespa Lake. It is estimated that half of phos­ phorous inputs in the Prespa Lake are contributed by household detergents from RN Macedonia (Malakou 2000). 13 Twenty-three taxa of fish have been identified from the Prespa lakes. Eleven of these have been introduced or translocated, and 7 of the remaining 12 are endemic to the Prespa lakes. Over-harvesting of fish has caused the decline of populations during the past 20 years, including those of endemic species (Malakou 2000). 14 Fishermen make a pile of branches in a sheltered area of the lake in a depth of 2–3 meters, close to a reed bed. The base of the pile is 2–5 meters in diam­ eter and the pelaiza sticks 20–50 centimeters above the water surface. The

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sites where these “pelaizia” are built depend entirely on the experience of the fishermen who hand down the knowledge of favorable sites for this type of fishing from generation to generation. Once built, the pelaizias are used for several successive years, each year being repaired and new branches being added. 15 Here I draw on Greenberg’s analysis on post-Miloshevic’s Serbia and her argument that politics of disappointment “emerged as people compared the expectations of revolution to the realities of democracy in an impoverished country marked by the legacies of state violence and repression” (Greenberg 2014, 8).

References Anzaldúa, Gloria. 2007. Borderlands: the new mestiza = La frontera. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books. Bintliff, John. 2003. “The Ethnoarchaeology of a ‘Passive’ Ethnicity”, in The Usable Past: Greek Metahistories, edited by K. S. Brown and Yannis Hamilakis. Lexington Books. Catsadorakis, G., and M. Malakou. 1997. “Conservation and Management Issues of Prespa National Park.” In Lake Prespa, Northwestern Greece: A Unique Balkan Wetland, edited by A. J. Crivelli and G. Catsadorakis. Doordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer Science + Business Media. Crivelli A. J., and G. Catsadorakis, eds. 1997. Lake Prespa, Northwestern Greece: A Unique Balkan Wetland. Doordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer Science + Business Media. Dimova, Rozita. 2021. Border Porosities: Movements of People, Goods and Ideas in the Balkans. Manchester: Manchester University Press. (Forthcoming.) Faloutsos D., V. Constantianos, and M. Scoullos. 2006. “Assessment of the Management of Shared Lake Basins in Southeastern Europe”. A Report within GEF IW:LEARN Activity D2. GWP-Med, Athens. Geertz, Clifford. 1972. “The Wet and the Dry: Traditional Irrigation in Bali and Morocco.” Human Ecology 1: 34–39. Greenberg, Jessica. 2014. After the Revolution: Youth, Democracy, and the Politics of Disappointment in Serbia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hall, R. C. 2000. Balkan Wars 1912–1913. Prelude to the First World War. New York, NY and London: Routledge. Hastrup, K. 2013. “Water and the Configuration of Social Worlds: An Anthropological Perspective.” Journal of Water Resource and Protection 5: 59–66. Karakasidou, Anastasia. 1993. “Politicizing Culture: Negating Ethnic Identity in Greek Macedonia” Journal of Modern Greek Studies. https://doi.org/10.1353/ mgs.2010.0204. Катарџиев, И. 1985. “ВМРО (Обединета) од создавање до распуштање’ (VMRO United from foundation until dismissal)” Гласник на Институтот за Национална Историја на Република Македонија 1–2: 39–92. ———. 2000. Историја на македонскиот народ, Том 4: Македонија меѓу Балканските и Втората светска војна (1912–1941) (History of the Macedonian people). Volume 4: Macedonia between the Balkan and the Second World War (1912–1941)). Скопје: Институт за национална историја. Kancov, V. 1900. Македония. Етнография и статистика, София. http://www.promac­ edonia.org/vk/index.html.

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Kolind, Tornsten. 2007. “In Search of ‘Decent People’: Resistance to the Ethnicization of Everyday Life among the Muslims of Stolac.” In The New Bosnian Mosaic: Identities, Memories and Moral Claims in a Post-War Society, edited by X. Bougarel, E. Helms, and G. Duijzings. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Krstić, S.S. 2012. “Environmental Changes in Lakes Catchments as a Trigger for Rapid Eutrophication—A Prespa Lake Case Study.” In Studies on Environmental and Applied Geomorphology, edited by Tommaso Piacentini. InTech. http://www. intechopen.com/books/studies-onenvironmental-and-applied-geomorphology/ geomorphological-changes-in-lakes-catchments-as-a-trigger-forrapid-eutrophica­ tion-a-prespa-lake-cas Malakou, C. 2000. UNDP, Project document. GEF “Integrated Ecosystem Management in the Prespa Lakes Basin of Albania, FYR Macedonia and Greece” Project. Matzinger, A., M. Jordanoski et al. 2006. “Is Lake Prespa Jeopardizing the Ecosystem of Ancient Lake Ohrid?” Hydrobiologia 553: 89–109. Mazower, M. 2000. The Balkans. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Mead, Margaret. 1943. “The Role of Small South Sea Cultures in the Post-War World.” American Anthropologist 45, no. 2:193–97. Michaelsen, Scott, and David E. Johnson. 1997. “Introduction”. In Border Theory: The Limits of Cultural Politics, edited by Scott Michaelsen and David E. Johnson. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Myrivili, E. 2004. Liquid Borders: Subjectivity at the Limits of the Nation-State in Southeast Europe. PhD Thesis. Anthropology Department, Columbia University. ———. 2019. “Borders as Ghosts.” In The Political Materialities of Borders: New Theoretical Directions, edited by Olga Demetriou and Rozita Dimova. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Orlove, B., and S. C. Caton. 2010. “Water Sustainability: Anthropological Approaches and Prospects.” Annual Review of Anthropology 39:401–15. Orlove, B., and M. Rasmunssen. 2015. “Anthropologists Exploring Water in Social and Cultural Life: Introduction.” In A Virtual Issue from American Anthropologist, edited by Mattias Borg Rasmussen and Ben Orlove. https://anthrosource.onlineli­ brary.wiley.com/doi/toc/10.1002/(ISSN)1548-1433(CAT)VirtualIssues(VI) Exploring Water in Social and Cultural Life. Пандевски, М. 1993. “Македонската револуционерна организација меѓу 1893 и 1918година: формирање и развој” (Macedonian Revolutionary Organization between the years 1893 and 1918: formation and development). Прилози 2: 5–15. Пачемска, Д. 1985. “Внатрешната македонска револуционерна организација (Обединета).” Студенски Збор (The Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization—United) 7. Skopje. Pijpers, R. J. and Eriksen, T. H., eds. 2018. Mining Encounters: Extractive Industries in an Overheated World. London: Pluto Press. Popovska, C. 2016. “Hydrology of Lake Prespa.” Vodoprivreda 48, no. 279–281, 19–28. Popovska, C., and D. Sekovski. 2011. “Hydrological Sub-Watersheds Analysis of Prespa Lake.” Vodoprivreda 43, no. 2011: 249–51. Rasmussen, M. B. 2015. Andean Waterways: Resource Politics in Highland Peru. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Richter, H.A. 2015. Geschichte Griechenlands im 20. Jahrhundert, Band 2, 1939–2004. Franz Philipp Rutzen: Ruhpolding. Schriek van der T. and C. Giannakopoulos. 2011. Establishing the Influence of Climate, Water Extraction and Tectonics on the Water level of the Prespa Lakes (In Greece).

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Working Paper of the project CLIM-HYDROLAKE (Improving future projections of climate change induced hydrological responses by looking into the past: the Lake Prespa/Aliakmonas River case study in Greece), Framework Program 7, Grant 321979. Schriek van der T. and C Giannakopoulos. 2014. “The Water Level Fall of Lake Megali Prespa (N Greece): An Indicator of Regional Water Stress Driven by Climate Change and Amplified by Water Extraction?” Geophysical Research Abstracts 16: EGU, 1131–48. Synvet, A.1878. Les Grecs de l’Empire ottoman: Etude statistique et ethnographique. Constantinople: L Orient illustre. Sfetas, Spyridon. [Σπυρίδων Σφέτας]. 2003–2004. Οι σχέσεις ΚΚΕ και NOF στη διάρκεια του εμφυλίου (1946–1949), (KKE and NOF relations during the Civil War (1946–1949)). In: Βαλκανικά Σύμμεικτα. Band 14–15, Thessaloniki. ISSN 2407-9456. S. 239. Stankovic, S. 1960. “The Balkan Lake Ohrid and its Living World.” Monographiae Biologicae 9. The Hague: Dr W. Junk Publishers. Stoianovic, T. 1994. Balkan Worlds: The First and Last Europe. Armonk, NY and London: M.E. Sharpe. Тодоровски, З. 2014. Тодор Александров (Todor Aleksandrov). Скопје: Државен Архив на Република Македонија. Wateau, Fabienne. 2011. “Water, Societies and Sustainability: A Few Anthropological Examples of Non-Market Water Values.” Policy and Society 30, no. 4: 257–65.

Websites: https://www.calvertjournal.com/articles/show/7394/letter-from-prespa­ balkan-hinterland https://english.republika.mk/news/macedonia/warrior-on-a-horse­ becomes-a-hellenic-monument/ http://vistinomer.mk/site-prislushuvani-razgovori-objaveni-od-opozitsijata­ video-audio-transkripti/ https://prizma.mk/kompleten-materijal-od-site­ bombi-na-opozitsijata/ https://www.gtp.gr/LocPage.asp?id=13602 https://anemi.lib.uoc.gr/php/pdf_pager.php?rec=/metadata/8/e/b/metadata­ 388-0000002.tkl&do=121610.pdf&pageno=3&width=841&height=595& maxpage=42&lang=en

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3

A glass half full or a

poisoned chalice?

The Prespa Agreement and the

modern Macedonian language

Victor A. Friedman

Introduction The Modern Macedonian language was an important factor both in the actual articles of the Prespa Agreement (henceforth PA) and in the discus­ sion around the September 30, 2018 referendum concerning that agreement in what is now North Macedonia.1 The agreement as such makes signifi­ cant progress in settling linguistic disputes concerning Macedonian—both in Greece and in North Macedonia itself—but there are two major issues left unresolved: 1) the fate of the Macedonian-speaking minority in north­ ern Greece, including the representation of their dialects, and 2) Bulgarian claims in general concerning Macedonian. Sections §2 and §3 discuss those clauses in the PA that mention language explicitly and their implications, which are all positive. Section §4 discusses a problematic formulation that includes language and that deploys a semiotic process that Irvine and Gal (2000) identify as erasure. Section §5 discusses a clause in the PA that, while not mentioning language, could be used to damage Macedonian linguistic scholarship and the status of the Macedonian language, especially in the EU. Some scholars tend to view the so-called Macedonian question only in terms of Greek contestation, eliding the fact that there is also a Bulgarian problem, which the PA does not, and could not be expected to, address. However, since Bulgaria, like Greece, is now part of the EU, the Bulgarian problem has significant bearing on the PA. Thus, section §6 discusses how the PA does not put to rest Bulgarian claims to Macedonian, and has actu­ ally resulted in an exacerbation of Bulgarian nationalism. The article con­ cludes in §7 that, despite its problematic aspects, from the point of view of trying to combat exclusionist nationalism, right-wing populism, outright extremism, and even—at least in North Macedonia—criminality (Prizma 2015; Vistinomer 2016; Friedman 2019a, 2019b), the PA has the potential to bring benefits to North Macedonia and the recognition of Macedonian, but unfortunately, it can also be used to erase (in Irvine and Gal’s 2000 sense) the existence of Macedonian-speakers in Greece and fails to counter Bulgarian irredentist linguistic claims, which extend to all of North Macedonia as well as parts of Albania, Kosovo, and Serbia.

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Article 1(3c) of the PA: the recognition of Macedonian Except for a reference to the English language in Article 20, the word language occurs three times in the PA. The first occurrence, in Article 1, Paragraph 3c of the PA, reads as follows:2 The official language of the Second Party shall be the “Macedonian language” as recognised by the Third UN Conference on the Standardization of Geographical Names, held in Athens in 1977, and described in Article 7(3) and (4) of this Agreement. During the lead-up to the September 30, 2018 referendum, this clause was the cause of much discussion, and arguably, misrepresentation in what was then still the Republic of Macedonia. Opponents of the PA claimed that this formulation endangered the recognition of the Macedonian language. Such opponents, however, never cited any passage in the UN document that justified such a claim. I therefore quote the relevant passages here in full: Vol. I Report of the Conference (UN 1979)

Contents, III. Resolutions Adopted by the Conference:

p. iv: “11. Serbo-Croatian and Macedonian Cyrillic alphabets of Yugoslavia” p. 20, [Report of the Work of Committee IV, Action by the Conference, paragraph 77: “In connexion with the work of Committee IV the Conference adopted resolutions on the romanization [sic] of Chinese geographical names (resolution 8); the romanization [sic] of Arabic characters (resolution 9): the Bulgarian Cyrillic alphabet (reso­ lution 10); the Serbo-Croatian and the Macedonian Cyrillic alphabets of Yugoslavia (resolution 11);” p. 29 [resolution] 11: Serbo-Croatian and Macedonian cyrillic [sic] alphabets of Yugoslavia The Conference, Recognizing the need for elaboration of resolution 6 of the Second United Nations Conference on the Standardization of Geographical Names, 31/ Recognizing, further that in Yugoslavia the romanization [sic] of the Serbo-Croatian and Macedonian cyrillic [sic] alphabets has long been employed in official gazetteers and maps, Recommends that the systems that are given in the annex to this reso­ lution be adopted as the international systems for the romanization [sic] of Serbo-Croatian and Macedonian geographical names in Yugoslavia. p. 31, Annex to Resolution 11: A table of the Macedonian Cyrillic alphabet is given under the heading “Macedonian”, to the right of a table of Serbo-Croatian Cyrillic under a broader heading “Cyrillic character”, above them both, and a list labeled “Romanisation form”

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to the right (with a notes that ѓ and ќ are to be rendered g and k before e and i, e.g. Gevgelia, Kirovo). This same recommendation for the romanization of ѓ and ќ is given on p. 144 of Vol II. Vol. II. Technical papers (UN 1981) p. 144: “Cyrillic script of the Macedonian language standard”. This is the heading of a table of the Macedonian Cyrillic script, which is given with the scripts of Serbo-Croatian (Croato-Serbian) and Slovenian and a column of remarks. p. 145: “Similarly, the Cyrillic alphabet used in the Serbo-Croat con­ sists of 30 characters and 30 sounds, whereas the Cyrillic alphabet used in the Macedonian language consists of 31 characters and 31 sounds.” p. 145: “It must be borne in mind, however, that the sounds lj, nj and dž must not be substituted by the characters нј, лј and дж, but rather by the characters and sounds љ њ and џ, and that the sound dz must be indicated by s, not by дз, when transliterating to the Macedonian Cyrillic alphabet. In all the other cases transliteration is done according to the ‘letter-for-letter’ and ‘sound-for-sound’ principles.” As can be seen from all those passages in the Conference documents them­ selves, the phrase “of Yugoslavia” occurs in the description of both “SerboCroat” and “Macedonian” in Vol. I (except on p. 31) but not in Vol. II. The usage in Vol. I might have been cited by the anti-PA side, but it was not. I argued at the time of the September 30, 2018 referendum (Friedman 2018c) that the UN Conference documents can be taken as representing the fact that already in 1977, Greece, as a part of UNESCO, recognized Macedonian as a language. My interpretation here is that reference to the UN document was a way for Syriza to point out to their local opponents that Greece had already recognized Macedonian as a language at the UN level back in 1977. To the best of my knowledge, this part of the PA has remained uncontroversial since the PA was ratified by both sides. It is also worth emphasizing that in recog­ nizing the Macedonian language as Macedonian and not, for example, North Macedonian, the PA keeps the internationally recognized name of the lan­ guage, and recognizes Macedonian as a language, rather than as “the idiom of Skopia” or any other number of formulations promoted by Greek nation­ alists for a very long time (cf. Andriotēs 1957; Antonov 2012; Friedman 2012).

Article 7(4) of the PA: Macedonian is a South Slavic language Article 7(4) of the PA states: The Second Party notes that its official language, the Macedonian lan­ guage, is within the group of South Slavic languages. The Parties note that the official language and other attributes of the Second Party are not related to the ancient Hellenic civilization, history, culture and her­ itage of the northern region of the First Party.

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First, it is important to state that Modern Macedonian is indeed a South Slavic language. Its closest relatives are Bulgarian and the former SerboCroatian. The speakers of the dialects of Common Slavic that became the South Slavic languages, including Modern Macedonian, arrived in the Balkans in the 6th-7th centuries CE, i.e. at the beginning of the Middle Ages.3 At that time, Common Slavic was already differentiating into dia­ lects that would become the various Slavic languages, much as, at the same time, Latin had become differentiated into dialects that eventually became the various Romance languages. Thus Macedonian is a Slavic language just as surely as French is a Romance language. It is important to emphasize that in modern terms, Slavic is strictly a linguistic term and not a racial one. The conflation of language with race was a common discourse in Europe until World War II (for example, the “Racial Map of Europe” published in Hammond 1923, 9), and to this day language names are occasionally deployed in a way, that conflates language with “race” or ethnicity.4 Part of what necessitated Article 7(4) was the Greek claim that no one but descendants of the Ancient Macedonians had the right to the name Macedonia, that the Ancient Macedonians were Greek, and that therefore Modern Macedonian was either Greek or did not exist.5 One response in what was then still the Republic of Macedonia was to accept the first claim and deny the second (and third) by claiming Modern Macedonian (and therefore its speakers) as direct descendants of Ancient Macedonian. This claim was picked up by right-wing Macedonian nationalists and aggres­ sively pursued by Nikola Gruevski’s VMRO-DPMNE government (2006– 16) in a policy called “antiquization” by its proponents and “Bucephalism” (after Alexander the Great’s horse) by its opponents.6 Regardless of the position of Ancient Macedonian within Indo-European in general and its relationship to Hellenic in particular, an issue which objective scholarship regards as moot owing to the lack of textual evidence (see Ilievski 1997, 2008; Trudgill 2017 for a discussion of these issues), Modern Macedonian is no more descended from Ancient Macedonian than French is descended from Frankish, the Germanic language whose name ended up being used by speakers of the Romance language called by its speakers français.7 Unfortunately, the antiquization project included claims that Modern Macedonian was directly descended from Ancient Macedonian; and therefore, not a Slavic language. In its most extreme version, proponents of Bucephalism claimed that since Modern Macedonian was descended— unchanged—from Ancient Macedonian (see Ilievski’s 2008 rebuttal of such pseudo-scientific claims), Modern Greek was actually descended from Modern Macedonian, since the Greeks claimed that Macedonian was Greek. Thus, for example, according to some Bucephalists, Greek Koinē (‘common’ and also the name of the Hellenistic form of Attic Greek spread throughout the ancient world by Alexander and subsequent rulers as a ‘com­ mon language’ to be used throughout his empire), is derived (by pseudoetymology) from Modern Macedonian koj ne [zboruva] ‘who doesn’t

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[speak]’. In this way, the Bucephalists attempted to reverse the Greek claim “Macedonia is Greece” to “Greek is Macedonian.”8 Thus, article 7(4) of the PA is a good thing in that it discourages Macedonian governments from supporting pseudo-science. It also encour­ ages Greek governments to recognize a reality that is based on modern lin­ guistic facts.

Articles 7(2, 3) of the PA: the problem of erasure This section treats articles 7(2) and 7(3) together, as they are conceptually and ideologically linked, although only 7(3) mentions language. The two articles read as follows: 2. When reference is made to the First Party, these terms denote not only the area and people of the northern region of the First Party, but also their attributes, as well as the Hellenic civilization, history, culture, and heritage of that region from antiquity to present day. 3. When reference is made to the Second Party, these terms denote its territory, language, people and their attributes, with their own history, culture, and heritage, distinctly different from those referred to under Article 7(2). From a strictly linguistic point of view, these articles employ the semiotic process identified by Irvine and Gal. (2000, 38) as erasure, which they define as “the process in which ideology, in simplifying the sociolinguistic field, renders some persons or activities (or sociolinguistic phenomena) invisi­ ble.” In linguistic terms, the PA renders invisible multilingualism in both Greece and North Macedonia. Like almost all European countries, North Macedonia and Greece are both homes to people whose first language is not that of the eponymous nation-state. However, in the constitution of North Macedonia that multilingualism is explicitly recognized and protected by law, whereas in Greece and its constitution, the same phenomenon is denied and there is a long history of persecution of non-Greek speakers by the Greek state, especially speakers of Macedonian (Kostopoulos 2000; Friedman 2012; Lithoksóou 2013). As noted above, in its formulation in 7(2), the PA does nothing to protect Macedonian speakers in Greece, a fact even noted by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC 2019). The term erasure, however, while originally identified to explain the effects of certain linguistic ideologies, can also be applied to other ideol­ ogies, which in turn can affect language practices. Article 7(2) implies a seamless, uninterrupted connection between the Hellenized Macedonia of late antiquity and the modern Greek territory of Macedonia, as if there were not—nor had there ever been—speakers of the Slavic that became Macedonian, of the Latin that became Aromanian, as well as Albanian, Romani, and in the early modern period, Turkish and Judezmo.9 And yet,

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from late antiquity onward, Greek Macedonia (as well as North Macedonia) was or became home to speakers of all these languages with “their attrib­ utes, … history, culture, and heritage.” Of particular significance is the fact that from the end of the 14th century until the beginning of the 20th, the territories of North Macedonia and Greek Macedonia were part of a single state—The Ottoman Empire—and for most of that time were in a single administrative unit of that empire, the Eyalet of Rumeli.10 The peoples liv­ ing in that territory obviously shared considerable history, but also culture, attributes, multilingualism, and civilizations. When, in 1913, the Treaty of Bucharest awarded the Ottoman territory that became Greek Macedonia to the Kingdom of Greece, in most of that territory—including Salonica, its largest city—Greek was at most a minority language, and in much of it, Greek was not spoken at all (Friedman 2013). The kind of erasure that the PA imposes on these facts is central to the 19th-century ideology that resulted in today’s nation-states, including the ethnic cleansing of Greek Macedonia mandated by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne.11 The PA thus not only fails to protect or acknowledge Macedonian­ speakers living in Greece, it leaves Greece free to deny their existence and to erase Greek Macedonia’s multilingual past.

Article 8(5): the question of dialect atlases Article 8(5) does not mention language, but it has the potential to disrupt the study of Macedonian, as will be explained below. Article 8(5) states, in connection with “historic, archaeological and educational matters,” the following: “It [a committee supervised by the Ministries of Foreign Affairs] shall consider and, if it deems appropriate, revise any school textbooks and school auxiliary material such as maps, historical atlases, teaching guides, in use in each of the Parties, in accordance with the principles and aims of UNESCO and the Council of Europe.” While this clause should ensure the integrity of Macedonian dialectology, which is supported by— in the words of Article 8(5)—“authentic, evidence-based and scientifically sound historical sources,” the fear among Macedonian dialectologists is that Article 8(5) will be used by the politicians supervising the academic committees to prevent them from including data points in Greece in cur­ rent on-going and future dialect atlas projects and also from using the historically attested toponyms of the villages. At issue are at least two major projects—one international and one national—that are in danger of being negatively affected. The two projects are the Common Slavic Linguistic Atlas (Macedonian Opštoslovenski ling­ vistički atlas), henceforth OLA, and the Macedonian Dialect Atlas project, henceforth MDA. A brief description of these two projects follows.12 The OLA project was initiated by the International Committee of Slavists at the 4th International Congress of Slavists in Moscow in 1958.

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It is a massive, on-going project involving a questionnaire of 3, 454 items for 853 data points in what was then the USSR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria, as well as in Austria, Hungary, Italy, Romania, Albania, Greece, Turkey, and what was then East Germany. Each of the countries with one or more Slavic languages as official or primary was repre­ sented by their respective national committees drawn from their respective academies of sciences (or arts and sciences), which, in the case of the former Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and USSR, meant the academies of the respec­ tive relevant republics.13 The data were collected between 1965 and 1975. The actual volumes of OLA began to appear in 1988. To date, 18 volumes have appeared, and there are many more yet to come.14 For those villages that are located in nation-states where a Slavic language is official or primary, the village names are given in the relevant Slavic language (and, if relevant, alphabet), for example, Sali in Croatia, Guber and Губер in Bosnia, Кула in Serbia, Туринка in Ukraine, etc. For those villages that are not located in nation-states where a Slavic language is official or primary, the village names are given in the relevant Slavic language (and, if relevant, alpha­ bet) first, and in parentheses in the official language of the nation-state, for example, Sv. Križ (S. Croce) in Italy, Potoče (Potschach) in Austria, Gornji Senik (Felsoszölnök) in Hungary, Бобошчица (Boboshticë) in Albania, etc.15 OLA has a total of eleven data-points in Greece. Of these, eight are the responsibility of North Macedonia and three were assigned to Bulgaria. Consistent with OLA principles, the points assigned to North Macedonia are in Macedonian and Greek, for example, Нестрам (Νεστόριον).16 The MDA project is a joint effort by the Research Center for Areal Linguistics (ICAL) of the Academy of Arts and Sciences of North Macedonia (MANU) and the Institute for Macedonian Language. To date, only the preliminary volume has appeared (Gajdarova 2008), published by the Institute for Macedonian Language. The maps for this project contain 392 points, of which approximately a hundred data points are in Greece.17 The MDA uses Macedonian toponyms, in Cyrillic, although the index, which is in preparation, also gives the current Greek names. Here it is important to note that the Macedonian toponyms were, for the most part, the ones in use for centuries, and they were not changed by Greece until after World War I. In a number of cases, the villages in Greece no longer have Macedonian speakers, but the dialects were recorded from speakers who fled Greece in the wake of the Civil War of 1946–49 or one of the earlier 20th century wars. The MDA is thus, in certain respects, a historical document, although in many respects it reflects current realities. There are two problems for these (and any future) dialect atlas projects posed by Article 8(5) of the PA. The first is the cartographic representation of Macedonian dialects that are or were spoken on territory that is now in Greece. The second is the use of the non-Greek toponyms that were in place prior to their most recent name changes (and which, in some cases,

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are still used by the local population).18 Consistent with its non-recognition of Macedonian outside the borders of North Macedonia, the Greek side could require the Macedonian government to prohibit any representations of Macedonian dialects and/or the Macedonian versions of toponyms in Greece, citing Article 8(5) and claiming that the aforementioned are irre­ dentist. Thus far, all attempts at reaching agreements as per article 8(5) have been stymied by nationalists on the Greek side. What is needed, therefore, is a clear statement from the Macedonian government—since it is the gov­ ernments that are supervising scholars (itself an obviously problematic situation)—that Macedonian dialectology will not be impaired by the PA both in scholarship and in education. As of this writing, no such statement has been forthcoming.19

Bulgaria: the Bumblebee in the ointment Despite the recognition of Macedonian as the official language of what was then the Republic of Macedonia in February 1999, and despite the so-called Friendship Agreement of August 1, 2017, Bulgaria continues to claim all dialects of Macedonian—including those in the Republic of North Macedonia—as dialects of Bulgarian.20 These claims are not—nor could they be expected to be—addressed by the PA. Nonetheless, the issues adduced in §5 above have a direct bearing on Bulgarian behavior with respect to Macedonian linguistics. Here a brief history of Bulgaria’s troubled participation in OLA is rele­ vant. In 1982, the Bulgarians, led by dialectologist Ivan Kočev, a Bulgarianidentified Macedonian from Struga and father of dialectologist Ana Kočeva (see below), withdrew from the OLA project because the other national com­ mittees refused to give them control over the data points in the Republic of Macedonia as well as the Macedonian points in Albania and those in Greece that had been assigned to Macedonia As a result, all the pre-2005 volumes of OLA have no data for the points controlled by the Bulgarians (all of Bulgaria, 1 point in Turkey, and 3 in Greece), and the points in Bulgaria (114-145) are grouped out of order, at the end of the list of points.21 It was not until 2005 that the Bulgarians changed their mind and asked to rejoin OLA. However, their rejoining the project required the agreement of all the national committees, which by this time included an independent national committee of what was then the Republic of Macedonia. The head of the Bulgarian committee, who was in that position ex officio as direc­ tor of the Institute for the Bulgarian Language (IBL), happened to be Vasil Rajnov, a psycholinguist with no particular complexes about dialectology.22 The head of the Macedonian committee was Marjan Markovikj, Director of ICAL-MANU, a dialectologist who happened to be without nationalist prejudices. As a result, the two directors came to an understanding and Bulgaria was re-admitted. The reconciliation resulted in close ties between the IBL and ICAL In 2012, however, Rajnov retired, and the current

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director, Svetla Koeva, herself a computational linguist has given free rein to unabashed nationalists at the IBL, especially Ivan Kočev’s daughter, Ana Kočeva (2018a, 2018b), in a move that can charitably be described as perfidi­ ous, given that it was Macedonian good will that allowed Bulgaria back into the OLA project.23 In 2001 (shortly before Rajnov became director), IBL published the first volume of a Dialect Atlas of the Bulgarian language that included all Macedonian and southeast Serbian dialects (Kočev 2001). The project was apparently discontinued, but in 2016, the IBL published another volume in the series (Tetovska-Troeva 2016), with the same map and thus the same claims.24 If Macedonian scholars are prevented from publishing dialect atlases that have points in Greece, Bulgaria is most likely simply to claim those points (as they tried to do in the past, see above), thus further undermining the status of the Macedonian language. Unfortunately, the problems with Bulgaria do not stop at dialect atlases. On the contrary, the refusal of Bulgaria to accept the existence of Macedonian as an independent language has been enshrined in a declara­ tion adopted by the Bulgarian parliament and published on the website of the Council of Ministers of the Republic of Bulgaria as a direct result of the possibility of EU accession opened up by the PA (Council of Ministries of the Republic of Bulgaria [CominBug] 2019). In that document, among the conditions set by Bulgaria are the following: —with regard to language, the phrase “official language of the Republic of North Macedonia” should be used. When it is absolutely necessary to use the phrase “Macedonian language.” in documents and posi­ tions of the EU, on each occasion, with and asterisk under the line, the clarification “according to the constitution of the Republic of North Macedonia” must be made. It follows that it is clear that the linguistic norm, declared as the constitutional language of the Republic of North Macedonia, is connected to the evolution of the Bulgarian language and its dialects in the former Yugoslav republic since 1944.25 No docu­ ment or statement in the process of accession can be taken as a recogni­ tion of the Bulgarian side of the existence of a so-called “Macedonian language” separate from Bulgarian.26 In that document, Bulgaria has also demanded that North Macedonia drop any claims concerning the Macedonian minority in Bulgaria, a demand which was found invalid by the International Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg on May 28, 2020.27 Following the Soviet tradition of academia supporting political agendas, Kočeva et al. (2020) has published a screed that recapitulates attacks on Macedonian from 1978 (see Lunt 1984 for references and analysis). The Institute for Macedonian language has already published a response (IMJ 2020), and MANU (The Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts) has also published a response, which includes Friedman (2020).28

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Moreover, even before it joined the EU, Bulgaria began a diplomatic and monetary campaign to convince the Macedonians of Albania and the Gorans of Albania and Kosovo to declare themselves (and therefore their language) to be Bulgarian.29 In the above cited “Framework Position,” Bulgaria also insists that Bulgarian schools be opened in Albania and Kosovo for these speakers. In order to understand this last move, consider the following thought exercise. Imagine that Norway was an EU member and that Sweden and Finland were not but wanted to be. In such a con­ text, consider the following scenario: On the basis of the name Norse as the origin of Norway, the fact that all Vikings were Norsemen, and that at one time Norway and Sweden were in the same state, the modern Norwegian state had a policy that all dialects closely related to Old Norse and con­ tiguous with Norway are Norwegian dialects. They would therefore claim all Swedish dialects as dialects of Norwegian.30 In the case of the Swedishspeaking minority in Finland, however, imagine that instead of being priv­ ileged former colonizers, they were a marginalized indigenous minority. Then imagine Norway sending diplomats and spending state money to convince those Swedish speakers to declare themselves Norwegians, and their language Norwegian (despite the fact that their dialects are more like the Swedish of Sweden than the Norwegian of Norway). Moreover, failure to obey Norway would result in Finland’s and Sweden’s being denied acces­ sion to the EU. If we change Norway to Bulgaria, Swedish to Macedonian, and Finland to Albania (and Kosovo), we have an almost perfect analogue of the behavior of an EU state vis-à-vis nearby non-member states. In a recent specious claim, Kočeva (2019) compared Macedonian visà-vis Bulgarian to Moldavian vis-à-vis Romanian. The claim is specious because, as Dyer (1996, 1999) has shown, Moldavian and Romanian are based on the same Wallachian dialect base, with its center in Bucharest. Standard Macedonian, however, is based on West-Central dialects bounded by Veles-Prilep-Kičevo-Brod, whereas standard Bulgarian is based on the northeastern dialects centered on Veliko Tărnovo, basically at opposite ends of the southern part of the East South Slavic dialect continuum (see Friedman 2000). Bulgaria also has a policy of granting Bulgarian (and therefore EU-eligible) passports to ethnic Macedonian citizens of North Macedonia if they declare themselves to be Bulgarians (see Neofotistos 2009). In 2007, not long after Bulgaria joined the EU, I had the occasion to remark on this scheme at a conference, pointing out that Bulgaria was using its position in the EU to pressure Macedonians. A Bulgarian colleague exclaimed of the Macedonians applying for Bulgarian passports: “It’s not just instrumental!” To which I replied: “Of course it is!” And, indeed, Macedonians taking out Bulgarian passports in order to study and work in the EU, where the visa restrictions on Macedonians are like those on Somalis and Azerbaijanis, are explicit that—as is also the case with the PA—one does what one must to get access to the EU.31

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An inconclusive conclusion With regard to the Macedonian language, the Prespa Agreement helps undo some of the damage done by domestic right-wing nationalists with regard to linguistics and scholarship in what is now North Macedonia. It also requires Greece to recognize both the existence and the name of the Macedonian language within North Macedonia. Unfortunately, it also opens the way for new kinds of damage to both the status of the Macedonian language and to Macedonian linguistic scholarship. In this regard, perhaps the most insidious part of the PA is the result that by opening the way to North Macedonia’s membership in the EU it has also opened the way for Bulgaria to pursue its denialist policies toward the Macedonian language and to lay claim to all its dialects. In this respect, the PA itself only threatens the status of an ethnolinguistic minority that the Hellenic Republic claims does not exist. Bulgaria, on the other hand, is attempting to erase (in the sense of Irvine and Gal 2000 cited above) Macedonian altogether. In this sense, the PA settles a local quarrel that is seen in global terms, while the real global threat to Macedonian language and linguistic scholarship comes from Bulgaria, which is outside the terms of the agreement, and which is under no constraint to behave according to so-called European values with respect to Macedonian.

Notes 1 Having published extensively on the history of Modern Macedonian (Fried­ man 1985, 1993, 1998, 1999, 2000), I will not rehearse those details here. I have also published in detail on the 30 September 2018 referendum (Friedman 2018a, 2018b). In this chapter, and consistent with the Prespa Agreement, I shall use Macedonian to refer to Modern Macedonian. I will use Modern Mac­ edonian elsewhere in this chapter only when it is necessary to distinguish it from Ancient Macedonian. 2 The fact that English has replaced French as the language of international relations, treaties, diplomacy and other areas is simply noted here in passing. While a fascinating subject, it is beyond the scope of this chapter. 3 Common Slavic is the name given by linguists to the language from which all the Slavic languages derive and which would have been spoken roughly just before and during the time of the migrations of Slavic speakers into the Balkans. 4 The complex interrelationship of language and religion to ethnic identity in the Balkans is beyond the scope of this article. See, for example, Friedman 1996. 5 See Ilievski (1997) on the question of Ancient Macedonian and the Modern Macedonian language. 6 To the best of my knowledge, the term was first used in Macedonian by Acad. Marjan Markovikj in 2005, and it was quickly picked up and popularized in the Macedonian media. 7 Note that all historical linguists agree that Ancient Macedonian was an Indo-European language. The question is where it fits in relationship to the Hellenic branch of the Indo-European language family. To use a kin­ ship analogy, the question is whether that relationship is one of cousin,

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8

9 10

11

12

13

14 15

16 17 18 19

sibling, or child. Arguments can be adduced for all three conjectures owing to the paucity of the evidence, although the overwhelming majority of lin­ guists outside of Greece favor either the sibling or the cousin hypothesis (cf. Trudgill 2017). “Macedonia is Greece” was the wording used by the Greek government in 1992, when what was then the Republic of Macedonia became independent. The Greek government even paid for banners to be hung from lamp posts along Michigan Avenue, the most prestigious business street in downtown Chicago, with that slogan. On the other hand, the chant from the black-shirted thugs that, the Golden Dawn political party bussed in to Florina (Macedonian Lerin) in Greek Macedonia, to intimidate participants in the book launch of the first Modern Macedonian- Modern Greek dictionary to be published in Greece on September 17, 2011, was: Η Μακεδονία είναι Ελληνική ‘Macedo­ nia is Greek’. The author was a witness to both these events. On the non-Hellenic character of Ancient Macedonia prior to late antiquity, see Hall (1997:45–46, 63–65, 2002:154–56). The terms beylerbeylik and vilayet are also relevant to certain time periods for this highest level Ottoman administrative unit. Until the administrative reforms beginning in the mid-19th century, all of the territory of Macedonia was in the Eyalet of Rumeli. For Greece as a modern nation-state see especially Herzfeld 1982. On the Treaty of Lausanne, which mandated an exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey that affected Macedonia more than any other region, see Ladas (1932) and Yıldırım (2006). We can note here a third project, a Macedonian dialect atlas based on the dialect points of OLA (Markovikj 2020). While the data is drawn from that published in OLA, the format is much easier to read. Also, unlike OLA, the lexical items are entered directly on the map (rather than being referenced by symbols) and are in Cyrillic rather than phonetic transcription. See the Appendix 2 for examples from all three atlases. Since the various post-1991 changes, the respective academies of the result­ ant new nation-states have taken responsibility for their respective territories. Since these institutions were already in place prior to 1991, this transition has been relatively unproblematic. Many of these volumes, including the complete list of data points, maps, etc. are available on the OLA website http://www.slavatlas.org/publications .html. The main exception to the ordering and presentation is for Upper and Lower Sorbian (Lusatian), the only Slavic language spoken exclusively in Germany. Sorbian toponyms are given first in German and then, after two slashes, in Sorbian, e.g. Dissen // Dešno. The data points controlled by Bulgaria are given only in Cyrillic, in their Slavic form. It is worth emphasizing here that the large number of data points in Greece reflects the large number of Macedonian-speaking villages located in what is now Greece prior to 1912-1949. I use non-Greek here because in some cases the relevant toponyms were Turk­ ish or of some other origin. Parts of this paragraph are based on conversations with the Director of ICAL­ MANU Acad. Marjan Markovikj, Prof. Ljupčo Risteski, a member of the Macedonian negotiating committee for Bulgaria, Dragi Georgiev, Head of the Macedonian negotiating committee for Bulgaria, Irena Stefoska, special­ ist in Byzantine history and independent MP, and with Stevo Pendarovski, the president of North Macedonia.

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20 See Friedman (1999, 2000) and Lunt (1984) on the vicissitudes of Bulgarian language policy vis-à-vis Macedonian since 1944. 21 The Bulgarians have subsequently published two separate volumes with some of those data (Vendina 2013, Kalynin’ 2015). It should be noted that of the three villages in Greece, one is in Greek Thrace, but the other two are in northeastern Greek Macedonia. 22 Rajnov was director 2003–11. 23 See Fielder 2019 on recent Bulgarian and Austrian denials of Macedonian’s right to exist, and Popetrevski 2019 on Kočeva and her father. 24 These volumes are available on line at . The Bulgar­ ian claims are apparently based on a combination of Serbian dialectology and politics. The territory claimed in Serbia corresponds to the Timok-South Morava dialects as identified in Ivić (1956)—their principle defining char­ acteristics being the absence of phonemic length and tone, the presence of mobile stress, and /e/ as the reflex of Common Slavic *ē—but only in Serbia itself, despite the fact that these dialects extend into most of southern Kosovo. It is this last fact that is political rather than dialectological. In Kosovo, as long as the dialects of Gora, in southwesternmost Kosovo were claimed as Serbian (Ivić 1971), they were not claimed by Bulgarians (Kočev 1988). After Ivić accepted Vidoeski’s (1973) arguments that the Goran dialects were closer to Macedonian than to the Prizren-South Morava, dialects of what was then Serbo-Croatian, so that Ivić (1985) and Brozović and Ivić (1988) excluded Gora from their maps of what is now the former Serbo-Croatian, Kočev (2001), fol­ lowed by including Gora in his map of Bulgarian dialects and the map was reproduced in Tetovska-Troeva (2016). 25 See Lunt (1984) for a discussion of earlier Bulgarian iterations of this claim. 26 - по отношение на езика да се използва фразата „официален език на Република Северна Македония “При абсолютна необходимост от използване на термина „македонски език“в документи и позиции на ЕС, със звездичка под линия следва да се пояснява всеки път - „съгласно конституцията на Република Северна Македония“. Следва да е ясно, че езиковата норма, обявена за конституционен език в Република Северна Македония, е свързана с еволюцията на българския език и неговите наречия в някогашната югославска република след кодифицирането им след 1944 г. Никой документ/изявление в процеса на присъединяване не може да се разглежда като признание от българска страна на съществуването на т.нар. „македонски език“, отделен от българския. 27 The best source concerning Bulgaria’s Macedonian minority is Stojkov (2014). A discussion in English is available in Stojkov (2020). 28 On 2 July 2020, the European Commission published the following state­ ment: “The designation used for the language is Macedonian, without any additional explanations or footnotes. This is considered an act of official rec­ ognition of the Macedonian language at EU level and its promotion as one of the official languages of the European Union in the future. The Macedo­ nian language issue was formally closed with the Prespa Agreement as the key identity benchmark for ethnic Macedonians from North Macedonia.” . This is an obvious victory for Macedonian as a language. However, it leaves the question of Macedonian dialects outside the current borders of North Macedonia unaddressed, and Bulgaria continues to proselytize in the non-EU countries (Albania, Kosovo). 29 Direct observations by the author. Even in the depths of isolation under Enver Hoxha, Macedonian was recognized as a minority language in Albania and, in the Prespa region, taught through grade four.

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30 Let it be remembered that Swedish and Norwegian are mutually intelligible Scandinavian languages that can be distinguished from one another at all lin­ guistic levels. Bulgarian and Macedonian are similarly mutually intelligible and likewise similarly distinguishable at all linguistic levels. 31 The concrete comparison is based on the experiences of Macedonian colleagues.

References Andriotēs, Nikolaos P. 1957. The Confederate State of Skopje and Its Language. Athens: s. n. [No publisher given.] Antonov, Dragan, Chief ed. 2012. The Name Issue Revisited: An Anthology of Academic Articles. Skopje: Macedonian Information Center. British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). 2019. Greece’s Invisible Minority—the Macedonian Slavs. https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-47258809 (Accessed February 24, 2019). Brozović, Dalibor, and Pavle Ivić. 1988. Jezik, srpskohrvatski/hrvatskosrpski, Hravtski Ili Srpski. (Offprint from 2nd ed. Enciklopedija Jugoslavija.) Zagreb: Jugoslavenski Leksikografski Zavod “Miroslav Krleza.” CominBug (Council of Ministries of the Republic of Bulgaria). 2019. Document Entitled Рамкова позиция относно рзширяаване не ЕС и процеса на стабилизиране и асоциране: Реублика Северна Македония и Албания [Framework Position Relating to the Expansion of the EU and the Process of Stabilization and Association: Republic of North Macedonian and Albania]. http://www.gov.bg/bg/prestsentar/novini/ramk­ ova-pozitsia (Accessed October 9, 2019). Dyer, Donald L., ed. 1996. Studies in Moldovan: the History, Culture, Language and Contemporary Politics of the People of Moldova. Boulder, CO: East European Monographs. Dyer, Donald L., ed. 1999. The Romanian Dialect of Moldova: A Study in Language and Politics. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press. Fielder, Grace E. 2019. “Metalinguistic Dimensions of the Macedonian-Bulgarian Friendship Treaty: The Serbian Typewriter Meme and the Propagation of Language Ideology.” Proceedings of the X Macedonian-North American Conference on Macedonian Studies, edited by Markan Markovikj, Victor A. Friedman, Anastasija Gjurčinova, Elena Petroska, 131–58. Skopje: University of Skopje. ———. 2020. “Come Over into Macedonia and Help Us” Evidence for the Macedonian Language in the 19th Century.” In Macedonia on the Periphery of European Modernity, edited by Victor A. Friedman, Goran Janev and George Vlahov, 1–32. Berlin: Peter Lang. Friedman, Victor A. 1985. “The Sociolinguistics of Literary Macedonian.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 52: 31–57. ———. 1993. “The First Philological Conference for the Establishment of the Macedonian Alphabet and the Macedonian Literary Language: Its Precedents and Consequences.” In The Earliest Stage of Language Planning: The “First Congress” Phenomenon, edited by Joshua Fishman, 159–80. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ———. 1996. “Observing the Observers: Language, Ethnicity, and Power in the 1994 Macedonian Census and Beyond.” In Toward Comprehensive Peace in Southeastern Europe: Conflict Prevention in the South Balkans, edited by Barnett Rubin, 81–105 and 119–26. New York, NY: Council on Foreign Relations/Twentieth Century Fund.

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———. 1998. “The Implementation of Standard Macedonian: Problems and Results.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 131:31–57. ———. 1999. “Macedonian Language and Identity: Recent History and Recent Historiography.” In Guard the Word Well Bound: Proceedings of the Third North American-Macedonian Conference on Macedonian Studies (Indiana Slavic Studies 10), edited by Christina Kramer and Brian Cook, 71–86. Bloomington, IN: Slavica. ———. 2000. “The Modern Macedonian Standard Language and Its Relation to Modern Macedonian Identity.” In The Macedonian Question: Culture, Historiography, Politics, edited by Victor Roudometoff, 173–206. Boulder, CO: East European Monographs. ———. 2012. “A Tantrum from the Cradle of Democracy: On the Dangers of Studying Macedonian.” In Macedonia: The Political, Social, Economic and Cultural Foundations of a Balkan State, edited by Victor C. de Munck and Ljupcho Risteski, 22–43. London: I.B. Tauris. ———. 2015. “The Effects of the 1913 Treaty of Bucharest on the Languages Spoken in Macedonia.” In On Macedonian Matters: From the Partition and Annexation of Macedonia to the Present, edited by Victor A. Friedman and Jim Hlavač, 133–60. Munich: Otto Sagner. ———. 2018a. “The Name is Macedonia: North Macedonia.” Foreign Affairs. https:// www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/greece/2018-10-01/names-macedonia-north­ macedonia (Accessed October 1, 2018). ———. 2018b. “Naming and Shaming in the Balkans.” Foreign Affairs. https:// www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/greece/2018-10-19/naming-and-shaming-bal­ kans?cid=int-fls&pgtype=hpg (Accessed October 19, 2018). ———. 2018c. 360˚ Фридман: Македонскиот јазик не е никако загрозен со Договорот од Преспа [Friedman: The Macedonian language is not at all threatened by the Prespa Agreement]. Interview for 360º (News Program) on Alsat television. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3BBOyavys8 (Accessed September 20, 2018). ———. 2019a. “Double Determination in Colloquial Macedonian: Evidence from the 2015 Bombi.” And Thus You Are Everywhere Honored: Studies Dedicated to Brian D. Joseph, edited by James J. Pennington, Victor A. Friedman, Lenore Grenoble, 109–24. Bloomington, IN: Slavica. ———. 2019b. “Expletive Not Deleted: The Grammar of Macedonian Ebе With ‘mother’ as Direct Object in the 2015 Bombi and Its Balkan Context.” Чекај: Papers for Christina E. Kramer On the Occasion of Her Retirement, edited by Donald L. Dyer and Jane Hacking. Balkanistica 32, no. 2: 71–94. ———. 2020. “Bai Ganyo in the Academy: Bulgarian Ideological Dementia.” Pogledi za Makedonskiot jazik: Vo čest na 75 godini makedonska azbuka, 75 godini make­ donski pravopis, ed. by Elena Jovanova=Grujovska, et al. Skopje: Institut za Makedonski Jazik, MANU, Sovet za makedonski jazik, Filološki fakultet “Blaže Konseski”. 2020. pp. 25-33. http://manu.edu.mk/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Pogledi­ za-makedonski-jazik-v2.pdf Gajdarova, Ubavka, Chief ed. 2008. Makedonski Dijalekten Atlas. Skopje: Institut za makedonski jazik “Krste P. Misirkov.” Hall, Jonathan M., ed. 1997. Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University. ———, ed. 2002. Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago. Hammond, C. S. & Co, ed. 1923. 1923 Atlas of the World and Gazetteer. New York, NY: Funk and Wagnalls.

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Herzfeld, Michael. 1982. Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of Modern Greece. Austin, TX: University of Texas. Ilievski, Petar. 1997. “The Position of the Ancient Macedonian Language and the Modern Name Makedonski.” Balkanistika 10: 227–40. ———. 2008. Dva Sprotivni Prioda Kon Interpretacijata Na Antički Tekstovi so Antroponimska Sodržina. (Prilozi, Oddelenie za lingvistika i literaturna nauka 31.1). Second Edition. Skopje: MANU. IMJ 2020. Po Povod Najnovoto Izdanie Na BAN so Naslov “Za Oficialnija Ezik Na Republika Severna Makedonija. Skopje: Institut za Makedonski Jazik “Krste P. Misirkov”. Irvine, Judith T., and Susan Gal. 2000. “Language Ideologies and Linguistic Differentiation.” In Regimes of Language, edited by P. Kroskrity, 35–83. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Ivić, Pavle, ed. 1956. Dijalektologija Srpskohrvatskog Jezika: Uvod U Štokavsko Narečje. Novi Sad: Matica srpska. ———, ed. 1971. Srpski Narod I Njegov Jezik. Belgrade: Srpska književna zadruga. ———. 1985. Dijalektologija Srpskohrvatskog Jezika. 2nd ed. Novi Sad: Matica srpska. Kalynin’, L. È. 2015. Obščeslavjanskij Lingvitičeskij Atlas (OLA). Serija Fonetiko­ Grammatičeskaja. Bolgarskie Materialy. Vols. 1, 2a, 2b, 3, 4a, 4b. Sofia: BAN. Kočev, Ivan., ed. 1988. Bălgarski Dialekten Atlas: Obobštavašt Tom. Sofia: BAN. ———, ed. 2001. BăLgarski Dialekten Atlas. Obobštavašt Tom: I-III Fonetika, Akcentologija, Leksika. Sofia: Trud. Kočeva, Ana. 2018a. БАН: Македонскиот јазик е “деструктуриран книжевен бугарски јазик” [BAN: The Macedonian language is a “deformed literary Bulgarian language”]. https://meta.mk/ana-kocheva-od-ban-go-osporuva-makedonskiot­ jazik-zaboravajki-na-prerodbenitsite/ (Accessed November 21, 2018). ———. 2018b. Що е то “македонски език” и може ли да бъде официално признат в ЕС? [What is this “Macedonian language” could even be officially recognized in the EU?] https://meta.mk/ana-kocheva-od-ban-go-osporuva-makedonskiot­ jazik-zaboravajki-na-prerodbenitsite/ (December 13, 2018). ———. 2019. Доц. Анна Кочева: Фридман, говорейки за български езиков империализъм, използва терминологията на Коминтерна [Doc. Ana Dočeva: Friedman, speaking of Bulgarian linguistic imperialism, uses the terminology of Comintern.] http://focus-radio.net/доц-анна-кочева-фридман-говорейки-за/ (Accessed December 17, 2019). Kočeva, Ana et al., eds. 2020. Za Oficijalnata Ezik Na Republika Severna Makedonija. Sofia: BAN. http://www.bas.bg/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Za-oficialnia-ezik-na­ Republika-Severna-Makedonia-Online-Pdf.pdf Kōstopoulos, Tasos., ed. 2000. Hē Apagoreumenē Glōssa: Kratikē Katastolē Tōn Slavikōn Dialektōn Stēn Hellēnikē Makedonia. Athens: Maure Lista. Kotova, Nadežda V. 2018 Jazyk albancev Ukrainy v seredine XX veka: teksty i slovarʹ, kommentarii. 2nd ed. Moscow: Jazyki slavjanskoj kultury. Králik, L’., and J.Waniakowa, 2009, Map No. 17: L 1388 губы Npl, In Общеславянский лингвистический атлас. Серия лексико-словообразовательная, v. 9, edited by J. Siatkowski, J. Waniakowa, 66–67. Человек, Kraków: Instutu Jęyzka Polskiego. Polskiej Akademii Nauk. http://www.slavatlas.org/files/publications/atlasy/ola9/map-17.pdf Ladas, S. P., ed. 1932. The Exchange of Minorities; Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey. New York, NY: Macmillan.

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Lithoksóou, Dimitris, ed. 2013. The Greek Anti-Macedonian Struggle, From St. Elias’ Day to Zagorichani (1903-1905). Melbourne: Salient Publishing. Lunt, Horace G. 1984. “Some Sociolinguistic Aspects of Macedonian and Bulgarian.” In Language and Literary Theory. Papers in Slavic Philology, 5, edited by B. Stolz, I. Titunik, and L. Doležel, 83–127. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan. Markovikj, Marjan. 2018. Географска дистрибуција и етимолошко-семантичка анализа на називите за ’грд’ во македонските дијалекти // Језик као запис културе у етнолошкој и лингвистичкој анализи на релацији Србија-Македонија = Јазикот како запис на културатаво етнолошката и лингвистичка анализа на релација Србија-Македонија. Т. 1, гл. уред. П. Пипер, М. Марковиќ ; уред. 1 тома = уред. на 1 том С. Станковић, В. Лаброска, САНУ, Београд, Одељење језика и књижевности, 2018, стр. [181]-187+[3 карти]. Markovikj, Marjan, ed. 2020. Lingvistički Atlas Na Makedonskite Dijalekti (Spored Materijalite Na Opštoslovenskiot Lingvistički Atlas—OLA). Skopje: MANU. Neofotistos, Vasiliki P. 2009. “Bulgarian Passports, Macedonian Identity: The Invention of EU Citizenship in the Republic of Macedonia.” Anthropology Today 25, no. 4: 19–22. Novik Aleksandr, A., et al. 2016. Priazovskij Otrjad”: Jazyk I Kulʹtura Albancev Ukrainy. 2 vols. St. Petersburg: Kunstkamera. Popetrevski, Vasil. 2019. Напади од Бугарија врз академик Виктор Фридман по интервјуто за „360 степени“ [Attack from Bulgaria on Acad. Victor Friedman after his interview for “360 degrees”]. https://360stepeni.mk/napadi-od-bugarija-vrz-akade­ mik-viktor-fridman-po-intervjuto-za-360-stepeni/. (Accessed December 18, 2019) Prizma. 2015. Комплетен материјал од сите бомби на опозицијата [Complete mate­ rial from all the bombs of the opposition]. https://prizma.mk/kompleten-materi­ jal-od-site-bombi-na-opozitsijata/ (Accessed May 17, 2015). Siatkowski, J, and J Waniakowa, eds. 2009 Список населенных пунктов. Общеславянский лингвистический атлас. Серия лексико-словообразовательная, v. 9: Человек, 19–24. Kraków: Instytut Jęyzka Polskiego Polskiej Akademii Nauk http://www.slavatlas.org/files/publications/atlasy/ola9/05-puncts.pdf Stojkov, Stojko, ed. 2014. Tabu. Vreme na strah i stradanie, Presledvanieto na makedon­ cite v Bălgarija po vremeto na komunizma (1944-1989). Sandanski: Družestvo na Represirani Makedonci v Bălgarija. ———. 2020. “Persecution of the “Non-Existent”: Repression of Macedonians in Bulgaria during the Period of Communist Rule (1944–1989).” Macedonia on the Periphery of European Modernity, edited by Victor A. Friedman, Goran Janev, and George Vlahov, 205–55. Berlin: Peter Lang. Tetovska-Troeva, M., Chief ed. 2016. BăLgarski Dialekten Atlas. Obobštavašt Tom: IV Morfologija. Sofia: BAN. Trudgill, Peter. 2017. Macedonia Deconstructed. The New European. May 5–May 11, p. 47. UN. 1979. Third United Nations Conference on the Standardization of Geographical Names, Athens, 17 August - 7 September 1977, Vol. I Report of the Conference, edited by Department of Technical Co-Operation for Development. New York, NY: United Nations. https://unstats.un.org/unsd/geoinfo/UNGEGN/ungegnConf3.html ———. 1981. Third United Nations Conference on the Standardization of Geographical Names, Athens, 17 August–7 September 1977, Vol. II Techincal Papers, edited by Department of Technical Co-Operation for Development. New York, NY: United Nations. https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/29404?ln=en

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Vendina, T. I., Chief ed. 2013. Obščeslavjanskij Lingvitičeskij Atlas (OLA). Serija Leksiko-slovoobrazovatel’naja. Bolgarskie Materialy. Vols. 1–3,8. Moscow/Saint Petersburg: Nestor-Istorija Vidoeski, Božidar. 1973. Govori na pološkite torbeški sela Urvič i Jelovjane. Simpozium Kiril Pejčinovikj i negovoto vreme: Tetovo 24 i 25 noemvri 1971. Tetovo: Opštinsko sobranie na grad Tetovo. pp. 21–32. Vistinomer 2016. Сите прислушувани разговори објавени од опозицијата (видео/ аудио/транскрипти) [All the wire-tapped converstions published by the opposition video/audio/transcriptions]. http://vistinomer.mk/site-prislushuvani-razgovori­ objaveni-od-opozitsijata-video-audio-transkripti/ (Accessed February 23, 2016). Yıldırım, Onur., ed. 2006. Diplomacy and Displacement: Reconsidering the TurcoGreek Exchange of Populations, 1922–1934. New York, NY: Routledge.

Internet sources cited directly in footnotes OLA website, http://www.slavatlas.org/publications.html Bulgarian dialect atlases, https://ibl.bas.bg/bda/ https://meta.mk/ana-kocheva-od-ban-go-osporuva-makedonskiot­ jazik-zaboravajki-na-prerodbenitsite/ https://faktor.mk/nova-provokacija-ana-kocheva-od-ban-go-spori­ makedonskiot-jazik

https://okno.mk/node/67894

http://ibl.bas.bg/balgarskiyat-dialekten-atlas-v-v-internet/

http://ibl.bas.bg/lib/bda4/#page/23/mode/1up

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4

When the ethnographic

field gets unfriendly

Identity politics and censorship in

the Greek region of Macedonia

in light of the Prespa Agreement

Marica Rombou-Levidi

I will tell a largely personal story because it sheds light into Greece’s longterm political volatility, refreshed by the Prespa Agreement. In June 2016, my anthropological study Life under surveillance: music, dance, and the for­ mulation of subjectivity in Macedonia, dealing with cultural practices and the processes of identification in the eastern Macedonian region of northern Greece, was published in Greek in Athens.1 The book was the outcome of long-term ethnographic research, carried out in 25 villages of the GrecoBulgarian borderland between 2000 and 2008, and focused on surveillance, coercion, and acculturation experienced by Slavic-speaking populations who self-identified as “dopii” or “locals” during the 20th century in the con­ text of national consolidation and competing Balkan nationalisms.2 The crux of the study was the prohibition of the language of the dopii—locally called “Bulgarian,” “Macedonian,” or dopia—by the Greek state in the con­ text of politics of surveillance, and the employment of strategies from below, including censorship and self-censorship aimed at managing forced silenc­ ing. Contrary to existing scholarly literature on northern Greece (Lithoxoou 1993; Danforth 1995; Vereni 1996; Van Boeschoten 2000; Trubeta 2003), I considered this encounter of the state with the dopii not in terms of exclu­ sion, but rather as forming part of the politics of national inclusion and as involving human agency. One of the consequences of surveillance and language prohibition was silence and speaking about silence has been for me a major methodologi­ cal issue in itself both during fieldwork and while writing my ethnography. As post-publication circumstances have indicated, it has also proved cru­ cial in what I call the “second life” of my study, which unfolded during the period leading up to the signing of the Prespa Agreement and is probably not over yet. In this chapter, I consider this post-publication experience for myself and particularly the communities described in a self-reflexive and autobiographical way (see Reed-Danahay 1997) by analyzing the nation­ alist sensitivities aroused in Greece by the negotiations leading up to the agreement and discussing how nationalist sensitivities were involved in the reception of my book by my interlocutors in my ethnographic field. This critical ethnographic process aims to place my personal experience within

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the same social and cultural context in which my interlocutors in the field were located during the period leading up to the Prespa Agreement and improve my understanding of the social conditions that have produced my own ethnography. Furthermore, I want to use my case in order to shed light on larger issues concerning the shaping of identity politics during this polit­ ically heated period. When my book was published, I sent a few copies to people and organi­ zations that had played a key role in my field research. Initially, their feed­ back, also reflecting community sentiment, was very positive. Nevertheless, a few months later things took a different turn. The book gave rise to rather unprecedentedly unfriendly reactions, triggered and managed by an umbrella interest group known as the Panhellenic Federation of Macedonian People’s Cultural Associations (Panellinia Omospondia Politistikon Syllogon Makedonon in Greek, or POPSM).3 The reactions managed by POPSM were associated with nationalist claims over the appellation of the Republic of Macedonia raised by right-wing and extreme right Greek political parties, including the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn.4 Moreover, reactions to my book’s publication were tuned to a broader intra-national controversy over the appellation of the Republic of Macedonia that culminated in a charge of high treason to members of the government and the parliament, thus ultimately challenging the democratic functioning of the country.5 In other words, in light of the Prespa Agreement, an anthropological study of the interaction of the Greek state with a specific ethnic group became the target of political agitation and censorship by nationalists. Following the 1990s upheaval surrounding the so-called Macedonian Question, the issue concerning the Macedonian ethnicity and language in Greece became less prominent in public discourse. Although it had never vanished, the name issue reemerged strongly after the SYRIZA-ANEL coalition government (2015–19) initiative to renegotiate with the neighbor­ ing country.6 With exclusive ownership of the name “Macedonia” at stake, actors occupying the nationalist political space once again viewed ethnic and national difference as a major flashpoint. Any questioning of Greece’s cultural, ethnic, or linguistic homogeneity was interpreted as “national bartering” and was considered to be an abdication to the Republic of Macedonia’s alleged irredentist aspirations. My ethnographic study had taken place during the “softening” interval between the late-1990s and mid-2010s. Had it been under way a little earlier or later, it would have perhaps been more difficult—or even impossible— for me to unravel the processes and practices of identity construction. In this sense, I consider myself fortunate. Nevertheless, in the context of the intra-national controversy regarding the Prespa Agreement, I was faced with a rather unfortunate situation, as sometimes happens in ethnographic research (see, for example, Karakasidou 1997; Scheper-Hughes 2001[1979]), whereby a considerable part of my interlocutors in my ethnographic field had become unfriendly, even hostile, toward me.

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My exploration of the post-publication circumstances relating to the régime of surveillance in northern Greece will start with a brief description of the measures of surveillance which were initially implemented in 1936 and adopted by successive governments until 1974; then I will proceed with the presentation of four distinctive forms or levels of censorship, which I con­ sider to constitute expressions of this regime of surveillance in local society. I will continue with an account of the various forms the reactions against my book have taken during the last three years, and argue that these con­ stitute active and persistent aspects of censorship raising legal, ethical, and human rights issues. In the final part, I will focus on methodological issues and discuss in a self-reflexive way a number of dilemmas, which have been on my mind throughout the ethnographic process and re-emerged press­ ingly after the publication of my book. This auto-ethnographic exploration, besides being a personal challenge, aims to contribute to the discussion of some larger anthropological issues; for example, the role played by broader contexts of social inequality and political ideology or practice in shaping stories of personal experience in the field; the ethnographer’s positioning in the ethnographic field but also in the field of academic production; and the difference between insiders’ and outsiders’ perceptions of subjectivity and objectivity in ethnography. At the same time, the chapter aims to provide some insights into the socio-political volatility leading up to and following the signing of the Prespa Agreement.

Surveillance and the multiple levels of censorship An examination of the régime of surveillance and the therein management of difference begins in 1936. Drawing on the logic of national defense, the Ioannis Metaxas dictatorship imposed a series of coercive legislative meas­ ures against ethnically and culturally different populations living in the regions of Macedonia and Thrace.7 The measures were the institutional culmination of discriminatory policies that had already been introduced by previous governments. The most important of these measures was the implementation of a zone of surveillance in the north-eastern, northern, and north-western borders of the Greek state, 1212 kilometers long and from 5–100 kilometers wide, containing 420 urban and rural communities. The imposition of the zone involved the demarcation of special, “prohibited” and” supervised,” areas whose control was allocated to the military authorities. In fact, Metaxas imposed an “internal border” along the entire northern border­ land of Greece, which—-importantly—outlived his rule and lasted until 1974. In the Greek region of Macedonia, the measures lasted for almost 40 years, while in Thrace for almost 60 years as they were lifted only in 1995. The traces of surveillance have been present in both regions even after the official lifting of the zone (Rombou-Levidi 2009, 8–9; 2016, 43–48; 2017, 41–42, 71). The prohibition of the dopia language was the most significant meas­ ure enforced in the zone. The dopii were forced to learn Greek and use it

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exclusively in public spaces and private life. This also meant that singing in public in dopia was totally prohibited. The responsibility for the imple­ mentation of the measures was allocated to the police; policemen serving in villages of the Macedonian region of Greece—that is, civil servants usually originating in other parts of the country—were often acting as spies and practiced eavesdrop (Cowan 1990, 43; Danforth 1995, 72; Karakasidou 1997, 210–15; Kostopoulos 2000, 169–70). Failure to comply with these measures implied the arrest of dopii, their public torturing, or even deportation. Compulsory language silencing and shifting constituted a first and straight­ forward policy of censorship, implying the intersection of the cultural and political spheres (Rombou-Levidi 2009, 72–80, 111–179; 2016, 62–139). Significantly, this first form of official censorship, language prohibition, also caused self-censorship—a second and more enduring aspect of legal prohibition. The reaction of the dopii to the measures of language silencing and shift­ ing; however, was not passive subjection to state sovereignty. Surveillance triggered a third aspect of censorship that implied human agency and was more complex than self-censorship, because it was not simply an act of prohibition of discourse and restriction but also a creative act concerning processes, which acted formatively (Athanasiou 2008, 158–59). Drawing on Butler (1997a), I call this aspect of censorship “creative.” My book focuses on this creative aspect of self-censorship, particularly in the field of music culture, and argues that it took mainly the form of trans­ lating the song lyrics from dopia into Greek and shaping new songs, which guaranteed the continuity of the particular music culture and allowed its performance in public (Rombou-Levidi 2016, 62–139). Importantly, this was primarily a dopii women’s initiative. A further manifestation of human agency—this time undertaken by men—took the form of replacing ethni­ cally marked musical instruments, particularly the gaida (a kind of bagpipe) and the lyra (lyre), with the zourna (a kind of oboe). The zourna, almost exclusively played by Roma musicians, does not allow the matching of instrumental music with singing due to its extremely acute and penetrating sound and it thus accommodated the silencing of dopia (Rombou-Levidi 2009, 180–220; 2016, 173–220). Therefore, as I argue in my book, the instru­ ment has become increasingly popular the last 50 or 60 years. Finally, the creative aspect of censorship also meant a very personal process of identi­ fication for the dopii with regard to ethnic difference under the régime of surveillance. Usually, however, this creative aspect of censorship is incomplete because the censored discourse or performance cannot be entirely controlled by the new discourse produced by the coercive mechanism; and therefore, “leaks” into the public sphere. This is precisely what happened in some of the performances I recorded in the field: a peculiar and unjustified disjunc­ ture between the rhythm and intonation of song lyrics on the one hand and dance steps on the other allowed some hidden information to “leak” into the

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performance. This “crack” in the censored discourse and the extra-verbal language of body movement gave me the opportunity to penetrate into the facts that had marked the lives of dopii during the 40 years of surveillance and were detectable in fieldwork 30 years later. Furthermore, it allowed me to understand power relations between dopii, the state, and other popula­ tion categories, such as the refugees from Turkey that had settled in the region in the 1920s, the Sarakatsans and the Vlachs, in terms of segmentary opposition (Rombou-Levidi 2009, 46–51). The régime of supervision in the geographical zone had been surprisingly suppressed in public discourse at the national level for many decades. This constitutes yet a fourth aspect of censorship. As I will argue here, the public denial of the existence of the forbidden zone influenced decisively the reac­ tions caused by my study’s publication. Overall, the establishment of the zone was far more than a measure of national defense against “state enemies.” It was a ruthless measure for the official production of difference and for isolating and controlling those pop­ ulation categories that differed from the majority of the Greek state in cul­ tural or ethnic terms. For several decades, the surveilled areas were used by Greek governments as a geographic and symbolic space where “enemies within the walls” lived (Michailidis et al. 2006). This central policy of difference has caused the building of politically defined feelings of fear and guilt among dopii, because they were targeted as lacking “national sentiment.” Furthermore, this charge created a trauma, which, during the four decades that the measures were implemented, was not associated with the dopii’s actual practices. The Slavic-speakers living within the zone of surveillance were treated by the state as “dangerous” “at the level of their potentialities” and not “at the level of their actions” (Foucault 2000, 57). In this way, a political “super-ego” (to borrow a psy­ choanalytic term) was created among the particular population, which defined the processes of subjectification while stimulating human agency. I am using the term “subjectification” here instead of “identification” because I want to point out that “trauma is not only a clinical description of a psy­ chological status, but also the political expression of the state of the world” (Fassin 2008, 553). Accordingly, the processes to which I am referring involve “the production of subjects and subjectivities that hold political sig­ nificance within the framework of social interaction” (ibid: 553). Moreover, as Judith Butler (1997b, 2) has argued, the term “subjectification” signifies the process of becoming subordinated by power as well as the process of becoming a subject. In Greece’s northern borderline, this highly political sense of guilt described above has drawn on the experience of living on the border. Although in official public discourse, the border is considered to be a mech­ anism of vigilance and control that serves the protection of the nationstate from “dangers” and “enemies” coming from the “outside,” in practice it is primarily an “inward” facing construction aimed to consolidate the

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imagined ethnic, cultural, religious, and linguistic homogeneity that consti­ tutes the ideological foundations of nationalism. But how can we analyze this subjectification trauma, closely associated with the four forms or levels of censorship, in terms of personal experience? In what way does it take form in the individual lives of dopii and the work and life of an ethnographer? The different kinds of reaction, directly or indi­ rectly associated with the publication of my book during the period leading to the Prespa agreement, provide some answers to these questions while throwing light on issues of identity politics and the complex processes of subjectification.

Reactions caused by the study By the time I had finished writing this chapter, there were two different kinds of reaction to my book: first, a systematic triggering and management of protest; and second, an appeal to the judiciary system. I will refer to these separately. A) Systematic triggering and management of protest In autumn 2016, POPSM initiated a propaganda campaign, promoted on Facebook and other social media outlets, against my book.8 The Federation’s president Georgios Tatsios, a military pharmacist living in a small town in the vicinity of Serres, criticized the book in public, alleging that it provided fake information, counterfeited reality, and promoted the argument about the existence of a “Macedonian” national minority within the Greek state. He characterized the book as “blasphemous” and included it in a list of “similar” books, pictures of which he posted on POPSM’s Facebook page. In other words, Tatsios set up a “black list” of books on the Greek region of Macedonia.9 In December 2016 and January 2017, the same person urged individuals and the local authorities in all parts of Greek Macedonia to participate in an organized protest against the book. He called a series of conferences, aimed at criticizing the book, in several cities of northern Greece, and prompted the people to mobilize broadly.10 As could be expected, these ini­ tiatives appealed to a part of the population living in the Greek region of Macedonia—including my field site— who either politically identified with Tatsios or were worried about the book’s breaking the years’ long silence regarding the experience of surveillance and about the impact of this break­ ing on local society. At this point it is necessary to mention that in 2001, before engaging in my field research in eastern Macedonia that led to the writing of my dis­ sertation, I participated in an ethnomusicological research project, run by the Friends of Music Society (Syllogos ton Filon tis Mousikis in Greek or SFM) and carried out in the same region. In this context, I visited several

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communities in the vicinity of Serres and Drama together with other col­ leagues to collect information on local music culture. Among these commu­ nities was Vamvakofyto; there, I had the chance to listen to the members of the local cultural association sing and dance, to record their performances, and interview a few people involved in cultural politics, including a retired teacher named George Kalingas. These encounters provided me with crit­ ical information about the prohibition of dopia and its impact on dancing practices. Together with one or two music sessions in neighboring villages, they offered me the first indications about the impact of surveillance on identity and language, which were subsequently confirmed by my disser­ tation research. During the initial session in Vamvakofyto, Kalingas told me and my colleagues that in the context of surveillance he had himself engaged in translating songs from dopia into Greek; the information was quite exceptional because, as I found out later, translation in the eastern Macedonian region of Greece was almost exclusively undertaken by women. All the people who participated in our recordings had been informed that the recorded material would be uploaded on a database and used by the researchers and the association for making the outcome of the research pro­ ject public. Indeed, the recordings were analyzed by our research group, Slavic lyrics were translated into Greek by a translator hired by the project, and all the information was uploaded on the SFM database that was made available to the public in late 2004/early 2005. This more or less “raw mate­ rial” did not raise any reactions among the inhabitants of Vamvakofyto or any other communities. In 2016, however, following the publication of my book, where the information was put in historical and cultural context, used as ethnographic evidence, and combined with anthropological theory, Kalingas sent a letter to SFM in which he stated that in his village and region “there had never been lives under surveillance.” In other words, 15 years after our initial meeting and 12 years after the publication of the data­ base, the teacher rejected and publicly denied his own personal experience by applying intensive self-censorship. He also demanded that comments on his village’s musical tradition, specifically concerning the use of dopia and the appearance of the original Slavic lyrics alongside their translation into Greek, be deleted from the open access database set up by the SFM pro­ ject. The same letter was also sent to me with the demand to remove spe­ cific information from my book and the threat that if I failed to comply, he would undertake legal action against me. This initiative constituted a fur­ ther manifestation of the history of censorship and a fundamental violation of the ethnographer’s right to free speech. I understood this self-censorship stance of the retired teacher as a sad trace of surveillance, justified by the shock of breaking cultural intimacy (see Herzfeld 1997) that in northern Greece, as I have already argued, was associated with the feelings of guilt and fear and with the experience of trauma. However, as far as me—an outsider—and my book were concerned, I had consciously decided several years before Kalingas’ protest not to share in my ethnography the fear of

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surveillance and its public dismissal. This had been a really difficult choice for me because I knew that it was highly probable my writings would be at the same time liberating, relieving, and upsetting. They would break a silence that up to that time had been carefully kept and reproduced both from “above”—the state and civil society—and from “below”—part of local population. In fact, my decision was largely political; nevertheless, it drew also on how other anthropologists have addressed the question of “truth” in anthropology and how ethnographic authority is constructed.11 Kalingas’ decision was also political: he had aligned himself with the self-censored part, like when he took the initiative to translate his village’s songs into the hegemonic language of the Greek state. Although I would have liked to contact both him and my other interlocu­ tors in Vamvakofyto and discuss with them the arguments made in my book, I determined this was not possible while the appellation of the Republic of Macedonia was at stake; it seemed to me there was no possibility for emotion-free communication. Therefore, I reckoned I had no other choice but to ignore Kalingas’ letter. This does not mean that I have forgotten all about his reaction. I truly believed that, at the particular moment, the pos­ sibility for civil communication was non-existent. The SFM, however, did not follow the same strategy as me regarding censorship. Despite my persistent conversations with Stephania Merakou, Director of The Lilian Voudouri Music Library where the materials col­ lected from the SFM project were hosted, the association removed from the database the information the retired teacher had considered to be problem­ atic. This, besides being personally disappointing to me, was also important because it constituted yet another expression of censorship. However, what was even more frustrating and illuminating with regard to larger processes of border censorship was the fact that three out of four academics that had been leading the SFM project from 2001 to 2004 complied with Kalingas’ request and consented to the removal of the information from the data­ base. Only one of them objected to this decision—Miranda Terzopoulou.12 I would like to make clear that I am sharing this story not to refer to personal frustration, but rather to illuminate the penetrating power of censorship, particularly when so-called national issues are at stake, and to underline the politically crucial fact that an ethnography about difference became a venue through which border censorship successfully reached into both civil society and academia. In the context of this intense initial reaction to the publication of my book, POPSM sent a letter to the University of Sussex demanding that my PhD be revoked. Not surprisingly, the university ignored their request. Where national ideology was concerned, British aca­ demia did not succumb to the pressures of censorship.13 In January 2017, during an anthropology seminar on my book at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, I noticed Tatsios and a local authori­ ties’ representative in the audience. The two men, I reckoned, had come to voice their objections to my book within the academic space. In this regard,

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they failed. Their arguments and accusations, imbued with nationalist ideas, did not make sense to the particular audience. Our encounter, how­ ever, influenced me in a different way. As I had not expected their presence at the anthropological seminar, I was prepared to use in my talk projec­ tions of audio-visual recordings from fieldwork, which demonstrated the translation of Slavic lyrics into Greek by the dopii. Under the new circum­ stances, I had to reconsider in order to protect my interlocutors in the field, who, following the publication of the book, were experiencing pressures by POPSM, local cultural associations, and their co-villagers who were afraid of speaking out about the complex processes of identification and surveil­ lance; and moreover, about language shifting. I changed the structure of my lecture leaving out the audio-visual material. This was another frustrating personal experience—of self-censorship this time. I still have doubts about my decision. Nevertheless, auto-ethnographic insights provided by other anthropologists who have been struggling with similar issues, like Nancy Scheper-Hughes (2001[1979]) and Peter Metcalf (2002), have offered me a useful frame of reference for this kind of self-reflection and assessment. In addition, the “unfriendly” switch of the field has come at a high per­ sonal cost to me as highly valued relationships have now been traumatized. I consider this to be yet another aspect of surveillance and censorship because people with whom I had worked closely re-evaluated their rela­ tionship with me. I already mentioned the case of Vamvakofyto. Another case was that of a dopia woman from Ano Oreini (a village near Serres), who was even more deeply involved in local cultural politics than Kalingas and had worked with me even more closely both during my collaboration with SFM and during my own research. She had spoken to me extensively about the strategy of translation, had provided me with significant visual material, and had repeatedly performed songs in both dopia and Greek for the purpose of my study. She was also among those who, right after my book’s publication, had felt enthusiastic about it and had asked me to send her several copies in order to offer them to other people—locals and non-locals—as a gift. However, as soon as the book was targeted by Tatsios and POPSM, she switched sides and interrupted our communication for good. I think that, her personal beliefs and feelings left aside, her position in the field of local cultural politics had been threatened by her potential identification with the writer of this “blasphemous” book. Unfortunately, there have been more cases like the two mentioned above. All of them con­ cern people who are involved into local cultural politics; and in my view, shed light into the complexities of surveillance and censorship experienced among my interlocutors. Tatsios’ aim, however, was much broader than to provoke a one evening face-off in academic space and take the various local cultural associations under his wing. He wanted to extend POPSM’s impact on the academic world in a much more extensive way. Already since June 2016, he had par­ ticipated in a narrowly targeted project concerning the founding of a “Chair

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of Macedonian History and Tradition” at the University of Macedonia (Thessaloniki). He had signed an agreement with the Dean, Achilleas Zapranis; and the then Minister of Macedonia and Thrace Maria KolliaTsaroucha. Following a mobilization of academics; Minister of Education, Kostas Gavroglou cancelled the initiative.14 Continuing his attempts to trigger and manage reactions at the local level, Tatsios then asked two Serres-based scholars to critically assess my book. Thus, in the summer 2017, two long reviews were released to local cultural associations. The first one, 39 pages long, was signed by the President of the “Serres and Meleniko History and Folklore Society” Thomas Pennas, who while clearly accepting the historical fact of a harsh régime of surveillance in the Greek region of Macedonia in the past, accused me of drawing “erro­ neous conclusions,” “cloaking arbitrary arguments in academic language,” and “interpreting unquestionable historical facts of the 1913 and 1936–74 periods as she [I] sees [see] fit.” This review also contained a so-called dic­ tionary of anthropological terms commissioned by Pennas because my book was allegedly inaccessible to the public. The provided definitions of the terms were erroneous and confusing; and therefore, did nothing to clar­ ify the arguments I made in my book.15 The second review, 43 pages long, was signed by the former President of the Municipality of Petroussa, Kostas N. Mademlis, who stated first that the study presented the facts in a “partial and one-sided way” and second that “there is no Slavic language.” According to him, the language spoken by the native people of the Macedonian region in northern Greece is plainly a “Greco-Slavic idiom, an orphan of the Proto-Slavic language” that “has no relation to the Bulgarian language.” Mademlis followed the renowned strategy of founding his nationalist arguments on the “Greek­ ness” of Macedonia, which draws on the ancient Macedonian cultural her­ itage (Dionysiac rituals, and so on). Tatsios’ initiative to address the two scholars brings to mind Anastasia Karakasidou’s analysis of “sacred schol­ ars and profane advocates” (Karakasidou 1994), who hold a “sacred” truth of national history and are asked to act as its protectors by applying their powerful social capital to attack and de‐legitimize critical interpretations that challenge the nationalist narrative. One needs to keep in mind that the kind of arguments used by Tatsios and the “scholars” he mobilized have also constituted the core of the Greek public discourse regarding the Prespa agreement; and more generally, over the post-1989 period. B) The mobilization of the judiciary The propaganda against my book culminated in spring and summer 2018 in a second form of nationalist paroxysm, namely, an appeal to the judi­ ciary and the parallel use of formal extra-judiciary procedures. I consider this initiative to be a greater threat to liberal values than the initiatives dis­ cussed above because, first, it concerns institutionalized forms of power;

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and second, it transcends the boundaries of local communities and local cultural politics while involving national politics. On February 26, 2018 and in the midst of negotiations on the name dispute, the President of POPSM, in cooperation with other so-called Pan-Macedonian associations in both Greece and abroad, sent to Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras; the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Nikos Kotzias; the Minister of Defense, Panos Kammenos; and the 300 members of the Greek Parliament extra-judiciary notices.16 These threatened their receivers that if the term “Macedonia” were included in the composite appellation of the neighboring country and no referendum on the name issue were held, they would all be subject to legal action and accused of high treason carrying the penalty of life imprison­ ment or death. The senders of the notices pompously disregarded the fact that the death penalty had been abolished in Greece by the government of Andreas Papandreou in December 1993, 25 years earlier. The explicit threat issued to the members of Parliament and the government—a direct challenge to democratic institutions—was condemned by the President of the Parliament, Nikos Voutsis and some media. Given the public atten­ tion to the threats and the ensuing political developments, POPSM did not achieve its aim. Nevertheless, this initiative once more brings to mind Anastasia Karakasidou and the reactions raised by her articles and book (see Karakasidou 1993, 1997) more than 25 ago; particularly because, in her case too, reactions were initially triggered by right wing associations of Greek Macedonians in the USA and accusations for “high treason” and death threats were issued by civil society—against the anthropologist instead of high-ranking politicians. The argument was that Karakasidou had spoken about the existence of Slavic-speaking populations within the Macedonian region of Greece and also about the “negation” of these peo­ ple’s particular ethnic identity—mainly in the western Macedonian region of Greece—in the context of nation building. The recent appeal was escalated to judiciary authorities in March 2018, when POPSM sued the association of dopii “Brotherhood of Serres Dopii Cyril and Methodius” on the grounds that it was nationally dangerous. One week later, an identical suing report was submitted to the Supreme Court by the then Golden Dawn MP, Elias Panayotaros.17 In fact, the latter document included the text that had been submitted by POPSM and signed by Tatsios. This evinces that the President of POPSM was communicating closely with at least one member of the extreme right and was acting in cahoots with him. Taking into account that POPSM’s statute and politics regarding the “Greekness” of Macedonia are inspired by nationalist principles shared by both the extreme right and the most fervent MPs of right wing parties in the Greek Parliament, the cooperation of the two men—and possibly the collectivities they were representing—should not come as a surprise. The negotiations leading up to the signing of the Prespa agreement made nation­ alist alliances tighter.

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The “Brotherhood of Serres Dopii Cyril and Methodius” was founded two months earlier in the small town of Herakleia near Serres, and accord­ ing to its statute it aimed to support the cultural heritage of dopii “by saving, preserving, and promoting historical elements, the local language, customs, and traditions.” Therefore, it is clear that the members of this organiza­ tion perceived the ethno-cultural subjectivity of dopii very differently from POPSM. They did not want to compromise with the imagined cultural and linguistic homogeneity imposed by nationalist politics. Furthermore, they did not want to keep on hiding ethno-cultural difference and living with the feelings of guilt and fear and with the experience of trauma caused by sur­ veillance. On the contrary, they wanted to claim the right to their difference, which did not challenge their national sentiment. I argue that this initiative was also associated with the negotiations leading up to the signing of the Prespa Agreement but from a viewpoint situated on the opposite side of the ethno-cultural—and in this sense, political—spectrum. By filing a lawsuit against the association, POPSM demanded that the judicial authorities, which had approved the association’s founding two months earlier, “immediately abolish this association, which irrevocably exposes our homeland to the risk of disintegration, and punish its founders according to penal law, on the charge of challenging Greece’s territorial integrity and directly engaging in this… by jeopardizing the international peace of the country …;” also that the judicial authorities “… consider all these self-determination actions, associations, and public events jointly, and characterize them [the association] accordingly as a criminal organization” (POPSM lawsuit 12.3.2018). Against the background of the political climate created by the ongoing trial of Golden Dawn, it is likely that these demands, which abridge fundamental human rights, referred to the pending charges against Greece’s neo-Nazi party and returned the accusations in a com­ bating way, nourishing the production of socio-political schisms in Greece. The practices of POPSM and the wider politics of surveillance to which they point thus need to be understood against the backdrop of the current political climate in Greece, especially the Golden Dawn efforts to revive the fear of difference. In the witness testimony report given to the police investigators regard­ ing the lawsuit, Tatsios argued that “the creation of the Brotherhood of Serres Dopii Cyril and Methodius, in combination with the founding of the Macedonian Alliance in Thessaloniki and the action of … specific [individ­ uals] in Edessa, is the outcome of the organized action of self-determination circles, who desire the creation of a fake ‘Macedonian’ minority in Greece, in order to shrink Greece’s National Borders, at least with regard to Macedonia. This is proved by the actions of [Herakleia dopios] I. [Ioannis] Pounios [founder of the aforementioned Brotherhood] and various initi­ atives undertaken from 2011 until today.”18 Moreover, in the same docu­ ment, Tatsios referred to four sets of arguments, which, in his view, “prove his [Pounios’] participation in an organized anti-Hellenic movement,

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which prepares the ground for the transformation of Greece’s borderline.” Therefore, he twisted the character and aims of the Brotherhood from ethno-cultural into national. This is where my book becomes entangled with this trial. The last of the four sets of arguments supplied by Tatsios in his report was connected to Pounios’ public alignment with the views articulated in my study, which “uses the same rhetoric as self-determination circles do.” Thus, my arguments about the ethno-cultural nature of dopii’s difference were also twisted and turned into alleged claims about the recognition of a national minority within Greece. Specifically, Tatsios asserted that during one of the conferences he organized in the region of Serres Pounios had publicly questioned his own take on my book and argued that it constituted “an organized conscious manipulation of the mass opinion to one direction, aiming to foster a distorted, in relation to reality, view which, as it happens, is fake, wrong, and totally catastrophic for Greece as a nation-state, while being unthinkable for a democratic society.” On these grounds, POPSM had decided that my book was “anti-national.” Besides his initiatives against my book, Tatsios also targeted my personal profile by uttering insinuations regarding my sex, my mature age that con­ trasts the relatively early stage of my academic career, and my academic qualifications, while criticizing the fact that before becoming an anthropol­ ogist, I had trained to become a ballet dancer. The trial took place οn April 9, 2019. Alexandra Ioannidou and Konstantinos Tsitselikis, both academic experts on dopii and issues of minority rights and languages in the Balkans and Greece (see Tsitselikis 1996; Ioannidou 1999), were the two witnesses who testified in support of the Brotherhood. As they observe in a note posted on the Hellenic League for Human Rights website (Ioannidou and Tsitselikis 2019), within the con­ text of the Prespa Agreement, which in the meantime had already been rat­ ified and entered into force, and under the pressure of “indignant” local nationalist citizens, the trial was actually turned into a trial of intentions. Prosecutor Sophia Diploidou adopted the arguments of Golden Dawn and POPSM regarding the attempt to “create and broaden a distinct linguistic and cultural community in a borderland.” In this way, in 2019, accusations that the dopii posed a potential threat to national security were revived 40 years later and formed yet again the backbone of the charges the state leve­ led against them. The prosecutor argued that the term dopii did not actually refer to the Slavic-speaking population of the Greek region of Macedonia and to their particular language but rather to the Greek speaking native population and to the Greek language. Moreover, the term allegedly had no relation to any Slavic idiom, dialect, or language. Also, she stated that the judge who had approved the founding of the association in early 2018 had been tricked and she proposed that the association’s permit ought to be revoked. Her positions were also supported by the President of the Serres Bar Association Panayotis Karipoglou, who acted on behalf of this

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body together with his colleague, Alexandros Paraskeviotis. Ioannidou and Tsitselikis experienced verbal attacks and were treated with sarcasm. Many of the questions addressed to them by the prosecutor and the lawyer of the suitors, Polychronis Karsambas, were completely hypothetical, had no con­ nection to the facts, and were thus highly problematic in terms of civil pro­ cedure legislation. For example, the witnesses were asked “what would a German person say if he read the Brotherhood’s statute?” or “what would a Serres dopios say if he were asked what language he speaks?” Also, in her private communication to me, Alexandra Ioannidou clearly stated that she had been verbally harassed because of her sex. Additionally, following the trial she had to endure a plethora of insults and threats. The testimonies of those who spoke against the Brotherhood were meant to spread fear. Their main argument was that the functioning of the association had to be pro­ hibited as a preventive measure. The existing law, however, does not permit such preventive action. The judges supported their decision by affirming that the use of the term dopii in the public sphere constituted an action against public order. Again, there is no law or statute that allows such an assertion to be legally adjudicated (Ioannidou and Tsitselikis 2019). On September 10, 2019, as I was still writing this chapter, the court issued its ruling, whereby the Brotherhood of Serres Dopii Cyril and Methodius is to be banned on the above-mentioned grounds. The ruling is informed by arguments that the term dopii defines the people who live in the region of Serres and are supposedly all Greek and that the term dopia defines the language of these people, which is supposedly Greek. Therefore, according to the ruling, allegedly the terms dopii and dopia in the eastern Macedonian region of Greece are used to denote a relation to land and they do not have ethno-cultural connotations. Moreover, according to the Serres court, the ethnic category of Slavic-speakers is non-existent in the Serres region. Such arguments are historically unsubstantiated. Indeed, for many dec­ ades, the language was officially defined by the Greek state as “Macedonian” (1920 Census), “Macedono-Slavic” (1928 Census), and finally, “Slavic” (1940 and 1951 Censuses). Most importantly, it has been defined by people who use it as “Bulgarian,” “Macedonian,” or “dopia.” In fact, Tatsios himself used dopia in public as an ethno-cultural definition, as evinced by a video record­ ing of a talk he gave in the western Macedonian periphery of Ptolemaida in February 2015. During the talk, he tried to persuade local cultural associa­ tion representatives, who were not ashamed or afraid of the Slavic elements in their particular culture, to join the newly founded POPSM, rather than set up a different umbrella organization.19 Although the talk abstract con­ taining the term dopia was posted on POPSM’s Facebook page at that time, it was removed right after the trial. The Brotherhood’s defense, complying with the provisions of law, submitted the abstract to the court as additional evidence against Tatsios’ arguments one day after the trial. It is really frus­ trating to see Serres judge, Ergina Theophilidou, who acted according to the suggestions of prosecutor, Sophia Diploidou, decide that the twisted,

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historically erroneous, and ideologically laden arguments about the mean­ ing of the term “dopii” presented by POPSM and the former Golden Dawn MP are valid—particularly at a time when Greek courts issue convictions against Golden Dawn members and followers, who in the last few years have committed crimes against Greek citizens and migrants, thus confirming the criminal character of this political party. The court’s ruling, against which the Brotherhood’s defense immediately filed an appeal, can only be under­ stood as an additional form of censorship, a weakness in separating judi­ cial and executive power; and ultimately, a grave pathology of the Greek democratic system. The appeal was heard by the Thessaloniki Court of Appeals in January 2020. I traveled to Thessaloniki for this purpose and followed the hearing together with some members of the Brotherhood, their defense, Professors Ioannidou and Tsitselikis, and finally, the historian, Leonidas Embirikos. We had all been called by the Brotherhood’s defense to testify as academic experts in relation to the nature of dopia. However, the Thessaloniki court decided that the information accumulated by the Serres court was sufficient; therefore, they did not allow for any additional testimonies. The ruling should normally be issued by September or October 2020; however, taking into consideration the COVID-19 lock down circum­ stances, it will probably take more time. If it follows the lines of the Serres ruling, there is only one final step of legal action to be taken in the context of the Greek judicial system, namely, filing an appeal with the Supreme Court [Άρειος Πάγος]. Finally, if even after exhausting the procedures of legal action in Greece, the claims of the Brotherhood are still rejected, then the case will be taken to the European Court of Human Rights. Judging from several other cases and particularly from the precedent of the “Sidiropoulos and Others v. Greece” case, which concerned the controversy over the “House of Macedonian Civilization” [Στέγη Μακεδονικού Πολιτισμού] and the Rainbow party in Florina in the 1990s (see https://hudoc.echr.coe. int/eng#{%22itemid%22 [%22001-58205%22]. See also Karakasidou’s chap­ ter in this volume), it is highly likely Greece will be convicted. Undoubtedly, if the case goes as far as the European Court of Human Rights; and more­ over, if the unfortunate—nevertheless sound—expectations for Greece’s conviction come true, this will cast yet another shadow over the Greek judi­ ciary as far as human rights are concerned. The problem with the Serres court, the banning of the Brotherhood, and the reactions to my book is not POPSM or Tatsios (who has in any case completed his term as the Federation’s president); nor is it the section of the media or the political world that reproduces and refurnishes nation­ alist beliefs. The problem is that, 45 years after the lifting of the legislative measures in the Greek region of Macedonia, the impact of surveillance is still present while local society is re-emerging as vulnerable. The trauma of subjectification caused by surveillance is still alive and has indeed been refreshed in the context of the name issue negotiations. The political super­ ego shaped years ago as a consequence of prohibition is being recycled

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today. The fear generated by all these circumstances leads certain people today to a type of self-blindness that suits them, while producing more fear bordering on terror. In fact, the circumstances discussed above sadly con­ firm the arguments that were raised in my book about the long-term impact of the régime of surveillance in the borderland of Greek Macedonia. This broader context of social inequality influences the ways stories of life expe­ rience are told by interlocutors in the field and are used by people who have undertaken the negotiation and management of collective identities inside and outside the field. Furthermore, it is the reason why I consider it neces­ sary to find ways to talk about silence.

Speaking about silence: methodological considerations—food for thought But what are these ways? How does one speak about silence? Moreover, how does the researcher perceive it? And, how do individual interlocutors or societies under study understand it? In this last and self-reflexive part of the chapter, I will consider my posi­ tioning in the field and the issue of silence in ethnography both by providing answers that draw on my experience in eastern Macedonia and by uttering further questions aimed at triggering additional reflection. On the issue of perceiving silence, my experience from northern Greece suggests that the ethnographer can do no more than carry out long and careful ethnography, sensitive to the lapses and contradictions in what is observed and heard, testing out the hypotheses. Therefore, I would answer this overarching dilemma with another question. What data does one need to ‘prove’ what a silence means? What data is there other than one’s meticu­ lous observations or the little ethnographic information interlocutors might have offered? On the issue of breaking silence, the first dilemma I had to resolve, while keeping in mind that anthropology is by nature intrusive, was whether I had the ethical right to cross the threshold of the concealed intimate histories of dopii, (re)search, bring to light, and disseminate the terms of intimacy pervading their social lives. If I did, then what was the legitimate way to approach “the unavowed” and the people who had adopted practices of forgetting or concealing the truth? If, on the other hand, I did not, where should I draw the line when it comes to interpreting the social, historical, and cultural facts? How would I demarcate what my eyes were allowed to see and how would I censor myself a priori? Finally, who was to decide about these issues: myself, my interlocutors, or some external agent? Then, regarding the question of representation I had to decide how I was going to write about the things that could not be said; and moreover, had never been written before. I had to answer the question of what hiding information or revealing intimacies would mean to dopii and their communities. I had to find a way to make sure that my ethnographic analysis would contain

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the different views about silence and prohibition and would represent these with justice. At different points of the ethnographic description provided in my book, I have explained how I dealt with each one of these dilemmas by supporting my analysis with factual information and by never hiding my hesitation or ambiguity. This was the only “honest” way I thought of to shield my work from the arbitrariness and the authority of the ethnographic construction. Here, I would like to discuss my interpretive framework by comment­ ing on two points, which contribute to understanding the post-publication controversy. First, in my book my approach to breaking silence has largely relied on the concept of cultural intimacy. An intimacy that, one could say, is imposed by a world—such as the world of the nation state, the world of the border, the world of “identities”—where cultural matters are high-stakes. This subtle theoretical concept, coined by Michael Herzfeld (1997), is indeed very useful for understanding many of the practices undertaken by dopii in eastern Macedonia and many aspects of my relation to them as ethnogra­ pher. However, following post-publication reflection, I think it is important to underline that in his analysis of cultural intimacy; Herzfeld mainly refers to breaking the explicit—jokes, ironies, inversions, and paradoxes—, while in the case of my approach to dopii breaking the silences concerns a space that is totally inexplicit.20 This distinction is significant because it shows that in the case of eastern Macedonia, the process of perceiving and repre­ senting silence is excessively difficult, particularly with regard to the relation between the ethnographer and the subjects of her research. Post-publication circumstances have shown that, despite the involvement of agency in shap­ ing strategies “from below,” the people who have experienced silence as a consequence of surveillance have also largely accepted and embodied their position of mutation. Therefore, they are not prepared to interpret the breaking of the inexplicit in the same way as outsiders. This leads me to the second point I want to make, namely that my anal­ ysis of the transformation of ethno-cultural and linguistic difference into sameness has drawn on the anthropological theory of segmentary opposi­ tion (see Evans-Pritchard 1940; Campbell 1964; Herzfeld 1980, 1997, 2003;. Sahlins 1989, 1998; Hart 1999; Papataxiarchis 2006). In my elaboration of its implementation in the Greek context, I have additionally drawn on Papataxiarchis’ (2006) concept of the “régime of difference” whereby in Greek society difference has been transformed into sameness at the official level—the sphere where national homogeneity has been achieved—, while it has been reproduced at the unofficial level—the sphere of cultural inti­ macy and everyday sociality where difference is relativized. However, it is important to note that in eastern Macedonian region of Greece where the imposition of the zone and the settlement of post-1922 refugees within the communities of dopii were experienced as a double border, the dynamics of transforming difference into sameness unfolded quite distinctively. The sphere of cultural intimacy lost its flexibility (Papataxiarchis 2016) and the

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issue of difference remains at stake to this day. Thus, this “silent persistence of silence” became particularly salient during the period leading up to the signing of the Prespa Agreement. As the object of anthropology, silence like secrecy (Jones 2014; Debenport 2019), which can perhaps be seen as a variant of silence, is historically and contextually contingent. The practice or the mutation of a language and the concealment or the revealing of information concerning difference changes in time. The impact of surveillance, an issue defining subjectivity in east­ ern Macedonia, was supposed to go away initially with the Cold War (or with its delayed ending in Greece after the fall of the junta) and then with post-socialist transition, but it did not. Recent developments have shown that almost 30 years later—at the time of the Prespa Agreement, Greece’s finan­ cial crisis and the migration crisis—it has ebbed to smash through again very powerfully. People with nationalist aspirations have taken advantage of these complex national and international circumstances in order to gain ground. The connection of both surveillance and silence to affect is something that came out throughout my research, is carefully described in my book, and was made evident by the impact the breaking of silence had on some people in my field. Post publication circumstances have shown that the var­ ious strategies of mutation employed by the dopii through the years have been carefully nourished and protected largely because of their connection to affect. Moreover, they have shown that this connection has been crucial in shaping the “second life” of my book. Finally, as already briefly men­ tioned, they have shown something particularly important for understand­ ing the relation of affect to censorship: how significant the former is when “national” issues are at stake. Then, there is also the relation of silence and of its breaking with gender. During fieldwork, the largest proportion of my interlocutors was women. This was because in eastern Macedonia, like in many other places in Greece and elsewhere in the world (see Abu-Lughod 1986; Rice 1994; Silverman 1996; Sugarman 1997; Terzopoulou 1999) cultural practices constituted the women’s domain. It was they who had engaged in the translation of song lyrics from dopia into Greek—that is, in the concealment of their own lan­ guage. It was also they who eventually revealed the concealed information. And, it was they who performed the songs in both languages for me—yet another woman. In other words, a significant part of the management of silence, largely concerning the unofficial and intimate sphere, was in their hands. However, as I have noted in my book, in most cases cultural asso­ ciations were managed by men because men were considered, both locally and extra-locally, to be responsible for the presentation of a community in public and to be in charge of the public sphere, collective identification, and politics in general. The reactions against my book were also triggered and managed by men, such as Tatsios and other local authorities’ representa­ tives who yet again engaged in the management of (cultural) politics. The retired teacher was also a man, and so was the Golden Dawn MP. During

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the years leading up to the Prespa Agreement, Tatsios, though not a politi­ cian in institutional terms, has also played a more extensive political role.21 As already mentioned, he has challenged me in terms of gender and has commented pejoratively on my age, pointing out that I joined anthropology unusually late in life; and therefore, did not accomplish an “ordinary” or “expected” academic trajectory leading up to a tenure; on these grounds, he questioned my professional status as an academic researcher and writer, while challenging my right to free speech. Tatsios employed a strategy, grounded in nationalist ideology and favored among nationalist men and women, whereby women—mature ones in particular, whose “position is at home as housewives and mothers”— are allegedly not suitable to engage in the public sphere unless they promote nationalist positions. But, is this how one is supposed to argue against a book and the arguments developed in it? Isn’t this yet another form of censorship, discrimination, and manipulation of public opinion originating from an actor who is at the same time insider and outsider? On the question of gender, I feel I should raise one more point. My opponents’ arguments have been found sound by the Serres court authorities, which—importantly—were formed exclusively by women. I am afraid this piece of information, which came to the fore as the writing of this chapter was coming to its end, shows that the role of gender in the judici­ ary—a fundamental form of power—constitutes an important issue in itself that deserves to be studied anthropologically. Finally, there is the issue of consent, which is directly related to the reactions to my book. How does the ethnographer guarantee the subjects’ consent about all issues that will result from the ethnographic process, including silence? How does she distinguish individuals from the multiple collectivities containing them? And, perhaps most importantly, how does she mitigate—since she cannot eliminate—the hegemonic nature of the research and her own hegemonic position both in the field and within the entire ethnographic process? Surely, there is no way to ensure consent to what anthropology does when it does its work seriously. Consent is a critical topic, and it is not the easy thing people may want it to be. If one recognizes the real political predica­ ment of one’s subjects and wants to challenge oppression, she can’t pretend that people can just say what they want; or know what they want to know; or won’t be frightened. Therefore, ethics really goes far beyond the terrain of questions about consent in the “institutional review board” sense and is always about social and political responsibility, which cannot be evaded through any seeking of approval from one’s informants. And that again does not mean that one always breaks the silence—or secrecy. It depends on what the silence or secrecy is and to whom it refers. As we know, already in the 1960s-era works on “studying up,” the inev­ itability of publishing findings at odds with one’s subjects’ interests and desires—however temporal and flexible these might be—was raised as an ethical issue.22 Therefore, from the 1960s forward anthropologists have faced

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some of the dilemmas described above. Also, implicit in anthropology’s foundational Boasian mandate has been that one studies one’s subjects as an advocate.23 This assumption is shaken when the ethnographer considers herself a sympathizer with her subjects, but under various pressures, some of these subjects may reject her “advocacy” or her engagement as a misrep­ resentation. When discussing advocacy, I think that Bourdieu’s concept of méconnaissance, or misrecognition (Bourdieu 2000; James 2015) is very useful despite the fact that it has come under attack more than once for its vulner­ ability to accusations that it implies that the researcher has greater insight than the subject about what the subject thinks. As far as my field research is concerned, I believe that, by connecting misrecognition with symbolic and structural violence, Bourdieu has provided a solid framework for understand­ ing reactions raised within the category of dopii by the negotiations leading up to the signing of the Prespa agreement. Let me remind us of the uttering of the retired teacher in Vamvakofyto which directly referred to the title of my book: “We never lived lives under surveillance” he said. The interpretation of this “negation” lies precisely in the connection mentioned above. In short, besides being academic, the methodological considerations raised above are also deeply political. Drawing on my ethnographic experi­ ence and the post-publication controversy, I believe that the key to answer­ ing each dilemma separately lies precisely in this last argument. Research projects concerning surveillance, silence, secrecy, prohibition, oblivion, for­ getting, memory, and ultimately, subjectification are, at the same time and inseparably, intellectual and political actions. And this is how they have been faced by anthropologists, sociologists, and historians who have stud­ ied collective memory before me (for example, Halbwachs 1992; Herzfeld 1986; Connerton 1989; Scott 1990; Karakasidou 1993, 1997; Scheper-Hughes 1995; Ricoeur 2006; Danforth and van Boeschoten 2015). Therefore, they require the thorough understanding of the historical, cultural, social, and political context defining the field, the equally clear understanding of one’s positioning in the field, the awareness about the social or political inequality that defines the relation of the interlocutors with the broader social context; and finally, the greatest possible amount of control of personal political views and emotions. None of the above is easy. All require the solid theo­ retical and empirical knowledge of the field; familiarization with the people living in it; an approach of empathy; awareness that approaching the issues at stake may cause discomfort, reaction, or collision; and finally, a certain amount of decisiveness, drawing on a broader stance of social and political responsibility, while possibly implying personal exposure. It is through this kind of processes that one can talk about silence. And this is how I tried to do so in my book: by arguing my position concerning the suppression of history and the creative response to it with meticulous data and by founding the legitimacy of my interpretation on the explana­ tion of puzzling conflicts in these data. Those who triggered and managed reactions against my book challenged my positions with no more than a

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particular hegemonic political ideology, nationalism, which at this moment in time is gaining ground among one segment of the population in my fieldsite. There is another segment, which still feels relieved by the breaking of silence and its representation in my book; even these people, however, are afraid to express their feelings right now. My doubts as to whether I have exhausted all the critical potential as an ethnographer working in the “hot” region of Greek Macedonia will always be there. However, for me it is important to consider my labor an offering to this second category of people, mostly dopii, who on the occasion of the Serres trial keep contacting me and reminding me the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity in ethnography is false. As Bourdieu (2003, as quoted in Reed-Danahay 2017, 147) has argued, absolute objectivity or subjectivity is not possible. In the closing part of this chapter, I will once more mention Anastasia Karakasidou’s Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood, which, as already stated, has received similar and indeed tougher criticism by nationalists than my book, while referring to an anthropological text that, in my view, consti­ tutes a seminal auto-ethnographic account on balancing the ethics and the politics of anthropological work. This is Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ (2001) self-reflexive preface to the updated edition of Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland, which deals with secrecy. The anthropologist there explains how her attempt to reconcile with her interlocutors during a visit to her field-site 20 years after the initial pub­ lication of her book failed. I certainly share the latter’s strong sentiment for reconciliation with people who once opened their homes and hearts to the ethnographer. I am afraid, however, that although Scheper-Hughes’ engagement in Ireland is political—since mental illness, religion, the rural household and other topics she studied deal with difference and contesta­ tion; and therefore, constitute political fields—, the issues of ethnic iden­ tity, and language, which have been central in both Karakasidou’s work and mine, are political in a dual sense; they deal with difference and contes­ tation but at the same time they concern the dynamics of politics—national and international. Furthermore, in the case of my book, the recent devel­ opments regarding the Prespa Agreement have had a decisive impact on the controversy over it. Therefore, although I too look forward to reconcil­ ing with my interlocutors, I consider this prospect to be even more difficult than it proved for Nancy Scheper-Hughes.

Acknowledgments I am indebted to Vasiliki (Vaso) Neofotistos, Laurie Kain-Hart, and Jane Cowan for their high-valued feedback. Also I thank Evthymios Papataxiarchis and Effie Plexoussaki for inviting me to the University of the Aegean in Mytilene and giving me the opportunity to discuss with the Department of Anthropology and History Wednesday Seminars’ partici­ pants an earlier and less elaborate version of this chapter.

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Notes 1 According to the administrative division of northern Greece, this region forms part of the Periphery of Eastern Macedonia and Thrace. 2 In Greek, the terms dopios/dopia (singular masc/fem)/ dopii (plural)—for the people—and dopia—for the language—literally mean “born to the site” (en topo). In this very broad sense, they are used throughout Greece to denote a link to a particular place. In the Greek region of Macedonia, however, the terms are loaded with ethnic and political connotations (Agelopoulos 1997; Cowan 1997; Kostopoulos 2002). Specifically, they primarily carry a jus soli, in contrast to jus sanguinis, connotation. Jus soli, besides signifying a relation to the land, also implies the wish to define some form of dynamic social boundaries on the basis of locality and indigeneity operating in dis­ tinction from other population categories. Therefore, the term dopii, intro­ duced by the Slavic-speaking locals as a least-categorical definition after the 1922 exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey and the sub­ sequent arrival of refugees from Asia Minor, Cappadocia, and the Black Sea, is used as a self-designation to define one part of an imagined homog­ enous whole on the basis of certain criteria and in opposition to other parts of that whole. In linguistic terms, the language of the dopii who live in the eastern Macedonian region of Greece, along with those languages spoken by other native people of the central and western Macedonian regions of Greece who self-identify as dopii, belongs to the eastern sub-group of local Slavic languages, which in turn, together with Albanian, Bulgarian, Mac­ edonian, and Romanian, forms part of the broader family of Balkan lan­ guages (Ioannidou 1999). 3 The group was founded in 2014 in Yannitsa, a city of 30,000 residents in the Greek region of central Macedonia, by adamant nationalists in view of the impending negotiations between the governments of Greece and the—at the time officially known as—Republic of Macedonia over the appellation of the latter. According to POPSM’s website (http://www.popsm.gr/stoxoi/), their main aim is to “save the authentic Macedonian Tradition, as integral part of Greek Tradition, from transformation, foreign additions and usurpation …” while “defending our name as Macedonians and the appellation of our own homeland against pseudo-irredentist threats expressed by foreign centers out­ side Greece” (my translation). 4 Golden Dawn has been on trial since 2015 over alleged criminal action. 5 In the July 2019 general election, Golden Dawn lost its seats in the Parliament. 6 The acronym SYRIZA, which stands for “Coalition of the Radical Left” (Synaspismos Rizospastikis Aristeras in Greek), is a reference to the Greek adverb “σύρριζα” meaning “from the roots.” The party was initially formed in 2004 as a coalition of left-wing and radical left parties. Between 2015 and 2019, and under the leadership of Alexis Tsipras, it formed a coalition government together with the right-wing party ANEL (Anexartitoi Ellines in Greek, or “Independent Greeks”). In January 2019 and in view of the Prespa Agree­ ment, ANEL quitted the governmental coalition. SYRIZA, however, man­ aged to stay in power and sign the agreement with the Republic of Macedonia (now the Republic of North Macedonia). In July 2019, and largely as a conse­ quence of the agreement, SYRIZA lost the national elections and since then constitutes the largest opposition party in the Greek Parliament. 7 Ioannis Metaxas was appointed Prime Minister in April 1936. On August 4, 1936, with the support of King George II, he initiated a coup and established an authoritarian, nationalist, and anti-communist régime. He died in January 1941 before the German invasion and the subsequent fall of Greece.

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8 Following the publication of Danforth and Van Boeschoten’s book Chil­ dren of the Greek Civil War (2015), a similar campaign was launched by the Pan-Macedonian Association—USA under the leadership of Nicholas Gage (Loring Danforth, personal communication). 9 The quotes around the term Macedonian were used by Tatsios himself. 10 The conferences took place in Prosotsani (Prefecture of Drama), Lefkonas (Prefecture of Serres), Skydra (Prefecture of Pella), and Veroia (Prefecture of Veroia). In the relatively recent past, a similar campaign was launched by Golden Dawn members against Vasko Karadza’s Greek-Macedonian Diction­ ary, which was published in Thessaloniki in 2008. 11 Peter Metcalf’s auto-ethnographic work (1998, 2002) on the people of a Berawan Longhouse in Borneo, which highlights the complexities that occur in the practice of ethnography, particularly within the relationships that grow between researchers and their interlocutors, was particularly inspiring in this sense. So was Martin Holbraad’s work on Ifá, an Afro-Cuban tradition of divination in Havana (2012), which recasts the very idea of truth as a matter not only of epistemological divergence but also of ontological difference. 12 The program was led by five academics. When the controversy broke out, one of them, who passed away in 2019, was already not in a position to take action; this is why I am here referring to only four academics. These were three professors from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (Lambros Liavas, Professor of Ethnomusicology; Pavlos Kavouras, Profes­ sor of Anthropology of Music; and Rena Loutzaki, Associate Professor of Anthropology of Dance, now retired) and one Researcher at the Hellenic Folklore Research Center of Academy of Athens (Miranda Terzopoulou, Folklorist-Ethnologist, also retired). I respect the fact that the first three colleagues mentioned above might have had disagreed with the analysis I provided in my book and I certainly did not expect them to align with my interpretation of the management of difference in the eastern Macedonian region of Greece. However, all of them had checked and approved before publication the data base, which included information and evidence of the prohibition of dopia in the region. 13 Let me remind us, however, that in 1996, Cambridge University Press can­ celled the publication of Karakasidou’s book Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood: Passages to Nationhood in Greek Macedonia, 1870–1990, eventually published by Chicago University Press in 1997. 14 Maria Kollia-Tsaroucha participated in the coalition government as an ANEL MP in Serres. 15 By mentioning “unquestionable historical facts,” Pennas referred to the Bal­ kan Wars and the official implementation of surveillance measures respec­ tively. The “dictionary” was annexed and signed by the General Secretary of the Meleniko History and Folklore Society, Eleni Letsiou-Koromila. 16 These were signed by Georgios Tatsios and Nina Gatzouli, President of the Committee of World Pan-Macedonian Associations. As mentioned in the document, the latter was acting on behalf of the Pan-Macedonian Association of Canada and its president, Christos Karatzios; the Pan-Macedonian Asso­ ciation of South Africa and its president, Christos Amyntas Papathanasiou; and the Pan-Macedonian Federation of Australia and its president, Panayio­ tis Iasonidis. 17 He is one of the oldest members and executives of Golden Dawn and is cur­ rently under trial with the charge of running a criminal organization. In 2009, accompanied by a small group of Golden Dawn members, he participated in a violent interruption of the presentation of Vasko Karatza’s Greek-Macedonian Dictionary that took place in Athens.

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18 Ioannis Pounios is a dopios inhabitant of Herakleia. 19 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyceULL1qgU&fbclid=IwAR04cbA2vm­ KT7Rs1RarB4nrjEe0whGWfl7GgW2MTXlOcxtS7lBbshOV9fFI 20 Further refinements of the notion of cultural intimacy are offered in Herzfeld’s third edition of Cultural Intimacy (2016); see also Neofotistos 2010. 21 For example, as I already mentioned, he sued public personalities for their political views; in addition, he was the main organizer of the 2018 big demon­ stration against the Prespa agreement in Athens. 22 I refer particularly to the work of Laura Nader 1974 (1969) and others (see, for example, Sharon Traweek 1988; Hugh Gusterson 1995; Jennifer Pierce 1995), who argued that anthropologists should do ethnographies not only of disem­ powered groups, but of groups who wield power in society, perhaps even more than the ethnographers themselves. Also, I am referring to a more recent piece of work by Joan Cassell (2010), who, by studying surgeons, faced some of my dilemmas, although not all. 23 On advocacy in anthropology there have also been several recent discussions. For example, see Current Anthropology, v.51, S2 on engaged anthropology, which presents the outcome of a Wenner-Gren sponsored workshop in Jan­ uary 2008. In particular, see Low and Merry 2010. For an earlier discussion, see Scheper-Hughes (1995). Finally, in relation to Greece, the issue of engaged anthropology has emerged pressingly in the last few years in relation to the migration ‘crisis.’ See indicatively, Cabot (2019) and Rozakou (2019).

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Tsitselikis, Konstantinos. 1996. Το διεθνές και ευρωπαϊκό καθεστώς των γλωσσικών δικαιωμάτων και η ελληνική έννομη τάξη. [The International and European Régime of Language Rights and the Greek Legal Order.] Athens and Komotini: Sakkoulas. Van Boeschoten, Riki. 2000. “When Difference Matters: Sociopolitical Dimensions of Ethnicity in the District of Florina.” In Macedonia: The Politics of Identity and Difference, edited by Jane K. Cowan, 28–46. London: Pluto Press. Vereni, Piero. 1996. “Boundaries, Frontiers, Persons, Individuals: Questioning ‘Identity’ at National Borders.” Europaea 2, no. 1: 77–89.

WEBSITES http://www.popsm.gr/stoxoi/ (Accessed August 13, 2019). https://w w w.youtube.com /watch?v=z yc eULL1qgU&f b cl id=I­ wAR04cbA2vmKT7Rs1RarB4nrjEe0whGWfl7GgW2MTXlOcxt­ S7lBbshOV9fFI (Accessed August 16, 2019). https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng#{%22itemid%22:[%22001-58205%22] (Accessed August 31, 2020).

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5

Voters and clients Elections in Florina before and after the Prespa Accord Anastasia Karakasidou

On May 26, 2019, three simultaneous elections took place in Greece: voters were asked to cast their preference for European Parliament, Regional, and Municipal leaders. Admittedly, it was a confusing moment for many, since 40 parties ran for European representation.1 Regional and Municipal elec­ tions were even more confusing since the number and the political allegiance of the candidates varied immensely.2 The results were overwhelmingly pos­ itive for the New Democracy party on all three fronts, and, as expected, early elections for national parliament followed on July 7. A number of important issues were at stake for Greek voters-at-large: the never-ending financial crisis, the never-ending influx of refugees and migrants, and the signing of the Prespa Accord the previous year. Given the historical and ethnic particularities of the Florina region, the elections offer an important terrain to observe, discuss, and interpret the electoral culture in this border, and at times, contested region of Greece. This essay aspires to offer an interpretation of political party and ideologi­ cal allegiances of the Macedonian-speaking inhabitants of the Florina region, and explore how the signing of the Prespa Accord influenced their electoral choices. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the area before and after the 2019 summer elections, it will borrow from historical sources to trace Florina elec­ toral results from the first national elections of 1915 to the present. It will discuss three important factors that shaped electoral culture in the area. 1 The nation-wide contest between the right, the left, and the center influ­ enced voters in the region as much as it did in other parts of Greece. But the “local” character of this contest was no less due to the multi-ethnic canvas of the area, and mirrored inter-ethnic relations and contest between the local Macedonian speakers (dopii), and the refugees from Asia Minor who settled in the area after the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey in 1922. For the last 100 years or so, the politics of land distribution and agrarian disputes have been played out in elections and have drawn oppositional lines of allegiance. 2 Certain prominent politicians, such as Philippos Dragoumis (1890–80), Georgios Modis (1887–75), and Yiorgos Lianis (1942–), also played over

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the decades a role in shaping local electoral culture. They offered, as did other national and local politicians, a helping hand in dealing with the bureaucracy of the Greek state or finding employment for their loyal followers. Clientelism was practiced widely, but it meant something dif­ ferent from other parts of Greece: along with benefits came ideological and ethnic identity shifts. Political party allegiance and engagement in mainstream politics contributed to the creation of a “conspiracy of silence” regarding local Macedonian identity and allowed the “deep” Greek state, rather than voters, to choose candidates and parliamen­ tary representatives. 3 The “Macedonian Question” (Μακεδονικό Ζήτημα), however, espe­ cially after the establishment of the People’s Republic of Macedonia as a constituent republic in the Yugoslav federation in 1945 and the Greek Civil War (1946–49), has been a driving force behind party allegiance and electoral behavior. The Communist Party of Greece (KKE) has drawn many Macedonians to their cause since the 1930s, and a solid number of them were loyal supporters over the decades. When the Rainbow party appeared in the political scene in 1995, many local Macedonians opted to follow its cause, and the party promoted minority rights both in Greece and abroad. The recent signing of the Prespa Accord and KKE’s adamant opposition to it has brought an end to this deep-seated loyalty, and many abandoned the communists in favor of, the more moderate yet still leftist, SYRIZA, and the Rainbow party. When the Tsipras government decided to start negotiations for an accord with the Republic of Macedonia, popular dissatisfaction was voiced every­ where in Greece, especially in the northern part of the country, that led to the eventual defeat of SYRIZA in all recent elections.

Topoi and actors I arrived in the Florina area the weekend before the European and local elections to follow the campaign of the Rainbow party (Ευρωπαική Ελεύθερη Συμμαχία-Ουράνιο Τόξο) which decided in its November 11, 2018 Congress to participate in the European elections. My first stop was the village of Lofoi (also known among the local population by the Macedonian name Zabrdeni) which was hosting its annual celebration.3 Located some 20 km east of the town of Florina, the village had 355 inhabitants in the 2011 Census.4 Administratively, it belongs to the Meliti municipal division (Δημοτικό Διαμέρισμα) of the Florina Municipality (Δήμος Φλώρινας), and historically it has been considered a stronghold of Macedonian activism. As a cool breeze forced us to bring out woolens and socks, we sat in plastic chairs and listened to a local music group playing songs in Macedonian in the village’s central square. Young and old were dancing in a circle and people seemed to be enjoying performing their culture freely. These events

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used to be “boring,” a friend told me, either with only Greek songs, or with just music, since no lyrics in Macedonian were allowed. “Now, we are not afraid, and we can sing in Macedonian,” he added. While the orchestra was taking a break, a fashionably dressed and well­ coiffed blond young woman spoke in Greek on the microphone express­ ing her happiness to be present for the celebrations and her promise that if SYRIZA did well in the elections, she would do her best to represent the concerns of the villagers and solve their problems. When I asked my friends who she was, they told me: “This is Peti Perka. She will probably run for Parliament. She is promoted by the SYRIZA party against Kostas Seltsas. She is ‘the female Lianis’.” That was a lot of information and names to digest all at once, but it was an introduction to the complicated political fabric of the area. Since elections for parliament were not yet at stake, I put the information about Seltsas and Perka in the backburner, and concentrated my research for the next week on the Rainbow party and its participation in the European elections. The fact that the party did not run for municipal and district elections perplexed me, and when I inquired about the reasons behind the decision, a friend replied: “It would trigger civil war.” Of course, people with Rainbow leanings ran under other local slates, especially the ones supported by SYRIZA, but formally the party only ran for European representation. I met many people that night, from all parts of the political spectrum and with differing views on the Accord. I met a young man from the leftist ANTARSYA party, who was against the Accord, but was quick to show his anger when I made an in-passing historical reference to the “SlavoMacedonians:” “We are Macedonians and the term ‘Slavo’ is very mislead­ ing,” he told me firmly. A middle-aged KKE supporter was also against the Accord because he believed it was guided by capitalist, imperialist and anti-working class ideologies. But another man of similar age and past KKE allegiance denounced the party: “The KKE has dropped one of its Ks and become just KE.” (The party of Greece, rather than the Communist Party of Greece.) His only alternative, as he saw it, was to vote for the Rainbow party in the European elections, and for SYRIZA in the district and local elections. Women were in general not very communicative about politics, and a few elderly women, who did not speak good Greek, turned away from my questions, and directed me to talk to their sons and husbands. As I will discuss below, it is usually the male members of the family that bring the ballot (ψηφοδέλτιο) home and influence the voting of the elderly and females. But a young female supporter of the Rainbow party was eager to tell me how “nullifying” the Accord was since it does not mention the Macedonians of Greece: “We are still a big zero,” she concluded. Her hus­ band was also a Rainbow supporter, but he applauded the Accord, because allegedly it opens up the discussion and offers a starting point for future rec­ ognition of the minority: “it was an important step towards the recognition of what had really happened to the local population” he added. I also met

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New Democracy (ND) supporters who were against the Accord, and they echoed the general dissatisfaction of the Greeks: the Accord sold out the name, the ancient history and the Greekness of Macedonia. Some of them only at the sound of “The Rainbow” turned around and walked away from conversations: despite the friendly greetings and politeness, “The Rainbow” appeared to be a taboo and something to avoid altogether. Most of the hands I shook that night were those of farmers and hard-working country men, who had to choose the following Sunday for whom to cast their votes. Undoubtedly, the Accord was a factor in the choice of some, but it appeared from the outset that for the overwhelming majority, more nuanced—familial and personal—rather than ideological factors were going to play an important role in their decision making. That night, I also noticed the handing out of ballots (ψηφοδέλτια): along with the handshake, came the ballot and maybe a leaflet, or a visiting card with the name of the candidate and the political party affiliation. Since most of the conversations in this public sphere were in Greek, I was able to cap­ ture certain comments from the conversations around me: one’s sister was running for office in the municipal election on a ND party ticket, and this man would have to vote for her despite his anti-ND ideology. For the local municipal elections, support for a family member, a neighbor, or friend seemed to come first. For the European elections, party ideology and affil­ iation mattered. In the days that followed, I realized that the campaigns did not really involve major public speaking events. The only major politician I had the chance to hear was ND leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who was supposed to speak in Florina’s main square on Thursday, May 23. There was heavy rain that evening, and he was forced to address the people of Florina from the terrace of the Lingos Hotel, located on the square. Friends joked about the attendance, claiming that if an older Florina man died, more people would attend his funeral than the numbers attending the Mitsotakis’ rally. It was a confusing event, since attendees could not hear his address. I only noticed the local politicians, members of the ND party and candidates run­ ning under ND’s ballot, shaking hands, smiling, and hugging constituents. “We will do whatever we can to soften the negative consequences of the Prespa Accord,” Mitsotakis said in his speech.5 While SYRIZA and Tsipras compromised on matters of language and identity, he promised to stand firmly by “Greece’s position.” In an earlier interview on June 20, 2019, he stated clearly ND’s position on the Accord: “It is nationally dangerous and wounded the Greeks…We need to protect the Macedonian products…and naturally to safeguard the Greekness of the term Macedonia. [We need to] promote internationally the real Macedonia that is an inseparable part of Greek history and heritage.” And he reminded, Greece had the right to block the entrance of the neighboring country to the European Union if that process did not support national interests.6 The economic crisis was addressed as well, with the ND promising more jobs and less taxation.

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Other than this event, campaigning was more informal and local. The district and municipal candidates had rented shops, functioning as their offices, in the downtown area of Florina. Some offices were busier than others, but it appeared that conversations did not include the Accord, but rather centered around party politics and ideologies. Billboards and leaf­ lets decorated the town, and there was more traffic that week. But it was the Wednesday Florina bazaar (παζάρι, or farmer’s/popular market), where candidates were circulating and discussing with constituents. Attracting customers from the town and the surrounding villages, this weekly open market has always been a popular event in the town, with people crowding stalls to buy vegetables, fruits, meats, spices and clothing. Two more mar­ kets in the area also functioned as campaign spaces: the Friday bazaar of the village of Meliti, and the Monday bazaar of the town of Amindeo. One can argue that these bazaars are a “public sphere” (Habermas 1991) where the public gathers, encounters the politicians, and engages in discussions.7 Scheduled weekly, these three spaces offered the ethnographer a number of opportunities to observe and hear the voices of both politicians and voters. The Amindeo (Sorovich) bazaar is more “cosmopolitan” of sorts, since the town is larger with a population of 3671 (2011 Census) peoples of mixed ethnic descent, but predominantly Macedonian. It is the seat of one of three municipalities of the Florina Prefecture, Florina and Prespa being the other two. As such, it offers an array of government offices, schools, banks, and shops. The town is well-known for its leftist and Rainbow leanings overall, and Kostas Seltsas, the SYRIZA Parliamentary Representative, practices dentistry in the town, although he was born and raised in the nearby village of Xino Nero (known also by the Macedonian name Vrbeni and the Turkish Eksi Sou). I only visited the Amindeo market before the national elections that followed, and I will discuss it in more detail below. Meliti (Ovčarani), with a population of 1432 people in the 2011 Census, is considered to be an “avant-garde” community in terms of Macedonian activism. In addition to the original local Macedonian population, some 40 families from Pontus and East Thrace were settled there in the 1920s. Despite the local-refugee antagonisms, the Macedonian community has been vocal in articulating their distinctive identity and history, and their July 20 (Prophet Elias) local festival has morphed into a celebration of Macedonian identity and culture: known as Ilinden, it commemorates the uprising that is central to Macedonian national identity. It was in the 1983 celebration that the microphone was seized by Kostas Gotsis, a local Macedonian from the village of Meliti, who famously said “It is time to sing one of our songs.” This was the beginning of vocal and open resist­ ance to what I call the “conspiracy of silence” that prevailed for decades (see also Rombou-Levidis’ chapter in this volume). I borrow the term from Patterson (1988) who masterfully analyzed the ways in which doc­ tors, family members, and patients “conspired” to avoid the term cancer

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in a diagnosis. In a similar manner, local Macedonians, politicians, and historians joined in a conscious or unconscious effort to silence the ethnic difference. The Friday bazaar I visited before the European elections had a more local character than its Florina counterpart, with more local farmers, in addition to itinerant vendors, selling their produce. The encounters were more personal and Macedonian language could be heard, especially in conversations among the elderly. I spotted SYRIZA, KKE and Rainbow candidates, as they shook hands and distributed their ballots to vendors and customers. Others gathered in the nearby coffee shops and engaged in conversations about election result speculations. “We will get 20,000 votes,” claimed a Rainbow candidate. Others were not as optimistic, but most were committed to “leftist” or Rainbow leanings. I met that day a Meliti man, now in his 90’s and still farming his land, who was eager to recount his sto­ ries of Greek police brutality. Another old woman wanted to forget that she was raped as a young girl during the Civil War. These narratives and mem­ ories of violence and oppression popped up in almost every conversation I had in this town. The past mattered, and it was people of this sort that the Rainbow Party tried to attract and offer a different discourse that replaced the conspiratorial silence of the past.

Rainbow promises “European Free Coalition-Rainbow” is the name the Rainbow party used in the European elections. In the flyer that candidates circulated, along with the ballot, the party was described as the Political Party of the Macedonian Minority in Greece, a member of the European Free Alliance-European Political Party (EFA-EPP), and member of the Federal Union of European nationalities (FUEN). The Party held its 3rd Congress on November 11, 2018, which I did not have a chance to attend, in the village of Xino Nero community offices. The village belongs to the Amindeo Municipality, and the then mayor of Amindeo gave the permission, and local media protested for providing public space for the “Skopians.”8 Despite local protests, the Congress was fruitful and Rainbow party members decided to run in the European elections. The 2019 European election ballot was printed in pale blue color and it included the names of 14 candidates, 8 males and 6 females. Eight candi­ dates were from the Florina area, and six from other areas of Macedonia (Ptolemaida, Kozani and Kastoria). Given the Meliti/Lofoi activism, it is not surprising that six of the candidates were from those two geographical communities. Voters were supposed to choose up to three candidates by putting the sign of the cross next to the candidate names. For such a small party, individual preferences were not very important, since nobody would get enough votes to be elected to the European Parliament. What mattered was how many votes the Party would get at-large.

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The party’s flyer for the European elections accompanied the ballot and addressed the voters as “Macedonian men and women, Greek Democratic citizens.” It offered a short introduction to the history of the party, including how it was established in 1994 and it participated in 6 European elections, its purpose being to offer “an answer to those who claim that Macedonians with Macedonian as their mother tongue do not exist. …We exist, and we fight every day for our dignity, for defending our heritage, culture, songs and ancestors. Especially for the Deca Begalci and the political refugees.” It is interesting that the flyer was in Greek, but there were a few phrases in Macedonian that raise our curiosity. Deca Begalci (child refugees) here refers to the united Macedonian diaspora, people who have migrated volun­ tarily or not from the area and now live around the globe. People who carry the memory of cultural oppression, discrimination, and assimilation (see Danforth and Van Boeschoten 2012). The flyer urged voters to consider “Greek” matters when they cast their votes in the local and district elections. But for the European parliament, it encouraged them to vote for deepening democracy in Greece and for more respect for the Macedonian minority’s human rights. “For 25 years, we have been prosecuted, facing legal charges, lies and slander, but we stand tall and continue … Brakia i sestri Makedontsi [Macedonian brothers and sisters] … We used to dance mute, and now we have accomplished a lot. You know us, with great personal and familial cost, we kept fighting. Brakia i sestri Makedontsi. GORE GLAVATA.” Macedonian brothers and sisters, “keep your head up” is the last urging, and it is in Macedonian. Gore Glavata was the phrase that Pavlos Voskopoulos, the Florina man who has dedicated his life to the recognition of the minority and the Rainbow Party, used in an interview with ALTER TV on March 10, 2009. There, he criticized Greece for having parochial policies while living in the 21st century and for how “otherness” is not recognized in the homogeneous national myth. But when he dared to say Gore Glavata in Macedonian, the journalist asked him politely not to do so.9 This is an important instant of “the conspiracy of silence” that the Macedonians of Northern Greece have experienced for almost a century. “Dear Macedonians, teach your children your Macedonian mother tongue, tell them they are Macedonian, don’t be afraid,” urged the Party in their 2009 European elections flyer. Appealing to the young parents, sensing that the Greek version of the region’s history has been re-written and most young adults of Macedonian descent would choose not to propagate the language to the offspring generation, Rainbow activists had become increasingly worried. This concern led to the estab­ lishment of the Party by a few activists. The Rainbow Party (Vinožito) was established in 1994 and in September 1995 it attempted to open up its offices in the town of Florina. Greek authori­ ties refused to register the association under the name “House of Macedonian Civilization” (Στέγη Μακεδονικού Πολιτισμού), especially because the sign hanging on their balcony was in Cyrillic (Виножито—Лерински Комитет,

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or Rainbow-Florina Prefecture). Local protests began, and Rainbow mem­ bers were attacked while the party office was set on fire. The Florina clergy urged for a demonstration against this “anti-Hellenic logo.” The town’s Council also supported and publicized the demonstration, while the district attorney asked for the logo to be removed since it could provoke unrest. The police confiscated the logo, the party placed a new one on the balcony, but after midnight the next day, on September 13, a group of men attacked the offices again and demanded for the logo to be removed.10 To make the long story that followed short, and after legal action in Greece was unsuccessful, the Rainbow party decided to file an appeal with the European Court of Human Rights. In what came to be known as “Sidiropoulos and Others v. Greece” case, Greece was convicted for violating Articles 6 (right to a fair trial) and 11 (freedom of assembly and association) of the European Convention on Human Rights, and in addition had to pay 34,245 euros to the party within 3 months in compensation.11 It was these funds that, Rainbow members told me were used for covering the cost of participating in the European elections. Although many Rainbow critics allude pejora­ tively that the Party receives funds from “Skopje” and the “Skopians” from abroad, the picture of a struggling small party organization prevails. But the stigma of being labeled a “Skopian” deters people from being associated with the Party. They look for political representation and solace elsewhere. The results of the European elections in May, as well as of the ensuing dis­ trict and local municipal elections, painted the vast majority of the Greek prefectures in blue, the color of ND. Florina was no different, and with the exception of the Meliti community that chose a SYRIZA leader, the rest of the prefecture and municipal elections showed the same trend towards the ND conservatives (see Table 5.1). The Rainbow Party received a total of 4951 votes, or a 3.33% of the Florina prefecture vote. The party was more popular in the Florina electoral district, where the communities of Meliti and Lofoi belong.12 SYRIZA did rather well if we take into consideration the 2014 Table 5.1 European election results for the Florina Prefecture at large and the three electoral districts (Florina, Amindeo, Prespa) https://ekloges.ypes.gr/current/e/ home/districts/14/ Florina Florina Amindeo Prespa Florina Prefecture electoral electoral electoral Prefecture 2019 district, 2019 district, 2019 district, 2019 2014 New Democracy SYRIZA KINAL/PASOK Golden Dawn KKE Rainbow Greek Solution

33.84 27.02 7.15 4.19 3.50 3.33 3.20

34.97 27.83 6.80 3.83 3.14 4.22 2.95

30.63 25.80 7.85 4.96 4.34 2.24 3.79

43.08 26.14 6.35 2.97 1.83 0.57 2.00

27.05 23.52 8.15 8.50 4.17 -

Source: https://ekloges.ypes.gr/current/e/home/districts/14/

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election results: raising the percentage of its supporters in the prefecture, it received four points more. The signing of the Accord and the overall stance of SYRIZA towards the local Macedonians probably influenced this increase. But in no way did it influence the Rainbow vote, which dropped from the orig­ inal 6% in the 1993 elections to 3.3%. KKE also suffered a drop, but not signif­ icant enough to blame it on the party’s adamant position against the Accord. Many local Macedonians supported the KKE starting in the 1930s. But they also supported the anti-Venizelist conservative blocks that rallied against the agrarian reforms the influx of the 1922 refugees required. The centrist post-WWII politicians, such as Yeorgios Papandreou, who embraced the progressive forces in Greece after the tumultuous Civil War, also found supporters among the local Macedonians. And, so did the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK, Πανελλήνιο Σοσιαλιστικό Κίνημα) in the1980s with its populist ideology that opened up civil servant jobs to peo­ ples of socialist and leftist leanings, independent of their ethnic and linguis­ tic origin. In the first decades of the 21st century, local Macedonians started supporting SYRIZA, albeit with controversial consequences, as I will dis­ cuss below. The Rainbow Party was the first local party to openly repre­ sent the Macedonians and their cause, and it premiered in the 1993 national elections. It received around 6% of the area’s vote, a percentage indicating that the vast majority of the area’s adult population casted their vote along mainstream Greek political party lines (Zagos 2011, 75).

Patrons and clients The results of the May 26 elections quickly set in motion early national elections scheduled for July 7. The Florina district elects two parliamentary representatives and for those two seats (έδρες) fought a number of candi­ dates from all parties, as I will discuss below. The number of “seats” allot­ ted to the district changed over the decades depending on the electoral laws and gerrymandering. But overall, national elections played an important role in allowing the local Macedonians to enter the scene of Greek political antagonisms and reap the benefits of political party allegiance and clien­ telism. What were the processes that shaped this wide spectrum electoral culture of the Macedonians? What were the ideological factors that guided them? What were the practical issues that forced them to party allegiances? How were they represented? Contextualizing historically the 2019 elections might give some answers, and the discussion will now turn to an overview of political party allegiances over the past century as well as to the role of four major political figures in shaping the electoral culture in the region: Philippos Dragoumis, Yeorgios Modis, Yiorgos Lianis, and Kostas Seltsas. Politics, Press and Place (2011) is a seminal work by Christos Zagos, and it offers splendid facts and interpretations of the parliamentary elections in Florina for the period 1926–2009. The book is also theoretically sophisti­ cated since it attempts to discuss the notion of place/space and how Florina

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acquired over the years a uniqueness in the politics and social relations visà-vis the Greek state. The author, additionally, offers an extensive history of the Florina press and how it changed over the years depending on national political trends and political party affiliations. Hand-in-hand, the local press with the political parties attempted to shape the electoral culture. Zagos (2011, 74) tells us right at the outset that the Florina Prefecture had local particularities, especially in the competition between the indigenous (γηγενείς), Slavic-speakers (σλαβόφωνους) και refugees (πρόσφυγες). At the beginning of the 20th century, more than 70% of the region’s population were Slavic speakers.13 While Venizelos and his liberals were the patrons of the refugees, the Populist Party or the anti-Venizelist block in general were appealing to the local Macedonians. But despite this antagonism, all governments during the interwar period subjected the population to a, at times, violent “internal colonization” (Zagos 2011, 74). The memory of the Macedonian Struggle (1901–03) between Greece and Bulgaria was still afresh, and the so-called Machedonomachoi (those who fought on the side of the Greeks) that survived morphed into heroes or local politicians, Yeorgios Modis (1967) being a good example, as I will discuss below. According to Kostopoulos (2016), the town of Florina was rather small when it entered the Greek national domain. It had some 10,000 inhabitants, 2/3 of whom were Muslims, while the majority of the Christians were Slavic speakers with the exception of 30 Vlach and 89 refugee families from Thrace and Asia Minor. But the Christians belonged to the Greek party and even the Bulgarians acknowledged that over half of them were “Grecomans,” who actually after 1912 supported the anti-Venizelists. Dragoumis was instrumental in this trend. In the 1915 elections, eight of the nine elected representatives were anti-Venizelists. They acted as patrons and helped nav­ igate the Greek bureaucracy and they also helped those who belonged to the Bulgarian party and faced police brutality. The nascent local press also helped politicians disseminate their views. Anderson’s print capitalism has indeed entered the Florina space after the Greek nation-state took over administration and power from the defeated Ottomans in 1912, and newspapers were in the hands of Greek educated Vlachs. Three newspapers are worth mentioning: 1. 1914 saw the publica­ tion of Τα Νέα της Φλώρινας (Florina News) by a man of Vlach descent from Vitola (Monastir) who moved to Florina after the Serbs took over his printing press there. This newspaper did not last long, and was followed by the weekly newspaper “Florina.” Philippos Dragoumis was an instrumen­ tal politician in the area and this newspaper supported his political cause. 2. Η Φωνή του Λαού (The Voice of the People) was another newspaper that attempted to give voice to the wider right wing politicians. It also published widely about the Macedonian Question and voiced anti-communist ideol­ ogy. 3. Ελεγχος (Control) was first published in 1921, and voiced the ideology of the center forces.14 In 1931, it changed its name to Εθνος (Nation) with its agenda laid out in the first issue which included slogans urging readers

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to love Greece and be proud of the Greek motherland. The editors did not mind whether katharevousa or demotic Greek would be used, but “We can­ not stand foreign language, not Greek. Don’t speak a foreign tongue at home. Make sure you tell the foreigners to speak to you in your own lan­ guage” (Zagos 2011, 53).15 Overall, in the 28 elections that Zagos (2011) investigated for the period 1926-2009 in the Florina area, 25 were won by the right, with the 1928, 1950 and 1952 elections being the exception.16 Why the “right” leanings, espe­ cially among the local Macedonians? To begin with, only 12,548 refugees were settled in the district, a small number in comparison to other districts in Macedonia, and their vote was not very influential, at least in the interwar period. The local Macedonians sided with the conservatives mainly because they were against the Venizelist agrarian reforms that distributed land to the refugees. In addition, important politicians like Philippos Dragoumis sided with the conservatives, and they offered a clientelist network that helped them navigate through Greek bureaucracy and work employment (Zagos 2011, 669–70). Let us take a look at the work and life of Philippos Dragoumis, who shaped political allegiances in the area. Philippos Dragoumis (1890–80) was the fourth son and next to the last of the 11 children of Stefanos Dragoumis with his wife Eliza Kondoyiannakis. His archives are now housed at the Gennadios Library in Athens.17 Born in Athens in January 1890, he had a good secondary education before he studied law at the University of Athens (1906–10). He was drafted, however, for the Balkan War of 1912, and he was present when Prince Constantine entered Thessaloniki in 1913. His alliance with the anti-Venizelist forces had him exiled for a while, but after his brother’s Ion Dragoumis assassination in 1920 he started his political career for both family and personal reasons. He entered the political scene either as an independent, or after forming alli­ ances with the Agrarian Party, the Populists or the pro-Royalists. Iosifidis (2015) claims that Dragoumis did get his power from the “slavophones” and offered them a protective nest against those who treated them with suspi­ cion and enmity. He was first elected representative in 1920–22, and then 1926–28, 1932–33, 1933–35, and 1946–49 in Thessaloniki, a total of five times. He withdrew from politics in 1952, putting an end to a career that saw him designated as Minister General Governor of Macedonia (1932–34), among other gov­ ernment posts.18 He was against both the Metaxas government and the communists (ibid.). He also wrote about issues of decentralization, local gov­ ernment, party politics, and national concerns and demands in Macedonia and Epirus.19 In addition, he oversaw the publication of his brother’s work. Philippos also wrote five volumes of personal diaries that shed light to the activities of the Dragoumis family and the general political history of Greece. He was also busy being member of various Athens-based Societies that promoted folklore, arts, music and in general Greek civilization.20 In 1952, for example, he worked for the establishment of the Institute of Balkan

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Studies as a branch of the Society of Macedonian Studies (established with the help of Modis, as I will discuss below). Philippos never became a perma­ nent resident in the Florina area and died in Athens in 1980. According to his grandson’s blog, an Athenian artist and local politician who carries the same name, the memory of his grandfather and great uncle should not be abused by ultra-nationalists.21 He reminds us that his grand­ father was open-minded and included Vlach or Slavic speakers in his bal­ lots. The so-called “professional patriots” (meaning the Greeks and their local supporters) did not like his approach, the grandson claims, because they called the locals “Bulgarians” and took advantage of them. His grand­ son defends Philippos by saying that he was not a professional nationalist: he preferred collaboration and friendship among people. According to Isosifidis (2015) who studied the Dragoumis archives at the Gennadios Library in the period 1924–35, Dragoumis spoke freely about the “few tens of thousands’’ of Bulgarian-speaking Greeks. He was definitely against the Venizelist Great Idea and Greek irredentist visions. For him, as was also the case for his brother Ion, an Eastern Federation was the best solu­ tion for the Balkans, a federation that guaranteed the survival of the nation within. Lithoksoou (1994) tells us, however, that while Dragoumis would freely use the term Macedonian or Slavic-Macedonian to describe the lan­ guage spoken in the area in the 1920s, after WWII and the Civil War a shift in his approach to the Macedonian Question can be clearly seen. He wrote two confidential memorandums: one to the Greek Military Commander in 1948 and one to the King, Prime Minister, and Foreign Minister in 1962, which clearly asked for an assimilationist approach to the local Macedonians.22 To begin with, he is definitely against the term “Slavo-Macedonian” since the term was invented by the Communists.23 Dragoumis preferred to call them “Bulgarian speakers,” some 120,000 peoples, of which only 10-20% could be considered “troublemakers” who could potentially resist Greek administration. It was indeed the KKE that coined the term “SlavoMacedonian” in their Communist International meeting on February 25, 1934. There, the KKE arraigned Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia, the three imperialist countries that divided the geographical territory of Macedonia, for claiming that the Macedonian nation did not exist. In their own 6th Congress of December 1935, the KKE also denounced the terrifying stran­ gling of the human rights of the national minorities living in Greece, espe­ cially in Macedonia.24 Dragoumis’s good friend Konstantinos Karavidas, who wrote the sem­ inal Agrotika in 1931, also mentions the communist leanings of the local Macedonians. In the 1926 Florina elections, he informs us, 1278 votes went to the communists: this is important, according to Karavidas, because the votes signified anti-Greek and autonomist trends of the “blindfolded” peas­ ants. Each vote really radiated to 30–40 more people, he says. These were not accidental votes: people did not vote to their own advantage and guided by their self-interest, or for personal reasons.25

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The Hellenization of the “foreign speakers” and educational policies were also part of Dragoumis’s concerns in those two memorandums. He acknowledged that the peoples were victims of bad government policies, in addition to war and poverty. The foreign and communist propagandas found fertile ground in them because the schools were not functioning properly, and there were not enough priests in the area. The katharevousa taught in schools further alienated the population and demoticism was the answer to these problems: he insisted the children should be taught demotic Greek, otherwise they would be linguistically confused. He stressed the role of the teachers and the importance of distributing books free of charge, both books for instruction and books that work towards the creation of national consciousness, particularly books about figures who fought for the spread Hellenism, such as Alexander the Great and Pavlos Melas. He also promoted the hanging of posters of fighters for Macedonia and Greek national heroes on the walls of the schools. Competitions for the writing of the history of Macedonia were also recommended. He even went as far as suggesting in 1948 that children should learn at school their mother tongue, a language he described as kin to Bulgarian with Cyrillic alphabet, but not to the “Macedonian” language used in the Macedonian Republic of the new Yugoslav Federation. In the 1962 Memorandum, he further discusses pol­ icies that would help the assimilation process: organize school excursions to the area; bring in priests from Greek-speaking areas; give bonus allow­ ances for the civil servants working there; provide special training for civil servants, especially policemen; establish kindergartens all over the area so the locals can learn Greek as their mother tongue and be permeated by the orthodox spirit; establish night schools for the illiterate, especially women; and start farming and home economic instruction. From the above discussion, we see how Dragoumis’s early and more romantic approach to the local Macedonians (1915–35) was replaced by an assimilationist ideology (1935–50) springing from the widespread fear of communists: Greek heritage should be taught and the government and intellectuals should work together to accomplish its dissemination. The German-Bulgarian occupation of the area brought dilemmas to the local Macedonian population, since Bulgarian propaganda resurfaced once again. A good number of them joined the Greek partisan forces instead, and eventually the KKE agreed for the establishment of SNOF (Slavjano­ makedonski Narodno Osloboditelen Front, or Slavo-macedonian People’s Liberation Front) on October 20, 1943 (Sfetas 2001, 35; Grouios 2019, 47). Plenty of historiography exists about the reasons, the details, and the per­ sonages involved in the establishment and activities of SNOF (see for exam­ ple Kofos 1964; Kolliopoulos 1994; Sfetas 2001). Whether it was a communist conspiracy, or Tito’s aspirations, the local Macedonians were embroiled in the conflict that left them vulnerable in the end. At the same time, they lost their old patrons, such as Dragoumis. Those years are still recounted in family history accounts, and the Civil War (1946–49) that followed found

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thousands of adults and children departing for the Eastern bloc, while those who stayed had no choice but to acquiesce in Greek desires and par­ ticipate in the “conspiracy of silence” as to who were the Macedonians (see Danforth and van Boeschoten 2012). The 1946 elections in Florina merit a special mention, since the years were tumultuous for Greece in general and the next year, 1947, saw the eruption of the Civil War. Philippos Dragoumis had built a strong “electoral clien­ tele” among the local Macedonians in the 1930s that followed him through a number of elections. The communists even accused him that he tried to keep people from leaving voluntarily for Bulgaria in 1928 because he wanted them as voters and clients.26 But, in 1946 his anti-communist sentiments and campaign resonated differently among local Macedonians. He returned to the area, gathering around him pro-royalist forces that were accused of being German-Bulgarian collaborators and autonomists. Yeorgios Modis, his fierce Venizelist opponent that we will encounter below, tried to do the same: the hearts and minds of the local Macedonians were once again at stake, while national consciousness and the threat of communism were the new challenges that the old patrons had to address. According to Stefanos Pougaridis (2019), Modis in his campaign speeches stressed that the essential contest in these elections were “the fight between Greeks and non-Greeks, between humans and non-humans.”27 The 1946 elections saw 7 represent­ atives elected to parliament, Dragoumis being one of them. Although the center, liberal forces together came as the majority, the pro-Royalists col­ lected almost half of the votes cast.28 The clientelism of the Interwar period was still strong, and the patrons got elected, but their relationship with their constituents had changed. Dragoumis also saw the KKE as the enemy which threatened the territorial integrity of Greece, and patriotism was guiding political culture. Violence erupted in Florina before the elections, with the pro-Royalists fighting against the communists. Yeorgios Modis was also a powerful Florina patron, and was elected to Greek Parliament a total of seven times. He was born in Monastir (today’s Bitola) in 1887 and died in Thessaloniki in 1975.29 He has been heralded as an emblematic persona of Macedonia, along with the notorious Metropolite of Florina, Augustinos Kandiotis. He is also known as a writer, his most famous books being “Macedonian Stories” (Μακεδονικές Ιστορίες, 1960) and “Struggles in Macedonia” (Αγώνες στην Μακεδονία, 1975). It is not clear whether he was a storyteller or a narrator of history, but he was clearly drawing his stories from his personal experience when he fought on the side of the Greek cause in the Macedonian Struggle as a youth. Although the Vlach community claims he was born in a Vlach-speaking family, it was Greek culture and identity that he promoted.30 Modis began his political career once he moved to Florina after the Balkan Wars. He was elected to Greek parliament numerous times as a representative from the Florina district. He also served a number of gov­ ernment posts, including in the interwar period the positions of Prefect of

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Florina and Governor General of Epirus, while after the war he served as Governor General of Macedonia, Minister of the Interior, and Minister of Education. He was also a member of the Society for Macedonian Studies (1939) and many other committees that oversaw the recognition of the Macedonian fighters for the Greek cause and sought to prove the Greekness of Macedonia. He was instrumental in the placing of statues of Alexander the Great, Philip, and Aristotle throughout northern Greece.31 His posi­ tion on who were the Slav speakers of Northern Greece became the formal position of Greece: Macedonian nationality was invented by Tito in 1944 in Skopje and so was the Macedonian language, which is only a “first cousin” of Bulgaria.32 For him, the birth of Yugoslav Macedonia was like rising from the dead. According to Terleki (2018), Modis died of lung cancer in 1975, exhausted from all the work he had done for his country but honored by the Greek parliament for his contribution. The language that Modis uses in his books is simple, critics say, with many grammatical and syntax mistakes. He made cheap printings of his books and distributed them free of charge to village schools. He, like Dragoumis, defended demoticism and after the Civil War the two continued for a while to be political opponents, but their approach to the local Macedonians was similar. In the decades that followed the Civil War, the voting culture of the local Macedonians still supported the conservatives, with the National Radical Union party (ERE, Εθνική Ριζοσπαστική Ένωσις) of Konstantinos Karamanlis leading in national elections (Zagos 2011, 78–79). The Yeorgios Papandreou centrists also attracted those individuals fighting for social and educational reforms. The leftist United Democratic Left (EDA, Ενωμένη Δημοκρατική Αριστερά) took around 8% of the vote and continued attract­ ing loyal supporters. When ERE changed into New Democracy (ND) after the fall of the military dictatorship in 1974, it still gained the majority of the votes in Macedonian villages. Andreas Papandreou’s PASOK entered the political scene in the 1980’s and brought a new air of protest and activism into the electoral culture of the area. Yiorgos Lianis became the new patron of local Macedonians and refugee descendants alike, and was elected nine times to Greek Parliament. Yeorgios Lianis was born in 1942 in the town of Amindeo, Florina. He studied chemistry at the University of Thessaloniki and played professional soccer for a while. But it was his testimony against the junta and his career as a journalist that brought him nationwide fame. He was elected parlia­ mentary representative in 1989, 1990, 1993, 1996, 2001, 2004, 2007, and 2009 with the PASOK party. He also served as Undersecretary for Athletics for a while, but he quit politics in 2011 when he refused to support the austerity measures proposed by his party.33 His personal life was a popular subject in gossip newspapers and TV shows, but overall Lianis implemented a col­ laborative agenda in his politics and tried to unite all peoples of his district. He used his political connections to secure government employment for his

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constituents. I had the pleasure of meeting Lianis back in 1993, and in addi­ tion to being an articulate man, he also appeared committed to bringing “development” into the area. Besides infrastructural works, such as roads, he established the Prespeia celebrations every August in an attempt to both introduce the area to peoples from other parts of Greece and expose the local population to musical events. He was also very vocal against Greek policies that did not allow peoples from Yugoslav Macedonia to visit the area, not even for funerals and other family events. Lianis’ PASOK Florina friends, however, did not like it when Lianis started “flirting” with Tsipras and invited him to attend the Prespeia con­ certs in 2017.34 Neither did they like his support for the Prespa Accord. On June 16, 2018, Lianis was attacked by his old friends while walking down­ town Florina.35 Following the attack, Lianis gave an interview to a radio station (Red Thessaloniki 93.4) where he openly stated his support for the agreement and maintained that if a referendum was conducted, 80% of the Florina people would accept it. “The native population knows that the Agreement liberates them from many things,” he said referring to the local Macedonians.36 The situation was very tense those days in Florina. Town mayor, Yiannis Voskopoulos (a cousin of Rainbow supporter Pavlos) started a campaign to collect signatures protesting the Accord. According to Koutavas (2018), the mayor spoke vehemently against the Accord and supported the local protests the day of the signing. Lianis answered by say­ ing that we should not raise cold-war walls around us. He maintained that Florina is a very wounded area, with most of the population either having been involved in atrocities or having departed abroad. “The Accord is great, because the neighbors will get rid of the irredentist clauses in their constitu­ tion,” he added characteristically. The Rainbow Party expressed its support for the Accord as well.37 They urged the Greek government to ask for forgiveness and raised the issue of the Macedonian minority in the area. “We want to remind that it is time to ask for forgiveness for the organized crimes they committed for the past 120 years against the Macedonian people, aiming at their distinction or assimilation. Ask for forgiveness from those thousands who fled Greece as political refugees after the Civil War and lost their citizenship and their rights. That’s enough Доста веќе! Αιδώς Αργείοι. They should also ask for forgiveness from the Greek people who have been taught the wrong history of the area.”38 The KKE opposed the Accord and alienated a number of dedicated sup­ porters and voters. I visited the village of Lofoi the day of the signing of the Accord (June 17, 2018), but avoided observing the protests staged on the road leading to Prespa. The village of Lofoi, as we have seen, is con­ sidered to be one of the “beehives” of Macedonian activism, and it was these villagers’ reactions to the Accord that I wanted to capture that day. As I entered the coffee shop in Lofoi, a group of men were asking kindly a bearded young man to leave the premises: he was a KKE member who

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religiously came every Sunday to sell the party’s newspaper (Rizospastis). “You have betrayed us,” the Lofoi men told him, referring to the party’s position against the Accord, and guided him to the door. They then gath­ ered at a table, ordered drinks for everybody, and celebrated the signing of the Accord. “It was about time,” they said as they started reminiscing about events from their past, including resistance to Greek assimilation. It was indeed a festive occasion that day: although the Accord did not mention “them,” they argued, it was a step forward for resolving the century-old dis­ pute. They felt betrayed by the KKE, which did not even bother to assume historical responsibility for the way it had handled the local Macedonians in the past. KKE only contextualized the Accord through its own ideological lenses, and it vehemently opposed it, just like a nationalist party. More peo­ ple joined in the celebration, while on the television screen the smiling faces of Tsipras, Zaev, and their ministers were completing a historical agreement promising to bring an end to the animosity between the two countries. The majority of the Greeks were against the Accord, despite SYRIZA gov­ ernment efforts to educate the public through a series of editorials in their daily newspaper Avgi, televised discussions and interviews, as well as exten­ sive talks in the Greek parliament during January 2018. Greeks continued under the guidance of the Orthodox Church and educational institutions to oppose the Accord and protesters gathered on the road to Prespa report­ edly defending the Greekness of Macedonia. The citizens of our neighbor­ ing country were now defined as Macedonian, citizens of North Macedonia, and that was not acceptable.39 The TV news covered both the signing and the protests, but it also covered Kostas Seltsas, the SYRIZA parliament representative of Florina, who, after the signing of the agreement, spoke with Macedonian journalists in the “Skopian” language.40 The Greek Press and social media began a campaign to discredit Seltsas and smear his repu­ tation. This was an act “against Greece,” claimed the popular online news site Voria.gr, since Deutsche Welle called Seltsas the first “Macedonian national” in the Greek parliament. Seltsas answered the accusations, and self-identified as a globalist and a patriot at the same time. He maintained that his goal was not the recognition of a Macedonian minority in Greece, but the recognition of Macedonian language and culture in the area. Born in 1956 and raised in Xino Nero (Vrbeni/Eksi Sou), Seltsas stud­ ied dentistry in Thessaloniki and practiced his profession in the town of Amindeo before he was elected parliamentary representative in 2015. He was a candidate on the SYRIZA ballot in the 2012 elections, but was not elected to parliament.41 As early as 2012, however, his presence on the SYRIZA ballot meant to some that it was the Rainbow supporters the party wanted to attract. But it also meant that for the first time a committed local Macedonian entered mainstream Greek politics and “educated” other politicians about the tumultuous history of the area. Seltsas was indeed an active supporter of the Rainbow party. He was involved in the House of Macedonian Culture events of 1997 I mentioned above. He was also one of

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the people who brought the “Sidiropoulos et al against Greece” case to the European Court of Human Rights asking for the conviction of Greece.42 We also learn about young Seltsas from a protest against male members of the neo-fascist Golden Dawn party: the ultra-right newspaper Stohos has uploaded to their website a video clip, dating back to November 29, 1998, and showing a young Seltsas and his wife involved in a protest against a group of Greek-flag holding men in front of a statue. The event takes place in Xino Nero and is a shouting match between young men, while the police are trying to calm them down. “Get rid of the Greek flags,” shouts the group to which Seltsas belongs. Eventually, a priest is allowed to officiate a cere­ mony honoring the Macedonian fighter Papapetrou to whom the statue is dedicated.43 We also see Seltsas dancing to a Macedonian tune at the 2018 Meliti Ilinden festival: a video clip made the rounds in the social media, and view­ ers were alarmed by what they perceived as irredentist and imperialist lyrics of one of the songs about Macedonia. Twitter comments about Seltsas are indicative: reportedly he should resign, he is disgusting and uneducated, he is seeking the dismemberment of Greece, a proven traitor, an EAM (National Liberation Front, Εθνικό Απελευθερωτικό Μέτωπο)/Bulgarian, married to both Stalin’s and NATO’s agenda.44 Some critics are even asking for a district attorney to intervene and charge him with treason.45 The clergy was also furious at Seltsas’ participation in the festival, and a priest asked Seltsas to publicly repent (δημόσια μετάννοια) because supposedly the sin of betraying your country is the biggest one of all.

Accord and discord In January 2018, the Greek Parliament dedicated lengthy sessions on whether the Agreement should be signed. Representatives from all par­ ties gave speeches, some more heated than others. Seltsas gave a speech on January 25 as well and he had the courage to recount the history of oppres­ sion his fellow Macedonians have gone through since 1912. He distinguished between nationality and citizenship in his speech and he found the Accord to be well balanced. History will be re-written in a non-nationalist way and the Macedonian language will be recognized as a South-Slavic language. What Seltsas emphasized was also the opening up of communication between the two countries and the Laimos-Prespa new border crossing. He also envi­ sioned a Balkan park at Prespa, where cultures meet and people mix. At the end, he congratulated the Prime Minister on his courage to sign such an Accord, and mentioned that all political refugees should return and bring to an end the 1982 Skoularikis-Gennimatas law, which did not allow the repa­ triation of those who do not declare they are of Greek descent. He added that the Accord would bring the much-desired healing of the historical wounds the population had suffered and would help the leaders of both Greece and North Macedonia look towards bridging the rifts between the two countries.

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The two elections that took place in 2015 (January and September) brought SYRIZA into power, and also saw the election of Seltsas to the Greek Parliament with 2758 votes. The second seat went to the ND candi­ date Ioannis Andoniadis, who seems to have gathered the “refugee” votes, himself of Pontic Greek descent and having held plenty of leading positions in Pontic Greek Associations for the past 25 years. It was for those two seats that both men competed in the July 7 national elections, which were admit­ tedly lukewarm in comparison with the May elections. This time, only 16 parties (ballots) ran. Conventional wisdom held that ND would win, and indeed it did (see Table 5.2). In total, 39.05% (12,696 votes) of the Florina district voted for ND and Ioannis Andoniadis was elected the party’s repre­ sentative with 7612 votes. The SYRIZA numbers were close, but the party still came second with 35.49% (11,540 votes). As conventional wisdom also predicted, Theopisti (Peti) Perka was elected with 4418 votes, while Kostas Seltsas received only 3301 votes and lost his seat. The newly founded Greek Solution party (Ελληνική Λύση) did quite well with 7.29% (2369 votes) of the vote, while KKE trailed in the fourth position with a mere 3.09% (1004 votes). “With powerful support and trust, voters made me the first woman elected to represent our district to Greek Parliament,” said Perka in an interview after her victory and promised to work hard and responsibly to represent the district. “Florina has a voice,” she concluded.46 Born in 1961 and raised in the town of Florina, Perka was a mother of two and had a degree in Engineering and Transportation from the University of Thessaloniki. Since her university years, she has been a member of SYRIZA and has held a number of government and private sector posts in her field. After 2015, she worked for the SYRIZA government as General Secretary of the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure. In her campaign flyer, she informed potential voters of all her accomplishments in building roads and dams in the area. “Now we decide for our lives” (Τώρα αποφασίζουμε για τη ζωή μας) was SYRIZA’s general slogan for the July national elections, but Perka’s slogan was “Florina has a voice” (Η Φλώρινα έχει φωνή). While, as we Table 5.2 July 7, 2019, national elections results in Florina Prefecture

New Democracy SYRIZA Greek Solution ANEL KKE

Florina Prefecture

Florina electoral district

Amindeo electoral district

Prespa electoral district

Outside residents

39.02 35.51 7.27 6.24 3.07

38.39 36.48 8.01 6.23 2.73

38.61 34.88 6.54 6.10 3.76

47.88 31.22 7.48 3.78 1.69

50.15 22.85 6.23 5.34 5.04

Source: ekloges.pdm.gov.gr

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140 Anastasia Karakasidou have seen above, Seltsas brought the voice of the ethnic Macedonians to the forefront, Perka wanted to raise a different “voice.” This new Florina voice is more composite and complicated, without ethnic and national dividing lines: it is the voice of a neglected border region with high unemployment and not much infrastructure. Since the Accord had proven to be unpopular even among SYRIZA supporters, Perka was a far more neutral candidate than Seltsas, who continued to campaign around identity issues. “We vote for clean/pure/unadulterated faces who will defend the rights of the many. Florina-Amindeo-Prespa, bring them to the center in the new government,” read the Seltsas pre-election flyer. He also listed his accomplishments in the past four years regarding the infrastructure public works in the district, such as in agriculture, the University of Western Macedonia, environment, health, inter-border communication, and public policy. But he did not abandon his original commitment to the ethnic Macedonians and their human rights. I met Seltsas a number of times over the course of my fieldwork. Accompanied by an entourage of young men and women who distributed his flyer and his ballot, Seltsas made the rounds of the three bazaars and spoke with people. I met Perka only once at the Amindeo bazaar, and after shaking my hand, she told me that I could bring any problem and concern I had to her. She reminded me that if she did not get elected, she would not be able to help me and other people with their dealings with the government. When I told her that I do not vote in the Florina district, she was a little embarrassed, but reassured me that SYRIZA had good candidates in all districts. When my friend told her that he would vote for Seltsas, she politely bid us goodbye. I met ND candidate Yiannis Antoniadis in the Florina bazaar with his entourage, shaking hands and talking to people. When I asked for a few minutes of his time, he promised to talk to me after the elections. In his flyer, he reminded people that he was a “real” Florina man, born and raised in the town. “You all know me, because I am Yiannis, your own man.” Nowhere in his flyer did he mention the Prespa Accord or the controversy over the use of the term “Macedonia.” He addressed people of all ethnic backgrounds and he would strive, he promised, for the district’s development and economic revival. At the Amindeo bazaar, I also met an unpretentious young man with a Marxist beard, who was running on the KKE ballot. It was apparent from his posture and way he interacted with people that he did not run to gain power, but only to have enough voices of leftist opposition in the new par­ liament. “Your power on the next day” (Η δύναμή σου την επόμενη μέρα) was KKE’s general slogan, and it appealed to workers and civil servants, farmers, pensioners, and the young. KKE stood by the people and never gave up fighting for their rights, the flyer told voters. The overall rhetoric was against the European Union, NATO, and capitalist monopolies. Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras, spoke in Florina’s main square on June 23, and admittedly the event gathered more people than the Mitsotakis public appearance a few weeks before. The weather was better, and young and old

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gathered to hear him. Security was tight as it was easy to spot the security men surveying the event. Tsipras expressed his happiness to be in Florina and openly referred to the Prespa agreement and the possibilities it opens up for the area. The common enemy is Turkey, he reminded the people, and North Macedonia is a valuable ally. People cheered and clapped, the music was good and loud, and one left the event thinking that a SYRIZA win was possible. “Of course it was well attended,” a ND supporter told me with irony in his voice, “all the autonomists and all the villagers came.” I saw familiar Rainbow Party faces in the event that evening; and in my con­ versations with them, they expressed their happiness to be there. SYRIZA appeared to have empowered them, opening up the conversation about their past and their quest for cultural rights. The Prespa Accord offered the same empowerment to a number of Greek academics and historians who have been trying to research and write about the area’s history in a balanced and non-nationalistic way. SYRIZA might have lost the summer 2019 elections, but the party won the “hearts and minds” of some local Macedonians who felt betrayed by the KKE and did not want to carry the “stigma” of the Rainbow. Nonetheless, local voters outvoted Seltsas, who was very instrumental in the promotion of Macedonian culture and language in the SYRIZA government. “We can­ not vote only for sentimental reasons,” told me a middle aged man who casted his vote for Perka, despite his support of Seltsas in his commitment to openly express Macedonian culture. “We need funds, and we need to get local development initiatives promoted,” he continued, pointing to the inability of Seltsas to become a powerful mediator and patron.

Deep state The important lesson we therefore learn from the 2019 national elections is that the majority of the local Macedonians prefer to vote for mainstream candidates that offer chances of financial and labor security. This trend is by no means a recent development, as the electoral results of the past cen­ tury indicate. Voting for the royalists and the conservatives in the Interwar period, for example, was by no means due to ideological links: politicians like Dragoumis capitalized on the anti-refugee sentiments of the locals and began a culture of clientelism that turned local Macedonians into clients. The romance with the KKE started around the same time and attracted those locals who were more keen to express and fight for their non-Greek otherness. But when the local Macedonians were drawn into the resistance and the Civil War on the side of the communists, and the world was divided between the capitalist west and the communist east, the majority of them were obliged to leave Greece. For those who stayed, the option to follow main­ stream political parties became an attractive survival strategy. Politicians like Modis created a circle of clients among the local Macedonians, and with their anti-communist ideology offered them a safe space for their work

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142 Anastasia Karakasidou and family. A “conspiracy of silence” about their otherness also has roots in the post-WWII decades, since practicing Macedonian culture became synonymous with being communist and “traitor.” The post-junta PASOK socialists opened new venues for the locals, with Yiorgos Lianis holding a prominent position as a powerful patron. Lianis, in addition to bringing economic development and jobs to the local Macedonians, spoke freely of their ethnic particularity, but it was Greek culture that he promoted. He semi-lifted the veil of silence, but Macedonian identity was never conceived outside the Greek national model. Seltsas in the 2010s was successful in completely lifting the veil, but as we have seen, he lost in the 2019 elections because he could not morph into a powerful patron and because his party (SYRIZA) promoted another candidate that did not threaten the ethnic bal­ ance of power in the Florina region. According to a 2013 Nova Zora, the newspaper of the Rainbow Party, article, this “deep state” (βαθύ κράτος) condition characterizes politics in the Florina area: every time a local Macedonian takes a step towards pub­ licly and politically maintaining a Macedonian identity, failure ensues. The article discusses the case of Haralambos Papathanasiou, originally from the village of Sitaria (Rosen) who studied law in Athens and was elected twice to Greek parliament (11/1989 and 6/1990). He was known among the local Macedonians as Babi-nash, “our Babis,” who attracted their vote although he ran on the ND ballot. The third time he ran for parliament, however, the ND party “pulled the rug under his feet,” and he found himself defeated by a candidate of Pontic Greek descent promoted by the party.47 Seltsas seems to have had the same luck, and found himself outvoted as well. The signing of the Prespa Accord proved overall to be disastrous for SYRIZA and led to its defeat in the 2019 elections. But even within SYRIZA, the contest between those who raise a Macedonian voice, like Seltsas, and those who raise a Florina/Greek voice, like Perka, indeed points to the influence of the “deep state” and “conspiracy of silence” conditions discussed above.

Acknowledgments My friends in the Florina region deserve my deep gratitude for opening up their homes and memories to my inquisitive anthropological query. Vasiliki Neofotistos both inspired me to research and write this chapter, and she diligently went through a few drafts and challenged me to further think and develop certain points. Loring Danforth also read an earlier version of the paper and he deserves my many thanks as well.

Notes 1 https://www.cnn.gr/ekloges/story/177328/eyroekloges-2019-saranta-kommata­ tha-symmetasxoyn-sti-diadikasia (Accessed May 20, 2020). 2 Florina Prefecture belongs to the district of western Macedonia that includes the Kastoria, Grevena, and Kozani prefectures. For this reason, this paper

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12

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will not address issues and voting patterns in the district elections. Neither will it discuss all local elections, with the exception of the Florina and Meliti municipal elections. For more information on the village’s history, as well as other villages and towns mentioned in this paper. http://novazora.gr/arhivi/category/nasi-sela (Accessed May 20, 2020). The names of villages will henceforth appear in Greek, while the old Macedo­ nian name will be given in parenthesis. https://www.iefimerida.gr/politiki/omilia-toy-kyriakoy-mitsotaki-apo-tin-flo­ rina (Accessed May 20, 2020). https://echoflorina.gr/αποκλειστική-συνέντευξη-του-κυριάκο/ (Accessed May 20, 2020). The term “public sphere” is freely borrowed from Habermas, who traced its origins to the 1750’s, when newspapers assumed the important roles of being leaders in public opinion and weapons of party politics. https://www.pellanews.gr/politiki/η-ραχήλ-μακρή-κατηγορεί-τον-δήμαρχο­ αμυνταίου-ότι-έδωσε-άδεια-για-το-συνέδριο-του-ουράνιου (Accessed May 20, 2020). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JXJ5T9wm94 (Accessed May 20, 2020). https://www.in.gr/2018/12/04/politics/diplomatia/istoria-gia-ti-makedoniki­ meionotita-ta-dikastiria-oi-apofaseis-ouranio-tokso/. Christos Sidiropoulos is a minority activist and founding member of the Rain­ bow Party. https://www.in.gr/2018/12/04/politics/diplomatia/istoria-gia-ti­ makedoniki-meionotita-ta-dikastiria-oi-apofaseis-ouranio-tokso/ (Accessed May 20, 2020). It should be noted that the Rainbow Party was less popular in the Prespa electoral district, which in general votes more conservative than the other two districts. Most of the Macedonians of the area left after the Civil War and new inhabitants of refugee, Vlah, Sarakatsan or Albanian descent were settled there. According to Kostopoulos (2016), the Prefecture of Florina-Kastoria had 140,000 people, of which 110,000 were Christians, 30,000 Muslims, and 1500 Jews. The 80,000 of the Christians were speaking Slavic, with the exception of the town of Kastoria and 14 Greek-speaking villages in the district. A 72% of the Slavic speakers (or 41% of the total population) also belonged to the Bul­ garian Exarchist Church until the Balkan Wars. The Konstantinidis family was well respected by the Liberals and Venizelos himself had a personal respect for the “Grandfather” of Florina’s Press, Stav­ ros Konstantininidis. Katharevousa was conceived in the late 18th century as a writing and literary language that combined Ancient Greek and demotic (spoken) Greek of the time. For example, in the 1928 elections, the Communists received 7.68% of the vote in the villages predominantly inhabited by local Macedonians, while the Lib­ erals came first with 45.71%. The anti-Venizelists trailed with 19.8%, while the Agrarian and Populist alliance received 7.68%. https://www.ascsa.edu.gr/index.php/archives/philippos-dragoumis-biogra­ phy (Accessed May 20, 2020). General Governor of Macedonia (1932-34), Foreign undersecretary (1944–45, 1946) Minister of the Military (1946–47), Foreign Minister (1952) and Minis­ ter of the Military (1963). A sample of his publications are: “Pay attention to Northern Greece” (1948), “The National Rights in the Peace Convention” (1949), “Defense of the parlia­ mentary system” (1950), “On the Cyprus Question” (1950).

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144 Anastasia Karakasidou 20 A sample of the societies he was an active member includes Association for the Dissemination of Greek letters, Greek Geographical Society, Greek Folklore Society, Musical and Dramatic Association of the Athens Conservatory, Soci­ ety of Byzantine Studies, Center for Asia Minor Studies, and Rotary Club. 21 https://www.iefimerida.gr/news/122586/o-ιων-δραγούμης-δεν-έχει-καμία­ σχέση-με-τη-σημερινή-εθνικιστική-ακροδεξιά-της-χρυσής-αυγ (Accessed May 20, 2020). 22 http://www.lithoksou.net/dhraghumis.html and https://adiotos.wordpress. com/2009/06/20/dragoumis-makedoniki-gloss/ (Accessed May 20, 2020). 23 http://novazora.gr/arhivi/10681http://novazora.gr/arhivi/10681 (Accessed May 20, 2020). The document is now housed in the Gennadios Library, Athens, Folder 96-11, dated to September 14, 1962. 24 http://www.lithoksou.net/dhraghumis.html (Accessed May 20, 2020). 25 Κωνσταντίνος Καραβίδας, Αγροτικά, επανέκδοση Α.Τ.Ε., Αθήνα 1978, σ. 306–307. 26 Avgi (4.12.1954). 27 https://radio-lehovo.gr/oi-ekloges-tis-31is-martioy-1946-sti-florina-grafei-o­ filologos-poygaridis-stefanos/ (Accessed May 20, 2020). 28 https://radio-lehovo.gr/oi-ekloges-tis-31is-martioy-1946-sti-florina-grafei-o­ filologos-poygaridis-stefanos/ (Accessed May 20, 2020). 29 http://history-of-macedonia.com/2009/04/04/georgios-modis-kai-i-makedo­ nia/ (Accessed May 20, 2020). 30 http://vlahofonoi.blogspot.com/2013/01/blog-post_971.html (Accessed May 20, 2020). 31 For example, on June 19, 1966 he spoke at the inaugural ceremony for a Mac­ edonian fighter monument in the town of Goumenissa and he was praised by the local press as the true hero of the struggle.http://www.goumenissa.eu/1su­ grafeis.htm (Accessed May 20, 2020). 32 http://thesecretrealtruth.blogspot.com/2019/01/1944.html#ixzz5zhHSrHov (Accessed May 20, 2020). 33 https://www.ianos.gr/en/person/lianis-giorgos-0028043.html (Accessed May 20, 2020). 34 https://www.iefimerida.gr/news/358647/o-giorgos-papahristos-gia-ton-liani­ poy-ypodehtike-ton-tsipra-thymos (Accessed May 20, 2020). 35 https://w w w.kar f itsa.g r/προπηλακίστηκ ε- ο -γιώργος-λ ιάν ης- στη- φ/ (Accessed May 20, 2020). 36 https://www.voria.gr/article/lianis-ena-dimopsifisma-sti-florina-tha-edichne­ 80-iper-tis-simfonias (Accessed May 20, 2020). 37 https://www.protothema.gr/politics/article/859845/to-ouranio-toxo-ka­ lei-tin-ellada-na-zitisei-suggnomi-gia-ta-eglimata-pou-diepraxe-enadi­ on-tou-makedonikou-laou/ (Accessed May 20, 2020). 38 Μανόλης Γαλάνης, 29/01/2019, 17:48 32 Προκαλεί το «Ουράνιο Τόξο»: Είμαστε μέλη εθνικής Μακεδονικής μειονότητας στη Βόρεια Ελλάδα Σοφία Βούλτεψη: Η Συμφωνία των Πρεσπών άνοιξε την όρεξη στο σλαβόφωνο «Ουράνιο Τόξο» 14/12/2018, 12:33. 39 Γιωργος Σκαφιδας. https://www.ethnos.gr/politiki/59854_skopianoi-boreio­ makedones-slabomakedones-i-makedones-pos-prepei-na-toys-apokaloyme (Accessed May 20, 2020). 40 https://www.voria.gr/article/kata-tis-elladas-iche-prosfigi-o-seltsas-gia-make­ doniko-somatio (Accessed May 20, 2020). 41 The other three candidates were Athanasios Germanidis, Pavlos Georgiou, and Anna Spirtou. 42 The six men who filed the charges were: Christos Sidiropoulos, Petros Dimtsis, Stavros Anastasiadis, Anastasios Bules, Stavros Sovitsilis, and Kostas Seltsas.

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43 http://ambassadorsatlarge.com/archives/73983 (Accessed May 20, 2020).. 44 EAM was the main movement of the Greek Resistance during the German occupation of Greece, with the KKE being its main driving force. 45 https://twitter.com/hashtag/σελτσας?lang=en (Accessed May 20, 2020). 46 https://echoflorina.gr/ευχαριστήριο-μήνυμα-θεοπίστης-πέτης/ (Accessed May 20, 2020).

47 http://novazora.gr/arhivi/date/2013/02 (Accessed May 20, 2020).

References http://neaflorina.blogspot.com/2015/01/1915.html Andreou A., and Iliadou-Tahou S. 2009. “Εκλογικές συμπεριφορές στη Δυτική Μακεδονία (1915-1936).” [Voting behaviors in Western Macedonia (1915-1936).] Thessaloniki: Proceedings of the Panhellenic History Congress of the Historical Society, 464–85. Danforth, Loring, and Riki Van Boeschoten. 2012. Children of the Greek Civil War: Refugees and the Politics of Memory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Grouios, Elias. 2019. SNOF: Η συγκρότηση και η Δράση του στη Δυτική Μακεδονία. [SNOF: Its establishment and activities in Western Macedonia.] MA Thesis, Department of Public Education, University of Western Greece, Florina. Habermas, Jurgen. 1991. The structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Iosifidis, Vasilis, 2015. Ο Φίλιππος Δραγούμης και το ζήτημα των ξενοφώνων: Προβληματισμοί και εφαρμογές στην εκπαιδευτική πράξη της Δυτικής Μακεδονίας. [Philippos Dragoumis and the case of the foreign-speakers: Questions and imple­ mentations of educational policies in Western Macedonia.] MA Thesis, Department of Public Education, University of Western Greece, Florina. Kofos, Evangelos. 1964. Nationalism and Communism in Macedonia. Thessaloniki: Institute of Balkan Studies. Kolliopoulos, Ioannis. 1994. The Plundering of consciousness: The Macedonian Question in occupied western Macedonia. Thessaloniki: Vanias. Kostopoulos, Tasos. 2016. “Απελευθερώσεις κατά συρροή.” [Massive liberations.] https://www.efsyn.gr/themata/fantasma-tis istorias/81987_apeleytheroseis-kata-syrroi (Accessed September 11, 2016). Koutavas, Spyros. 2018. “Λιάνης: Η Φλώρινα θα έχει περισσότερο φώς από το αποτέλεσμα της συμφωνίας.” [Lianis: Florina will have more light from the Accord.] https://vetonews.gr/politiki/item/50572-lianhs-«h-flwrina-tha’chei-perissotero­ fws-apo-to-apotelesma-ths-symfwnias»-boskopoylos-ochi-sto-onoma-makedonia (Accessed June 13, 2018). Lithoksou, Dimitrios. http://www.lithoksou.net Modis, Yeorgios. 1967. Ο Μακεδονικός αγών και η νεώτερη Μακεδονική Ιστορία. [The Macedonian Struggle and the Modern Macedonian History.] Thessaloniki: Institute for Balkan Studies. Pougaridis, Stefanos. 2019. “Οι εκλογές της 31ης Μαρτίου 1946 στη Φλώρινα.” [The elections of 31 March 1946 in Florina.] https://radio-lehovo.gr/oi-ekloges-tis­ 31is-martioy-1946-sti-florina-grafei-o-filologos-poygaridis-stefanos/ Sfetas, Spiridon. 2001. Οψεις του Μακεδονικού Ζητήματος στον 20ο αιώνα. [Facets of the Macedonian Question in the 20th Century.] Thessaloniki: Vanias.

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Terleki, Paraskevi. 2018. Ο Γεώργιος Μόδης ως Πηγή της Τοπικής Ιστορίας [Yeorgios Modis as a Source of Local History.] MA Thesis, Department of Public Education, University of Western Macedonia, Florina. Zagos, Christos. 2011. Πολιτική, Τύπος και Τόπος̈Οι κοινοβουλευτικές εκλογές στη Φλώρινα (1926῏2009). [Politics, Press and Place: Parliamentary elections in Florina (1926-2009).] Athens: Epikendro.

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6

The Agreement that brought the nation to completion and extinction Macedonian political parties and the framing of the Prespa Agreement Aleksandar Takovski

Introduction The 27-year old name dispute between Greece and the country formerly known as the Republic of Macedonia and now known as Republic of North Macedonia ended with the Prespa Agreement in June 2018. The Agreement stipulated that the Republic of Macedonia would add the geo­ graphic qualifier North to its constitutional name, a political solution that sought popular consensus through the referendum organized in September 2018. Both events caused significant political controversies, manifested in the divergent narratives and visions of the state, the nation, and its identity produced by two political actors—the incumbent Social Democratic Union (henceforth SD) and the oppositional Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization-Democratic Party for Macedonian National Unity (hence­ forth VMRO-DPMNE). At the core of this inter-party conflict was the interpretation of the impact of the Agreement on the political future and the identity politics in the Republic of Macedonia. The debate was framed along the conflicting attempts to legitimize/delegitimize the Agreement vis-à-vis national prosperity on the one hand and national identity on the other. The incumbent SDSM have produced a discourse that highlights the Agreement’s positive instrumental value -its significance for Macedonia’s EU accession process- while at the same time have presented the Agreement as a tool for preserving and perpetuating national identity.1 Moreover, the Agreement according to the Minister of Foreign Affairs Nikola Dimitrov marks the completion of the processes of nation and state formation. On the other hand, the opposition VMRO-DPMNE party has vehemently crit­ icized the Agreement on the grounds that it has an anti-constitutional char­ acter and it is a grave threat to the Macedonian nation, even pushing it over the edge of extinction. Having this in mind, the primary purpose of this chapter is to identify the arguments offered in support of these two divergent claims and to discuss them in relation to identity politics by looking into the SD-deployed strat­ egies that positively present the Agreement as a benefit to both the state and the national identity, and the VMRO-DPMNE produced strategies that

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negatively construct the Agreement as a threat to national identity. The reason for discussing the effect of the Agreement, and the referendum in consequence, on the political and the politicized discourses on the nation and its identity is to provide an answer to the overarching question of this study. Namely, is national identity really jeopardized as claimed by the Macedonian opposition, or is it protected as advocated by the Government? If none of these are true, then is it the case that these conflicting discourses of the nation and its identity politics, which emerged as a response to the Agreement, are not more than convenient instruments of interparty con­ flict, transforming identity politics into a highly commodifiable and suscep­ tible populist tool of inter-party competition? To identify and discuss the strategies deployed by the two main political actors, the chapter will undertake discursive analysis of the parties’ inter­ pretations and (de)legitimizations of the Prespa Agreement and the referen­ dum vis-a-vis the two separate visions and discourses on the nation. Given that the official discourse on the Agreement and the adherent referendum is structured around the topoi of benefit and threat, the focal point of the analysis will be the discursive strategies and linguistic means of realization that present the Agreement positively as a benefit and those presenting it negatively as a threat. To do so, I have collected two data corpuses, consisting of the official news statements issued by Minister of Foreign Affairs Nikola Dimitrov, Prime Minister Zoran Zaev, VMRO-DPMNE leader Hristijan Mickoski, former president Ivanov, and few of VMRO-DPMNE high officials and sup­ porters. The sources used to collect data were the website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the websites of various newspapers and portals, identified and reached through the news aggregate time.mk. Unfortunately, due to their low functionality (archived data was inaccessible through a key word search), the official sites of the two parties could not be used as additional data sources. The initial data search identified more than 500 news releases/articles, which were then narrowed down to 51 by eliminating multiple reports of the same news. The initial qualitative reading of these resulted in the identification of five categories of alleged benefits of the Agreement consistently communicated by the Government. A similar pro­ cedure was undertaken to identify, collect, and process statements issued by VMRO-DPMNE members and supporters during which 300 news releases and articles were first collected and then narrowed down to 38. The two recurring topics related to the Agreement were threat to sovereignty and threat to the constitution. The data is organized into two corpuses. The first corpus consists of statements issued in the period between June 17, when the Agreement was officially announced, and June 30, when initial reac­ tions to and interpretations of the Agreement were produced. The second corpus consists of statements that were issued between September 1 and September 28 and given during the referendum campaign. The reason for looking into two distinct periods, June and September respectively, is to

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ascertain possible shifts in the parties’ discourse. Before embarking on my analysis, I should note that I will henceforth use the abbreviated name RN Macedonia instead of the constitutional name North Macedonia in order to express my dissatisfaction with the renaming being externally imposed by Greece, additionally supported and legitimized by the EU. Also, this choice reflects the strong feeling of bitterness shared by many Macedonians about the name change.

The contours of national identity In an attempt to answer what national identity is (what are its constitutive elements), how it is constructed and/or contested, and what can threaten or even deconstruct it, I shall make a short overview of some theories of nationalism with the focus on ideas most readily applicable to the case at hand. Their explanatory power aside, modernist theories of nationalism (see Anderson 1983; Gellner 1983; Hroch 1985; Nairn 2003) tend to focus on the historic, social, economic, and political processes underpinning the rise of the nation rather than the contents that define the notion of national identity, such as territory, history, memories, language, and so on. In this respect, the ethnosymbolic theory (see Smith 1988, 1991, 1995) offers an interpretation of nationalism that highlights the constitutive role of the cul­ tural contents of nationality. According to Smith, ethnicity as the founding block of nationalism is “a type of cultural collectivity, one that emphasizes the role of myths of descent and historical memories, and that is recog­ nized by one or more cultural differences like religion, customs, language, or institutions” (Smith 1988, 32; 1991, 20), while nation is “a named popu­ lation sharing a historic territory, common myths and historical memories, a mass public culture, a common economy and common legal rights and duties for all members” (1991, 14). The bases for nationalism, Smith argues are (1991), a collective proper name, myth of common ancestry, shared his­ toric memories, one or more elements of common culture, association with a homeland, and a sense of solidarity. The ethnosymbolic understanding of the nation, however, is not without conceptual flaws and methodologi­ cal inconsistencies. It has been pointed out that such an understanding rei­ fies nations (Norval 1996), lacks historical detail and methodological rigor (Breuilly 2005), and makes no differentiation between modern nations and earlier ethnic communities (Connor 1994, 2005), in addition to being deter­ ministic, fatalist, and finalistic (Malesevic 2006). Nonetheless, the concept of the nation as constructed around the themes of myth of origin, antiquity, common ancestry, and shared memories is a useful explanatory tool to understand VMRO-DPMNE-DPMNE’s bitter criticism of the Agreement as a threat to national identity. The Agreement in this sense denies access to the very core of the national identity as conceptu­ alized by ethnosymbolists and materialized by VMRO-DPMNE’s national

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150 Aleksandar Takovski building project Skopje 2014, which has placed Alexander the Great and antiquity at the heart of the national narrative. The Agreement forbids the use of Alexander the Great as the foundation myth of the nation and thus disturbs the necessary continuity with the past that the nationalist discourse seeks to establish. The prohibition on the use of the ancient Macedonian past, one of the most significant identity building blocks for VMRO-DPMNE, caused an anxious reaction among party members and supporters, as shown below. Such a reaction complies with Hobsbawm’s seminal work on the invention of tradition (1983) through a set of repetitive practices seeking to incalculate certain values, norms, and behaviors that automatically imply continuity with the past. In the process, history is used as a legitimator of action and cement of social cohesion, and the new traditions are fashioned in the likes of the old as a response in times of rapid social change when unity and order is paramount, such as the political crisis that emerged from the name dis­ pute. Three particularly useful means, “innovations” in Hobsbawm words, facilitate the invention of tradition: primary education, invention of public ceremonies, and mass production of public monuments. The set of repetitive practices and the innovations are the key instruments in the discursive con­ struction of national identity since they help produce meanings about “the nation” with which people can identify. These meanings, Hall argues, are contained in the stories told about the nation, the memories which connect its present with its past, and the images constructed of it (Hall 1996, 613). The specific meanings, memories, and images that enact and reproduce the national narrative and contain the myth of origin and continuity are encapsulated in the blueprint of the VMRO-DPMNE-produced discourse on national identity—the Skopje 2014 project. The project is a physical representation of the party’s vision of the Macedonian national narrative. It positions Alexander the Great at the symbolic center of national iden­ tity, presenting him as the undeniable foundation myth and creating the necessary continuity between past and present on which national identity allegedly depends. The visual narrative of the nation embodied in the mon­ umental architecture consuming the whole of the Macedonian capital’s city center is repetitively reproduced, as stipulated by Hobsbawm, by a set of discursive products and practices, such as school curricula and textbooks, museum exhibits, TV documentaries, and tourist brochures, to name a few. The pressure, then, exerted by the Prespa Agreement to re-conceptualize all of the identity enacting practices, and hence to reconstruct the national narrative by abandoning Alexander the Great and Antiquity, is the ground upon which VMRO-DPMNE has raised its criticism against the Agreement. However, in order to understand the manner in which the party has artic­ ulated its reaction to the Agreement, two additional concepts related to national identity, and to inter-party communication and confrontation need to be introduced. These will also help explain the specific mechanisms of SD’s presentation of the Agreement.

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The two useful concepts are discursive construction of national identity as elaborated in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and the concept of neg­ ative versus positive presentation as structuring principles of political com­ munication.2 In terms of the former, Wodak et al. (2009) have identified five discursive strategies and two sub-strategies of national identity construc­ tion.3 Out of all these seven strategies, two are particularly useful for this study. These are the strategies of perpetuation, which aim to maintain (pre­ serve, support, protect) and reproduce national identity, especially when threatened, and the strategies of dissimilation, which emphasize difference in the contents of national identity. The latter concept is concomitant with Barth’s view of boundary making mechanisms, essentially mechanisms of creating and perpetuating differences, as the basis of nationalism (Barth 1969). In this context, the strategies of presenting the Agreement as a means of preservation and protection of national identity and as a tool that unambiguously differentiates (dissimilates) between Macedonian and nonMacedonian identity are but sub-strategies of the macro strategies of pos­ itive/negative presentation of the Agreement, deployed by the two parties alike in an attempt to legitimize or delegitimize its acceptance. These two macro strategies of presentation may be accomplished through a set of dis­ cursive sub-strategies, namely, referential, predicational, argumentation, perspectivization, and mitigation/intensification strategies (Reisigl and Wodak 2001). Of seminal relevance to the present study are the argumenta­ tion strategies and the fund of topoi that the two actors (SDSM and VMRO­ DPMNE) have used to present the Agreement as good (a benefit) or as bad (a threat) and to justify such predications by the use of specific topoi. The identification and discussion of these strategies and the fund of topoi used by the parties form the backbone of my analysis. Finally, two issues need to be addressed before presenting the methodo­ logical design: a) the role of a name in, and its relation with, the construction of national identity, b) the threats to national identity. Naming is a funda­ mental expression of political power because to name something means to bring it into existence (Bourdieu 1991). This is precisely what legitimates the Greek 27-year old fear mobilized by the use of the word “Macedonia” by a newly emerged independent state in 1991—this, and the need to cre­ ate a threatened self as a façade and distractor from domestic economic and political problems (Triandafyllidou 1998). In addition, names are met­ aphorical devices, providing conceptual casing and summarizing complex sociohistorical circumstances (Edelman 1971; Lakoff and Johnson 1980). Each name drives, and is sustained by, narratives in the process of “collec­ tive remembering” (Wertsch 2002). Telling stories, suggesting metaphori­ cal links with behaviors and unfolding events. As such, names are indexes of existence and symbols that summarize all nation-constituting elements, such as myths, memories, history, shared language, values, and the emo­ tional attachment associated with these elements. Somewhat different from this, Geary argues that due to the constant shifting of allegiances,

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152 Aleksandar Takovski intermarriages, and transformations, all that remains are names, vessels that could hold different contents in different times, or as he puts it “names were renewable resources, old names (Alexander) could be reclaimed, adopted to new circumstances used as rallying cries for new powers” (2002, 118). However, the issue of renaming a country is a much more complex issue given the attachment of the people to the country name and the unifying symbolic power it bears as a signifier of history, memory, and even destiny. Understandably, its change may be disturbing to parts of the nation, espe­ cially when the name change is the result of foreign political pressure (Greek veto) and not the result of an ideological clash (as in Volgograd/Tsaritsyn/ Stalingrad, Ho Chi Minh/Saigon, Zaire/Congo), or (de)colonization (as in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, Ivory Coast, formally Côte d’Ivoire). The change of the name may not directly jeopardize identity because first, it breaks the popularly internalized link, which seems unbreakable, between itself and the constituent contents of the identity it should signify in its totality and second, it bears significant implications for daily life given that the new name is unanimously used to refer to all state institutions. What can actually cause changes in the population’s identity are certain events that generate profound changes in the nation constituting elements, events such as wars, enslavement, genocide, conquest, exile, influx of immi­ grants, and religious conversion (Smith 1991). All these disrupt the sense of cultural continuity, but also the sense of group cohesion. What is at stake in the Macedonian case is not the threat of colonization or cultural assimilation, but the loss of one national identity building resource, that of Alexander the Great. This resource is the foundation myth that both places what is now known as RN Macedonia in times immemorial and guarantees historical continuity. Re-naming in the Macedonian context as prescribed by the Agreement requires abandoning of this particular myth of origin, causes fissure in the narrative of common ancestry and common historic memories, and threatens solidarity. It is clear that the threat as such is of representational (discursive), rather than phenomenological, character. But, who can deny the emotional and psychological reality of national identity as felt by the members, the same urge that made some Macedonians bitter about the loss of their identity pantheon, and pushed many Greeks to vehe­ mently protest against the use of the word “Macedonia” and of the figure of Alexander the Great by Macedonians. Methodological design As noted earlier, the discourses on the Agreement are not designed to con­ struct national identity, but rather to legitimize and/or delegitimize the acceptance of the Agreement. While the legitimization efforts produced by the SDSM rely on the assumption that the Agreement is a benefit to both Macedonian state and identity politics, the oppositional VMRO-DPMNE has tried to delegitimize the Agreement on grounds of it being a threat to the

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Macedonian state and identity politics in what is now RN Macedonia. The overarching argument that interrelates all benefits suggested by SD, I argue, is that the Agreement creates and enables conditions for a better future. To justify this implicit argument, the SDSM have positively described the Agreement while highlighting the multiple benefits it brings and offering few arguments in support. It is these arguments along with the topoi (argumen­ tative schemes) and their discursive manifestations produced by the SDSM that I will identify and analyze in order to illustrate the positive presentation of the Agreement. Regarding the issue of identity politics, the SDSM have on the one hand primarily used perpetuation strategies, whereby the party presented the Agreement as a necessary tool to preserve, support, protect and perpetuate national identity, and on the other hand used partly dissim­ ilating strategies in order to help disassociate the contents of Macedonian identity from those forming the identity of its neighbors. On the other hand, and expectedly so, the opposition has labeled the Agreement negatively as shameful, a capitulation, traitorous, genocidal, and so on. Within the plethora of such attributions, the most repetitive negative predication used by the party is that the Agreement is an anticonstitutional act that erases Macedonian identity. Euphemistically speak­ ing, it is allegedly a threat to both state sovereignty and national identity at once. The main topos used in support of this predication is that of loss (of statehood and identity), while the most exploited linguistic means of reali­ zation is metonym pars pro toto (whole for a part), whereby the loss of one part of identity is the loss of the whole. Within this context, my analysis will seek to demonstrate these particular strategies that VMRO-DPMNE has used to present the Agreement in a negative light. In short, the analysis will focus on: a) the predicational and argumen­ tation strategies used by the SDSM to legitimize (positively present) the Agreement), b) the strategies of perpetuation and dissimilation used by the SDSM to present the Agreement as an instrument of identity disambigua­ tion, preservation, and protection, and c) the strategies used by the oppo­ sition to construct a negative image of the Agreement as a threat to both Macedonian sovereignty and national identity. Although parties’ attempts to delegitimize each other’s arguments are constitutive of the interparty conflict enhanced by the Prespa Agreement, these have been left out of the scope of this analysis due to space limitations. On one hand, the acts of blame-casting and accusation that structure the inter-party discourse of delegitimizing the opponent refer to a plethora of discursive events that pre­ date the Prespa Agreement. Their analysis would not be complete without an extended historic background necessary to understand present day accu­ sations. On the other hand, these moves rely on different discursive strate­ gies and linguistic means of realization, the inclusion of which would have burdened this analysis beyond necessity. Hence, these, albeit being part of the discourse triggered by the Agreement, constitute a different subject of analysis.

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154 Aleksandar Takovski Identity politics within party discourses Prior to presenting the positions of the two main political actors on the Agreement and the referendum, I will turn to an examination of how the parties have addressed the issue of identity politics in their discourses. Traditionally, SDSM members have undertaken a more modernist, flexible approach to the question of identity politics, very often taking the 20th cen­ tury, the ASNOM assembly in particular, as the core of Macedonian -under­ stood as a Slavic- identity. In addition, the party has maintained the attitude that a change to the name of the country does not affect national identity. Moreover, the question of national identity has been treated as secondary, especially to the question of RN Macedonia’s accession to the EU. In this respect, the pro-European discourse of SD, as well as their instrumental use of it, dates far before 2018. During the intensive political crisis in the for­ merly called Macedonia when VMRO-DPMNE was in power (2014-2016), SDSM capitalized on the EU officials’ interest and presence in the country to create an image of itself as ‘EU-bedient’ political ally with a rational political EU-vision (Takovski 2019).4 Hence, their discourse, produced in response to the Agreement, is a continuation of the discourse where the issue of national identity is treated as secondary to the socio-political and economic end of joining the EU. The present-day VMRO-DPMNE, a conservative party with a mark­ edly nationalist discourse, claims historical continuity from VMRO, a XIX Macedonian revolutionary organization fighting for the country’s independ­ ence from the Ottoman Empire.5 Over the period of VMRO-DPMNE’s reign between 2006 and 2016, the party commissioned a nation branding project dubbed Skopje 2014 (see Graan 2013, 2016) as a response to the impasse caused by the name dispute with Greece (Damjanovski and Markovikj 2020). Through the appropriation of public space (buildings, monuments, statues) and the use of state institutions (museums, schools, media), the project has introduced a revived nationalist discourse at the core of which is Alexander the Great. The statue of this historic figure is placed at the Skopje city square, and appears as the apotheosis of the national ideal, one that literally rises above all else (Graan and Takovski 2017, 70). Undeniably, the project seeks to invent a tradition for the Macedonian nation that orig­ inates in antiquity and creates continuity between the past and the present. The attempt to abolish this narrative with the Prespa Agreement has stirred discontent and criticism among VMRO-DPMNE officials and supporters labeling the Agreement as a threat to identity politics in the state. Data presentation The Agreement brings a better future because … The next table summarizes the key arguments raised by PM Zoran Zaev and MFA Nikola Dimitrov in support of the assumption that the Agreement

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creates a better future by offering specific benefits. The table outlines the benefits, along with the topoi used, illustrated by examples in June and September. The two different periods were chosen in order to ascertain potential differences in the official discourse resulting from the shift of the focus on the Agreement in June to a focus on the referendum as a means of gaining popular acceptance of the Agreement in September. The language forms through which the topoi have been realized in the discourse are high­ lighted in bold in order to facilitate the presentation and comprehension of the material.6 Positive presentation of the Agreement Benefit

topoi

Example in June

appeal to a positive We have created a regional community, a family.7 It social value [the Agreement] brought (friendship/family) us a friend believed not to be one. We have chosen a solution that unites, we have built friendship with Greece. That is the jewel in our relations. That is the factor that provides safety and security to both countries.8 With the Agreement we positive enables have created a chance. We consequence, better have a historic opportunity desired ends future to build stronger economic relations, and achieve better growth and development rate, new era of stability, prosperity and security. The Agreement pulls us away from the past and takes us to future.10 Appeal to negative The question was open solves a consequence, now for three decades. Three problem decades of uncertainty and then, Closes a for our future. Three unique example troublesome decades of serious fears past of undesirable circumstances.12

builds friendship with Greece

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Example in September With it [the referendum] we are building friendship with the countries from the region, with EU. Macedonia is determined to […] build friendship, to create future.9

With the referendum, we will have secured the future of the state, the future of our children.11

The Prespa Agreement is a unique example from the Balkans of compromise, reconciliation13 […] it was our

responsibility to

solve the open

question that

jeopardized the

Macedonian

future.14

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156 Aleksandar Takovski Completes statehood

EU member­ ship

historic necessity

EU as idyllic place (locus amoenus), desired end

With the referendum The problem which as a in 1991, we have stone pulls back our gained independ­ prosperity, statehood and progress, makes us a ence, with the referendum on 30th state with incomplete September we are statehood, […] it is the cementing our last stage of an era of independence. Back building our statehood, then we gained gaining international legitimacy15, […] and this independence, now we need to secure Agreement puts an end Macedonian future of that stage, it closes a with a quantum leap strategic chapter of its to EU by accepting modern history—EU full the Agreement. This membership.16 second referendum will enhance our independence and we need to say yes, for a stable and secure future, for a future in Europe.17 Macedonia in the EU It de-blocked our and NATO to secure ascension to the EU stable future and alliance. Let Prespa be the path to our European economic growth, […] new work future.18 Membership places, higher negotiations will create a salaries, eco and track, a frame where the healthy agricultural old politics will be produce,20 […] replaced with a new politics of responsibility, guaranteeing the transparency, rule of law. integrity, safety and 19 The businesses have a stability. Higher wages, lower future in the European unemployment rate, market […] The Unions grater (tourist) will have better rights. mobility, health EU and NATO, besides benefits, security, means economy. insurance.21

Given that the key motive underpinning the striking of the Agreement is the settlement of a diplomatic dispute with a neighbor, it is not surprising that PM Zaev has presented the Agreement as a tool for creating a very close, socially valuable bond (friendship, family). Although other benefi­ ciaries of the newly created friendship, such as the countries in the region and the EU are mentioned, the key beneficiary of the bond created is Greece, judging from the high frequency of the occurrence of Greece in the phrase “friendship with….” This new unity (friendship) is, furthermore, positively evaluated with the metaphorical expression “jewel” (skapocen kamen), and presented instrumentally as a factor of stability and a springboard to a better future.

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The argument regarding the positive consequence of a better future is present everywhere in Zaev’s discourse. On one hand, the Agreement is allegedly a platform upon which a better future (stronger economic rela­ tions, better growth, and so on) can be built. On the other hand, this is made possible because the Agreement brings closure to a troublesome chapter in the country’s history -the 27-year old name dispute with Greece- that could potentially jeopardize the future. In this context, to highlight the impor­ tance of the solution (the Agreement), the discourse portrays the problem/ the unsettling past as marked by uncertainty, fear, undesirability, and dan­ ger. By reference to such potential negative consequences, framed against the two polar opposites of “the troublesome past” and the prosperous future (the past and future topoi), the Agreement is presented as a unique tool for closing down the troublesome past and allowing for a prosperous future. The resolution of the bilateral dispute with Greece, termed more often than not as “the problem” (problemot), brings another important benefit according to the SD. Specifically, the Agreement is presented as a double instrument for overcoming the so-called problem, and in consequence, completing statehood by becoming an EU member. It is only through international recognition and acceptance that Macedonian statehood can reportedly be legitimized, completed, and secured. This, at the same time, legitimizes the necessity to make the decision to accept the Agreement since incompletion implies susceptibility to danger and to undesirable changes and modifications, leading to state vulnerability. No wonder then that the so-called problem is presented as an impediment (a stone) that prevents RN Macedonia from its allegedly historic mission of achieving complete state­ hood, one that is enabled by the Agreement. Moreover, the Agreement, and the referendum, will allegedly not only secure such a state of affairs and bring RN Macedonia closer to the EU, but also fortify and cement the coun­ try’s independence. How exactly can and will independence be fortified is an interesting question to explore, especially in light of the absence of viable and tangible proof in PM Zaev’s discourse. Finally, one does not need to go much beyond the referendum question, “Will you accept the Agreement in order for Macedonia to become an EU and a NATO member” to understand the government’s instrumentalization of the Agreement for the political purpose of EU accession. The assumption that the Agreement and the referendum are undeniable means to the end of EU membership is evident in the governmental discourse. Phrases such as “Prespa is the path to European future” are indicative in this regard.22 This political end has been justified time and again mainly by presenting the EU as an idyllic place and a solution to many social, economic, and political problems that have troubled the country for ages. There are a great many examples of the alleged benefits that EU membership will bring, both political (politics of responsibility, rule of law, transparency and so on) and economic (economic growth, higher salaries, and so on). These and many other purported benefits have been the focal point in the government’s ref­ erendum campaign Izlezi za Evropska Makedonija (Vote for a European

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158 Aleksandar Takovski Macedonia).23 In this respect, the campaign website has a section dedicated to the alleged benefits, whereby numbers are the crucial organizing principle used to convince the reader of the benefits of EU membership.24 For exam­ ple, the site explains that the youth unemployment rate in Croatia decreased after the country became an EU member, and presents the EU member­ ship as the underpinning reason. In a somewhat similar vein, it explains the increased rate of young Bulgarians travelling abroad as the result of Bulgaria’s EU membership. Identity is disambiguated, preserved, and protected Two days after signing the Agreement (June 20, 2018), PM Zaev addressed the Macedonian Parliament discussing the event in some detail. The follow­ ing segment of Zaev’s address depicts his and the government’s position on the issue of identity as related to the Agreement: “…an Agreement with the clear traits of the Macedonian, the Macedonian language, the way we understand it, […] The signatures in Prespa guarantee our Macedonian identity and language forever, we have managed to protect Macedonian identity with all its attributes […] we are accomplishing the century old ambition of our predecessors to have a state finally recognized in the world, where people will speak the Macedonian language recognized by the whole world.25 During the “Vote for a European Macedonia” campaign in September 2018, PM Zaev repeated the same arguments on several occasions: We have accomplished our ancestors’ ‘pledge/covenant’ with an inter­ national verification. We’re making this centuries’ old dream come true. The Agreement with Greece states loudly that Macedonians, and the Macedonian nation and language have all been acknowledged/con­ firmed/recognized once and for all.26 Not only we managed to protect our identity and language but we have also fortified it […] Greece admitted and accepted our Macedonian identity and language.27 A few assumptions are embedded in Zaev’s thinking. First, the Agreement is allegedly the fulfillment of the historic mission, inaugurated by the Macedonian ancestors, to have a state with a people and a language recog­ nized by the whole world. The recognition, at the same time, is a supposed means of protection and preservation, although the exact details of how this protective mechanism comes about are not explicitly stated. This claim thus begs the question, “From whom is the identity protected?” Finally, the last excerpt is provided as an illustration of another repetitive element in the government’s discourse about the Agreement’s protective nature, whereby

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Greece is the most significant “Other’ in the whole world upon whom the complete recognition of Macedonian language and identity depends. Taking all this into account, not much can be discerned from Zaev’s discur­ sive strategies regarding the specific ways in which the Agreement protects Macedonian identity. A more systematic effort in this respect has been made by Minister of Foreign Affairs Nikola Dimitrov, who in a longer address to the Commission for European Issues on June 19 thoroughly explained each of the Agreement’s articles and their implications, highlighting the disam­ biguating function of the Agreement as can be seen in the next section: The terms Macedonia and Macedonian refer to our territory, our lan­ guage, our people. What does this Macedonian people, Macedonian, Macedonians, etc. mean […] That is the essence of Article 7. To solve this problem we need to find a way to accept that it is differently under­ stood by us, and differently understood by them. And these two under­ standings are not contradictory but complementary.28 A seemingly similar explanation was offered during a press conference by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on September 24, 2018 during the referen­ dum campaign. The selection here is deliberately longer to illustrate the ambiguity present.29 Dimitrov: The two states understand and accept that their understand­ ing of the term Macedonia and Macedonian refer to different historic concept and different cultural legacy […] To us, the terms Macedonia and Macedonian denote our territory, our language—Macedonian, our people—Macedonian, with all its traits and attributes, […] with our history, with our culture, with our cultural heritage. […] Journalist question: You said, the Constitution will state that it remains Macedonia from the Illinden uprising onwards, whose hol­ iday is Illinden then? Dimitrov: Well, our region, the Balkans has a very rich history. And a quite interwoven one. The aim of the commissions we have estab­ lished with Greece and Bulgaria […] was how to make our and our neighbors’ histories not stand one against another but to be more complementary to each other. For us, the Illinden uprising is one of the pillars of the Macedonian state. Bulgaria has a different view. Hence, the task of the historians, not politicians, is how to find a common language and make these differences reconcilable. We lose nothing if this big event is significant in another historic tradition save ours. […] When one says it [the term Macedonian] in Greece, both in a sense of regional belonging and cultural heritage, as for an example when a Greek in Thessaloniki says, “But I am also a Macedonian, we are also Macedonian,”

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160 Aleksandar Takovski they think of a different concept. That is what Article 7 states. When we say “We are Macedonian,” we think of our state-legislative-historic narrative. That is a narrative that rests upon two pillars. In the first selection and the last, Dimitrov explains the dissimilative nature of the Agreement in order to make a clear, undisputable distinction between the use and the understanding of the controversial term “Macedonian” (“dif­ ferently understood by us, and differently understood by them”) by detailing its constitutive elements and scope of application (history, legacy, territory, and language.) One may from the examples I have cited get the impression that the Agreement is portrayed as a boundary maintaining mechanism, whereby the meaning of the word “Macedonia” and the implications the word has for Macedonian identity are unambiguously distinguished from the meaning and identity implications it has in the Greek context. However, if we pay close attention to Dimitrov’s answer to the journalist’s question regarding Ilinden, we cannot but help notice an unexpected ambiguity, a contradiction so to speak. On the one hand, MFA Dimitrov describes the event as “one of the pillars of the Macedonian state,” on the other he implies the possibility of the same event being a constitutive element of another state’s history, even identity (His remarks, “Bulgaria has a different view” and “We lose nothing if this big event is significant in another historic tra­ dition save ours” are indicative in this regard).30 His answer does not only bring confusion but it also obliterates the dissimilative function of national identity, whereby any content of national identity should be exclusive and hence a distinguishing element. Contrary to this, Dimitrov accepts the pos­ sibility that a single historic event can have an equal nation formation power for two states—in other words, the possibility that a single event can be fundamentally formative for the national imaginary of two states. The idea to have a history equally constitutive of two nation-states and nationalities is, to say the least, unprecedented. It is tantamount to saying that Cinco de Mayo is recognized as an equally important and formative event in both Mexican and French history, or that the declaration of Hungary’s independ­ ence on October 23 (33 years after Russian troops crushed a revolt against Russian rule) is treated as a formative event that is imbued with the same meaning by both Hungarians and Russians, and so on. This is not to suggest that different nationalist historiographies cannot imbue a major historical event with different meaning. Rather, it is to say that these meanings are rarely, if ever, compatible one to another, especially if they are treated as the foundation events in modern histories and nationalisms. Finally, equally unprecedented is the suggestion that Macedonian national history should be (re)written by nationally mixed groups of historians (Macedonian, Greek, and also Bulgarian, per Dimitrov’s above-mentioned statement). The Agreement is a threat to identity because … The bulk of VMRO-DPMNE’s criticism directed against the Agreement has focused on portrayals of the Agreement as “capitulation” (kapitulacija) a

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betrayal, and a shame and built upon the idea that it is an anti-constitutional act that threatens Macedonian national identity. This idea is exemplified in the talks given by former president Ivanov, VMRO-DPMNE member, for­ mer candidate for Macedonian President, and Professor of Constitutional Law Siljanovska-Davkova, Professor of History Nikola Zezov, and VMRO­ DPMNE leader Hristijan Mickoski.31 The Agreement is a threat to sovereignty/statehood One of the most important critics of the Agreement was Macedonian for­ mer president Gjorge Ivanov, who stated that: The Agreement brings the Republic of Macedonia in a position of sub­ mission and dependence towards another state, the Republic of Greece. According to Article 308 of the Penalty Law, “Any citizen who will bring the Republic of Macedonia in a position of submission and dependence towards another state shall be penalized with a minimum of five–year imprisonment.”32 It is obvious that former president Ivanov labels the Agreement as a crime against the state, while at the same time argues that the relations between the two parties-signatories of the Agreement, Greece and Macedonia, are asym­ metrical. Such objections are echoed by VMRO-DPMNE president Mickoski and continuously elaborated by the likes of Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova, Professor of Constitutional Law and VMRO-DPMNE member. According to the latter, the Agreement manipulatively transforms the name dispute into a dispute about identity, history, language, and culture.33 Additionally, she claims that the name of the state is an essential element of the state as a legal entity and its rights, and as such it falls under the state’s jurisdiction. Also, Siljanovska-Davkova argues that one defines neither the status of a lan­ guage nor the meaning of the terms “Macedonia” and “Macedonian” by an Agreement, while she suggests that the application of the adjective “North” to state institutions, the Macedonian Bank, and the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts is unprecedented and troublesome. The Constitutional Law professor, what is more, finds the Agreement unacceptable because it allegedly reflects asymmetry—the first party (Greece) has rights, while the second (Macedonia) has obligations—and imposes Constitutional changes by an external party (Greece); this alleged imposition is construed as a direct violation of the sovereignty of Macedonia by Greece. The Agreement is a threat to national identity Professor of history Nikola Zezov offers a similar line of criticism, though more focused on the issues of identity and history, in an interview with the daily paper Nova Makedonija.34 He explains that: The parts of Article 8 which allow the re-examination of the monu­ mental architecture in the Republic of Macedonia and [create the

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162 Aleksandar Takovski opportunity] for Greece to evaluate if they are a part of Greek antique history is a coarse interference in the internal affairs of our country and an alienation of the Macedonian cultural and historic heritage. […] The Agreement undertakes a complete revision of the elements of statehood of the Republic of Macedonia by redefining and falsifying Macedonian his­ tory, which it tries to artificially divide and alienate one of its parts, mak­ ing it a part of Greek history. This document negates the basic right of the Macedonian people for self-identification and the right to free expression of Macedonian national consciousness. […] Article 7 of the Agreement allows Macedonians to give up on the antique part of Macedonian history, something that did not happen in SFRY where the part of the Macedonian Antique history was studied in the schoolbooks even at the elementary level of education. Zezov’s reaction emphasizes the alleged external interference and viola­ tion of Macedonian sovereignty and independence by Greece, and points to a purported revisionary nature of the Agreement that tends to do away with a very significant historic element of the Macedonian national identity narrative—the period of Antiquity, previously accepted as both a historic and institutionalized fact existing, inter alia, in the primary school curric­ ula. Moreover, the alleged act of re-writing Macedonian history, according to Zezov, defies Macedonian statehood and denies Macedonians’ rights to self-determination and self-identification. Besides supposedly being a threat to one specific part of the Macedonian national narrative, the Agreement is also constructed as a threat to Macedonian institutional identity, which, in the words of VMRO-DPMNE leader Mickoski, is a significant element of national identity. In an interview for the Croatian newspaper Vecernji List, Mickoski explains and exemplifies the relation between the two thus: Macedonia has lost its institutional identity, which is a significant part of national identity. All names of institutions that contain the name Macedonia will change. This will mean that tomorrow when the Macedonian national football team will play, the commentator cannot speak about the Macedonian team, but will have to say ‘the team from North Macedonia’ […] Thus, according to the Agreement, Macedonian commentators will be obliged to comment. In the end, the country has its constitutional name, Republic of Macedonia, recognized by 140 states in the world, and will now have to admit being wrong [to use this name] and will have to use the name PM Zaev has agreed upon […] First the Constitution is changed, which is the ID card of a state, in conse­ quence the identity changes. It is very simple, if your ID says you have this name, after everybody meets you that means change in the iden­ tity. The identity that has long before been recognized by the United

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Nations also changes and a wide interpretation takes place, in other words instead of Macedonians, as we are now, with the Agreement we will become Macedonians from RN Macedonia. Shortly before, I men­ tioned that the institutional identity is also jeopardized. Article 8 that stipulates the establishment of commissions between the two states, Macedonia and Greece, will undertake a revision of history, archeol­ ogy, education, which means that even if the Agreement is fulfilled, Greece will have the opportunity to block our accession to EU.35 Even though the interview answers are not perfectly coherent, one can eas­ ily elicit Mickoski’s key arguments. The first refers to the normative use of the adjective “Macedonian.” According to Mickoski, the Agreement stipu­ lates that the use of the adjective to modify the name of any legal entity, be it a sport team, or scientific institution such as the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts, cannot be used without the newly coined name of the state—RN Macedonia. This change, according to Mickoski certainly affects the existing linguistic habits practiced by both national and subnational entities, states, international organizations, and non-state actors, which, in his own words, will have to accept the guilt of being wrong because they have accepted to use a name that is no longer existing. It seems to me, and here I speculate, that Mickoski struggles to explain that once someone is introduced by a certain name, which is also part and parcel of their iden­ tity, the name change, in consequence, implies identity change as well. In addition, Mickoski fears that the amendment of the Macedonian constitu­ tion, metaphorically presented as the nation’s ID, will bring about change in national identity. Finally, Mickoski fears that even if the Agreement is fulfilled, Greece may continue blocking RN Macedonia’s accession to the EU, an assumption on which he fails to elaborate.

Discussion The Macedonian left- and right-wing political parties presented the Agreement to the public either positively or negatively according to their own interests and tried to respectively legitimize or delegitimize the Agreement’s popular acceptance. The incumbent SDSM have tried to construct a posi­ tive image of the Agreement, presenting it as an instrument of a better EU future, and also as an instrument that protects national identity. To accom­ plish the first end, namely, the presentation of the Agreement as a means to a better future, the party has generated a discourse on the multiple ben­ efits of the Agreement, such as friendship with a long time “foe” (Greece), a solution to a protracted problem (the name dispute), a springboard to a better future, completion of statehood, and a means to the ultimate politi­ cal end—EU membership. To justify the use of such discourse, the SDSM have stressed the negative consequences of the problem (uncertain future, and incomplete statehood), while at the same time highlighting the positive

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164 Aleksandar Takovski consequences of its solution (better future, more responsible politics and so on). The discourse makes ample reference to the EU as the ultimate political goal, made desirable by being presented as an idyllic place, a promised land (higher salaries, better economy, student and labor mobility, and so on). Within this context, the only instrument of the accomplishment of the goal of EU accession is allegedly the Prespa Agreement. Such instrumental use of a political act, or even a supranational organization (EU), is not new (see Takovski 2019). But it does not address the opposition’s criticism that the Agreement is a threat to national identity. To support the argument that the Agreement is a benefit to Macedonian people, the party has deployed a perpetuation strategy constructing national identity as preserved and protected. In the words of PM Zaev, the Agreement fulfills the century-old dream “to have a state finally rec­ ognized in the world, where people will speak the Macedonian language recognized by the whole world” and “the Agreement with Greece states loudly that Macedonians, and the Macedonian nation and language have all been acknowledged/confirmed/recognized once and for all.”36 This line of argumentation is based on some troublesome premises. The first is that “Macedonian identity is protected through/by international recognition.” In the absence of a well-articulated justification providing clarity, given either by Prime Minister Zaev or by Minister of Foreign Affairs Dimitrov, regard­ ing the ways in which recognition protects identity, one can only speculate on the possible explanation. Defining the constitutive elements of national identity in the Agreement and differentiating them from such elements in the national identity of Greece—in MFA Dimitrov’s words “the two states understand and accept that their understanding of the term Macedonia and Macedonian refer to different historic concept and different cultural leg­ acy”—guarantees that identity is being understood, accepted, practiced, and recognized as stipulated therein.37 This, however, opens up a few questions, among which is the following: can one’s national identity be formalized and defined by a political and legal act given that identity is a total sum of many pieces—acts, practices, and perceptions? Second, the premise that the pro­ tection of the identity is ensured by recognition implies a sort of “perverted logic,” whereby personal existence, self-consciousness, and identity depend more on someone else’s recognition than on one’s own understanding and meaning-making. In the discourse of PM Zaev, the (international/external) recognition of national identity is presented as more important than the meaning that identity has in people’s lives. This argument promotes exter­ nal acknowledgment rather than subjective perception and significance to be the most important aspect of identity. This interpretation thus confirms VMRO-DPMNE’s accusations that the Argument is asymmetric. Finally, the premise that Macedonian national identity is recognized by the whole world is misleading at best because first, it implies a fixed understanding of identity, which is at odds with an otherwise more modernist, flexible under­ standing of identity promoted by the SDSM elsewhere.38 More importantly,

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it leaves room for the understanding that global recognition of Macedonian national identity is actually recognition by a single state—Greece. Instead of unambiguously communicating that the recognition by Greece comple­ ments the global recognition, the argument implies that Greece’s recog­ nition is per se the global recognition, thus devaluing the recognition of Macedonian identity by many other countries, except for Greece, following Macedonia’s independence in 1991. Furthermore, the assumption that the recognition, and hence that the unequivocal and undisputed acceptance of Macedonian identity, is com­ plete is inaccurate given the recent serious challenges imposed by Bulgaria regarding the 1903 Ilinden uprising and the pressure on RN Macedonia to recognize and accept that the uprising and the revolutionaries involved, including Goce Delcev, widely recognized as the founding father of the modern Macedonian nation, are Bulgarian.39 Therefore, Dimitrov’s con­ ception of complementary, reconciling histories is both puzzling and troublesome. Theoretically, this understanding is at odds with the under­ standing of identity as difference constructed and perpetuated by the strat­ egy of dissimilation, of making the contents of national identity exclusive and non-complementary, especially if the element in question is a founding event on which modern national consciousness and identity depend. On the one hand, the Agreement dictates against the use of Antiquity as an identity building resource and requires that other such resources, for example, the Ilinden Uprising, be tapped into. On the other, these resources are made non-exclusive for Macedonians and hence they cannot satisfy, as exclusive resources do, the purpose of creating difference and serving as instruments of dissimilation. Moreover, their use needs to be negotiated with nonMacedonian historians. The Macedonian problem with Bulgaria (see also Friedman’s chapter in this volume) may not be directly related to the Prespa Agreement, but the restrictions imposed upon the available identity build­ ing resources of RN Macedonia both by Greece and the Prespa Agreement and by Bulgaria inform the critical reactions by Macedonian nationalists, headed by VMRO-DPMNE. It seems that the government did not produce a counter-narrative to the VMRO-DPMNE’s accusations that national identity is under threat. Such a narrative, however, is necessary to appease the intense feelings of loss among Macedonian nationalists, that is, among citizens who share an exclusivist understanding of nation and ethnicity. Such a narrative would actually unite the two polarized camps, those favoring and those opposing the Agreement, because it would present the Agreement as complementary to nationalist understandings of identity. Instead, the government decided to play the EU card, appreciated by all constituents who seem to favor the prospect, no matter how little, of socio-economic progress and integration into the EU. The logic that “there is no other alternative to solve the coun­ try’s political impasse except EU membership” is widely shared among gov­ ernment supporters and non-supporters alike. These citizens value hope

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166 Aleksandar Takovski and the presumed western European living standards more than a strong endorsement of the exclusivist understanding of identity. These citizens are not gullible, or biased to believe the information presented to them. They hope that an alliance with a politically and economically more powerful ally like the EU is possible and beneficial to the Macedonian people and to Macedonian citizens more generally. VMRO-DPMNE, on the other hand, has tried to delegitimize the Agreement by presenting it as a threat both to Macedonian statehood and to national identity. To justify the first claim, the party speakers have pro­ vided quite a few arguments in support of the anti-constitutional character of the unprecedented Agreement that allows an externally imposed amend­ ment to the Macedonian constitution. To legitimize the second claim, VMRO-DPMNE has relied on two arguments, underpinned by the same scheme that presents the threat to a part as a threat to the whole, a scheme realized by the same linguistic means—the pars pro toto metonymy, where the focus is placed on part of, not the whole, object. The party speakers have explained that what is actually threatened is the institutional identity, which, as stated by the party leader himself, is one part of national iden­ tity. They have also emphasized that what is jeopardized is a very impor­ tant component of national identity—history, and specifically the period of antiquity and the pantheon of historical figures, including Alexander the Great. Not being able to use this particularly favored “content”—the self-perceived differences from other nations—of identity means that the identity building resources have been narrowed down and a new foundation myth of the Macedonian nation’s identity and new continuity between past and present need to be established. However, the loss of these two constitu­ tive elements (institutional identity and Antiquity) is presented, through the use of pars pro toto metonymy, as the loss of the whole. It is worth noting that the explanation of how the loss of one element is equal to the loss of the whole is absent in this competitive (and admittedly, seductive) political discourse. However, there are some concerns that need to be considered as well. First, Mickoski, and rightly so, reacts that the naming practices that will emerge as a result of the Agreement’s application are not only confusing but unprecedented, to say the least, as RN Macedonia would probably be the only state that cannot name its national opera Macedonian but the national opera of the RN Macedonia.40 One of the problems not anticipated by the Agreement, and hinted at by Mickoski, is the naming habits of journalists, researchers, and laypeople in general, who either do not originate from what is now called RN Macedonia or are not familiar with Balkan politics. Despite the assurance that the name of the citizens of ethnic Macedonian origin will remain “Macedonian,” there are examples where the citizens are erroneously called North Macedonians.41 This logi­ cally presents the following two dilemmas: is the change of a single compo­ nent or narrative of national identity a change in identity itself? Moreover, if what remains needs to bear a new name, is the identity still intact? Or,

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phrased more boldly, if one does away with Act 1 of Romeo and Juliet and changes the name to Romeo, Juliet, and the Merchant, is the new play the same as the old one? It certainly does have a unique identity, but is it new or old? If we take into account that identity is a flexible category that can be re-conceptualized and parts of it can be erased and new narratives with new foundation myths may gain popular acceptance in time, the first dilemma is not so disconcerting. But, renaming an entity, while knowing that the name is the ultimate, unifying symbol of identity carrying and communicating at once all constitutive stories, images and feelings—the dilemma presented therein is not easily resolvable.

Conclusion There is no doubt that identity politics occupies different positions in the Macedonian parties’ discourses. The more flexible and quasi-modernist understanding of the concept by the social democrats allows them to treat identity politics, and the name issue herein concerned, both as prone to acceptable changes and as a matter of political negotiation and agreement. On the other hand, the more rigid, understanding circulated among VMRO­ DPMNE-DPMNE and its supporters does not conform to any attempt at intervention in the national narrative, especially the one so forcefully and systematically constructed by the party through the Skopje 2014 project. An interesting, though unanswerable dilemma is whether the name change has actually provided the benefits communicated by the Macedonian gov­ ernment or whether it has irreversibly changed the ways in which individu­ als make sense of national identity. Although RN Macedonia has officially been invited to commence EU membership negotiations, the resolution of the name dispute is but one factor among many (other factors include, but are not limited to, harmonization of domestic legislation with the EU legal norms, and structural reforms in the Macedonian judiciary and administra­ tive systems) that bring the country closer to the EU. The incumbent party, however, has presented this to be either the only or the most important one, disregarding the necessary institutional and social transformations required by the EU, and not anticipating pushback from EU members, such as France and the Netherlands who initially opposed the country’s acces­ sion to the Union. As an answer to the dilemma whether a name change affects the ways in which individuals make sense of national identity, I would like to offer the following hypothetical scenario. If this researcher only adds a single sound, say “r,” to his surname (Ta’r’kovski), would he still be related to his parents and family in the same way? Or, would people think that Andrei rather than Eftim is his father? Would he still be the same researcher, pro­ fessor, father, and friend? Would people look at him and talk with him iden­ tically as before? Would he be allowed to enter the Odeon cinema because his name is now more acceptable to other cinema-goers? Many people like

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168 Aleksandar Takovski their birth names, many people are proud of them. Some women, upon mar­ riage, explicitly refuse to change their surnames and adopt their husbands’. The change of the maiden surname is experienced differently by different women. For some, it is an act that acknowledges their acceptance into a new family, symbolizes a new unity, and offers security without compromising their identity. For others, it is a loss of identity, a reminder that wives are becoming more like their husbands, while at the same time it brings unneces­ sary inconvenience (people find it difficult to identify the married individual due to surname change). Either ways, the acceptance of and/or resistance to accept a new surname, reflect and perpetuate the gendered hierarchies in society, as Boxer and Gritsenko show (2005). Similar arguments may be made regarding the change of a state’s name. To some, the name change cel­ ebrates the, hopefully, eventual unity with a much desired ally, the European Union, offering the same feeling of security as husbands offer to their wives. To others, it is a representational inconvenience and marks the loss of iden­ tity. In both cases, the change of the country’s name expresses similar power inequalities and hierarchies—this time, not in the local society, but in the world of international politics. The intriguing difference is that the name change is made not to celebrate the union with the marrying partner—the EU, but to please a grudging aunt at the wedding table—Greece.

Notes 1 The term discourse in this chapter is broadly understood as (the production of) texts and talks interrelated by specific participants, ends, strategies, chan­ nels of communication, topics, all determined by and determining the social context(s) of their occurrence. As such, these texts/talks have two significant aspects, linguistic (the forms and strategies used) and social (the intentions of the speakers to produce specific world views, social roles, relations and identities). 2 Critical Discourse Analysis is a branch of linguistics that views language as a form of social practice and studies the construction, perpetuation, and con­ testation of ideologies, power relations, dominance, inequalities, discrimina­ tion, and injustice enacted through language. In the context of this study, it offers an ample methodological framework to study the discursive construc­ tion of the nation relying on linguistic strategies that help create the narrative of the nation while at the same time setting boundaries around the contents of the narrative so constructed. 3 The micro strategies singled out by Wodak at al. (2009, 33) include construc­ tive strategies, strategies of perpetuation, strategies of justification, strate­ gies of transformation, and dismantling strategies, while the two supporting sub-strategies are the strategy of assimilation and the strategy of dissimilation. 4 The expression ‘EU-bedient’ is my own quasi-blended creation combining ‘EU’ and ‘obedient’ in an attempt to signify uncritical acceptance of EU public discourse and policies by political actors. 5 VMRO-DPMNE. 2016. Statute. https://www.vmro-dpmne.org.mk/wp-con­ tent/uploads/2018/05/vmro-dpmne-statut.pdf (Accessed April 08, 2020). 6 All translation from Macedonian to English in this table and elsewhere in the text are my own.

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7 Zaev, Zoran. 2018. “An Address by Zoran Zaev on the Ceremony upon Signing the Agreement.” https://vlada.mk/node/14966 (Accessed April 05, 2020). 8 Zaev, Zoran. 2018. “Prime Minister Zaev on a Press Conference with Stolten­ berg from NATO: The Macedonian Seat in NATO Council Is Set, What Remains Is Our Own Home Assignment.” http://vlada.mk/node/15068?ln=mk (Accessed April 05, 2020). 9 Zaev, Zoran. 2018. “The Referendum Confirms Our Decision for European Macedonia.” https://iportal.mk/makedonija/video-zaev-od-shtip-na-referendu­ mot-ja-zaokruzhuvame-nashata-odluka-za-evropska-makedonija/ (Accessed April 05, 2020). 10 Zaev, Zoran. 2018. “An Address by Zoran Zaev on the Ceremony upon Sign­ ing the Agreement.” https://vlada.mk/node/14966 (Accessed April 05, 2020). 11 Zaev, Zoran. 2018. “I Believe that on September 30th Macedonian Citizens Will Make a Decision for European Macedonia.” (Accessed April 05, 2020). 12 Ibid. 13 Dimovski, Viktor, 2018. “Debate on Prespa Agreement.” http://mfa.gov.mk/ index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2829:debata-za-prespan­ skiot-dogovor-i-meg junarodnata-pozicija-na-republika-makedonija&­ catid=52&Itemid=684&lang=mk (Accessed April 05, 2020). 14 Zaev, Zoran. 2018. “The Referendum Confirms Our Decision for European Macedonia.” https://iportal.mk/makedonija/video-zaev-od-shtip-na-referendu­ mot-ja-zaokruzhuvame-nashata-odluka-za-evropska-makedonija/ (Accessed April 05, 2020). 15 Dimitorv, Nikola. 2018. “An Address by MFA Dimitrov to the Parliamentary Commission for European Issues.” http://mfa.gov.mk/index.php?option=com_ content&view=article&id=2721:obrakanje-na-ministerot-za-nadvoresh­ ni-raboti-nikola-dimitrov-pred-sobraniskata-komisija-za-evropski-prashan­ ja-za-dogovorot-so-grcija&catid=51&Itemid=359&lang=mk (Accessed April 05, 2020). 16 Zaev, Zoran. 2018. “Prime Minister Zaev on a Press Conference with Stolten­ berg from NATO: The Macedonian Seat in NATO Council Is Set, What Remains Is Our Own Home Assignment.” http://vlada.mk/node/15068?ln=mk (Accessed April 05, 2020). 17 Zaev, Zoran. 2018. “With the 1991 We Gained Our Independence, with This One We Will Cement It.” https://www.libertas.mk/zaev-vistinskiot-patriot-e­ gord-na-svo/ (Accessed April 05, 2020). 18 Zaev, Zoran. 2018. “Zaev with a Selfie from the Signing of the Agreement.” https://www.libertas.mk/foto-zaev-objavi-selfi-od-gliserot-so-koj-dojde-na­ potpishuvane-na-istoriskiot-dogovor/ (Accessed April 05, 2020). 19 Dimitorv, Nikola. 2018. “An Address by MFA Dimitrov to the Parliamentary Commission for European Issues.” (Accessed April 05, 2020). 20 Zaev, Zoran. 2018. “There Is no Dilemma that on the Referendum Citizens Will Choose European Future for Their Children.” https://kanal5.com.mk/ articles/346871/zaev-vo-valandovo-i-dojran (Accessed April 05, 2020). 21 Zaev, Zoran. 2018. “With the 1991 We Gained Our Independence, with This One We Will Cement It.” https://www.vecer.press/%d0%b7%d0%b0%d0% b5%d0%b2-%d1%81%d0%be-%d1%80%d0%b5%d1%84%d0%b5%d1%80% d0%b5%d0%bd%d0%b4%d1%83%d0%bc%d0%be%d1%82-%d0%b2%d0% b e -1991-% d1%98% d 0 %b 0 -% d 0 %b 4% d 0 %b e% d 0 %b1% d 0 %b8% d 0 % b2%d0%bc%d0%b5-%d0%b0-%d1%81/ (Accessed April 05, 2020). 22 Zaev, Zoran. 2018. “Zaev with a Selfie from the Signing of the Agreement.” https://www.libertas.mk/foto-zaev-objavi-selfi-od-gliserot-so-koj-dojde-na­ potpishuvane-na-istoriskiot-dogovor/ (Accessed April 05, 2020).

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170 Aleksandar Takovski 23 Although the literal translation of the campaign slogan is “Get out for a Euro­ pean Macedonia”, it is more convenient to translate it “Vote for a European Macedonia” since the verb ‘to vote’ is omitted, but can be inferred, from the original. 24 http://izlezi.mk/realni-pridobivki-od-eu/ (Accessed March 21, 2020). 25 Zaev, Zoran. 2018. “Let Us Be United When the Macedonian Flag Will Raise High next Month in Bruxelles.” https://iportal.mk/makedonija/zaev-site-da­ bideme-zaedno-koga-naredniot-mesec-vo-brisel-kje-se-krene-makedonsko­ to-zname/ (Accessed February 28, 2020). 26 Zaev, Zoran. 2018. “With the referendum, We Have Completed Our Responsibility—Personal, Civil, Friendly for the Future of European Macedonia.” https://www.libertas.mk/zaev-vistinskiot-patriot-e-gord-na-svo/ (Accessed February 28, 2020). 27 Zaev, Zoran. 2018. “I Believe that on September 30th the Citizens Will Make a Decision for a European Macedonia.” https://centar.mk/blog/2018/09/16/ zaev-veruvam-deka-na-30-septemvri-graganite-ke-donesat-odluka-za-evrop­ ska-makedonija/ (Accessed February 28, 2020). 28 Dimitrov, Nikola. 2018. “An Address to the Commission for European Issues.” https://mfa.gov.mk/page/6/post/1950/obrakjanje-na-ministerot-za-nadvoresh­ ni-raboti-nikola-dimitrov-pred-sobraniskata-komisija-za-evropski-prashan­ ja-za-dogovorot-so-grcija (Accessed February 28, 2020). 29 Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 2018. Transcript of the Press Conference of MFA Dimitrov “The Agreement between Macedonia and Greece is the Key to the Door for the Entry to EU and NATO, on September 30 We Are Deciding whether We Will Use this Key or not.” https://mfa.gov.mk/page/8/post/1564/30 (Accessed February 27, 2020). 30 Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 2018. Transcript of the Press Conference of MFA Dimitrov “The Agreement between Macedonia and Greece is the Key to the Door for the Entry to EU and NATO, on September 30 We Are Deciding whether We Will Use this Key or not.” https://mfa.gov.mk/page/8/post/1564/30 (Accessed February 27, 2020). 31 While professor Zezov may not be an open supporter of the party, his criti­ cism of the Agreement nicely encapsulates the two criticisms raised, namely, that the Agreement is anti-constitutional and a threat to Macedonian identity. 32 Nova Makedonija. 2018. “President Ivanov Decided not to Sign the Amend­ ment to the Law on the Ratification of the Agreement with Greece.” https:// akademik.mk/pretsedatelot-ivanov-donese-odluka-da-ne-go-potpishe-uka­ zot-za-zakonot-za-ratifikatsija-na-dogovorot-so-grtsija/ (Accessed February 28, 2020). 33 Davkova, Siljanovksa, Gordana. 2019. “On the ‘Prespa Agreement’ and Beyond.” https://umdiaspora.org/2019/01/28/on-the-prespa-agreement-and-beyond-by­ professor-dr-gordana-siljanovska-davkova/ (Accessed February 2020). 34 Zezov, Nikola. 2018. “The New Name in the Agreement is an Attempt for an Artificial Change of Macedonian Identity.” [Новото име во договорот е обид за вештачка промена на македонскиот идентитет]. https://www. novamakedonija.com.mk/makedonija/новото-име-во-договорот-e-обид-за­ вештач/ (Accessed February 28, 2020). 35 Mickoski, Hristijan. 2018. “What Does the Agreement with Greece Contain?” https://www.biznisvesti.mk/mitskovski-shto-sodrzhi-dogovorot-so-grtsija/ (Accessed February 28, 2020). 36 Zaev, Zoran. 2018. “Let Us Be United When the Macedonian Flag Will Raise High next Month in Bruxelles.” https://iportal.mk/makedonija/zaev-site-da­ bideme-zaedno-koga-naredniot-mesec-vo-brisel-kje-se-krene-makedonsko­

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37

38

39

40

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to-zname/ (Accessed April 06, 2020). Zaev, Zoran. 2018. “With the referendum, We Have Completed Our Responsibility—Personal, Civil, Friendly for the Future of European Macedonia.”. https://www.libertas.mk/zaev-vistinskiot­ patriot-e-gord-na-svo/ (Accessed April 06, 2020). Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 2018. Transcript of the Press Conference of MFA Dimitrov “The Agreement between Macedonia and Greece is the Key to the Door for the Entry to EU and NATO, on September 30 We Are Deciding whether We Will Use this Key or not.” https://mfa.gov.mk/page/8/post/1564/30 (Accessed April 06, 2020). Traditionally, SDSM have not paid minute attention to the issue of identity politics. Nonetheless, the party’s flexible attitude may be discerned from its statute, election campaigns, and public discourses produced through the years. For details, visit the party’s website at http://www.sdsm.org.mk/. Macedonia and Bulgaria signed an Agreement for Good Neighborly Relations on August 1, 2017 (https://vlada.mk/sites/default/files/dogovori/Dogovor_Za_ Prijatelstvo_Dobrososedstvo_Sorabotka_Megju_Republika_Makedoni­ ja_I_Republika_Bugarija.pdf) that, among others, sets the foundation of mixed commissions consisting of Macedonian and Bulgarian historians to write a “mutually” fair and acceptable version of Macedonian history. In the years that follow, on multiple occasions, Bulgaria has exerted pressure on RN Macedonia through the work of the commission to accept that Ilinden upris­ ing and Goce Delcev are Bulgarian; moreover, Bulgarian Academy has issued a statement negating the existence of Macedonian language (see Victor Fried­ man’s chapter in this volume). The naming is stipulated by Article 1.3(f) of the Agreement which states that “the adjectival reference to the State, its official organs, and other public enti­ ties shall be in line with the official name of the Second Party or its short name, that is, ‘of the Republic of North Macedonia’ or ‘of North Macedonia.’” I have personally come across recent and yet-to-be published research where the term “North Macedonians” is used throughout.

References Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York, NY: Verso. Barth, Fredrik. 1969. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries the Social Organization. New York, NY: Little Brown and Company. Boxer, Diana and Elena Gritsenko. 2005. “Women and Surnames Across Cultures: Reconstituting Identity in Marriage.” Women and Language 28, no. 2: 1–11. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Breuilly, John. 2005. “Dating the Nation: How old is the nation.” In When Is the Nation? Towards an Understanding of Theories of Nationalism, edited by Atsuko Ichijo and Gordana Uzalac, 15–39. Lomdon and New York, NY: Routledge. Connor, Walker. 1994. Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2005. ‘The Dawning of Nations”. In When is the nation? Towards an Understanding of Theories of Nationalism, edited by Atsuko Ichijo and Gordana Uzalac, 40–46. London and New York, NY: Routledge.

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Damjanovski, Ivan and Nenad Markovikj. 2020. “The Long Road to Europeanization North Macedonia’s Contentious Democratization between Its Democratic Deficit and External Involvement.” Southeastern Europe 44: 1–35. Edelman, Murray. 1971. Politics as Symbolic Action. Chicago, IL: Markham Publishing Company. Geary, P. J. 2002. The Myth of Nations. Princetown, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Gellner, Ernest. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Itaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Graan, Andrew. 2013. “Counterfeiting the Nation? Skopje 2014 and the Politics of Nation Branding in Macedonia.” Cultural Anthropology 28, no. 1: 161–79. Graan, Andrew 2016. “The Nation Brand Regime: Nation Branding and the Semiotic Regimentation of Public Communication in Contemporary Macedonia.”Signs and Society 51, no. 4: 70–105. Graan Andrew and Aleksandar Takovski. 2017. “Learning from Skopje 2014: Architectural Spectacle in the 21st Century.” LA+: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Landscape Architecture 5: 66–73. Hall, Stuart. 1996. “The Question of Cultural Identity.” In Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies, edited by Stuart Hall, David Held, Don Hubert, and Kenneth Thompson, 595–634. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger, eds. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hroch, Miroslav. 1985. Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live by. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Malesevic, Sinisa. 2006. Identity as Ideology: Understanding Ethnicity and Nationalism. Basingstoke and New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan Nairn, Tom. 2003. The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-nationalism. Mill Valley, CA: Common Ground. Norval. Aletta.1996. Thinking Identities: Against a Theory of Ethnicity. In The Politics of Difference: Ethnic Premises in a World of Power, edited by Edwin N. Wilmsen and Patrick McAllister, 59–70. Chicago, IL: The Chicago University Press. Reisigl, Martin and Ruth Wodak. 2001. Discourse and Discrimination: Rhetorics of Racismand Antisemitism. New York, NY and London: Routledge. Smith, D. Anthony. 1988. The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell. ———. 1991. National Identity. Hardmondsworth: Penguin Books. ———. 1995. Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Takovski, Aleksandar. 2019. “Battlefield EU: Macedonian Parties’ representations in Times of Crisis.” Journal of Language and Politics 18, no. 2:184–206. Triandafyllidou, Anna. 1998. “National Identity and the ‘Other’.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 21, no. 4: 593–612. Wertsch, James. 2002. Voices of Collective Remembering. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Wodak, Ruth, Rudolph de Cillia, Martin Reisigl, and Karin Leibhart. 2009. The Discursive Construction of National Identity. 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Seeing double Political polarization and identity

politics in Macedonia, before and

after the Prespa Agreement

Andrew Graan Every public sphere claims universality for itself, and battles marginal groups and subcultures in its effort to maintain dominance. It is through struggles of representation and claims of representativeness that these efforts for dominance are waged. These struggles are the substance of politics proper. (Rajagopal 2001, 148)

The puzzle of doubles This chapter is an inquiry into political polarization as a social and cultural phenomenon. These days one need not look far in order to find signs of polarized politics. The 2010s have witnessed new social movements on both the Left and the Right. Expanded digital communications have spawned fears over “filter bubbles” and “disinformation campaigns” that perpetu­ ate and prey on polarization. Partisan non-cooperation, whether through gridlock or boycott, wracks popular assemblies. The cascading successes of far-right political movements, exemplified by the likes of Trump, Brexit, Modi, Bolsonaro, Duatarte, and Orban, have been paralleled by reinvigor­ ated progressive politics, for example: Occupy, Podemos, Syriza, Rojava, the 2019 Chilean protests, Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. Polarizing and polarized politics, it seems, are a new normal. This statement, at least, is quite true of the recent political history of what is now the Republic of North Macedonia, where over the last 15 years, competition between left and right political parties has transformed into entrenched social division.1 In particular, Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski, who led Macedonia from 2006 to 2016, proved to be an utterly polarizing figure. His brand of ethnic Macedonian nationalism and his strong-arm politics inspired adoration among supporters but deep antipathy among critics. So too did his signature policy, “Skopje 2014,” a massive urban renovation project that transformed the country’s once modernist capital into a landscape overflowing with newly constructed neoclassical monu­ ments and buildings. Tellingly, the December 2016 parliamentary election in Macedonia resulted in a virtual dead heat between Gruevski’s right

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174 Andrew Graan nationalist party, the VMRO-DPMNE, and its left center rival, the Social Democrats.2 The political polarization of the Gruevski years only continued when the Social Democrats took steps to form a government in 2017, with party leader Zoran Zaev pegged as Prime Minister. Initially, VMRO MPs and Macedonian president Gjorge Ivanov worked to obstruct the Social Democrats’ efforts to convene a new ruling coalition. Infamously, when the Social Democrats exploited a constitutional loophole to form a new govern­ ment on April 27, 2017, masked thugs burst into the parliamentary chamber and assaulted several MPs, including Zaev.3 Fortunately, this possible coup d’état did not succeed, and a transfer of power occurred. Nonetheless, the attacks made terrifyingly evident the bristling political divisions within the Macedonian political scene. When then on June 12, 2018, Zoran Zaev announced what would become his own signature policy—an agreement with Greece to end the coun­ tries’ longstanding naming dispute—it was not surprising that reactions spanned from triumphant praise to vitriolic condemnation.4 According to the treaty, called the Prespa Agreement after the location of its signing, Macedonia would change its name to North Macedonia in exchange for an end to the Greek obstruction of its EU and NATO accession and rec­ ognition of the Macedonian language and identity. Zaev and his supporters celebrated the Prespa Agreement as a diplomatic breakthrough that would at last deliver Macedonia’s integration into Euro-Atlantic structures as well as the stability and prosperity promised by EU and NATO accession. For critics, especially on the right, however, the Agreement was a “humiliating” (ponižuvačko) capitulation to the Greeks. As one slogan attacking the Prespa Agreement expressed it, “Imeto e Identitetot” (The Name is the Identity), and in changing the former, Zaev and his supporters were allegedly betray­ ing the latter (see Figure 7.1). In no doubt because of such strong reactions, and because of the weighty, national significance of the issues addressed, the Zaev govern­ ment announced that they would hold a consultative referendum to assess popular support for the agreement. The referendum vote was scheduled for September 30, 2018 and was bound to showcase Macedonia’s deep political rivalries. In this chapter, I will look closely at the politics of polarization as they manifested in what is now North Macedonia in the period before and after the 2018 signing of the Prespa Agreement. I was in Macedonia over four months in 2018, from May 15 to September 15, conducting research on the Skopje 2014 urban renovation project and its discontents. Inevitably, then, I witnessed and discussed popular reactions to the agreement and also observed the organized movements that formed to campaign for and against the referendum. My summer of 2018 was thus filled with recurrent displays of political polarization. In this context, I frequently found myself seeing double. There

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Figure 7.1 A stenciled graffito of the anti-Prespa Agreement slogan, “The name is the identity” Source: Andrew Graan.

were the two names: Macedonia and North Macedonia. Two flags: the old “Star of Vergina” flag, which was used between 1992 and 1995, and the current, official flag featuring a yellow sun (see Figures 7.2 and 7.3).5 Two architectures: the monumental revivalism of the Skopje 2014 project and the renewed celebration of Skopje’s midcentury modernism (see Figures 7.4 and 7.5). Two stories of ethnogenesis: one rooted in the figure of Alexander

Figure 7.2 Macedonia’s “Star of Vergina” flag, used from 1992 to 1995 Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_Macedonia_(1992–1995).svg.

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176 Andrew Graan

Figure 7.3 The current flag of Macedonia Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_North_Macedonia.png.

Figure 7.4 A view of some of the neoclassical structures built as part of the Skopje 2014 project Source: Andrew Graan.

the Great and antiquity, the other focused on the late 19th century “national awakening” and the revolutionary struggle against the Ottomans (see Vangeli 2011; Muhić and Takovski 2014). And two mediascapes: one that was sympathetic to the Prespa Agreement and organized by an aesthetics of neutral, balanced reporting, the other trafficking in bold, sensationalist sto­ ries that presupposed the Prespa Agreement as an act of national betrayal. It was as if Macedonia itself was doubled. In paying attention to these doubled forms, I began to recognize how these combinations of symbols, discourses, images and narratives con­ stituted a popular cultural reservoir from which representatives of right and left political persuasions drew in order to express mutually exclu­ sive understandings of the Macedonian national identity. In Macedonia

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Figure 7.5 A poster by Zoran Cardula featuring the Skopje Post Office building, constructed in 1974. In the wake of the Skopje 2014 project, celebrations of Skopje’s modernist architecture spiked both inside and outside of Macedonia Source: Zoran Cardula.

and elsewhere, in recent times, political preference has increasingly been expressed as a primary aspect of identity. That is, rather than consider­ ing political preference as exterior to one’s fundamental self, in contexts of political polarization, people often view and experience political pref­ erence as something that is inalienable, non-negotiable, and incompatible with opposing viewpoints. In this sense, polarization is identity related via political affiliation. Especially in the wake of the 2016 Brexit vote and US presidential elec­ tion, scholarly analyses of polarization have proliferated but tend to focus on populism as a resurgent political phenomenon (for example, Müller 2016; Brubaker 2017; Norris and Inglehart 2019). In this chapter, however, I pursue a different line of analysis. Instead of attention to populism per se, I exam­ ine the role of public culture and its circulatory pathways in enabling and exacerbating political polarization as a relational and identarian practice. In focusing on public culture, understood here as mass-mediated visual, textual, and discursive artifacts, my approach is multimodal in nature.

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I attend to history of the public sphere in Macedonia but I am also interested in how media discourse resonates with other visual and textual artifacts, precisely things like: flags, names, architecture, music, images, political slo­ gans, public demonstrations and so on. In doing so, I contend that political polarization does not merely reflect underlying social differences in politi­ cal ideology. Rather, polarized political identities, like national identity in general, are mediated by histories and practices of public culture that shape competing projects of national identification and circulate signs that articu­ late and differentiate these projects. In developing this contention, I engage Arvind Rajagopal’s (2001) study of Hindu nationalism in India and his argument on the contribution of public culture and media ecology to Hindu nationalism’s rapid political ascent in the 1990s. Ultimately, I argue that the variety of political polarization evident in contemporary North Macedonia constitutes a new form of identity politics, one based not on multicultur­ alist claims to identity difference—so-called “recognition struggles”—but on competing, monopoly claims over one and the same identity category— what I characterize as “representation struggles.” In unraveling the “puzzle of doubles” present before and after the Prespa Agreement, I hope to bring the contours of this identity politics into relief.

Doubled identity: from recognition struggles to representation struggles At first glance, the doubling of national symbols in Macedonia was subtle: two similar flags, two variant names, two intermeshed historical narratives. But, from my past research in Macedonia, it was clear to me that the two national imaginaries so demarcated expressed socially potent differences. One imaginary was revivalist and exclusivist in nature, at once celebrat­ ing the claimed historic grandeur of ethnic Macedonian identity and also promising to redeem it in the present. The other was progressive, if rooted in political liberalism. It portrayed Macedonia as firmly within European modernity and sought to protect it from revanchist and illiberal forces on the right. Significantly, over the last several years, people in Macedonia not only marshaled these imaginaries, they also identified with them. On the right, proud Macedonians could don the mantle of ‘patriots’ (patrioti) while labe­ ling rivals as ‘traitors’ (predavnici). On the left, concerned Macedonians decried the ‘mad, insane’ (ludo) and ‘abnormal’ (nenormalno) policies and actions of Gruevski and his supporters. They thereby aligned themselves with a model of how things ought to be under rational, normal conditions while portraying their opponents as beyond reason. Such an us-versus-them logic was pervasive (Muhić and Takovski 2014), casting political persuasion in terms of discrete and opposing identity categories.6 Indeed, during my visits to Macedonia during and after the Gruevski years, I recurrently encountered statements on the utter incompatibility

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of Gruevski supporters and Gruevski critics. I also saw such social divi­ sion manifest first hand. Many of my friendships in Macedonia were formed during my first research trips there in the early to mid-2000s. My summer-long research stay in 2018 therefore occasioned opportunities to catch up with old friends. During these meetings, I would often ask after mutual acquaintances from the past, only to hear that so-and-so was now a “VMROvec” (VMRO supporter) and no longer a friend. Other times, I would be warned by acquaintances that particular intellectuals or media personalities were “VMRO” and hence not to be trusted. On the right, similar aspersions attached to epithets such as “Sorosidii” (Sorosians) or “Šarenite” (The Colorful Ones, i.e., participants in the 2016 Colorful Revolution, here used dismissively). More deeply, I was told stories of how political disagreements had ruptured families. Political identity thus appeared as a “total social fact”: it permeated and shaped Macedonia’s social terrain.7 This aspect of political identity was elaborated on the popular Macedonian news satire show, Fčerašni Novosti (Yesterday’s News). The first episode of the show’s fourth season, which debuted in September 2018, just weeks before the referendum, included a mock reality TV show named Mešan Brak or “Mixed Marriage” (see Figure 7.6).8 Across the former Yugoslavia, the term mešan brak referred to marriages between spouses of different ethnicities. However, in the Fčerašni Novosti skit, the “mixed marriage” is between a man who supports the Prespa Agreement and Macedonia’s entry in to the European Union and a woman who opposes the Agreement as an assault on Macedonian identity. As the

Figure 7.6 A still taken from the mock reality TV show “Mešan Brak,” which was featured as a skit on the Macedonian comedy program, Fčerasni Novosti. The skit humorously depicts a Macedonian family “torn apart” by the referendum on the Prespa Agreement

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Figure 7.7 A still taken from the mock reality TV show “Mešan Brak.” The parents have divided their living room, and even the coffee table, to reflect their stances on the Prespa Agreement

skit humorously depicts, due to their differing political views, the couple literally divide their small apartment into two opposing sides, with a rope bisecting the living room and its coffee table (see Figure 7.7). In consequence, their adult but infantilized son was caught in the middle of a family “torn apart” (see Figure 7.8). As the faux news anchors said in introducing the skit, this is a “reality show which perhaps some of you are living” (realno šou koje možebi nekoji

Figure 7.8 A still taken from the mock reality TV show “Mešan Brak.” The family’s adult son pleas for his parents to end their political feud

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od vas i go živeat). Through its deft humor, the skit assimilated political pref­ erence to an older logic of identity difference, that is, one based on ethnicity. In essence, political affiliation was presented as an identity as fundamental as ethnic belonging. Let us notice, however, the peculiarity of this form of identity politics. According to classic models (for example, Taylor 1994; Fraser 1997), identity politics is a late 20th century historical formation that is organized by a ‘pol­ itics of recognition,’ in which minority groups demand that aspects of their identity difference, whether it pertain to religion, cultural background, gen­ der, sexuality, or language, be acknowledged and protected within a larger liberal polity. Classic identity politics are thus premised on the assertion of identity difference and consequent “recognition struggles” (Hobson 2003). For many scholars, then, this form of identity politics birthed multicultur­ alism and similar efforts, for better or worse, at including difference within liberal polities.9 In contrast, the identity politics that manifested with polit­ ical polarization in Macedonia was a different sort of historical formation. This identity politics manifested not in claims to difference from the larger polity. Rather, it was premised on competing, monopoly claims over one and same national identity, constituting a struggle over the authoritative representation of the nation. In Macedonia, the older form of identity politics, predicated on asser­ tions of identity difference, manifested most clearly in the political demands of the 1990s and 2000s that ethnic Albanian citizens of Macedonia made for greater inclusion and autonomy with a country that had been framed, constitutionally, as a homeland for the ethnic Macedonian people (Krasniqi 2011).10 On the one hand, this particular, ex-Yugoslav expres­ sion of identity politics reflected how the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia institutionalized ethnic difference, recognizing distinct “nations,” “nationalities” and “ethnic groups,” and awarding particular rights and entitlements to members of each category (see Akan Ellis 2003). On the other hand, European and American intervention in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s and 2000s popularized discourse and policy on multiculturalism that also informed the politics of ethnic Albanian iden­ tity claims in Macedonia. In contrast to such an identity politics based on assertions of basic difference, identity politics in recent examples of political polarization often manifests in mutually exclusive claims to one and the same iden­ tity. Thus, in Macedonia, both Gruevski supporters and Gruevski critics claimed to articulate and represent something essentially Macedonian and something essential for Macedonia. In the place of recognition struggles, one encounters “struggles of representation and claims of representativeness” (Rajagopal 2001: 148).11 In such cases, rival identity projects invoke distinct social imaginaries and marshal distinct symbols and discourses to elaborate distinct visions of an otherwise common national identity.

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From bubbles to doubles: popular culture, mass media, and political polarization Arguably, the identitarianization of political persuasion has emerged as a global phenomenon, with many examples around the world. But, how might we explain such political polarization and the particular kind of identity politics that it seems to support? What practices and what institutional forms mediate the production, performance, and self-understanding of rival, even antagonistic identity positions? To answer this question, I turn to Arvind Rajagopal’s (2001) groundbreaking book, Politics After Television: Religious Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Indian Public. In this study, Rajagopal examines how pop­ ular culture and media technologies contributed to the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party, or BJP) in the 1990s. On one level, he argues that the liberalization and expansion of television in India resulted in new programming that inadvertently fueled Hindu nationalism in India. In particular, the BJP and allied groups were able to exploit the immense pop­ ularity of a serialized, television version of the Ramayana to support and profit from a movement to destroy a mosque, the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, and to replace it with a temple to Ram. On a deeper level, Rajagopal argues that the new varieties of mass communication facilitated by television also transformed the imaginary of an integrated, national Indian public: “If with the relatively small audience for print, the normative fiction of a bourgeois public could be preserved in some sense, the fissured character of this public becomes undeniable with electronic media” (2001, 25). Rajagopal thus coins the term, “split public,” to describe the “different languages of politics” that came to differently organize communication within a “bourgeois public” and a “Hindu nationalist public,” respectively. The consequences of such a split public should not be underestimated. As Benedict Anderson (1991) famously argued, the print capitalist circula­ tion of mass media genres (for example, broadsheets, newspapers, novels) grounded the social imaginaries by which nationalist ideologies and hence national identity emerged as historical forms. Within anthropology, Debra Spitulnik (1996), working with ethnographic material from Zambia, sim­ ilarly theorized how the social circulation of mass media talk—for exam­ ple, turns of phrase popularized by national radio programs—mediated a sense of national identity and collective belonging. For these scholars, persons’ orientation to a common field of discursive circulation as well as their uptake and recontextualization of media talk do not merely express underlying principles of social identity, rather they actively constitute social identities. The “splitting” of a public, that is, the emergence of rival “languages of politics” manifested in texts artifacts and performances oriented to distinct “regimes of circulation” (Cody 2009), therefore affects a core institution of the nation form and undermines the “normative fiction” of a representative,

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national public sphere.12 Not only is the imaginary of the “mainstream” or the “national conversation” undone but new “split” publics mediate and produce a different sort of identity politics. A multiculturalist discourse on the need for minority recognition in distinction to the majoritarian main­ stream is eclipsed by rival discourses on national essence. A religious con­ ception of the nation confronts a secular one, as in Rajagopal’s case. Or an ethno-nationalist conception of the nation confronts a cosmopolitan one, as in the Macedonian case. It is thus in the dialectic between political economy and the communica­ tive structures of the nation form that the identitarianization of political preference takes place. Tellingly, contemporary discourses on “filter bub­ bles,” “echo chambers,” and “media silos” reflect this point. As James Slotta (2019) argues, worries over filter bubbles and the like suggest a deeper anx­ iety over a fractured public sphere (cf. Mazzarella 2019). Slotta, however, treats “bubbles” not simply as empirical facts, but similar to the normative fiction of the national public, as social imaginaries that must be (re)pro­ duced. Working with material from the US, Slotta analyzes how particu­ lar news media genres, in which Donald Trump’s public assertions would be subjected to fact-checking or annotation, indexed and perpetuated the imaginary of separate, politically divided bubbles. Talk of “media bubbles,” and interpretive genres that presuppose them, thus mediate and even natu­ ralize a sense of incompatible political communities. Importantly, however, the communicative structures that foster political polarization do not simply forge an imaginary of separate “bubbles” or split publics; they also structure relationships between and across their distinct regimes of circulation. As Rajagopal contends, with split publics, “the sali­ ent question is of the terms of translation between them, in the reproduction of a structured set of misunderstandings” (2001, 25). In parallel to Slotta’s argument on fact-checking and annotation genres in Trump’s America, Rajagopal points to how the bourgeois press in India continually framed the BJP and the Ram Temple Movement as inexplicable problems to be solved, that is, as objects for interpretation rather than as subjects of news discourse. Such practices structure fissures, or misunderstandings, across the publics. In effect, participants in any one of the split publics would have to contend with a negative image of themselves (for example, as dangerous or irrational, as racist or unpatriotic) as the cost of engaging media from “the other side.” At the same time, newly differentiated publics can also ground new figures of collective action. As Rajagopal argued, with the Hindu nationalist pub­ lic, “Ordinary citizens now perceived their actions as having implications for society at large, suggesting a new dimension to their perception, and a different quality to the power that they wielded” (2001, 31). The “reshaping” of national publics into split form is thus a dynamic, generative process and is reciprocally about self-making and alter-making. It recasts politics and identity. Indeed, it recasts political preference as an identity.

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Antiquization and reshaping the Macedonian public Rajagopal’s approach emphasizes the role of public culture in shaping the social imaginaries that ground political movements and identity claims. This approach, I contend, can be useful in the attempt to understand the political polarization and identity politics that emerged in Macedonia in the 2010s. Again, the argument is that political polarization does not simply fuel “bubbles” but that structural transformations in public communica­ tion play an important role in shaping political polarization and struggles over representation. In what follows, I therefore analyze transformations in Macedonia’s public culture throughout the 2000s and 2010s. To do so adequately, however, requires a note on Nikola Gruevski, the former leader of the right-nationalist VMRO-DPMNE party who served as Macedonia’s Prime Minister from 2006 to 2016. Beginning in 2008, Gruevski launched a series of initiatives that pub­ licly claimed and celebrated Macedonia’s ancient heritage, and especially the figure of Alexander the Great, as central to Macedonian national identity. Reproductions of antique sculptures were placed in the yard of the Government Building. The Skopje Airport was renamed “Alexander the Great” as was the country’s major north-south highway. Telling also was the party platform published by the VMRO-DPMNE in 2007, titled, “Revival in 100 Steps” (Prerodba vo 100 čekori). The document diag­ nosed what it saw as the contaminating legacies of state socialism on the Macedonian mentality and set forth an agenda to (re)create “real human beings,” construed as forward-looking, dynamic, and proud national sub­ jects (see Dimova 2013, 117). In short, the Gruevski government adopted a rather interventionist form of cultural and social policy, one hinged to a nationalist project of “revival” that focused on ethnic Macedonians to the exclusion of Macedonia’s many other ethnic groups. Thus, the Gruevski government actively promoted Alexander and antiquity as sources of ethnic Macedonian national identity and national pride (Neofotistos 2012b). In addition, new policies of social reformation and regulation were implemented, from efforts to promote the Cyrillic alphabet, to restrictions of alcohol sales, to pronatalist social supports (see Crvenkovska Risteska 2018 for a critical analysis of VMRO pronatalist campaigns). The Greek government’s veto of Macedonia’s invi­ tation to join NATO at the 2008 Bucharest Summit only emboldened the Gruevski government’s assertions of Macedonia’s antique heritage. Yet, even from early-on, critics labeled and lampooned Gruevski’s policies as a bizarre form of “antiquization” (Vangeli 2011; Muhić and Takovski 2014) In some sense, Gruevski’s embrace of national revivalism in the mid­ 2000s constituted the first rumblings of an identarian formation of politi­ cal preference in contemporary Macedonia. Significantly, this development manifested multi-modally through public culture, across statues, names, and social campaigns. The ensuing years saw this cultural and political

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formation explode, in scale and in controversy. The effect was the introduc­ tion of a new, politicized aesthetics into Macedonia’s public culture, which ultimately worked to reshape Macedonia’s public sphere. So, how did this reshaping of the Macedonian public sphere take place? Freedom Square and 28.03.09 First, the Gruevski government ramped up its efforts to transform Skopje’s central district and thus to materialize the aesthetics of national revival across the city’s built environment. In 2009, the government announced plans to build a church on Skopje’s central Macedonia Square. Opposition to the church project quickly sprung up, however. Critics were disturbed by the plan to build a religious object on a public square, especially in the multi-faith context of Macedonia. There was also frustration over the lack of public consultation on the project and what would likely be the appropri­ ation of public funds and property by the Macedonian Orthodox Church. Furthermore, activists feared how the planned church would be detrimental to the spatial character of the square, which was arguably the most impor­ tant civic gathering space in the city. As the church plans progressed, so did opposition grow. On March 28, 2009 a group named Freedom Square (Ploštad Sloboda) organized a protest to demonstrate against the church. The protesters, however, were violently attacked by a group of counter-protestors who were allegedly bussed into Skopje to disrupt the protest (Vilic 2009; Janev 2011). Especially with the benefit of retrospect, the March 28 protest and assaults can be seen as a pivotal moment in the articulation of a new identity politics premised on competitive representations of Macedonian national identity. Whereas Gruevski and his VMRO supporters actively promoted an ideology of national revivalism, one that was draped within a duel appro­ priation of antique history and Christianity, opposing groups stood up for a Macedonia understood to be secular, cosmopolitan and progressive. These two different Macedonias were not only contrasted in terms of pre­ vailing values, but also in terms of aesthetics. One privileged a visual pal­ ette that featured the Christian and the (neo)classical. The other embraced and sought to defend a visual palette of Skopje modernism. Tellingly, many of the later showdowns between Gruevski supporters and opponents also came to be centered on architectural exemplars of the competing, newly politicized aesthetics. Skopje 2014 If the VMRO antiquization policies had already proved divisive, and espe­ cially after March 28, 2009 alarming, for many in Macedonia, the next chapter of VMRO revivalism constituted a quantum leap in the level of controversy. On February 2, 2010, the mayors of Skopje and the Centar

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186 Andrew Graan municipality held a press conference to announce a major urban renovation project. Named “Skopje 2014,” the project would add several public build­ ings and monuments to the city center and also replace the facades of several existing buildings. Insofar as all of the new objects would be in revivalist styles—chiefly neoclassical and baroque—the project would fundamentally transform the character of Skopje’s built environment (see Koteska 2011). Accompanying the press conference was a two-minute long CGI “visual­ ization” of Skopje in the year 2014.13 The video moved object by object to depict the numerous structures to be included as part of the project. Most Macedonians were stunned. Including objects like a triumphal arch and a 30-meter high monument to Alexander the Great, the project seemed oth­ erworldly and impossible in Skopje. But, by the summer of 2010, the new objects started to appear across the city center, often installed at night to affect a spectacular quality to their arrival. By 2014, not only had most of the structures envisioned in the 2010 video already been constructed, but the project had been expanded to include even more objects. Justified as an effort to build a “European” capital that would attract tourists and investors, Skopje 2014 installed a particular narrative of Macedonian national identity on the capital city’s built environment (Graan 2013).14 Complementing the architectural embellishments to Skopje’s land­ scape were mass media—television documentaries, talk shows, news pro­ gramming, public service announcements, advertisements, posters and leaflets—that served to reproduce and reinforce the revivalist politics and aesthetics of the Gruevski government. The Skopje 2014 statues and build­ ings were thus linked, interdiscursively and multi-modally, to a broader range of public culture and media discourse that combined to articulate and symbolize the VMRO’s political platform. Indeed, it was generally acknowledged that the VMRO-DPMNE employed sophisticated political marketing strategies during its period of rule. As one media strategist in Macedonia told me in a 2018 conversation, it was the VMRO under Gruevski’s leadership that brought advanced PR and marketing techniques to Macedonian politics. According to the strate­ gist, the VMRO moved beyond elections-focused media campaigns toward an ongoing and sustained communications strategy. Strategists and party leaders decided on core issues and messages; talking points were prepared for media appearances; unscripted media appearances were minimized; relationships were cultivated with sympathetic journalists and broadcast­ ers; and “hostile” journalists and broadcasters were shunned. Alliances between broadcasters and the party led to ancillary media (for example, talk shows and documentaries) that tended to flatter and support the VMRO’s political narratives.15 Through these means, the VMRO political appara­ tus infiltrated media publics in Macedonia to an unprecedented degree. In effect, the broader VMRO communications strategy, including the reviv­ alist aesthetics of Skopje 2014, served to create a new, trans-modal “visual regime” (Rajagopal 2001), one that disrupted the “normative fiction” of an integrated national public sphere.

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Significantly, Gruevski’s policies did elicit tremendous support among many in Macedonia. In analogy to Rajagopal’s argument on Hindu nation­ alism, the VMRO’s projection of a glorious past grounded imaginaries of popular participation that were polarizing, seducing some and repelling others: “A new public language was emerging, more intimate to a section of the population and intimidating to the rest, that resonated with themes of collective empowerment, albeit in disquieting ways” (Rajagopal 2001, 31). Indeed, Gruevski would emphasize his policies as collective actions, employing the catchphrase, “We accomplished it” (Toa go ostvarivme) when dedicating new Skopje 2014 objects or describing policy implementation. Through such tactics, ethnic Macedonians were called on to join in the national celebration, to enjoy their version of history and their faith, and to stand up against naysayers. Indeed, defiance mixed with pleasurable con­ sumption, as VMRO supporters were encouraged to delight in Skopje’s new city center, but also, when need be, to confront protestors, such as Freedom Square, who argued for an alternative vision of Macedonia. Despite, or perhaps, because of such support, Gruevski’s social and cul­ tural policies were very controversial and critics quickly mobilized in oppo­ sition. I will examine the public that emerged in opposition to Gruevski in detail in the next section. But it is worth noting here that several activist groups took to the streets to demonstrate against Skopje 2014 and its politi­ cized aesthetics. In addition to Freedom Square, activist groups such as the Singing Skopjeans (Raspeani Skopjani), the First Archibrigade (Prva ArhiBrigada) and Urban Artistic Action (Urbano-umetička akcija) produced happenings, discussions, and street art in efforts to pluralize, through spec­ tacle and practice, the national discourse on Macedonia (Mattioli 2014). Furthermore, several news outlets and journalists emerged as outspoken critics of Gruevski, his government, and even of “Gruevism,” portrayed as a mixture of craven strong-arm corruption and vainglorious, parochial kitsch (see Gelevski 2015). This emergent, alternative public sphere sought to maintain a space for political criticism and investigative journalism against the Gruevski government’s growing infiltration of the Macedonian public sphere. For, notoriously, the Gruevski government had begun to isolate and undermine journalists and news outlets that were considered to be overly critical of the party and the Prime Minister. Notably and most visibly, Velja Ramkovski, the owner of Macedonia’s once largest and most popular inde­ pendent television station, A1, was arrested and convicted on suspicious charges of tax evasion and money laundering.16 Similarly, the arrest and imprisonment of journalist Tomislav Kežarovski provoked protest and was widely seen as an act of government intimidation directed at investigative journalists.17 The government also practiced advertising favoritism, direct­ ing its large advertising budget toward friendly media to the detriment of critical media.18 More ominously, those journalists who continued to produce critical reports were often attacked as “traitors” or foreign agents by pro-government

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188 Andrew Graan media.19 Especially notorious were several online, government-aligned news portals, such as Kurir, Republika and Libertas, which would regularly pub­ lish anonymous, “hit job” stories on government critics. Oftentimes, the attacks published on the online portals were then referenced in reports pub­ lished on “more respectable” television and print media, building an intertextual chain of slander. Similarly, shock jocks like Milenko Nedelkovski and Dragan Pavlović Latas would verbally attack journalists and encourage audiences to do the same. Finally, as an editor at one independent news out­ let told me in a 2018 interview, the Gruevski government would also margin­ alize critical media with silence, that is, the government would simply refuse to acknowledge or comment on critical reporting. Due to this multi-faceted crackdown on independent media, the Gruevski government was routinely criticized within and without Macedonia for its increasingly authoritarian and illiberal character.20 The revelation of an illegal wiretapping operation, overseen by Gruevski’s cousin who led the Macedonian secret police, and the leak of several of the taped phone conversations among VMRO political elites, seemed to confirm the extent of corruption and the abuse of power that prevailed during the Gruevski period.21 Furthermore, it is both fascinating and troubling to note that the VMRO attack on independent media also produced its own stark examples of dou­ bling. For example, an online news portal named NOVA TV was founded in 2013 and featured critical reporting on the Gruevski government. However, in 2016, a pro-government portal was founded with the name, TV NOVA and with a suspiciously similar logo (see Figures 7.9 and 7.10). Likewise,

Figure 7.9 The logo for the independent news outlet, Nova TV

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Figure 7.10 A billboard featuring the logo of TV Nova, a now defunct news outlet that was friendly to the Gruevski regime Source: Andrew Graan.

a pro-Gruevski broadcasting venture named, Radio Slobodna Makedonija (Radio Free Macedonia) appropriated the name and visual identity of the longstanding, US-funded news source Radio Slobodna Evropa (Radio Free Europe), which had also emerged as a venue for critical journalism (see Figures 7.11 and 7.12). In parallel, a professional organization for journalists, led by notable Gruevski apologists, Makedonska Asocijacija na Novinari (The Macedonian Association of Journalists) was founded as an alternative to the much older, Združenje na Novinarite na Makedonija (The Association of Journalists in Macedonia). In these efforts to produce rival sources of infor­ mation, one finds too the proliferation of doubles, that is, of uncanny resem­ blances that simultaneously index and obscure the political divisions that are their conditions. In summary, the Gruevski government, through its transformation of Skopje’s built environment, its aggressive public relations, and its attack

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Figure 7.11 The logo of the VMRO friendly, Radio Free Macedonia

Figure 7.12 The logo of the US-funded, Radio Free Europe

on independent media, worked to reshape the Macedonian public sphere. In doing so, it undermined the normative fiction of an integrated national public. In its place, a split public emerged. One part was marked by a lan­ guage and aesthetics of ethnic Macedonian nationalism and was controlled by the VMRO party apparatus. The other part, organized across embattled independent media outlets and social media, articulated a left liberal com­ mitment to a “rational public sphere” to be performed through investigative journalism and open public debate. It is to this oppositional public that I now turn.

The contours of European Macedonia Despite Gruevski’s control over the government, the VMRO’s colonization of public space and mass media in Macedonia did not go unchallenged. In word and deed, a varied collection of media outlets, activists, intellec­ tuals, culture producers and citizen protestors articulated and performed a different sort of Macedonian public. This oppositional public valorized a vision of modernity premised on democracy, rational-critical discourse, and cosmopolitan belonging. Across this oppositional public, then, a vision of Macedonia recurrently manifested as being already modern and already

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European. From this perspective, the Gruevski government, accused of both authoritarianism and kitsch, posed a threat to the Macedonian nation (Graan 2013). One can see this distinct, oppositional “language of politics” across several different fields of cultural production. In regard to news media specifically, several journalists and media outlets bravely refused to relent to VMRO pressure and continued to publish crit­ ical news on the government, among them veteran news personalities like Borjan Jovanovski and Branko Geroski. Thus, even when VMRO pressure resulted in the closure of established news outlets, these professionals cre­ ated new venues for critical journalism. Tellingly, however, much critical news migrated to online news portals rather than traditional media such as print, radio and television, in order to minimize the costs of production and distribution in order to withstand the government’s practice of adver­ tising favoritism. These and other internet portals acted not only as news sources but also as virtual salons in which authors—often using pseudonyms—published critical reactions to Gruevski’s policies. Social media and online discussion groups served a similar function. The communication infrastructures of the internet and social media were thus crucial to crea­ tion of an oppositional public sphere, despite the Gruevski government’s de facto control of most major Macedonian news broadcasters and in the face of ongoing VMRO efforts to undermine independent media. Through their writings and public actions, critics of Gruevski and his policies invoked and performed a national imaginary that challenged the ethnonationalist premises of the VMRO public. However, like the VMRO public, this oppositional national imaginary emerged interdiscursively and multi-modally, across sites and artifacts of public culture. Several moments of political protest against the Gruevski government bring the symbolic dimensions of this imaginary into relief. Mass protests and student plenums For example, as the Skopje 2014 project accelerated, many valiant activists took up the pen and gathered in protest of Skopje 2014 and its monopoly claims on Macedonian identity. Consistent across these various actions were efforts to perform public discussion and rational deliberation, in explicit contrast to the Gruevski government’s lack of transparency and public consultation. Thus, in the wake of the 2010 announcement of the Skopje 2014 project, numerous authors published opinion pieces, whether in critical news media or on social media forums, in which they offered argu­ ments against the rationale and realization of Skopje 2014.22 Groups like the First Archi-Brigade not only published criticisms of the project but also convened public meetings, with international participants, to discuss urban planning, in effect modeling ideal versions of a rational public sphere.23 As time went on, popular discontent over Gruevski’s growing grip on politics resulted in several mass protests. In 2011, there were mass

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protests against police violence, following revelations of 22-year-old Martin Neškovski’s murder at police hands.24 Mass protests broke out again in 2014, following the passage of a controversial law on education. In conjunction with the protests, university students, presumably inspired by nearby Bosnia, organized “plenums” to debate the state of higher edu­ cation and civic politics in Macedonia.25 Again in May 2015, following the revelations of the Gruevski government’s illegal wiretapping scheme, mass protests erupted as citizens organized around the slogan, #protestiram (#IProtest). In effect, across such demonstrations, participants not only shook the Gruevski government’s claims to national consensus, they also explicated and performed the metapragmatics that organized the opposi­ tional public, one that celebrated “deliberation” and public participation, and that delighted in the ludic parody of Gruevski’s perceived pretensions (see Takovski 2016). I Heart GTC Furthermore, in parallel to Skopje 2014, protestors also turned to architec­ ture to ground and elaborate their vision of Macedonia. Indeed, two of the larger public actions protesting against the Gruevski regime were centered on the city’s old and new architecture as emblematic of competing visions of the Macedonian nation. The first action, named “I HEART GTC” (Go Sakam GTC) and launched in 2013, was a series of public demonstra­ tions against plans to replace the original façade of Skopje’s central mall, the Gradski Trgovski Centar (or GTC), with a new neoclassical façade.26 In their defense of the structure, they highlighted not only the building’s architectural merits, as exemplary of Skopje modernism and as part of Kenzo Tange’s post-earthquake plan for Skopje, but also how the building anchored a valued form of Skopje sociality, premised on openness, collec­ tive use and urbanity. Protestors thus defended the mall not only as a soli­ tary structure but as an emblem of a quintessential Macedonian lifeworld in need of acknowledgement and protection. The Colorful Revolution In a complementary fashion, the 2016 Colorful Revolution (Šarena Revolucija) used architecture—specifically the Skopje 2014 structures— to illustrate and perform an oppositional political imaginary. The protest action stemmed from Macedonian President Gjorge Ivanov’s decision to pardon the senior VMRO-DPMNE officials who had been implicated in criminal activities in the leaked phone conversations revealed through the illegal wiretapping scandal. The act was interpreted by many as audacious, partisan impunity, and outraged Macedonian citizens flocked to the city center to express their discontent over the pardons and what was increas­ ingly seen as the corrupt and autocratic rule of Gruevski. In the midst

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of the protests, several young people began slinging balloons filled with paint against Skopje 2014 buildings and monuments. The splashes of paint that subsequently appeared across the city ultimately gave the Colorful Revolution its name.27 For Gruevski critics, the paint splotches formed a potent symbol. The stylistic uniformity of Skopje 2014 structures had rep­ resented the centralizing and autocratic tendencies of the Gruevski regime. The act of “coloring” the Skopje 2014 objects was thus meant to counter government authoritarianism with pluralism, to defy the monochrome with the multichrome.28 Taking a step back, one can see how political polarization in Macedonia emerged through a “splitting,” whereby a Macedonian language public sphere that was once imagined as integrated was seen to have fractured into a right-nationalist public that was premised on fidelity to the VMRO’s nationalist politics and a left-liberal oppositional public that was premised on the performance of rational-critical discourse. This splitting did not simply reflect pre-existing polarization. Instead, diverging media publics worked to perpetuate polarization and to figure political commitments in terms of identity. In this light, the VMRO-friendly media’s attacks on par­ ticular journalists, politicians, public intellectuals, news outlets, NGOs as “traitors” functioned to (re)produce the imaginary of split publics. So too did parodies of “Grujo” or “VMROvci” and arguments against the “mad” (ludo) and “abnormal” (nenormalno) character of politics and society during Gruevski’s reign. From the perspective of the VMRO public, government critics could only be “traitors” endangering the nation. From the perspec­ tive of the oppositional public, VMRO supporters could only be fanatics or dupes in their allegiance to the autocratic Gruevski. The split publics thus worked to structure and perpetuate mutually exclusive visions of Macedonia and of the national identity. Indeed, the respective figures of the traitor and the lunatic indicated how the fracture of political language perpetuated forms of othering by which political identity was treated as a fundamental aspect of person. Across their distinct imaginaries of public culture and public communi­ cation, both Gruevski supporters and their left-liberal critics thus advanced rival, mutually exclusive visions of what Macedonia could and should be. The VMRO public wed the discourse of ethnic Macedonian nationalism with a revivalist aesthetics that was materialized across Skopje’s built environment, VMRO friendly news outlets, television commercials and documentary programming. In contrast, the oppositional public, despite government pressure and persecution, recurrently modeled and performed a commitment to deliberation and public participation that are often con­ sidered hallmarks of the idealized, rational-critical public sphere. Each side claimed to represent “Macedonia” and portrayed its rival as a threat to the national good. The reshaping of the Macedonian public sphere thus came to epitomize an identity politics structured by opposing sides claiming to represent one and the same national identity.

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Prespa Agreement Despite Gruevski’s efforts to consolidate political power and to squelch opposition, after a string of political scandals and political crises, the VMRO­ DPMNE ultimately lost power in April 2017 and the Social Democrats, led by Zoran Zaev formed a new government. This shift in power, however, did not end political polarization in Macedonia. On the contrary, it has brought even further expressions of an identity politics built on competing claims to represent the nation. In particular, the 2018 Prespa Agreement again galvanized political divi­ sions in Macedonia. Immediately after its signing on June 17, residents of Macedonia began discussing the agreement. Not surprisingly, the agree­ ment was controversial. The name ‘North Macedonia’ did not have any his­ torical traction inside Macedonia and thus even for those who supported the agreement, the name seemed alien. Furthermore, a name change like that of the Prespa Agreement was historically unprecedented. In the days following the agreement’s signing, the most common adjective that I heard applied to it was, “humiliating” (ponižuvačko). It was clear that the name change would be a sacrifice. And, of course, there were many people who were outright opposed to the agreement and its proposed change of name to North Macedonia. Indeed, on June 18, there was a protest in front of the Macedonian Parliament building that resulted in confrontations between protestors and police.29 Ultimately, however, many came to support the agree­ ment, not because they liked the name “North Macedonia” but because they saw the agreement as a necessary step to improve the economic and political conditions in Macedonia and to vanquish the toxic legacy of Gruevski. Given the strong reactions aroused by the Prespa Agreement, the Zaev government decided to submit the treaty to a consultative referendum, presumably to add popular legitimacy to the action. With the referendum vote set for September 30, 2018, politicking on the Prespa Agreement thus came to be organized through advocacy on each side of the referendum. Much could be written about the various efforts to mobilize supporters for and against the referendum as well as the shifting public discussion on the referendum issue. But, before too long, there seemed to be clear sig­ nals that a slight majority of the population favored the agreement and the prospect of Euro-Atlantic integration. Presumably because of this, a group of anti-agreement forces joined together under the slogan, “#bojkotiram” (#IBoycott), and urged people to forego participation in the referendum poll. Macedonian law requires that at least 50% of the electorate participate in a referendum for the final vote to be valid. The strategy of boycotting the referendum, one with a long history in Macedonia, thus acknowledges that the boycotting side would be unlikely to win in a straight vote. Hence, the attempt to invalidate and delegitimize the referendum through legal techni­ cality. One might also note how the #bojkotiram slogan mimics the earlier #protestiram slogan used by Gruevski critics: again, a play of doubles (see Figures 7.13 and 7.14).

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Figure 7.13 A sticker featuring the #protestiram slogan, which was used in protests against Gruevski in 2015 and 2016 Source: Andrew Graan.

Figure 7.14 A banner featuring the #bojkotiram slogan, which was used to protest the 2018 Prespa Agreement Source: Andrew Graan.

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196 Andrew Graan During the summer of 2018, both the Zaev government and the #bojkoti­ ram movement rolled out their campaign strategies on the referendum. Across public rallies, talk show appearances, public debates, billboards, posters, stickers and graffiti, the two sides sought to energize supporters (see Figures 7.15 and 7.16). The result was increasingly polarized reactions to the Prespa Agreement and further expressions of an identity politics predicated on rival claims to represent Macedonia. This was no more visible than on the 8th of September, Macedonia’s Independence Day, when both pro- and anti-referendum rallies were held in Skopje. The #bojkotiram movement planned an afternoon gathering in Skopje’s City Park that would be followed by a march to the Macedonian Parliament Building where a political rally would be held. The Zaev government had planned their own rally in the yard of the Government

Figure 7.15 A 2018 billboard promoting a referendum vote for the Prespa Agree­ ment. The sign declares, “The EU will help us to build the rule of law” Source: Andrew Graan.

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Figure 7.16 A 2018 poster decrying the Prespa Agreement. It states, “Who gave you the right to negotiate about my name and identity? #Our Name is Macedonia” Source: Andrew Graan.

Building, featuring a speech by the Prime Minister and then a perfor­ mance of Macedonian jazz-pop classics (šlageri) with accompaniment by the Macedonian Philharmonic Orchestra. In their form and content, these two rallies exemplified the dual (and dueling) national imaginaries around which Macedonian politics had come to be organized. On one side, the pro-referendum rally, hosted by the Prime Minister at the Government Building, broadcasted a nostalgia for the modern. I arrived at the rally about an hour before Zaev was scheduled to speak and was quickly struck by the 1960s soundtrack and a video montage featuring old black-and-white images of a postwar, pre-1963-earthquake Skopje that was projected on a large screen as a prelude to the main events (see Figure 7.17). In the montage, sleek cars and buses drove through the city center and the city’s modernist buildings appeared new and filled with promise. Through

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Figure 7.17 The early phase of the pro-referendum rally held in the yard of the Government Building. In the background, videos of 1950s Skopje are projected against a screen Source: Andrew Graan.

such subtle devices, the event recalled a bygone but valued modernity, anchored in the relative prosperity of the postwar period, and the commod­ ities and fashion that indexed an upwardly mobile life. The event’s aesthet­ ics thus served symbolically to align the present of the Prespa Agreement (and the focus on EU and NATO accession) with nostalgic images of past prosperity and undeniable modernity. Significantly too, this nostalgic por­ trayal of Skopje also recalled the city without the character-transforming changes of Skopje 2014. The implicit argument on the referendum was clear: the Prespa Agreement would at last fulfill the promise of the past. And the grammar of the argument—the songs, the images and their architectural references, the nostalgia, the national symbols—was both patently cosmo­ politan and unmistakably Macedonian. The #bojkotiram rally also advanced an argument on the referendum, but through a different symbolic dialect of Macedonian, so to speak. After spending time at the Government Rally, I began to walk over to Parliament Building, via Macedonia Square, to similarly examine the #bojkotiram event. En route, I chanced upon a remarkable procession. Several individu­ als, wearing black #bojkotiram t-shirts, unfurled a humongous Macedonian

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Figure 7.18 The flag procession that was part of the September 8th #bojkotiram rally. Here the flag bearers shake an unfurled “Star of Vergina” flag before the statue of Alexander the Great Source: Andrew Graan.

flag before the towering statue of Alexander the Great, which was con­ structed as the centerpiece of the Skopje 2014 project. Significantly, the flag was the “old” one with the Star of Vergina. The flag-bearers then proceeded to shake the flag before the statue, as if saluting the “ancestor” represented in the sculpture (see Figure 7.18). They then walked, holding the flag sus­ pended above the ground, from the square toward the Parliament Building. As the men waited before Skopje’s new triumphal arch—also a Skopje 2014 addition—I joined the #bojkotiram rally, which was just starting about 100 meters away. Actress Arna Šijak, who had made dubious claims to having been injured during the June 18th demonstration, served as event emcee. She opened the gathering, talking about the “humiliating” agree­ ment and the necessity of a “Se Makedonski sobir”—an all-Macedonian gathering. Cries of “Makedonija sekogaš, Severna nikogaš!” (Macedonia forever, North never!) filled the crowd. In conjunction with these opening remarks, the flag-bearers carried the suspended flag underneath the trium­ phal arch and again shook it. They then carried the flag to the center of the rally, before the stage, which looked onto a street that runs in front of the Parliament. The men then shook the flag a third and final time before

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200 Andrew Graan the stage and amid the group of people assembled for the rally. As the flag-bearers carefully folded up the flag, a costumed music group began to perform Macedonian folk music. The #bojkotiram rally thus crafted a quite different depiction of Macedonia compared to the pro-referendum event. The flag procession was quasi-religious in its performance. The flag-bearers resembled pilgrims and the Vergina flag appeared as some holy object to be sacralized before the new statue to Alexander and the triumphal arch. Šijak’s calls for a “PanMacedonian gathering” recalled the 19th century congresses of intellectuals who led anti-imperial, national movements across Europe. The folk song, played with traditional instruments and in “folk” dress, further broadcast an image of a time-worn and therefore timeless Macedonian ethnos, one that was sacred and thus which should not be profaned. As with its rival rally, this event put forth an argument on Macedonian identity that was distinctly Macedonian. These two rallies, both so thoroughly Macedonian yet so extraordinarily different, confirmed my own sense of discrete imaginaries through which people on each side of the political faction depicted their ideal image of Macedonia. I was amid a landscape of doubles: two flags, two soundtracks, even two Skopjes—one distinctly modern, the other sacred and eternal. Of #bojkotiram and #protestiram. Of two historical narratives. Two medias. Two identities. Two names. A political order premised on ideological differ­ ence was manifested in terms of competing claims to represent Macedonian national identity.

Conclusion As I have shown here, competing struggles to assert the representative­ ness of rival publics has defined recent politics in North Macedonia. The Macedonian case exemplifies a deeper restructuring of political identity that is occurring in many world contexts. In so many cases, political polar­ ization is not simply about fractious politics and parliamentary or congres­ sional gridlock. Rather, political polarization can constitute a new sort of identity politics, one based on competition over the nation, with focus not on the recognition of difference but on monopoly over representation. And with this politics, whether witnessed with the opposing Leave and Remain camps of Brexit or Red State/Blue State dichotomy of the US, political per­ suasion is increasingly construed as an inalienably identity. The intervention of this essay has been to argue that this variety of iden­ tity politics emerges through public culture and the (re)shaping of pub­ lic spheres. Social theorists (for example, Anderson 1991; Spitulnik 1996; Warner 2002) have long argued that the circulation of public culture medi­ ates articulations of identity. Of course, any public sphere is constituted by participation norms that privilege some and exclude others. Nonetheless, in many cases, to echo Rajagopal, the normative fiction of a unified public

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sphere was reproduced despite constitutive exclusions. Indeed, Michael Warner’s (2002) famous formulation of publics and counterpublics echoes this circumstance. Whereas publics operate within unmarked normative structures, counterpublics carve out discursive spaces predicated on marked forms of identity difference. This is the terrain of recognition struggles and an identity politics organized through assertions of identity difference. The identity politics that I have sought to describe here similarly emerges though the circulation of public culture. However, the organization of the public sphere is different. Instead of majoritarian publics countered by minoritarian ones, one finds a split public, that is, rival efforts to repre­ sent and claim representativeness over the nation. As Rajagopal argued in the Indian case, “the diverse and contradictory constituents of a languagedivided public worked themselves out against the shared backdrop of a sin­ gle (but diversely) imagined national culture…” (2001, 17). Such a reshaping of the public sphere transforms the way that political claims are made. Thus, in Macedonia, political demands to recognize and protect ethnic difference were displaced by claims to defend “normality” against “madness,” or the “nation” against “traitors.” Parallel claims can be found in other contexts of political polarization, from discourses of the “real America” in the US to the emergence of political parties such as the “True Finns” in Finland. In these cases, representation struggles engulf recognition struggles. During the recent history of what is now North Macedonia, these strug­ gles have taken place through an array of media, including state-sponsored projects of urban renovation and public relations but also through protests, memes, critical media, and mass demonstrations. Through these struggles emerged two rival visions of Macedonia, articulated through overlapping but distinct symbolic repertoires. It remains to be seen how these rep­ resentation struggles will be resolved. At present, however, they have come to structure North Macedonia’s polarized politics. Furthermore, such rep­ resentation struggles define a polarized politics of identity in many other contexts as well. Thus, if not all political cleavages or national contexts can be understood in terms of political preference as an identarian formation, representation struggles and their form of identity politics are nonetheless a remarkable feature of the present political moment. My hope is that this essay serves as a preliminary step toward their critical analysis.

Acknowledgments A 2018 Advanced Research Fellowship from the American Councils Title VIII Research Scholar Program supported the fieldwork on which this chapter is based. Many thanks to the American Councils for International Education and their wonderful staff in the US and Macedonia. I am grate­ ful to Jane Cowan, Heidi Härkönen, Elina Hartikainen, Anni Kajanus, Suvi Rautio, Aleksandar Takovski, and Heikki Willenius for comments on drafts, which pushed me to focus and sharpen the argument advanced here.

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And, of course, great thanks to Vasiliki Neofotistos, both for her genera­ tive comments on this chapter and for her deft leadership in compiling this volume.

Notes 1 The Republic of Macedonia officially changed its name to the Republic of North Macedonia on February 12, 2019. The time period discussed in this chapter precedes the country’s renaming. For accuracy, then, in this chap­ ter I use the name “Macedonia” to refer to the country that, after February 12, 2019, is now officially named North Macedonia. In addition, my use of Macedonia conforms to disciplinary convention whereby anthropologists use groups’ preferred terms of self-designation. 2 Sinisa Jakov Marusic, “Macedonia’s Knife-Edge Election Ends In Uncertainty,” Balkan Insight. December 12, 2016. https://balkaninsight .com/2016/12/12/macedonia-s-tie-election-ends-in-uncertainty-12-12-2016/ 3 Sinisa Jakov Marusic, “Macedonia Shaken by Violence in Parliament,” Balkan Insight. April 28, 2017. https://balkaninsight.com/2017/04/28/ macedonia-calms-down-after-parliament-violence-04-27-2017/ 4 Sinisa Jakov Marusic, “Macedonia Deal Draws Praise Abroad, Anger at Home,” Balkan Insight. June 13, 2018. https://balkaninsight.com/2018/06/13/ macedonia-name-deal-internationally-praised-criticised-at-home-06-13-2018/ 5 The Greek government placed a trade embargo on Macedonia between Feb­ ruary 1994 and October 1995, to disastrous effect in Macedonia. Macedo­ nia abandoned the “Star of Vergina” flag as a concession to Greece in the interim accord that ended the embargo. Nevertheless, the Star of Vergina flag has been used popularly, if unofficially, in Macedonia following the interim accord. Oftentimes, but not always, personal use of the Vergina flag was taken as an assertion of Macedonian national identity contra Greek denials. 6 See Friedman 2017 for a fascinating analysis of us versus them markers (naš and niven) in the wiretapped phone recordings that made public as part of the “Bombs” Scandal that revealed an illegal government surveillance program during the Gruevski period. As Friedman demonstrates, elite members of the VMRO party often combined references to “them,” their political enemies, with vulgarities that indicated engrained hostility and vitriol. Moreover, his analysis also showed how VMRO elites often used the term “ours” to deni­ grate persons understood as the party subordinates or lackeys. 7 While it falls outside of the scope of this chapter, it is worth mentioning that one’s political identity was also often essential for access to economic oppor­ tunities and resources. Party-based patronage systems served to reward party loyalists. One result of this was a prevalent discourse in Macedonia on the partiska knishka (party membership card) as the sine qua non of employment. 8 The entire episode can be viewed on YouTube at https://youtu.be/ H1LYa2UlV2U 9 For critical analyses of multiculturalism, see Povinelli (2002), Markell (2003), Hankins (2014), Simpson (2014), and Hartikainen (2019). 10 For an analysis of how ethnic Macedonian-Albanian identity politics played out in everyday situations, see Neofotistos (2004, 2010, 2012a). 11 One might further argue that contemporary political polarization, and its struggles over representation, has displaced or engulfed recognition struggles in many world contexts. In what is now North Macedonia, intensified polit­ ical polarization among the ethnic Macedonian majority has in many ways obscured the identity demands made by ethnic Albanian political leaders in

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the country. For example, the activist coalitions that emerged in opposition to Nikola Gruevski often celebrated the multi-ethnic character of political pro­ test against Gruevski but typically stopped short of engaging ethnic Albanian concerns over discrimination. Similarly, one might recall the 2016 critique that members of the Black Lives Matter movement leveled against Bernie Sanders, US presidential candidate and self-proclaimed “democratic socialist,” for his failure to address racism in his political platform. See Landes (1988), Fraser (1992), and Warner (2002) for complementary argu­ ments on how the bourgeois public sphere’s purported universality was belied by identity-based privileges and exclusions. The complete video, titled “The Visualization of the Center of the City of Skopje (2014)” is available on YouTube at https://youtu.be/iybmt-iLysU Interestingly, as Atanas Vangeli (2011) argues, the national celebration of Alexander and Macedonia’s ancient roots is relatively recent, developing in the 1980s to counter Bulgarian claims on Macedonian national identity. Examples of media programs that complemented VMRO messaging include Marina Dojčinovska’s show Macedonium (see Neofotistos 2012b) and Milenko Nedelkovki’s eponymous show, among many others. See Sase Dimovski, “Velija Ramkovski—Shady Tycoon Or Media Hero?,” Balkan Insight. December 2, 2010. https://balkaninsight.com/2010/12/0V2/ velija-ramkovski-shady-tycoon-or-media-hero/ See, BIRN, “Macedonia Jails Journalist Tomislav Kezarovski,” Balkan Insight. October 21, 2013. https://balkaninsight.com/2013/10/21/macedonia­ jails-journalist-tomislav-kezarovski/ Sinisa Jakov Marusic, “Macedonia Halts Controversial Ad Campaigns”, Balkan Insight. July 2, 2015. https://balkaninsight.com/2015/07/02/macedo­ nia-temporary-halts-govt-ads/, and Владо Апостолов, “Грујовизијата“чинела 26 милиони евра, 25 ноември 2019, Призма, https://prizma.mk/grujovizijata­ chinela-26-milioni-evra/ See Svetla Dimitrova, “Macedonia: analyst caught in political crossfire over Freedom House report,” Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso Transeuropa. September 7, 2014. https://www.balcanicaucaso.org/eng/Areas/North-Mac­ edonia/Macedonia-analyst-caught-in-political-crossfire-over-Freedom-House­ report-154079 For example, Brunwasser, Matthew. 2011. “Concerns Grow About Authori­ tarianism in Macedonia.” New York Times, October 13. http://www.nytimes. com/2011/10/14/world/europe/concerns-grow-about-authoritarianism-in­ macedonia.html https://truthmeter.mk/the-wiretapping-records-the-opposition-broadcasted­ audio-video-transcripts/ See the collections, Gelevski (2010a, 2010b, 2010c). See http://prvaarhibrigada.blogspot.com/2011/01/imagine-city-lectures-and­ panel.html Sinisa Jakov Marusic, “Macedonians Protest Over ‘Fatal Police Beat­ ing,’” Balkan Insight. June 7, 2011. https://balkaninsight.com/2011/06/07/ macedonians-protest-after-police-murders-youngster/ Erwan Fouéré, “Macedonian Student’s Plenum—A Cry for Respect.” Balkan Insight. December 15, 2014. https://balkaninsight.com/2014/12/15/macedonian­ student-s-plenum-a-cry-for-respect/ The movement website is available at: http://gosakamgtc.blogspot.com. For an overview of the protests, see: Deana Kjuka, “Macedonia’s ‘Colorful Revolution’ A Palette of Public Anger.” Radio Free Europe. April 22, 2016. https://www.rferl.org/a/macedonia-colorful-revolution-a-palette-of-pub­ lic-anger/27691237.html

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28 See Kristina Ozimec, “Осми ден од „шарената македонска револуција.” Deutsche Welle. April 19, 2016. https://www.dw.com/mk/осми-ден-од-шарената­ македонска-револуција/a-19199808?maca=maz-rss-maz-pol_makedonija_ timemk-4727-xml-mrss 29 See Sinisa Jakov Marusic, “In Pictures: Macedonia ‘Name’ Protest Turns Violent.” Balkan Insight. June 18, 2018. https://balkaninsight.com/2018/06/18/ in-pictures-macedonia-name-protest-turns-violent-06-18-2018/

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Muhić, Maja and Aleksandar Takovski. 2014. “Redefining National Identity in Macedonia: Analyzing Competing Origin Myths and Interpretations through Hegemonic Representation.” Etnološka Tribina 44: 138–52. Neofotistos, Vasiliki P. 2004. “Beyond Stereotypes: Violence and the Porousness of Ethnic Boundaries in the Republic of Macedonia.” History and Anthropology 15, no. 1: 47–67. ———. 2010. “Postsocialism, Social Value, and Identity Politics among Albanians in Macedonia.” Slavic Review 69, no. 4: 882–902. ———. 2012a. The Risk of War: Everyday Sociality in the Republic of Macedonia. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 2012b. “Going Home to Pakistan: Identity and Its Discontents in Southeastern Europe.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 18, no. 4: 291–316. Norris, Pippa and Ronald Inglehart. 2019. Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2002. The Cunning of Recognition. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rajagopal, Arvind. 2001. Politics After Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Simpson, Audra. 2014. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Spitulnik, Debra. 1996. “The Social Circulation of Media Discourse and the Mediation of Communities.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 6, no. 2: 161–87. Takovski, Aleksandar. 2016. “The Humor of Skopje 2014: Between Effects and Evaluations.” Humor 29, no. 3: 381–412. Taylor, Charles. 1994. “The Politics of Recognition.” In Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, edited by Amy Gutmann. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Vangeli, Anastas. 2011. “Nation-Building Ancient Macedonian Style: The Origins and the Effects of So-called Antiquization in Macedonia.” Nationalities Papers 39, no. 1: 13–32. Vilić, Nebošja, ed. 2009. Siluvajte go Skopje! Skopje: 359 Warner, Michael. 2002 Publics and Counterpublics. New York, NY: Zone Books.

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8

Innovation after Prespa Fabio Mattioli

According to “futurologists” and regulators alike, the future of global economies will be shaped by the disruption and innovation generated by emerging startups (The World Bank 2019). To capitalize on the next Facebook-scale enterprises, countries that have missed out on the first wave of digital technologies are investing heavily in innovation eco-systems— networks of support such as incubators, accelerators, or excellence centers, where innovative ideas can move from the closed spaces of universities to the market. Within these nurturing ecosystems, startups can emerge, grow; and theoretically, flourish. For countries at the periphery of the global economic system, such as North Macedonia, building support around emerging entrepreneurs is par­ ticularly important but it also depends on geopolitical considerations. Until very recently, investors remained wary of the country’s tensions with Greece. Its contested national identity reinforced other legal and economic barriers to the circulation of innovation, forcing Macedonian startups to operate in the domestic market, where they adopted frugal forms of innovation adapted to their relatively low ceiling for growth. In concomitance with the process of opening up, initiated by the Prespa Agreement, however, public agencies have invested growing sums of money in building support networks, which they see as part of a complex diplomatic strategy allowing Macedonia to strengthen its ties with several European partners but also with other geo­ graphically small, successful countries such as Singapore or Israel. This chapter interrogates how resolving the “name issue” through the Prespa Agreement has affected the Macedonian economy, and specifically entrepreneurs who circulate in the innovation landscape Skopje, the coun­ try’s capital. The data come from an ongoing ethnographic work with the first batches of mostly male and university educated founders that have completed several startup accelerator programs both before and after the signing of the Prespa Agreement. My approach to the field was facilitated by the fact that I have been running a similar research project in Melbourne, where I collaborated with startups and accelerators as an ethnographer in residence, offering some anthropological insights into their products or business strategies. Moreover, in 2019, my partner, whose background

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is in government innovation, started working on a startup project, which caught the interest of several founders and ecosystem operators in Skopje, allowing me to participate in several conversations about potential future collaborations. The chapter argues that speeding up the so-called Europeanization pro­ cess does not actually translate in a significant improvement of working conditions or future perspectives for startups. Instead, the country’s inno­ vation ecosystem reflects some of the broader contradictions of post-Prespa North Macedonia—whereby the promises of freedom and democracy that underlay the decision of changing the country’s name struggle to translate in practice. Ironically, this landscape, where innovation is presented as the path for­ ward but remains evanescent, reinforces the contradictions experienced by small companies at the periphery of Europe. Innovation in North Macedonia does not promote new forms of development, a sort of entrepreneurial citi­ zenship where domestic citizens could finally catch up with their European counterparts and become agents of (their own) change (Irani 2019). Instead, it empowers Macedonians who are already conversant in European busi­ ness practices, while heightening new challenges for those who are not.

Postsocialism and the European dream In the weeks before the referendum, when citizens of Macedonia were asked to express their opinion on changing their country’s name, I had been involved in countless debates, both in person and online, with friends of disparate political orientations. My discussion with Macedonian interloc­ utors were tense, funny, and most of all, resigned—as if changing the name was perhaps not what my interlocutors wanted, but nonetheless inevitable. At the heart of these conversations was the conviction, particularly strong among middle-class urbanites who circulated in Macedonia’s innovation ecosystem, that questioning the Prespa Agreement meant jeopardizing their chances of accessing Europe—and, finally, turning the page on dec­ ades of poor governance. Strictly speaking, that was not true. The Prespa Agreement did not guarantee Macedonia’s access to the EU. Instead, the Agreement constituted a promise, by the Greek government, to avoid veto­ ing Macedonia’s application and access. But none of that would come to fru­ ition, if the country were not to tackle a nagging list of reforms to undergo and criteria to fulfill—which, as of this writing, has not been addressed and led to France’s dramatic veto in 2019 (Cvetanoska 2019). If middle-class Skopjani (residents of Skopje) saw in the Prespa Agreement their opportunity to become European, it was largely because of how Zaev and his European allies had framed the political debate. In the months before and after the Agreement, a string of European political fig­ ures, from the European High Commissioner for Foreign Politics Federica Mongherini to the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, had reinforced the

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208 Fabio Mattioli historical character of the Agreement. Editorials in the NYT, local Balkan analyses, international newspapers, even critical academics such as Judith Butler, Etienne Balibar, and Antonio Negri had written in support of the Agreement as an opportunity to foster multiculturalism at a time when populism and nationalism threatened the liberal order in Europe (The Guardian 2018). Zaev, in Macedonia, echoed these commentaries. For him, the Prespa Agreement represented the best way for “getting back on the main Highway to Europe,” which allowed Macedonians to take “charge of [their] destiny into [their] own hands” (EWB 2019). Europe, not their name, was what Macedonians had to focus on. But why did Macedonians need to enter Europe? Zaev’s approach sug­ gested that European integration was necessary to guarantee political sta­ bility to the country and the region, a position long supported by Eurocrats and other international institutions in relation to Eastern Europe (Borneman and Fowler 1997; Agnew 2001). In this perspective, Macedonia’s access to the EU was about completing the process of Europeanization which, since the 1990s, had been one (if not the) preferred tool to implement so-called democratic reforms of institutions at the national level in former socialist countries. Joining the European Union, Eurocrats reasoned, would allow a “democratic” culture to grow and solidify in a part of the continent that Eurocrats often saw not only as backward, but also as inherently tending towards illiberal and non-democratic forms of government (Coles 2007; Bechev 2012; Petrović 2013). Finally, Europe, long divided in different cul­ tural and economic spheres, would be completed. For many Eastern European, and especially former citizens of the repub­ lics of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the underlying logic of Europeanization struck home. Since the 1960s, Yugoslav citizens had exhibited an appetite for increased involvement in political life, as demon­ strated in several (more or less widespread) protests that had mirrored similar movements in the Western world. Throughout the 1980s, Yugoslav cultural forms—from alternative music, to mass consumption and critical literature—had been permeated by a vernacular and visceral participatory aspiration, elaborated in direct dialogue with similar, Western cultural and artistic forms (Luthar and Pušnik 2010; Rajković 2011). The connection between Yugoslavia and Western Europe was even stronger at the economic level. Unlike other countries of the socialist bloc, whose economies were sealed from the inflow of western goods, money, or practices, Yugoslavia had created several joint ventures and licensing agree­ ments with European partners, including the famed partnership between Zastava and Fiat for the production of cars (Rajković 2018). To sustain its industries, the Federation depended on imported European technology, paid for through trade credits and loans that were generally provided by Western partners (Lydall 1989; Gapinski 1993). These deep economic ties resulted in a network of everyday interdependences and exchanges. Even in one of the most remote and less developed republics such as Macedonia,

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citizens routinely travelled to Trieste to buy (and smuggle) jeans, while Macedonian companies relied upon baroque currency conversions and trade tricks across the two blocs to keep their precarious economy afloat (Woodward 1995). Macedonian interlocutors suggested that, throughout the 1980s, they did not feel separated from Europe. In fact, many argued, they were Europeans (see Gilbert et al. 2008; Jansen 2015). Thanks to their “red” passport, which allowed them to travel in the East as well as in the West, Yugoslav citizens were geopolitical centrepieces—an enviable position that made them not only wealthier than their Soviet counterparts, but also able to enjoy com­ plex systems of economic and political participation that some considered equal to, if not better than, what was available in the West. After all, what was the constitutional and economic order of Yugoslavia, organized along complex layers of autonomies and self-management, if not a mini version of the dysfunctional, yet widely pronounced as democratic, governance of Bruxelles (Hayden 2012, see also Becker 2017)? In Macedonia, the sense of social affinity with Western Europe did not disappear with the collapse of Yugoslavia. In the newly independent coun­ try, many looked at Europe as the steward for a successful transition—a gal­ vanizing prize for their troubled secession (Thiessen 2007). Eurocrats and Western Europeans, however, had a rather different perspective. Former Yugoslav countries, like most other former socialist countries, saw their application to join the EU evaluated on a series of increasingly stringent parameters (called chapters), which required them to change radically their normative, economic, and political structure. From food regulations to the banking and payment system; from welfare to competition, every aspect of what it meant to be a socialist citizen was evaluated and often defined as either inefficient or lacking—regardless of whether (post)socialist proce­ dures were better and more conducive to the well-being of local citizens (see Gille 2007). Over time, the pathways of European Integration grew increasingly tor­ tuous. Countries in Central Europe, which embraced various degrees of shock-therapies (Dunn 2004), transformed their economies into a site of off­ shore production for North European industries. While devastating at the eco­ nomic level, the growing industrial co-dependency between Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Germany, Britain or the Netherlands meant that their political integration in the EU block became smoother, allowing an almost unrestricted access to the same political and social rights of other Western European citizens, including freedom of movement.1 Countries that entered the EU later, such as Romania or Bulgaria, found a rather different political climate. By the early 2000s, a so-called enlarge­ ment fatigue had seen several EU core states doubt the strategy of inviting new countries in the Union (Mandel 2013). On the left, critics were wor­ ried that new entrants could provide reservoirs of cheap labor that, given the increasingly neoliberal direction of the EU, would further accelerate a

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210 Fabio Mattioli block-wide race to the bottom. Right wing politicians, meanwhile, recast postsocialist countries like Romania and Bulgaria as backward, corrupted and dangerously exotic, home of both criminal gangs and dangerous ethnic others. The result was that, when Bulgaria and Romania accessed the EU in 2007, citizens from both countries were subjected to a strange geography of ad-hoc regulations that, for almost a decade, limited their ability to move in the Union (BBC 2014, see also Mikuš 2015, 2018). While these shortcomings pushed some Eastern Europeans to identify the EU with a neo-colonial project (Böröcz and Sarkar 2005; Dunn and Bobick 2014), the mainstream discourse from both Brussels and Eastern European capitals centered on the crucial role that the EU played in infusing new life in postsocialist societies and, especially, their economies. The example most often cited was Poland which has seen a significant growth in its economic standards and traversed almost untouched the Global Financial Crisis of 2007/08 and its subsequent replicas. It was the freedom of circulation and the integration in the European market, economists argued, that had shielded Poland from economic ruination—thanks not only to the benevo­ lent hand of Western European investors, but also to the significant sums that the European commission disbursed in infrastructural aid and devel­ opment (Becker and Jäger 2010; Kattl 2010). In the Eastern Block, however, Poland was the exception rather than the norm. Other Eastern European countries, including states that had been heralded as models of economic transitions such as the Baltics or Slovenia, were dramatically impacted by the crisis when their asset bubble imploded (Bohle 2018). Similarly, mortgages and debt reached dangerous levels in Hungary. In Croatia, the newest addition to the block, household debt, often indexed in foreign currency, spiraled, prompting a wave of household repossession and foreclosures that favored right-wing, anti-European lead­ ers (Mikuš 2019). The sense that something was structurally wrong in the European Union became clear even within some non-EU members like Macedonia. Since the early 1990s, Macedonia had been eager to participate in the enlargement process (Belojevikj and Mattioli 2017; Mattioli 2020). Yet, after an early start, the country seemed to stall. European partners found Macedonia lacking—not only because of the ongoing diplomatic tensions with Greece, but also in a series of other crucial domestic reforms—, and continued to postpone accession talks to an indefinite future. Two decades of continuous waiting; of unattended promises of “democ­ racy” and economic well-being; of personal humiliations and unfulfilled collective aspirations. By 2009, after the Greek veto at the NATO summit and with a global economic crisis looming onto the domestic economy, many Macedonians started to doubt whether joining EU was actually in their best interests. Certainly, the right-wing government of Nikola Gruevski had started to promote a different, more opportunistic posture towards European partners and Western donors. Officially, the country

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was actively engaged in promoting changes to its legislative structure and following the EU agenda, but, according to several administrators I inter­ viewed, laws were developed and passed without any intention of applying them. Macedonian bureaucrats with whom I spoke in 2014 suggested that behind closed doors they were constantly instigated to take advantage of their EU counterparts by senior members of the Government—who partici­ pated actively in diverting international and European aid towards illicit (or murky) goals (see also Mattioli 2020). Macedonians had tried to integrate, but to no avail: wasn’t it time to take some pride and dignity back?

“Selling” Prespa without nationalism In the decade before the Agreement, the relationship between Macedonian and European institutions came to be increasingly hollow—a shell for mutual exploitation, emptied of the principles of respect and solidarity that were supposed to inspire the process of integration (see Mattioli 2020). Under pressure to find new resources in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, Eurocrats I interviewed saw Macedonia as an opportunity to win lucrative contracts that furthered their home Ministries’ agendas and advanced their professional careers. Most of the Macedonian bureaucrats I spoke with, however, came to see European aid and investments as their opportunity to gain control over substantial financial resources. Diverting these funds from their official use, forcing partners into uncomfortable agreements, extract­ ing bribes and rent helped some bureaucrats in reclaiming a sense of pur­ pose, whereby their marginality was recast as a position of strength. On the long run, however, these extractive entanglements did not help the country’s struggling economy. Even when they managed to extract benefits or money from their European partners, Macedonian bureaucrats found themselves tied into uncomfortable tensions with their exasperated European partners. Over time, Gruevski’s tactics of transforming collaborative projects into rentier tools grew intolerable even to those individuals working with institu­ tions and companies who had benefitted from his governance. The decade-long, tense and uncomfortable complicity between Eurocrats and Gruevski’s officials imploded after the fall of 2015, when anti-government protests gained traction. Suddenly, Russia’s foreign minister designated the protests as “being orchestrated from the outside quite blatantly” (Georgievski 2015), utilizing a rhetoric that exposed an ideological align­ ment between Russia and Gruevski, and evoked spectres of a new geopo­ litical escalation similar to that of Ukraine (Petsinis 2015; Stojkovski 2015). Alarmed, Western actors stepped up the pressure on the regime. Between 2015 and 2016, diplomats and ambassadors from EU’s core countries rou­ tinely invited the government to find compromises with protesters and undermined Gruevski’s divisive rhetoric. This presence became particularly crucial in May 2015, when a day-long gun battle between Special Forces of the Macedonian army and a group of Albanian armed men stoked fears

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212 Fabio Mattioli of ethnic conflict. Immediately, Western diplomats mobilized to normalize the situation—holding Gruevski’s government accountable, and leading to the demise of several high-level figures, including the head of counterintelli­ gence and Gruevski’s cousin, Saso Mijalkov (Marusic 2015). After months of pressure, European (and American) diplomats pushed Gruevski to establish a Special Prosecution office, the SJO, to probe instances of high-level corruption and set out a roadmap for new elections. And yet, the regime continued to sabotage the SJO and delayed the popular vote—a strategy that allowed Gruevski and his party to prevent, tempo­ rarily, the formation of a new majority at the following vote in December 2016. In an increasingly uncertain political and economic context, many of my interlocutors were convinced that, without the direct intervention of the European community, Macedonia could have spiraled into chaos. Instead, the pressure of European leaders contributed to ensure a (rela­ tively) peaceful transition of power, neutralizing the VMRO-DPMNE’s attempts at inciting mob violence—but also erasing the EU past complicity with the regime. Even though the decline of Gruevski had relaunched Macedonia’s EuroAtlantic aspirations and rebuilt bridges between the Macedonian leadership and the Western bloc, there was still one major obstacle on the path towards EU (and NATO) accession: Macedonia’s name. Zaev’s government, perhaps encouraged by the new climate, or as other bureaucrats suggested, because of the pressure of international partners, made solving “the name issue” its number one priority. After months of negotiations, Zaev and Tsipras signed the Prespa Agreement, agreeing to set aside their diplomatic differences and recognize the country under a new constitutional name, that of “North Macedonia.” Considering the Macedonian context, the solution was fairly unsatisfac­ tory. The new name continued to identify the country in ethno-national terms, which did not address the country’s ethnic plurality. Even though, for the first time in the republic’s postsocialist history, Zaev had gained con­ siderable votes from ethnic Albanian citizens, his government did not seize the opportunity to drop the “Macedonian” identifier altogether or utilize more inclusive terminology. At the same time, many citizens who identi­ fied as ethnic Macedonian were clear that they were unhappy with the new name. They feared that the name change might renew questions around the legitimacy of their national identity, or language. Plus, they asked me, could anyone imagine France change its name because any other European state wanted it to? Shifting between resigned acceptance and latent resentment, my interlocutors felt humiliated. For about 30 years, they had suffered dep­ rivations, embargoes, and marginalization—and for what? Critiqued from both progressives and nationalists, Zaev’s government tried to make the Agreement palatable. Instead of debating its content, Zaev reframed the “Prespa Agreement” as a necessary step that would lead the country into Europe. Months of talks, speeches, and ads promoted the view

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that the only way of being pro-European was supporting the Agreement. Critiquing the Agreement, instead, meant assuming a backward, national­ ist position radically opposed to the multicultural project of the EU. This discourse went so far that, when citizens of Macedonia were called to vote on the name change, the new name was carefully elided from the actual question posed. Instead, voters were asked whether they supported “the membership in the EU and NATO by accepting the Agreement between the Republic of Macedonia and the Republic of Greece.” Zaev’s party supporters, who included many middle-class urbanites, responded overwhelmingly yes to that question. But the reason why many urbanites supported this position was different from the early 1990s, when they were fuelled by hopes of becoming an open society and of democratic integration. Contemporary Macedonia needed the EU, they reasoned, not so much to transform its institutions, but primarily to gain access to the global market. How could Macedonia, a peripheral country with an indus­ trial base mauled by a protracted and corrupted privatization, find the cap­ itals it needed to lift itself outside of poverty? Integrating in the EU market seemed the only viable solution. While these benefits were apparent, very few analysts provided impar­ tial assessments of the costs of joining the EU. Almost no commentator discussed what would happen to all of those small businesses who did not apply EU standards in their practices. Would they be able to survive, if North Macedonia were to be completely integrated into the EU market? Or, would Macedonian small diaries and cheesemakers be run out of business by the strict competition of international (i.e. EU) brands able to fulfill the sanitary and regulatory regimes prescribed by Brussels? Indeed, besides the numerous problems, well documented in other studies of Europeanization in the agricultural and food industry (Caldwell 2009; Jung 2019), Macedonia’s relatively weak industrial basis meant that the country was unlikely to be able to profit from an increased export ability. For international organizations, such as the IMF or the World Bank, these potential problems were outweighed by the increase in foreign invest­ ments that would follow the integration of (North) Macedonia in the EU. And indeed, Macedonian import-export companies and contractors who worked with international companies were convinced that their businesses would be able to access more investments if their country was better inte­ grated in the EU. But the economic benefits of attracting foreign direct investment (FDI) had come under increased scrutiny during Zaev’s ascent to power. The progressive current of his government, led by the team assembled by the minister of Finance, had released a series of analyses that highlighted how, in the previous decade, FDI had been rather detrimen­ tal to the Macedonian state and society (see Jovanovic 2015). With only a limited number of new jobs created, the subsidies Gruevski had put in place had translated in direct profits for international investors rather than domestic workers.

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So, for those who had followed the Zaev’s campaigns against foreign investments (stranski investicii), it was clear that the main beneficiaries of Macedonia’s integration in the EU would be European or global investors, not the Macedonian state—and even less, its citizens. And yet, very few of these critiques were directly raised against the Prespa Agreement. Squeezed between a resigned support of Zaev’s government and the nationalism prop­ agated by the VMRO-DPMNE party, critics of EU integration found them­ selves in a place where it was very difficult to articulate any kind of critical voice without being co-opted into a polarizing debate.

Innovation in North Macedonia For Zaev, technical and holistic analyses of the impact of European acces­ sion for the Macedonian economy were politically inconvenient. Instead, he opted to present Europe as an ideal goal and a land of opportunity, lever­ aging sentiments and aspirations from the Yugoslav and early postsocialist past. It is in this context of vague economic expectations and political resig­ nation that innovation emerged as an alternative lens to read the economic impact of European integration. On the trail of successes of digital companies and platforms like Facebook, Google, or Uber, the 21st century saw countries across the globe engaging in a rush to emulate the Silicon Valley model of innovation. European coun­ tries set up agencies to promote innovation and build local innovation eco­ systems, where non- and for-profit support programs, often funded by the government, facilitate technology transfer between universities and com­ panies—a triple helix of innovation, often coordinated by accelerators and incubators that are aimed at forging new successful, profitable companies as well as inculcating the social ethos of entrepreneurship. In Europe, the growing interest in start-up ecosystems was partly a reac­ tion to the global economic crisis. Caught between quickly spiraling public debt, a lack of coordinated solidarity, and a political minefield that saw north-European states opposed to heavy-handed, public investments in favor of the south-eastern periphery, start-up ecosystems seemed to offer an ideal solution. Entrepreneurs embodied the ideal “heroic actor” (Freeman 2014, 17) that could procure their own wealth, while also contributing to col­ lective forms of development (Irani 2019). “To bring Europe back to growth and higher levels of employment,” as argued in Brussels, “Europe need[ed] more entrepreneurs” (EC 2013, 3). In Macedonia, the idea of investing in innovation entrepreneurship was received and developed by the Gruevski government and it built upon a longer tradition of economic change. In fact, the entire 20th century was a period of constant economic and social innovation in Macedonia. Since the introduction of socialism, the country experimented with different forms of social organization, including movements away and towards social owner­ ship of means of production—which shifted from being controlled by the

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workers or the party to being appropriated by managers and oligarchs in the postsocialist period. During the 1970s, Macedonian companies had to devise entrepreneurial strategies to keep production alive, often embezzling foreign currency or finding other creative ways to import the parts and technology they needed. In the 1990s, when half of Macedonia’s industrial production collapsed, laid-off workers were forced to become small-scale, informal entrepreneurs—if nothing else, to monetize the barrels of cheese or coupons they often received in payment. Despite this cultural responsiveness to organizational innovation, the large-scale economic devastation of the postsocialist transition meant that Gruevski and his government faced significant challenges to pro­ mote a knowledge-based economy. On the one hand, a large number of Macedonians, especially in the IT, engineering, and architectural sector were extremely receptive to the new work systems and technologies brought forward by the digital revolution. On the other hand, the economic collapse of the 1990s drastically reduced the domestic capabilities of companies who developed, supported, and scaled up new technological processes, thereby de facto forcing highly qualified and receptive specialists into offshoring work, often for European and global companies. A research conducted in 2003 by the Business Start-up Center shows that investments in Research and Development (R&D) amounted to only 0.22% of the Macedonian Gross Domestic Product (Polenakovik and Pinto 2010), only 1% of which came from the private sector (Stankovic et Al. 2012) and only 2 private investment funds were active (Ramadani et Al. 2013) In a context where universities, private companies, and the government seemed to be unable to work together, Gruevski’s government sought the help of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the European Union to establish a more coherent National Innovation Strategy. In the report that followed, created with EU funds aiming at promoting regional competitiveness, it was highlighted how Macedonia lagged behind other similar economies, not only because of the postsocialist economic collapse, but also because the FDI attracted since the early 1990s had generated little in terms of research and innova­ tion (OECD 2013). To stimulate innovation, Gruevski created the Fund for Innovation and Technological Development (FITR). The FITR was supposed to support entrepreneurship and build partnership between universities and established companies, especially in Macedonia’s IT sector, to fuel a new phase of the country’s development—one where it would stop being a reser­ voir of cheap programmers and become a hotbed of innovation. Despite a promise of 8 million euros over three years between govern­ ment funds and World Bank investments (Kurir 2013), and the possibility of accessing the EU Western Balkans Enterprise Development and Innovation Facility, the growing gap between Macedonia and Europe pushed the FITR to the margins of Gruevski’s agenda. In 2017, the FITR was resurrected by Zaev’s government, interested in making of “innovation” one of the

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216 Fabio Mattioli priorities of its economic politics. With a new director and a new prominent location in the city center, the Fund announced several calls for proposals for a broad spectrum of projects, from eye-recognition technologies to bio­ degradable tights for women. Some of the Macedonians officials who were involved in the allocation of funds told me that, in fact, the kinds of innova­ tions funded were too broad, to the point where they benefited not only start­ ups, but also large companies that were fully capable to invest in research. Besides giving grants, the Fund kickstarted a series of business accelera­ tors aimed at supporting domestic startups. In less than a year, it invested in three, privately-run, programs, two in Skopje and one in Veles. In addition, it supported directly and indirectly a series of partnerships and organizations that internationalized the domestic innovation scene. On its open-space premises, it welcomed educational activities to teach entrepre­ neurship and lean methodologies, including events where entrepreneurs from the region, supported by a Swiss state agency, coached domestic founders; it supported local organizations, such as Startup Macedonia, and invested in strengthening the local ecosystem. It also funded exchanges and study trips, where delegations of its employees and selected startups could travel and observe best practices abroad—what some interpreted as a tangible sign of the new possibilities disclosed by the Prespa Agreement after it was signed in June 2018. The development of the Macedonian innovation ecosystem coincided with the creation of the Startup Europe–Western Balkans Network in 2018, a major initiative promoted by the European Union to create avenues of integration in one of its priority sectors. The strategic value of the initiative was not lost on Zaev who, at the Startup Europe Summit 2018 held in Sofia in November of the same year, seized the opportunity to reaffirm that his government’s investments in digital transformation and growth were proof that Macedonia belonged to the EU–as much as any other Balkan coun­ try. His government’s new initiatives, suggested Zaev, were a testament to “the World and [the EU] about how innovative and creative can people, and especially young people, be in this part of Europe” (Vlada 2018). In Zaev’s words, the growth of Macedonia’s ecosystem constituted a proof of belonging that subverted the country’s peripheral status. Startup, accel­ erators, and design thinking had quasi-magical powers, capable of lifting Macedonia out of the backwater of Europe. That message echoed strongly in Skopje. During the Startup Europe Week in November 2018, organizations such as Startup Macedonia organ­ ized events that brought to life the domestic innovation ecosystems and tried to showcase how supporting startups would have transformative polit­ ical and economic impacts. From the stage of the only co-working café in Skopje, Public Room, members of the international community, including several western European Ambassadors, a representative from Intel, and successful entrepreneurs from the region shared motivational speeches highlighting the international character of the Macedonian ecosystem. The

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ambition was clear: only a European North Macedonia could “be counted among the Startup Nations,” as Zaev declared at an event I attended in July 2019, before conferring 30,000-euro prizes to 48 startups. The experience of startup founders, however, suggested a more complex reality, where the promises of integration and innovation that came together under the umbrella of the Prespa Agreement remained largely elusive. In a sunny day of 2019, after the Agreement was signed and ratified, I met with Ana, a Macedonian professional in her 30s who had started a very promising company in the marketing space. After a university degree in Marketing, she had worked in the industry, both for a local and an interna­ tional agency. Despite her secure job position, several changes in her per­ sonal life and professional career had pushed her to quit her steady job and start from scratch with a start-up, where she offered traditional consulting services and explored opportunities to disrupt the sector. “Compared to other industries, market research has remained rela­ tively stagnant,” she told me. Surely, the digital revolution offered new methods that could be employed, she had imagined. After talking to sev­ eral researchers in Skopje, she realized that new eye tracking technologies offered ground-breaking opportunities. Together with psychologists and computer engineers, she developed a tool to track what customers visual­ ized on screen, identifying their emotions as they browsed the internet. At first, Ana invested her own money in the venture. When money ran out, she took out loans leveraging her property and business to continue fuelling their research. Finally, in 2018, when her tool passed several val­ idation tests, she approached FITR and was awarded one of the several 30,000-euro grants. “And yet, nothing happened,” she told me, seriously disappointed. The grants, which were supposed to be a lifeline for start­ ups, had yet to be disbursed, six months later. “And yet, creditors don’t wait! What am I supposed to do here?” I asked her whether she could access other, European funding. Her mood brightened a bit: “I am part of a Swiss accelerator program, specifically aimed at supporting women. Perhaps, something will happen through them.” Ana’s words were echoed in several other conversations I had with stakeholders in North Macedonia’s ecosystem. For John, a foreign inves­ tor in his 50s who had started several successful businesses in the country, Macedonians had “no clue” about what innovation was. “It’s all luck,” he continued, before finishing his coffee and storming out for a cigarette. I asked others who were with us, in the offices of an innovation agency, whether they agreed. “Da be,” (of course) answered Slavica, a university-educated manager of a public support program in her 30s. “Here, start-ups are the new thing, which came out since we published our calls for projects…but they don’t know how to support each other.” For all the promises of invest­ ments and becoming a start-up nation, the Prespa Agreement seemed to have changed little in the domestic economy, where investments seemed to be evanescent and startups struggled to find the right, horizontal tools

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they needed to support each other. If anything, the confrontation with “European” innovation procedures contributed to reinforce a sense of dif­ ference between North Macedonia and Europe. But why did founders and stakeholders feel that Macedonian startups “have to start from zero,” as one of them put it? What was missing in the local ecosystem? Darko, Ana, Slavica and others suggested that Macedonian founders prioritized networking and connections over developing a viable product. That, for them, was a subversion of the “proper” way of doing busi­ ness, a way of cutting corners. Others described these attitudes in cultural terms. “You see, our (founders) are…how to put it…wild,” suggested Petar, a university-educated manager of an accelerator in his 40s, when recalling an exchange where his teams had collaborated with European founders. “At first, our guys were all shy. Then, they went…brffff,” he exploded, opening his arms as if to signify a large fallout. “At that point, I had to struggle just to get them to focus on…well…anything!” For Petar, taming “wild” (divi) Macedonian founders meant teaching them how to disentangle business endeavors from personal relations and focus on the instrumental nature of their activities. It meant asking con­ stantly “what’s in it” for them or for others, a mantra that Petar himself con­ tinued to ask me, before introducing me to other interlocutors. Ironically, this utilitarian view of relationships was precisely what investors like Darko lamented in Macedonians, when they described their tendency to rely on social connections. For startup founders who were at the early phases of their programs (like Darko), personal connections were more important than the development of a viable product. But, for managers of startup accelerator programs (like Petar), personal relations came into play only after the devel­ opment of a viable product, able to attract investment and generate profit. The Prespa Agreement amplified these fractures within the ecosystem because it has created a new opportunity, and urgency, to become European and adopt more efficient business practices. Either because they were too opportunistic, or because they were not opportunistic enough, Macedonian founders continued to feel unable to hit the right balance between personal connections and goal-oriented behaviors that, in the innovation ecosystem, identified the “correct” way of networking.

Post-Prespa innovation and its challenges From the perspective of founders in the Macedonian innovation ecosystem, Europe appeared as both near and unreachable. Startup accelerators, com­ petitions, investments, and programs projected Macedonian startups on the European scene, accelerating their work rhythms and inserting urgency in their workdays. Accelerators, managed by local entrepreneurs, gave startup opportunities to connect to other peers located abroad and helped Macedonian startups pitch during competitions in Berlin, Ljubljana, and elsewhere in Europe. These opportunities provided a sense of perspective

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and excitement that Macedonians were eager to embrace. As Zaev declared while awarding the 2019 grants, “This is the century of startups. Startapuvajte (let’s start it up!)!” While it provided a window onto the European startup scene, the config­ uration of the post-Prespa innovation landscape created new challenges for Macedonians. Several successful startups I spoke with lamented that, while the Prespa Agreement was supposed to facilitate investments in North Macedonia’s creative economy, it had actually done little to facilitate start­ ups’ access to capital. In fact, behind the publicized events where awards were (symbolically, if not practically) given out, the number of investors in Macedonia had not grown substantially; start-ups did not gather interest from domestic companies, and continued to rely on public institutions; and the speeding up of Europeanization had done little to change the dynamics of allocation and disbursement of domestic funding, which continued to be plagued by delay. While innovation in post-Prespa North Macedonia was conceived as one of the new pillars of economic and social development, with goals that transcended enhancing local competition and involved stimulating found­ ers’ personal growth, it also created new social barriers. To be fundable and recognized as successful by the few investment funds, startup founders had to learn specific business practices and thinking techniques, organ­ ized around the lean canvases of design thinking—a format that breaks down the innovation processes in discrete phases, broadly conceived as ideation, validation, and implementation (Brown 2008; Kimbell 2011). In North Macedonia as elsewhere (see Hemment 2015; Irani 2019; Johnson 2019), that meant absorbing specific business norms that transformed local founders into “proper,” Western entrepreneurs.2 Commenting on their development during the acceleration process, Petar told me that local founders started out without “any idea of what a pitch is.” Some founders agreed; while techniques such as pitching their ideas in short formats were easily transferrable (and indeed, founders who took part in accelerator pro­ grams learned them quickly), other business practices that constituted a key of Silicon Valley-style innovation, such as competitive collaboration, were much harder to learn. Successful entrepreneurs and managers of accelerators suggested that their shortcomings, and those of the ecosystems, stemmed from a cultural context that favored “traditional” entrepreneurial practices—sometimes described as a residue of communism or as a “village” entrepreneur men­ tality. As one founder suggested, innovation was not unique to the startup world (or the socialist past): most postsocialist Macedonian entrepreneurs had often been forced to be innovative. To survive the transition, they had to invent every day new jokes, and devise new social performances ena­ bling them to be received by potential customers, sign deals, or get paid (see Mattioli 2020). But their cultural practices were hard to reshape in the for­ mat prescribed by design thinking. How could they transform their ability

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to bricolage and improvise across social networks into a business plan? How could they present their performativity as a service that “added value” to existing products in a way that could be fundable, scalable, or even lucra­ tive for investors? “Personally, that’s what I like about being an entrepre­ neur in Macedonia: the long lunches and dinners, the stories and circles one has to go through to get any deal done,” confided the same founder. But, in the acceleration that ecosystem builders were trying to impress upon Macedonia’s entrepreneurs, there was less time for those social perfor­ mances. Everything moved faster, on a more linear time scale, punctuated by pivoting according to market demands, rather than their interlocutors’ wishes. For him—a man used to thrive in the uncertainty of Macedonian deals—the “lean” process of startups felt overwhelming. The distinction between Macedonian and European business practices drawn up by my interlocutors was exaggerated. Indeed, as Rencher (2012) and Irani (2019) demonstrate, sociality is a crucial component of the inno­ vation world, including in its extravagant pitch nights and hackathons. Recent scandals, such as the spectacular scam of Theranos or the failure of WeWork (Carreyrou 2018), suggest that innovation is as much about lever­ aging class-resources and social networks into selling an idea as it is about creating a new, problem-solving product. So why did Macedonian entrepre­ neurs, founders, and ecosystem builders present their own reliance on social networks as proof of their own cultural backwardness? Besides evoking closely some of the self-deprecating cultural tropes of nested orientalism (Bakić-Hayden 1995), these diagnoses suggested that the changes put in motion with the Prespa Agreement had started to transform how entrepreneurs evaluated their own worth. A recent report suggested that the six private investors operating in North Macedonia’s innovation sphere were interested in startups that had convincing products, already devel­ oped and validated by the market, which they could help reach a broader customer base before cashing in on their investments (Startup Macedonia 2018). This meant, however, that venture capitalists and the other investors who were supposed to come to North Macedonia in the wake of the Prespa Agreement were not going to be interested in most of the innovation already present in the country, much of which was either nascent, or informal. For instance, venture capitalists were unlikely to consider being involved with one of the most successful, recent innovations that took place in North Macedonia, i.e. the fake-news industry. Most notorious for having contrib­ uted to spreading Trump propaganda during the 2016 US elections, per­ haps helping Trump secure a win, Macedonian fake news producers were, by any definition, innovators rather than trolls. At the basis of their busi­ ness model was a deep understanding of Facebook’s marketing algorithms, which allowed them to proliferate messages in demand by US electors, who, after clicking on controversial (and often fake) news, were likely to click also on ads. Uninterested in, and often against, the hateful messages they were spreading, fake-news producers I spoke with in Macedonia made money

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from services like Google AdSense and other marketing services, which paid them based on the clicks they received. To maximize the possibilities of getting clicks, Macedonian teenagers who shared (and spread) fake news (see Oxeham 2019) invented clever strategies that built upon Facebook’s marketing campaigns, devising smart working strategies that involved much collaboration and innovative use of media. While (mostly) legal, none of these techniques could be easily molded to fit a design thinking, lean business plan, or the expectations of venture capitalists. Paradoxically, while putting North Macedonia’s innovation ecosystem on the map of European venture capitalists had little economic impact, the hope of achieving greater integration in Europe’s startup ecosystems had the potential of reinforcing fractures—between innovation worth funding, and frugal innovation that was not. Like elsewhere (see Lindtner 2017; Avle et al. 2019; Irani 2019), where the formalization of design thinking created new dichotomies of value between the labor of designers and that of those who supported the ideation process and made ideas work in practice, this under­ standing of innovation relies upon further urban-rural and class divides. But, perhaps when compared to other, larger innovation ecosystems, it is also likely to generate a chasm between the aspiration of North Macedonia to become a startup nation like others in Europe and the complex reality of its innovation ecosystem. Some of those who thrived in the post-Prespa North Macedonia’s innova­ tion ecosystem were, ironically, founders who had worked abroad and had decided to come back to Macedonia. There, in a smaller country with rel­ atively low salaries, they could exploit their international connections and expertise to build small, viable enterprises without the pressure of compe­ tition found elsewhere. And yet, these founders were also less dramatically impacted by whether or not Macedonia was integrated in the EU. Angel, for instance, had spent several years in Germany, where he com­ pleted his studies before working for a large German conglomerate. He had acquired a hands-on experience of the dangers and possibilities unveiled by innovation and startups, which had allowed him to return to Macedonia and participate in several successful companies. For him, even the most optimistic scenario of EU accession after Prespa was unlikely to eliminate legislative differences between North Macedonia and the rest of Europe. After all, if differences in regulation continued to exist between European countries, why would North Macedonia be any different? The best solution to this problem was actually independent of a fuller integration in the EU. In his opinion, “when you deal with German companies, you always face a degree of suspicion if you are not based there.” If his start-up continued to expand, he planned to relocate the client-facing branch of his company in Germany, while keeping much of the back-office work in Skopje. If being successful in the innovation world meant having to relocate abroad, then why would founders stay in North Macedonia instead of resettling elsewhere in Europe? Some successful founders, frustrated by the

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fractures of Skopje’s ecosystem, were already prior to the Prespa Agreement planning to move abroad. Entrepreneurs who had actually found suc­ cess elsewhere told me that they were unconvinced about moving back to North Macedonia, even if the process of EU accession continued. Clearly, if European integration did not deliver tangible, local opportunities soon, able to transcend the implicit hierarchies that continued to exist within the EU, the sense that transpired in Skopje’s innovation ecosystem was that most of those who could would leave.

What’s next for Macedonia’s innovation ecosystem? It was the first cold evening after a series of very pleasant days. Petar, Angel, Svetlana, my partner, and I were having coffee next to Skopje’s tennis club— one of the few places where you could both have a social life and watch your kids, as Angel and Svetlana joked, running after their toddler. After a long and productive conversation, where we explored possibilities of work­ ing together on a start-up project, I asked them whether they thought that Prespa had done anything for their ecosystem. “Nisto,” (nothing) they both answered. From their perspective, the acceleration of the Europeanization process had not made the ecosystem more competitive, open, or functional. Their answer echoed most of the conversations I had with founders work­ ing in North Macedonia’s innovation scene. Without improved access to capital, founders still depended on many of the same institutional logics that had governed the domestic economy since the 1990s. “After all, what can you expect?” asked me in the summer of 2019 a former, high-level offi­ cial in the Zaev administration, responding to my findings. “Without struc­ tural changes, it’s obvious you will not have more significant investments. Certainly, foreign investors were very concerned with the political dead­ lock. But, once that is removed, there are plenty of other things that need to be fixed before they will start investing in Macedonia.” The experience of founders directly contrasted the hyped rhetoric of European institutions, global media, and Macedonian politicians on the role of Europe in the domestic economic sphere. Even in the post-Prespa Macedonian innovation ecosystem, replete with international aspirations, one could find little practical trace of the benefits evoked by Zaev in rela­ tion to the Prespa Agreement. If anything, the rhetoric of Europeanization, which fed upon socialist and postsocialist expectations of parallelisms between former Yugoslavia and Europe, showed how European integration, rather than constituting a blessing, posed new challenges for Macedonians. In fact, a deeper look at Macedonia’s ecosystem shows that change is indeed happening—although it does not necessarily empower Macedonian start­ ups or the broader Macedonian public. Within accelerators, design-thinking ideas and investment logics are pushing startups to think of their labor, and of themselves, as backwards compared to “proper,” European ways of being a startup—even if the difference is much less pronounced than what decried

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in Skopje. It is possible that Macedonians will find a way to incorporate their own sociality within these linear understandings of success and of entrepreneurial time and relations. Yet, at the moment, the logic of innova­ tion proliferates binary understandings of what counts as “proper” startups projects and, ultimately, good business practices. Built upon a longer his­ tory of lost belonging to the European (business) world, these redefinitions of what counts as innovation or how it creates social and economic value are likely to be reinforced in the post-Prespa geopolitical context. If the Prespa Agreement continues to allow for a “conditional” or “par­ tial” integration of North Macedonia in the EU sphere, other kinds of investments (and interests) are likely to shape the development of local start­ ups. For instance, Macedonian accelerators are trying to involve members of the diaspora—not as seed founders, but as mentors who can unlock access to large investments from wealthier countries like the US, Canada or Australia. Some of these mentors might see their involvement in North Macedonia’s innovation ecosystem as a patriotic activity—but also as a way of gaining influence in Macedonia, filling in some of the gaps created by the expectations of post-Prespa innovation.

Notes 1 This did not prevent social discriminations and stereotypes—think of “Polish Plumbers” in Germany or the United Kingdom, where Polish citizens came to occupy important (and often less paid) niches of the local economy and were often regarded with a mixture of exoticism and fear. 2 Johnson (2019) depicts a similar scenario in Serbia. There, entrepreneurs described their own understanding of entrepreneurship as lacking and saw it as an embodiment of “proper” Western entrepreneurship.

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9

Fantasies of citizenship Post-territorial nationalism and

Macedonian emigrants in Turkey

Burcu Akan Ellis

On February 8, 2018, the Turkish government announced the availability of a new online genealogy system (E-Devlet’in ‘Soyagaci’ 2018). While ances­ tral public records of one’s parents and grandparents had been available previously through formal requests, the digital registry would eliminate the arduous lines in local government offices, providing an instant geneal­ ogy going back three generations thanks to a back-root search feature. The online inquiry generated basic information—names, gender, place of birth, marriages, children and date of death of one’s grandparents. Yet, within its first three days, the online ancestry system received 300,000 inquiries; and within the first week the system had to be shut down for maintenance (Buyuk 2018). Twitter was abuzz at #digitalsoyagaci, (#digitalfamilytree) with Turkish citizens posting screenshots of their ancestors online and learning, in some cases surprisingly, that they had deeper immigrant roots than they had originally suspected. Scores of Turks seemed elated about the confirmation of their Balkanmigrant roots, especially those from Romania, Bulgaria and North Macedonia, which they hoped could provide them the prospect of dual-citizenship in countries that are either in or perceived to be on a fasttrack to European Union (EU) membership. In fact, the number of Turks seeking dual-citizenship in Balkan countries has tripled since the availabil­ ity of the online ancestry search, feeding conspiracy theories positing that the government’s offer to voluntarily offer information about the Balkan roots of its citizens might have been a ploy to extend Turkey’s strategic reach (Basaran 2018). Regardless, thousands of citizens went online to evaluate their prospects for a new passport, with a media frenzy about their intent to migrate, leading to a parliamentary inquiry as to how many Turkish citi­ zens were now seeking dual-citizenship following the initiation of the digital platform (CHP’li Tanrikulu’ndan 2018). Fantasies of Macedonian dual-citizenship were further rekindled with the June 2018 announcement of the Prespa Agreement and a contemporaneous resolution of the country’s long-standing naming dispute with Greece. The UN-brokered agreement changed the domestic and international name of the country to the Republic of North Macedonia, eliminating long-standing

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objections from Greece regarding the Republic’s accession to NATO and the EU. Taken together, these developments set the stage—among the opti­ mistic Turks, at least—for a new path to European citizenship through the potential future EU accession of North Macedonia. The seeming alleviation of the obstacles in the country’s EU path, widely broadcast in the Turkish media, reinforced dual-citizenship aspirations of Turks with Macedonian ancestry. Ancestral “citizenship shopping” (Moritz 2015) embodies the notion of “flexible citizenship” (Ong 1999) made possible within a globalizing world in which individuals seek the benefits of connections to multiple state systems with the hope that one set of ancestral links might provide better access to resources than another (Moritz 2015). In this respect, many East European and Balkan states have entered the market of competitive passports: they have extended dual-citizenship, voting rights, and investment perks to their ethnic diaspora, and many promote entrepreneurship based citizenship options where foreign direct investors can acquire citizenship in return for a substantial investment that would enhance job opportunities in the country. Citizens of countries with comparatively dire economic, social, or politi­ cal bottlenecks may be incentivized to seek citizenship opportunities that could improve their economic or mobility capital. In fact, the signing of the Prespa Agreement was partially justified by some Macedonian citizens “as a ticket out of the country” (Vasilevski 2019). Yet, flexible citizenship as an aspiration, or even something of a wish-fulfillment fantasy, has a restitutive dimension different from what a more conventional utilitarian model—that is, the search for optimized returns from a market of passports—might anticipate. This chapter argues that the interest of Turkish citizens in dual-citizenship in North Macedonia is more than a product of seeking fast-tracked access to Europe: it is a com­ bination of a durable sense of discrimination, a search for retributive justice in a homeland that does not desire their return, and respect for emigrant identities in Turkey. A byproduct of multiple immigration waves including the 1953 migration (Ellis 2003; Trix 2016), Turkey is home to hundreds of thousands of emigrants from former Yugoslavia. The contemporary dis­ course about retroactive citizenship, dual-citizenship, and possible access to the European Union through Macedonian citizenship underscores the durability of underlying fantasies about righting past wrongs in a life left behind in the Balkans as crucial parts of contemporary Turkish identity. While territorial and international disputes between Greece and North Macedonia may subside with the Prespa Agreement, states in the region continue to engage in post-territorial nationalism with their respective dias­ poras to support their own domestic policies and international interests, triggering questions about discrimination, diaspora rights, identity politics and retributive justice (Ragazzi and Balalovska 2011; Buyuk et al. 2019). These include possible national and citizenship claims by historical emi­ grants in Turkey, who regard reclaiming their “right” to rights an adequate

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way for North Macedonia to make up for historical wrongs to its Muslim emigrants by facilitating their mobility in modern-day Europe. This chapter is based on episodes of field research over the past two decades with Macedonian emigrants and Balkan immigrant organizations in Istanbul and Izmir, cities in which most of the Macedonian emigrants have histori­ cally settled. An analysis of Turkish media sources and social media reports on Macedonian citizenship since February 2018 uses thematic media analy­ sis of Turkish media articles to reveal the motivations of Turkish citizens as they evaluate their prospects for becoming citizens of the Republic of North Macedonia. Immigrant websites, blogs and social media accounts, particu­ larly about how Turks can live/study/gain citizenship in North Macedonia, currently abound with references to future European Union connections and to discussions of past “wrongs” that have not yet been reversed in a putative long-lost homeland. Generational differences are evident in narratives about the Macedonian emigrants in Turkey, as well as the recourse they seek for restitution of dual-citizenship and property. Turkish citizens’ discourse about rights to dual-citizenship in North Macedonia as a type of restorative justice for the Macedonian emigrants underscores how important the connection to the Balkans remains for modern Turkish identity. Turkey maintains deep Ottoman historical links to North Macedonia, and Turkish legacy in Macedonia is multi-faceted, energetically promoted by the Turkish government that has respected North Macedonia’s inde­ pendence and sovereignty from its inception. Yet, formal Turkish efforts to represent the citizenship and property restitution demands of Macedonian emigrants have been very limited. In parallel, North Macedonia’s own legal restrictions on citizenship and on nationality and property restitution dis­ cussed below suggest that the state differentiates between desirable and undesirable groups in its post-territorial diaspora engagement. As will be elaborated, Turkey’s expansion of its own post-territorial nationalism to promote dual-citizenship abroad and to encourage citizens “to settle as Turks” in Europe continues to place the fantasies of private citizens or fami­ lies in the service of state interests (Østergaard-Nielsen 2003). While Turkish economic and political support (Aydintasbas 2019) has strengthened North Macedonia’s ability to weather regional pressures, it is not yet clear whether Turkey’s seemingly benevolent yet extensive involvement could trigger new expectations and corresponding frustrations that are revitalized by flexible access to identity markers among Macedonian emigrants in Turkey.

Post-territorial nationalism and dual-citizenship Post-territorial nationalism conceives the nation as a global ethnic entity, irrespective of the territorial residence of the nationals (and sometimes even their citizenship status). Diaspora politics on the basis of ethnic kin resid­ ing outside of the territory of a nation-state has been a noteworthy feature of post-colonial and post-socialist countries (Kacarska 2012; Ragazzi and

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Balalovska 2011). Transnational migrant communities who reside outside the territorial boundaries of their legacy nation-states have found them­ selves courted and targeted by governments who are more than willing to bring them under their post-territorial sovereignty through long-distance voting rights, heritage tourism, youth and language programs, extension of cultural, ethnic or religious services and investment opportunities, and even the offer of dual-citizenship without residence requirements (Sievers 2009; Waterbury 2008). Almost all Balkan states, including North Macedonia and extending to Turkey, are “keen on promoting a diasporic deterritorialized conception of the nation which grants rights and privileges to “nationals’ abroad,” with ministries and government agencies dedicated to the dias­ pora” (Ragazzi and Balalovska, 2011, 2). Arguably, the fragility of statehood in the Balkans drives countries to “state reinforcing overcompensation,” where states utilize dual-citizenship to extend the symbolic borders of their nation, offering incentives or removing barriers to naturalization especially for their ethnic kin in diaspora to ensure the vitality of their nation (Liebich 2009). Beyond the need to reconcile with their historical émigré groups in the post-communist era, states in the Balkans are faced with a con­ temporary condition of net out-migration, where countries such as North Macedonia contend with approximately 20% of the entire population living and working abroad (Buyuk et al 2019). In principle, aggressive outreach to their diaspora populations can help strengthen states whose nationhood is challenged in maintaining defining features of their nationality. States often adopt the discourse of human/minority rights to transnation­ alize their reach to promote the interests of their diaspora, stepping up to serve as an advocate and a leader to ethnic or religious minorities in lands other than their own (Cowan 2001). Such moves “abandon the territorial referent as the main criterion in the inclusion and exclusion from citizen­ ship, focusing instead on the ethno-cultural markers of identity, irrespective of the place of residence” (Ragazzi and Balalovska 2011, 4). Kin-states use tools such as non-resident ethnic citizenship and dual-citizenship in order to rebalance demographically without extending substantial resources, strengthening nationhood transnationally without directly questioning bor­ ders, and gaining symbolic recognition of the state’s reach without having to relocate populations (Waterbury 2014). The use of revised citizenship legislation as a restitutive measure to address inequalities arising from the former regime is a thread that runs through many new EU member and/or accession-path states. Restitution of citizenship and repatriation, often through dual-citizenship, remains a common method to address perceived past injustices in post-communist settings, with the hope that this offer may satisfy diaspora populations with­ out substantial compensation by the state (Liebich 2009). Such historical redress includes benefits for repatriation of former exiles and emigrants, and the restitution of citizen status may be of particular value to those who were

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previously forced to renounce their citizenship, such as anti-Communist exiles from Poland and Czech Republic (Liebich 2009). However, redress is not universally applied and arrives with exclusions as to who may not claim a part in the imagined national community. In some cases, new citizenship laws specifically exclude those non-ethnic nationals whose repatriation is not, for whatever reason, considered desirable. As Liebich (2009, 35) notes, “In most countries, redressing historical wrongs and favor­ ing co-ethnics are intimately connected matters and the issue of plural citi­ zenship is grafted onto this connection.” Such connections may be especially complicated for those emigrants who carry identity markers associated with a colonial past. Colonial duress and national redress are often intertwined in debates as to who is entitled to get-backs, persisting through “the language of rights, recognitions and choices that enter and recede from the conditions of duress” (Stoler 2016, 117). In regions characterized by violent circulation and forced migration such as the Balkans, anxieties remain that lives could be rapidly dislocated, hierarchies dislodged and identities disarticulated. As Stoler (2016, 117) notes, “Who is hunter and who is hunted are not fixed ontol­ ogies but unstable ones … there is no “being at home,” only unsettled waiting for something else.” As a result, new national citizenship laws, no matter how seemingly pluralistic they are, go to great lengths to exclude certain types of injustices and non-ethnic groups from their embrace, a legacy of colonial duress over historical redress. Kin-states employ varied bureaucratic and reg­ ulatory practices “to alter how and to what extent they incorporate external and transborder kin into their institutions of citizenship, reflecting shifting political interests and dynamics” (Waterbury 2014, 37). Yet, the discourse of rights and restitution that emanates from these par­ ticular spaces of exclusion has the power to extricate the foundations of present-day arrangements that seek to contain or deny fluidity and varia­ bility. The ambiguities that characterize the truth claims of those who seek historical redress challenge the ethnic/non-ethnic distinctions of citizenship and sovereignty that Balkan states typically seek to maintain in the contem­ porary era. With their “potent set of cultural and affective criteria whose malleability was a key to the sliding scale along which privilege was pro­ tected” (Stoler 2016, 302), colonial emigrants, whose descendants are seen as extensions of a long-lost empire, stand to challenge the agreements and arrangements that modern states hope to use to seal the outer borders of their nations. In this context, the quest for dual-citizenship emerges as the way “in which social actors use forms of personal documentation to chal­ lenge the state’s production of determined identities and its grip on citizens’ daily lives, and at the same time invent new identities for themselves as citi­ zens” (Neofotistos 2009, 19). The persistent claims of the Muslim emigrants of North Macedonia to, and their search for, dual-citizenship and property restitution in a setting where such claims are prohibited by the country’s legal system show the resilience of such identity claims.

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The kin-state clause as an exclusionary mechanism in North Macedonia The search for ancestral “citizenship with benefits” is not a concept foreign to Macedonians. In 2008, the year Bulgaria was admitted to the European Union, ethnic Macedonians with ancestry in Bulgaria applied in scores for Bulgarian citizenship, with 60,000 Macedonian applicants to the Bulgarian ministry that year alone (Neofotistos 2009). The present-day state of the Republic of North Macedonia itself has, in effect, marketed its passport to make the country attractive to foreign investors. Since 2012, Macedonian par­ liamentarians have traveled abroad, including to Turkey, to enthusiastically announce that any business owner who invests 400,000 euros and hires at least ten local workers can become a citizen of the Republic in less than a year, without a residence requirement (Marusic 2012). Social media sites for global entrepreneurs rate the country number one for its economic citizenship program that emphasizes ease and speed of acquisition of citizenship through investments: “[Then called] Macedonia offers the best of both worlds: the benefits of Europe and visa-free access to the Schengen Area, but none of the nonsense associated with being part of the EU” (Hendersen 2015). The country now called North Macedonia has also taken steps since 1992 to reform its citizenship laws, which have been amended several times due to the Ohrid Framework Agreement (2001) and the EU accession requirements. Black-listed through 2008 due to abuses of its visa system, the country shifted course to implement rapid reforms to acquire EU visa liberalization for its citizens, including revisions to its nationality laws in 2004 and 2012 that have made dual-citizenship easier for most ethnic and non-ethnic Macedonians. In addition, the reformed dual-citizenship and nationality laws in North Macedonia have removed many of the restrictions for those with former Yugoslav citizenship, and lowered residency require­ ments for naturalization. The country was among the first newly independ­ ent states to sign the European Nationality treaties and has been considered a “front-runner” for visa liberalization where its persistent efforts were duly rewarded with granting of access to visa free regime (Kacarska 2012). With a fifth of its population in diaspora, the Macedonian government has a demographic imperative to reach out to its emigrants and implement return and dual-citizenship programs. Over the years, it has actively tried to engage the ethnic Macedonian diaspora, promoting dual-citizenship, extending voting rights in 2008, and creating diaspora organizations to facilitate engagement in transnational political activities. The Republic of Macedonia had originally recognized the “Macedonian diaspora” as con­ sisting of ethnic Macedonians only, but revisions in contemporary citizen­ ship laws allow Macedonian emigrants of different ethnicities to be able to claim citizenship (Ragazzi and Balalovska 2011). While EU demands enabled reforms of the citizenship regime in the country to make it more inclusive for non-ethnic Macedonian citizens,

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it also came with stipulations to deny access to outsiders. The EU’s post-liberalization assessments have the power to suspend visa-free travel for the nationals of Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia, creating pres­ sures for the government to continue to control the movement of people (Kacarska 2012, 20). While visa liberalization has been implemented in the Balkans as a method to promote better identity documentation, pre­ vent human trafficking, and reform citizenship regimes that discriminated against minorities, policies to restrict asylum have, to some extent, effec­ tively criminalized mobility between Turkey and North Macedonia—a result stemming from the European Union warning accession countries against possible uses of restitution of citizenship to circumvent EU immi­ gration controls (Sievers 2009). These reforms have also set new boundaries that reflect the Macedonian nation’s anxieties related to the return of its Muslim emigrants who live in neighboring countries, such as Kosovo, Albania, and Turkey. The cit­ izenship laws of North Macedonia limit the right to claim citizenship to all citizens of the Republic who had emigrated from North Macedonia to another state with the exception of their kin country, making it particularly difficult for Macedonians who immigrated to Turkey or Albania to claim dual-citizenship. The 2004 definition, retained in the 2012 reforms, artic­ ulates an emigrant as “a citizen of Republic of Macedonia who emigrated from the Republic Macedonia to another country—with the exception of it being a kin-state, regardless of gender, race, skin color, national and social origin, political and religious belief, material and social status” (Spaskova 2010, 13, emphasis added). The legal precedence of the so-called kin-state clause indicates that those who emigrated from North Macedonia to states with which they have kinship or ancestral links (such as Turkey or Albania) may not acquire dual-citizenship. This definition is particularly exclusion­ ary to Muslims who involuntarily emigrated from Macedonia to Turkey in the 1950s and 1960s, and as part of the migration process were required to declare themselves as “Turkish” even though many of these “Turks” included Muslim Macedonians, Roma, Bosnians and Albanians, with argu­ ably no real ethnic kinship to Turkey (Icduygu, Colak, and Soyarik 1999; Ellis 2003; Cavusoglu 2007; Gingeras 2013). However, such non-kinship claims are difficult to prove in reverse and Turkish citizens’ inability to work around the kin-state clause continues to prohibit their naturalization in North Macedonia. National Turkish media and immigrant websites lament the limitations sustained in the Macedonian nationality laws: “Originally, an emigrant who was born in Macedonia was able to claim citizenship by applying for themselves, and once they acquired it, for their children. However, the citizenship laws were revised to add the phrase “unless they have immi­ grated to their homeland,” which makes it impossible for Turkish citizens of Macedonian descent to acquire Macedonian citizenship” (Sahin 2018, para 2). Many Turks interpret Macedonian citizenship laws as aimed at

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preventing “the return of the unwanted,” which is in line with the identity narratives of Muslim/Turkish migrants from Macedonia, many of whom sustain that their families left the country in fear in 1950s (Trix, 2016; Tekin 2018; Zorbay 2017). A 2017 online petition requesting the Macedonian par­ liament to reverse the homeland/kin-state clause gathered 2464 signatures in Turkey, stating that “It is a fact that the people who are homesick for their [Macedonian] homeland did not leave those lands willingly and voluntarily under the condition of the times. Hundreds of thousands of emigrants wish to be part of their motherland again. Yet the greatest obstacle that remains is Macedonian citizenship law” (Kurtuldu 2017: para 2), referring to the kin­ ship clause in Article 5 of the Law for Changing and Amending the Law on Citizenship of the Republic of Macedonia (Official Gazette of the Republic of Macedonia 2004). As Knott (2019) argues, strategic gains and identity connections may mutually co-exist in driving these claims, especially when there is an under­ lying dimension of legitimacy attached to dual-citizenship as a right to be recovered, driven from injustices experienced directly by family mem­ bers and tied to national and familial loss. The persistent claims of the Macedonian emigrants in Turkey and their search for dual-citizenship in a setting where such claims are prohibited by articles of the Macedonian citizenship legal system show the salience of such legitimacy claims and res­ titutive justice for identity politics of immigrants.

Turkish engagement and reticence in North Macedonia Although Turkey has practically been silent on the restitution of citizenship for its Muslim Macedonian emigrants, in the Turkish media it is common to read that Turkey “shares a geography of the heart and the mind in the Balkans” (Kalin 2018: para 2). Turkey strongly supports the independence of the new states in the region, which it treats as a historical sphere of strategic interests (Adar and Yenigun 2019; Ellis 2013) but has relied on a discourse of cultural engagement, nation-building, trade, and anti-Islamophobia to brand itself as a moderate influence that can bring modern prosperity and familiar cultural comforts to the Balkans. Turkey points to its regional efforts—such as building the cross-regional Belgrade-Sarajevo highway, or establishing trade relations with countries such as Serbia—to show that its brand of benev­ olent Neo-Ottomanism is beneficial to the region, in contrast to violent radi­ calism of other international actors (Kalin 2018). As the director of the Yunus Emre Foundation in Skopje summarized “we are trying to provide hope and security for those who have been waiting for us to return to these lands for 100 years but we have to represent the expanding new Turkish brand to those who might not know or trust us, or might even hold preconceived judgments toward us” (“TIKA and Yunus Emre Foundation” 2015). With moderate Sunni Islam becoming a foreign policy tool to raise Turkey’s soft power through Islamic leadership, the Directorate of Religious Affairs

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(Diyanet), which was originally established to serve the religious needs of Turkish citizens, has become a transnational actor that attends to religious needs of Turks or Muslims in North Macedonia and beyond (Ozturk 2018). Other Turkish institutions that are active in North Macedonia include the Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (Turk Isbirligi ve Koordinasyon Idaresi Baskanligi—TIKA), which has re-built mosques and Ottoman cultural monuments and engages in microcredit lending to small businesses. For its part, the Presidency for Turks Abroad and Related Communities (Yurtdisi Turkler ve Akraba Topluluklar Baskanligi—YTB) has established Turkish language schools, recently placed under the Turkish government’s Maarif Foundation (Adar and Yenigun 2019). The Yunus Emre Foundation (Yunus Emre Enstitisu) provides funding for numerous Turkish cultural activities and promotes student and cultural exchange while the Turkish Broadcast Foundation (Turkiye Radyo Televizyon Kurumu—TRT) promotes Turkish culture, language and traditions in the Balkans. Turkish officials posit that Turkish involvement creates local capabilities that are complementary to those of the Macedonian government, and Turkey’s trade of 371 million euros with Macedonia in 2017 underscores its economic influence (Aydintasbas 2019). Over the last decade, Turkey has expanded its own post-territorial reach, leading to concerns that the efforts of the Turkish government and its repre­ sentative institutions have the potential to get North Macedonia involved in Turkey’s intricate domestic political controversies (Adar and Yenigun 2019). North Macedonia has had to navigate, on occasion, complex Turkish pol­ itics, such as, for example, ownership of Turkish-language schools in the aftermath of the failed July 2016 coup attempt (Marusic 2016). Moreover, some (Buyuk et al 2019) have expressed concern that the Macedonian Turkish minority’s demands run the risk of being too closely associated with the perceived preferences of a government far away. Yet, thus far, there has been very little emphasis on the part of the Turkish government to officially challenge North Macedonia’s kin-state citizenship laws on behalf of the Muslim Macedonian emigrants in Turkey. Instead, most of the country’s efforts have concentrated on extending dual-citizenship and voting rights to the ethnic Turks in North Macedonia. In the most recent Turkish elections in 2018, 58% of the Turkish nationals residing in North Macedonia and Kosovo voted for the ruling AKP party, in contrast to the rest of the Balkans, where the majority voted for the opposition (Buyuk et al 2019). These dynamics arguably keep the focus of public attention on the activities of the Turkish state in North Macedonia, instead of on the claims of private Turkish citizens concerning dual-citizenship and restitution of property.

The elusive search for Macedonian citizenship In spite of legal obstacles and state-level disinterest, the search for Macedonian citizenship is a recurring theme among Balkan immigrant organizations, social media sites and immigration forums, revitalized

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with the initiation of the digital ancestry program and the conclusion of the Prespa Agreement in 2018. On social media, Prespa Agreement and the amelioration of Greek objections to North Macedonia’s EU accession were hailed as “opening of the gates” of Europe to North Macedonia, contribut­ ing to its popularity. Interest in Macedonian dual-citizenship has created its own cottage indus­ try: answers to dual-citizenship inquiries about the Macedonian legal system are available on hundreds of websites, and many attorneys claim to special­ ize in dual-citizenship applications in North Macedonia. Legal represent­ atives from Istanbul have established dedicated new branches in Gostivar and the capital city of Skopje, due to surging demands (Buyuk, 2018). Blogs of Balkan immigrants carry pages on how to apply for Macedonian citi­ zenship, pointing out that the citizenship requests of the second-generation immigrants could be faster once the first-generation immigrants gain cit­ izenship. All told, the country’s “high quality of education, low costs of education and its cultural affinity makes it rise in the ranks of countries in which Turks seek citizenship” (Macedonian Citizenship 2019). However, discussion on Macedonian citizenship online forums reflects different motivations and uncertainty about citizenship procedures (“Makedonya Vatandasligi Alan Var mi? 2017”): Person 1: My father and all of my extended family were born in Macedonia.

My father emigrated here when he was six and his place of birth on record

is Skopje. How can we acquire Macedonian citizenship?

Person 2: There are websites that can tell you all about how to change your

citizenship.

Person 3: You would not be changing citizenship, you would be applying

for dual-citizenship.

Person 4: No need for dual-citizenship. Just get the Macedonian citizen­ ship and leave the Turkish Republic.

Person 1: If I become a Macedonian citizen, does that mean I get an EU

passport?

Person 2: You naughty thing!

Person 5: Has anyone actually been able to get that citizenship?

Person 2: I heard they refuse if you apply from Turkey but maybe if you

apply in person there, it might work better.

While the Turkish interest in EU-accessible citizenship is a product of the “Fortress Europe” attitudes that have created impenetrable borders for Europe through restrictive immigration and asylum policies, there are many domestic drivers as to why Turkish citizens, especially the younger generations, are interested in seeking documents that can provide services and rights that their own states are unable or unwilling to provide. In the Turkish case, access to mobility in Europe remains very limited for Turkish citizens, and the EU accession process has stalled for many years. The lack

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of freedom of movement for Turkish citizens within the EU has been a par­ ticular bottleneck that the Turkish government has been unable to resolve, a prominent fantasy of the Turkish citizenry. Turkey spent most of 2018 restarting visa-liberalization roadmap negotiations that had stalled over the last decade (“Turkey EU Continue Visa Liberalization Dialogue” 2019). Not surprisingly in a context of low expectations for visa-liberalization suc­ cess, dual-citizenship in the Balkans has been discussed in the media as an “investment” in future mobility capital (Kaufmann et al 2004) of Turkish citizens, worthy of time and resources spent, not necessarily for immedi­ ate migration purposes, but as a “rightful privilege”(Guleryuzlu 2012) of Balkan immigrants. Possibilities of dual-citizenship, widely publicized in the media, foster an imagined world in which Turks are right there, along­ side their Balkan “brothers,” moving freely holding their EU passports, regardless of the EU accession failures of Turkey. As Gurel (2019: 1) notes these “texts of digital folklore demonstrate that Turks themselves will not be left behind.” An underlying driver of the dual-citizenship quest is a fundamental sense of lack of safety arising from anxiety about economic challenges and politi­ cal instability in Turkey. Failing economic and financial policies, foreign pol­ icy disputes with long-standing allies including the United States, regional competition, and persistent domestic upheavals have contributed to intense political, social, and cultural anxieties. The search for dual-citizenship, formerly reserved for immigrant workers, is now part-and-parcel of the imagination of ordinary Turks who worry that their futures may be at risk. As Basaran (2018, para 6) observes, “The ranks of the rich investors are now joined by those armed with the knowledge of their ancestors to seek dual-citizenship.” In this context, the search for ancestral links that may secure a meaningful second citizenship becomes a primary concern—a bet-hedging strategy of value should conditions in-country become unde­ sirable, even for those who never fantasized about immigration before. As Pinto and David (2019: 781) state in the case of Turkish Jews seeking Portuguese citizenship, “obtaining a second passport does not yet equate emigration. Rather, it constitutes an insurance policy aimed at alleviating growing ontological insecurity.” Educational opportunity is a third aspect that drives the evident inter­ ests of younger Turks in dual-citizenship. The rising costs of education in Turkey have led to a yearning for diplomas that may provide Turkey’s grow­ ing young population mobility capital abroad. Turkey and the Republic of Macedonia recognized equivalency in their educational degrees as early as 1998, and Turkish-language high schools have sustained a regular flow of students from what is now North Macedonia to Turkish Universities. Following North Macedonia’s EU-accession negotiations, this flow has notably reversed. There are now a dozen private universities in North Macedonia that strongly appeals to Turkish students, providing instruc­ tion in English and Turkish, with technical degrees that claim EU-wide

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recognition. Institutions of higher education, such as the International University in Gostivar, where the language of instruction is Turkish, are advertised as equivalent to a college degree in Turkey. These organizations promote that university degrees in Macedonia have a broader base of rec­ ognition than the corresponding Turkish degrees, leading to better job pros­ pects for graduates in Europe. Advertisements encourage many students to undertake their college edu­ cation in North Macedonia, as costs are estimated to be lower and univer­ sities do not require the rigorous entrance exams that typically overwhelm Turkish students. Scholarships attract Turkish students who would like degrees that are already certified through Erasmus Agreements with other European Universities (European Commission, 2018). On the other hand, there are numerous reports on social and national media about the problems experienced by Turkish students in Macedonian public and private univer­ sities, including reports of misinformation, corruption, visa problems and deportation, and difficulties in the educational environment, compounded by living costs in North Macedonia (“Makedonya’da Turk Ogrenci Olmak” 2019). Rising awareness of the difficulties associated with living in North Macedonia on a student visa contributes to the search for dual-citizenship as a potentially more viable option for young Turkish students, who turn to their ancestors as rightful owners of a lost homeland that holds the promise to help them reach opportunities in Europe at last.

“Rightful” citizenship: the past as a claim to a better present Turkish citizens’ deep connection with North Macedonia arises out of gene­ alogies of forced displacement from the Balkans, with the memories of the 1953 migration still alive for those whose families were displaced from the country now called North Macedonia. Between 1953 and 1968, approx­ imately 200,000 Turks, Albanians, Bosnians and Muslim Macedonians migrated to Turkey (Ellis 2003; Cavusoglu 2007; Mandaci 2007; Tekin 2018). In many cases, they left behind their savings, their nationalized property, businesses, and homes. Notably, this wave of migration sets the stage for many second-generation immigrants’ citizenship claims in a discourse of rights, restitution and discrimination. Following World War II, nationalization of land and property alien­ ated Muslim communities in Macedonia (Cavusoglu 2007). Many of these Muslims had lukewarm feelings about their new socialist country, and some had even fought against Yugoslav President Tito’s forces during World War II. Furthermore, many Muslims did not find communism appealing from a religious perspective: the closing of religious schools, the persecu­ tions of religious leaders and ethnic Turkish political groups who did not follow government orders, attacks and harsh police treatment in Muslim villages, and the reform of dress codes, especially concerning women’s attire, threatened their moral and social values (Caliskan 2014; Tekin 2018;

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Ozkul 2019). There was a prevailing sense of encroachment—danger, slowly closing in, stripping them one by one of the remaining tenets of their secu­ rity (Ellis 2003; Trix 2016). Engulfed in large-scale fear and anxiety, many affected Muslims turned their hopes to Turkey, anticipating that they could migrate to join their relatives. Consequently, benefiting from a warming of relations between Yugoslavia and Turkey, the two governments offered the Muslims in Yugoslavia the right to migrate to Turkey in 1953, facilitating the second-largest influx of people to Turkey in the post-World War II period. Yugoslav government presented migration to Turkey as a great option for Muslims who wished to depart, and promoted it through newspaper adver­ tisements and pressure tactics among the local communities (Ellis 2003; Caliskan 2014; Zorbay 2017). Between the loss of property and status, and fears for their general safety and well-being, many did not believe they had other viable options (Mandaci 2007). As one immigrant stated, “due to cul­ tural and political pressure, you ended up giving up the lands to which you belonged in return for safety in a country with which you shared your cul­ tural identity” (Ellis 2013: 146). While the migration was based on a Gentlemen’s agreement between states, arising out of Yugoslavia’s ideological concerns, it was legally a “vol­ untary/free” migration (serbest goc); therefore, not state-sponsored, which meant that the Muslims who migrated to Turkey would not qualify for the land rights and privileges extended to other immigrants who had been forced to leave the Balkans. In short, there would be no land or new jobs waiting for them; they were on their own, despite the fact that many arrived with little except the clothes on their backs (Trix 2016; Zorbay 2017). Their losses were permanent, displacement involuntary, and their migration irre­ versible. In the words of a first-generation emigrant from North Macedonia: “I left an entire life, I lost everything I owned. Nostalgia is for people who have not suffered in those lands.” While the discriminatory characteristics of the population movement from 1953 to 1968 form the basis of the demands to restitution and dual-citizenship, the legal process that facilitated the migration remains a significant bottle­ neck for contemporary claims. At the time, the right to migrate was granted to anyone who agreed to declare Turkish nationality. They did not necessar­ ily have to be ethnically “Turkish,” but immigrants to Turkey would need to denounce their Yugoslav citizenship, in effect giving up any rights or claims that they had under Yugoslav law (Cavusoglu 2007). “Driven by acts of dis­ crimination and poverty,” observes Gingeras (2013: 138), “both Turkish and Albanian speakers applied for exit visas with the intention of not returning.” Consequently, the 1953 census in Macedonia reflected a naturally impossi­ ble jump in the number of people who declared themselves Turkish, rising from 95,940 in 1948 to 203,938 in 1953 (Ortakovski 2001: 26). More than 50,000 of these “Turks” reported their native tongue as Macedonian or Albanian. Similarly, many Bosnians migrated to Skopje that year to fulfill

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the requirement of a six-month residence in Macedonia, so that they would be granted the opportunity to migrate (Ellis 2003). Neither government sought precision on this fundamental point. As long as people were somewhat loosely affiliated with Turkish culture and were willing to declare themselves Turks, they could migrate (Ellis 2003; Zorbay 2017). The new Turkish Republic’s national identity respected the common historical heritage of Muslims of the Empire, and non-Turkish Muslim groups were “accepted as members of the nation and state as long as they were willing to integrate or assimilate cultur­ ally and linguistically into Turkish culture” (Icduygu et al. 1999, 195). The ambiguities of who could be counted as “Turks,” the lack of any records about the ethnic composition of the Muslim immigrants from North Macedonia, and the anxiousness of the emigrants from Macedonia to fully integrate as “Turkish citizens” place them squarely in the category of “emi­ grants who migrated to a kin-state” according to the Macedonian legal system. As such, the groups who declared themselves Turkish in order to migrate to Turkey and at the same time renounced their Yugoslav citizenship do not qualify for any of the programs for repatriation or dual-citizenship for the diaspora. In contrast, the economic, political and social achievements of the second-generation migrants provide a sense of confidence and resilience, given the hardships that each family has survived. In some ways, Balkan emigrant celebrities such as Zeki Muren, Ali Sen and Metin Oktay have promoted emigrant identity into a social distinction. Today, contemporary Balkan civil society groups claim over 150,000 members (Aydintasbas 2019). Balkan emigrants were embraced by many secular Turks as “of their own,” by Turkish nationalists as the “true” Turks who had suffered, and by NeoOttomanists as “relics” of an Ottoman past. Yet in spite of their achieve­ ments, their status in the Turkish society has remained ambiguous. As a Macedonian emigrant noted: “One time I asked a young girl “Are you a Muhacir (emigrant)?” “No,” she responded. “I am Turkish.” The notion that Balkan immigrants sustain different traditions from Turks creates social distance between communities. Emigrant identities have the potential to be politicized, as seen in Turkey’s 2019 elections, where the former mayor of Ankara, Melih Gokcek, discredited his opponent by claiming that he was “Macedonian,” leading to wide scale protests by the Balkan immigrant organizations (“Melih Gokcek’e Cok Sert Tepki” 2019). As a result, the search for dual-citizenship retains its salience for the emi­ grant families who resent the hardships they still encounter in everyday life. The notion of dual-citizenship is a relatively new function of the post-territorial nationalism of Turkey, whereby the Turkish government’s efforts to remain connected with its diaspora in Europe coincided with the shift away from requirements for renunciation of native citizenship, leading to legally recog­ nized and easily acquired forms of dual-citizenship (Icduygu et al. 1999). The Turkish government’s adoption of a human rights-based discourse for Turkish immigrants in Europe and its approval and advocacy of dual-citizenship and

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extension of voting rights to “outer” Turks have contributed to normalizing dual-citizenship claims domestically (Kadirbeyoglu 2010). The irreversibility of the immigrants’ connection to the Balkans has been waning since the independence of the Republic of Macedonia in 1991 and the availability of visa-free travel between the two countries. Many Macedonian immigrants have returned to visit the lands they or their fam­ ily members still consider a homeland. Older generations have reluctantly taken an institutionalized approach to seeking dual-citizenship, advocated primarily through Balkan civil society organizations. First-generation Balkan immigrants in Turkey view themselves as “proud people who do not complain” (Trix 2016, 19), and this broad attitude orients them toward full integration in Turkey, without making significant demands concerning their emigrant backgrounds. This attitude has carried over into the numerous civil society organizations formed by Balkan emigrants, who focus their activities in helping refugees and orphaned children as “rescuers” rather than “victims.” Older immigrants feel strongly attached to Turkey and prefer to reconnect with North Macedonia through activities such as sup­ porting education, cultural exchange, business development and heritage tourism. In their view, it is their job to give rather than take back. Balkan migrant organizations have voiced concerns to the Turkish and Macedonian governments about dual-citizenship since 2002, communicat­ ing the limitations that the kinship/homeland clause in Macedonia’s citizen­ ship law has brought to Macedonian immigrants in Turkey. They proudly claim the collection of 384,000 signatures over the years to overturn the kinship clause in North Macedonia (Gul 2018: para 1). In fact, concurrent with the widespread euphoria over digital ancestry in 2018, many of these Balkan immigrant organizations urged Turkish citizens not to waste money on lawyers or companies to seek dual-citizenship, pointing out that the Macedonian legal system retained the kinship/homeland clause, and instead to continue to support the efforts of Balkan civil society organizations (Hamzic 2018). In the absence of a real ability to effectively pressure govern­ ments, Balkan organizations prefer to emphasize the economic benefits both states could garner from Macedonian emigrants’ search for dual-citizenship. Some organizational leaders have received honorary citizenship from the Macedonian government in return for their work, regarded as proof that their efforts will eventually pay off (“Vatandaslik Belgesi” 2019). However, this approach is resented by the younger descendants of Balkan immigrants who believe that their families have been shortchanged by both Turkey and North Macedonia over the years. Second- or third-generation immigrants have grown up with stories of disenchantment and losses in their families and they distrust both civil society organizations and govern­ ment efforts that have done little to remedy their cause (Guleryuzlu 2012). The younger generations are much more willing to play the role of the vic­ tim, and as visibly as possible, they seek retribution for the treatment of their families in North Macedonia. The younger diaspora, “are people who

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242 Burcu Akan Ellis see themselves as an inherent part of the Balkan geography as a result of their historical and cultural experiences, people who seek the homelands of ancestors who left them as a result of centuries of displacement” (Buyuk et al 2019: para 38). Their efforts are based on a discourse of individual and familial rights, laying out their family’s experiences of forced migration to claim entitlement to restitution of citizenship rights to make up for past wrongs. While the older generations accuse them of “being selfish and just seeking their own personal gains to get EU citizenship,” the younger gen­ eration focuses on their individual rights and moral duty to “get back at discrimination of their families” (Guleryuzlu 2012: para 9) Second generation immigrants accuse the older groups of complacency, characterized by an attachments to “folk songs and charity work, remain­ ing silent through the years” instead of reclaiming their rights. As the fate of the second-generation’s citizenship claims depends heavily on the claims of first-generation immigrants, they believe that the older generations have been standing in their way. As an immigrant explained, “they [older immi­ grants] were too grateful to be accepted in Turkey to make any demands.” Young generations’ visits to the Balkans focus on search for titles and deeds of property, “to settle grandparents’ accounts.” Their openness on social media (#digitalsoyagaci) has helped raise awareness about their history. Their relentless work with lawyers in search for dual-citizenship in North Macedonia is perceived as not self-serving, but “rights serving.” The younger generations assert that nostalgia about the past needs to be replaced by a demand-based discourse of rights that can lead to a deserved reversal of fortune: As a second-generation immigrant explained, “My grandmother suffered all her life. She left all the property that she had inherited from her father back in Macedonia. She became a nobody in Turkey. Someone has to make up for the voice that my grandmother lost.” The rights-based discourse finds its best articulation in the property restitution claims that children of the emigrants pursue in addition to dual-citizenship claims. Turkey’s Ministry of the Interior reports that inquiries about property records in the Balkans have steadily continued to increase (“Cifte Vatandaslik Icin” 2018). The local attorneys that handle Turkish dual citizenship claims all have services dedicated to the settlement of property claims of current Turkish citizens (Eren Avukatlik 2018) even though denationalization laws in North Macedonia are limited and exclu­ sive, and the process for seeking claims complex, so that only some individ­ uals or religious groups can actually qualify for actual compensation (US Department of State 2007). Macedonia’s denationalization law (2000) only applied to those who had Yugoslav and/or Macedonian citizenship at the time of the dissolu­ tion of Yugoslavia, and it excluded anyone who had revoked their citizen­ ship. Those who renounced former Yugoslav or Macedonian citizenship, as did Muslim emigrants at the time of the 1953 Migration, do not have any recourse to demands for property or restitution in contemporary

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Macedonian law (Nuhija 2013a). While property laws have been revised over the years to make them more inclusive (in 2003, 2007 and 2010), the claimants are still limited to “those persons only who were citizens of the Republic of Macedonia on the day of its entering into force. In this way peo­ ple who were expelled, took refugee abroad, emigrated forcefully or legally and lost their citizenship, consequently have not regained any right to their property lost due to nationalization, confiscation, expropriation, or agrar­ ian reform” (Nuhija 2013b: 958). Furthermore, property restitution laws preclude those previously com­ pensated. This makes the case of the 1953 immigrants even harder, since in 1967, during a budget crisis in Turkey, the government sought and accepted a lump sum of money from former Yugoslavia as compensation for the entire property and land left behind by the 1953 immigrants. The amount came down to just 16 dollars per immigrant—a far cry from the actual value of the property that they left behind (Kirisci 1996; Guleryuzlu 2012). Hence, while the immigrants claim losses, the modest compensation seem­ ingly settled their accounts. The Turkish government, a strong supporter of Macedonian independence and territorial integrity, has shown no inter­ est in officially readdressing such claims, leading to the second-generation’s distrust of governments to uphold their rights or best interests. Younger generations know that legally, there is probably little recourse; the denationalization law does not cover their grandparents who had given up their Yugoslav citizenship. They know that even if they were able to get some money, it would be minimal. But the central issue is one of pride and vindication—a perceived need to pursue the relevant court cases to get their grandparents’ stories out in the open (Guleryuzlu 2012). In spite of legal obstacles, children of emigrants engage in rigorous legal activity to seek restitution and dual-citizenship to make up for the devastating material and psychological losses of their family members (Zorbay 2017). Coupled with the financial resources in contrast to the powerlessness that characterized their grandparents’ past, the search for restitution and dual-citizenship is defined according to the present-day interpretations of emigrant identity, personal victimhood and need for recognition. Turkish citizens express that they seek acknowledgement of the historical truths of their families’ exist­ ence and losses in the past.

Conclusion There is no question that the kin-state and kinship/homeland clauses, or the Macedonian property laws, hinder the contemporary claims of Macedonian emigrants in Turkey for citizenship and property restitution. Since the 1953 migratory process required emigrants to declare themselves Turkish (even in the situations where the prospective immigrants were not ethnic Turks) and facilitated their application for Turkish citizenship and renunciation of Yugoslav passports, these immigrants are essentially blocked from

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citizenship claims in contemporary North Macedonia. There may be ways to use the digital ancestry registry and place of birth data to argue that these emigrants were typically ethnic non-Turks (as in the case of the Muslim Macedonians, Bosnians, Roma and ethnic Albanians), therefore eligible to request naturalization in North Macedonia. However, such claims are diffi­ cult to prove because all immigrants from North Macedonia were counted as “Turkish” once they were approved by the Turkish authorities, who at the time did not discriminate between various ethnic backgrounds of the Muslims who wished to migrate to Turkey. These “colonial genealogies of political disenfranchisement” make the claims of dispossession difficult in contemporary legal systems that distin­ guish between those who are entitled to political and economic rights and those who are excluded from such systems (Stoler 2016: 133). The claims of Macedonian emigrants in Turkey have ebbed and flowed since the inde­ pendence of the Republic of Macedonia in 1991, represented as forgotten and rediscovered. Macedonian citizenship laws have been revised repeat­ edly, in response to the Ohrid Framework and EU accession negotiations, making them arguably more inclusive and less discriminatory to non-ethnic Macedonians. However, “states are innovative and agile beasts” that “assign who are made into subjects of pity and whose cultural competencies and capital are deemed inadequate to make political claims” (Stoler 2016: 135). Turkish citizens of Macedonian descent, often viewed either as the last vestiges of the past Ottoman colonial presence in Macedonia or the new faces of the Islamic “other” in Europe, continue to fall under identity or procedural categories that are irrevocably precluded from participation in the Macedonian nation, in spite of—and sometimes in response to—the activities of the Turkish government in the Balkans. The discursive differences produced between nationals and citizens con­ tinue to plague citizenship debates throughout the Balkans as “prolonged exercises in forms of incorporation and differentiation that reshuffle and attenuate which populations and which social kinds at any specific moment had a ‘right to have rights’” (Stoler 2016: 197-98). Under Article 4(3) of the Prespa Agreement, the parties agreed that “nothing in its Constitution will ever be the basis of interference with the internal affairs of the other Party … including for the protection of the status and rights of any persons that are not its citizens” (“Agreement” 2018, 8). Given that ethnic Macedonians in northern Greece are not Macedonian citizens, ethnic Macedonians fear that the Prespa Agreement has eliminated North Macedonia’s ability to protect the rights of their diaspora group (Vasilevski 2019). While the goals of such arrangements are centered around finding conclusive statelevel solutions to populations whose presence present an anathema to the national discourse, or whose links to a kin-state cause anxiety, the voices of these populations continue to grow and their descendants become more motivated and competent at utilizing rights-based discourses over time.

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The Prespa Agreement has revitalized hopes among Turkish citizens that North Macedonia may now be more amenable to their demands of restitution and dual-citizenship, as its conflict with Greece has waned and obstacles to its European accession lessened. This level of high expectations leads to increased demands both domestically and in diaspora: citizens and emigrants now have greater expectations of the Macedonian state, even though nothing except its internationally recognized name has changed and its capacity for governance remains the same. As its post-territorial efforts continue to connect the country with its long-lost emigrants, North Macedonia’s efforts to maintain the boundaries of those who have a “right to rights” in its borders will continue to be challenged by the determination of those who wish to reclaim their rights and property as a reminder that people will take “creative and critical—and sometimes costly—measures to defy those constraints, to name that damage, or to become less entangled” (Stoler 2016: 346). The fantasies of North Macedonia as a ticket to smooth entry into a prosperous Europe that will right past wrongs are likely to lead to disappointments that fuel further claims from Macedonian residents and beyond.

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Appendix 1

Agreement Final Agreement for the settlement of the differences as described in the United Nations Security Council Resolutions 817 (1993) And 845 (1993), the termi­ nation of the Interim Accord Of 1995, and the establishment of a Strategic Partnership between the parties

Preamble The First Party, the Hellenic Republic {the “First Party”) and the Second Party, which was admitted to the United Nations in accordance with the United Nations General Assembly resolution 47/225 of 8 April 1993 {the “Second Party”), jointly referred to as the “Parties”, •

• •

• • • •

Recalling the principles and purposes of the Charter of the United Nations, the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, the relevant Acts of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (“OSCE”) and the values and principles of the Council of Europe, Guided by the spirit and principles of democracy, respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and dignity, Abiding by the provisions of the Charter of the United Nations and in particular those referring to the obligation of the States to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State, Emphasizing their full commitment to the principles of the inviolability of frontiers and the territorial integrity of States incorporated in the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, Reaffirming the existing frontier between them as an enduring interna­ tional border, In full accord on the need to strengthen peace, stability, security and further promote cooperation in Southeastern Europe, Desiring to strengthen an atmosphere of trust and good-neighborly rela­ tions in the region and to put to rest permanently any hostile attitudes

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• • •

• •

• •

•

251

that may persist and agreeing on the need to refrain from irredentism and revisionism in any form, Recalling their obligation, in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations and international law, not to interfere on any pretext or in any form in the internal affairs and jurisdiction of the other, Underscoring also the importance of the development of friendly rela­ tions among States and of resolving disputes by peaceful means in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations, Resolving the differences pursuant to Security Council resolutions 817 (1993) of April 7, 1993 and 845 (1993) of June 18, 1993, as well as Article 5 of the Interim Accord of September 13, 1995 in a dignified and sus­ tainable manner, having in mind the importance of the issue and the sensitivities of each Party, Taking into account the General Assembly resolution 47/225 of April 6, 1993, Taking into consideration the Interim Accord, the Memorandum of October 13, 1995 on Practical Measures related to the Interim Accord, the Memorandum on the mutual establishment of Liaison Offices in Skopje and Athens of October 20, 1995 as well as the process of Confidence Building Measures (“CBMs”), Underlining their strong will for mutual friendship, good neighborliness and cooperative partnership, Committing to strengthen, widen, and deepen their bilateral relations and to lay firm foundations for the entrenchment and respect of good neighborly relations and for the development of their comprehensive bilateral cooperation, and Seeking to reinforce and broaden their bilateral cooperation and to upgrade it to the level of a strategic partnership in the sectors of agri­ culture, civil protection, defense, economy, energy, environment, industry, infrastructure, investments, political relations, tourism, trade, trans-border cooperation and transport, capitalizing also on the existing CBMs.

Have agreed as follows:

PART 1 Settlement of the difference on the name, the pending issues related to it and entrenchment of good neighborly relations Article 1 1 This Agreement is final and upon its entry into force terminates the Interim Accord between the Parties signed in New York on September 13, 1995.

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Appendix 1

2 The Parties recognize as binding the outcome of the negotiations that have taken place under the auspices of the United Nations, to which both Parties have been committed pursuant to the United Nations Security Council resolutions 817 (1993) and 845 (1993) as well as the Interim Accord of 1995. 3 Pursuant to those negotiations the following have been mutually accepted and agreed: a) The official name of the Second Party shall be the “Republic of North Macedonia,” which shall be the constitutional name of the Second Party and shall be used ergo omnes, as provided for in this Agreement. The short name of the Second Party shall be “North Macedonia.” b) The nationality of the Second Party shall be Macedonian/citizen of the Republic of North Macedonia, as it will be registered in all travel documents. c) The official language of the Second Party shall be the “Macedonian language,” as recognized by the Third UN Conference on the Standardization of Geographical Names, held in Athens in 1977, and described in Article 7(3) and (4) of this Agreement. d) The terms “Macedonia” and “Macedonian” have the meaning given under Article 7 of this Agreement. e) The country codes for license plates of the Second Party shall be NM or NMK. For all other purposes, country codes remain MK and MKD, as officially assigned by the International Organization for Standardization (“ISO”). f) The adjectival reference to the State, its official organs, and other public entities shall be in line with the official name of the Second Party or its short name, that is, “of the Republic of North Macedonia” or “of North Macedonia.” Other adjectival usages, including those referring to private entities and actors, that are not related to the State and public entities, are not established by law and do not enjoy financial support from the State for activities abroad, may be in line with Article 7(3) and (4). The adjectival usage for activities may be in line with Article 7(3) and (4). This is without prejudice to the process established under Article 1(3)(h) and com­ pound names of cities that exist at the date of the signature of this Agreement. g) The Second Party shall adopt “Republic of North Macedonia” as its official name and the terminologies referred to in Article 1(3) through its internal procedure that is both binding and irrevoca­ ble, entailing the amendment of the Constitution as agreed in this Agreement. h) In relation to the abovementioned name and terminologies in com­ mercial names, trademarks and brand names, the Parties agree to

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support and encourage their business communities to institutional­ ize a sincere, structured and in good faith dialogue, in the context of which will seek and reach mutually accepted solutions on the issues deriving from the commercial names, the trademarks, the brand names and all relevant matters at bilateral and international level. For the implementation of the abovementioned provisions, an international group of experts will be established consisting of rep­ resentatives of the two States in the context of the European Union (“EU”) with the appropriate contribution of the United Nations and ISO. This group of experts shall be established within 2019 and conclude its work within three years. Nothing in Article 1(3)(h) shall affect present commercial usage until mutual agreement is reached as provided in this subsection. 4 Upon signing this Agreement, the Parties shall take the following steps: a) The Second Party shall, without delay, submit the Agreement to its Parliament for ratification. b) Following ratification of this Agreement by the Parliament of the Second Party, the Second Party shall notify the First Party that its Parliament has ratified the Agreement. c) The Second Party, if it decides so, will hold a referendum. d) The Second Party shall commence the process of constitutional amendments as provided for in this Agreement. e) The Second Party shall conclude in toto the constitutional amend­ ments by the end of 2018. f) Upon notification by the Second Party of the completion of the abovementioned constitutional amendments and of all its internal legal procedures for the entry into force of this Agreement, the First Party shall promptly ratify this Agreement. 5 Upon entry into force of this Agreement, the Parties shall use the name and terminologies of Article 1(3) in all relevant international, multi­ lateral and regional organizations, institutions and fora, including all meetings and correspondence, and in all their bilateral relations with all Member States of the United Nations. 6 In particular, immediately upon entry into force of this Agreement, the Second Party shall: a) Notify all international, multilateral, and regional organizations, institutions and fora of which it is a member of the entry into force of this Agreement, and request that all those organizations, institu­ tions and fora thereafter shall adopt and use the name and termi­ nologies referred to in Article 1(3) of this Agreement for all usages and purposes. Both Parties shall also refer to the Second Party in accordance with Article 1(3) in all communications to, with, and in those Organizations, institutions and fora.

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Appendix 1 b) Notify all Member States of the United Nations of the entry into force of this Agreement and shall request them to adopt and use the name and terminologies referred to in Article 1(3) of this Agreement for all usages and purposes, including in all their bilat­ eral relations and communications.

7 Upon entry into force of this Agreement, and subject to provisions under Articles 1(9) and (10), the terms “Macedonia,” “Republic of Macedonia,” “FYR of Macedonia,” “FYR Macedonia” in a trans­ lated or untranslated form, as well as the provisional name “the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia” and the acronym “fYROM” shall cease to be used to refer to the Second Party in any official context. 8 Upon entry into force of this Agreement and taking into account its Article 1(9) and (10), the Parties shall use the name and terminologies of Article 1(3) for all usages and all purposes ergo omnes, that is, domesti­ cally, in all their bilateral relations, and in all regional and international organizations and institutions. 9 Upon entry into force of this Agreement, the Second Party shall promptly in accordance with sound administrative practice take all necessary measures so as the country’ s competent authorities hence­ forth use internally the name and terminologies of Article 1(3) of this Agreement in all new official documentation, correspondence and rel­ evant materials. 10 As regards the validity of already existing documents and materials issued by the Authorities of the Second Party, the Parties agree that there shall be two transitional periods, one “technical” and one “political:” a) The “technical” transitional period shall relate to all official doc­ uments and materials of the Public Administration of the Second Party for international usage and to those for internal usage that may be used externally. These documents and materials shall be renewed in accordance with the name and terminologies as referred to in Article 1(3) of this Agreement within five years from the entry into force of this Agreement, at the latest. b) The “political” transitional period shall relate to all documents and materials exclusively for internal usage in the Second Party. The issuance of the documents and materials falling under this category in accordance with Article 1(3) shall commence at the opening of each EU negotiation chapter in the relevant field, and shall be final­ ized within five years thereof. 11 Procedures for the prompt amendment of the Constitution of the Second Party, in order to fully implement the provisions of this Agreement, shall commence upon ratification of this Agreement by its Parliament or following a referendum, if the Second Party decides to hold one.

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12 The name and terminologies as referred to in Article 1 of this Agreement shall be incorporated in the Constitution of the Second Party. This change shall take place en bloc with one amendment. Pursuant to this amendment, the name and terminologies will change accordingly in all articles of the Constitution. Furthermore, the Second Party shall proceed to the appropriate amendments of its Preamble, Article 3 and Article 49, during the procedure of the revi­ sion of the Constitution. 13 In the event of mistakes, errors, omissions in the proper reference of the name and terminologies referred to in Article 1(3) of this Agreement in the context of international, multilateral and regional Organizations, institutions, correspondence, meetings and fora, as well as in all bilat­ eral relations of the Second Party with third States and entities, either of the Parties may request their immediate rectification and the avoidance of similar mistakes in the future. Article 2 1 The First Party agrees not to object to the application by or the membership of the Second Party under the name and terminologies of Article 1(3) of this Agreement in international, multilateral and regional organizations and institutions of which the First Party is a member. 2 The Second Party shall seek admission to International, multilateral and regional organizations and Institutions under the name and termi­ nologies of Article 1(3) of this Agreement. 3 Upon entry into force of this Agreement pursuant to its Article 1, the First Party shall ratify any of the Second Party’s accession agree­ ment to International Organizations, of which the First Party is a member. 4 In particular with respect to the Second Party’s EU and North Atlantic Treaty Organization {“NATO”) integration processes, the following shall apply: a) The Second Party shall seek admission to NATO and the EU under the name and terminologies of Article 1 of this Agreement. Accession to NATO and the EU will be under that same name and terminologies. b) Upon receiving the notice of the ratification of this Agreement by the Parliament of the Second Party, the First Party shall promptly: (i) notify the President of the Council of the EU that it supports the opening of the EU accession negotiations of the Second Party under the name and terminologies of Article 1of this Agreement.

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Appendix 1 (ii) notify the Secretary General of NATO that it supports the extension of an accession invitation by NATO to the Second Party. Such support of the First Party is conditional, first, to an outcome of referendum, if the Second Party decides to hold one, consistent with this Agreement, and, second, to the com­ pletion of the constitutional amendments provided for in this Agreement. Upon receipt of notification by the Second Party concerning the completion of all its internal legal procedures for the entry into force of this Agreement, including a possi­ ble national referendum with an outcome consistent with this Agreement, and upon conclusion of the amendments in the Constitution of the Second Party, the First Party shall ratify the Second Party’s NATO Accession Protocol. This ratification procedure shall be concluded together with the ratification pro­ cedure of this Agreement.

Article 3 1 The Parties hereby confirm their common existing frontier as an endur­ ing and inviolable international border. Neither Party shall assert or support any claims to any part of the territory of the other Party or claims for a change to their common existing frontier. In addition, nei­ ther Party shall support any such claims that may be raised by any third party. 2 Each Party commits to respect the sovereignty, the territorial integ­ rity and the political independence of the other Party. Neither Party shall support any actions of any third party directed against the sov­ ereignty, the territorial integrity or the political independence of the other Party. 3 The Parties shall refrain, in accordance with the purposes and prin­ ciples of the Charter of the United Nations, from the threat or use of force, including the threat or use of force intended to violate their com­ mon existing frontier. 4 The Parties commit not to undertake, instigate, support and/or tolerate any actions or activities of a non-friendly character directed against the other Party. Neither Party shall allow its territory to be used against the other Party by any third country, organization, group or individual car­ rying out or attempting to carry out subversive, secessionist actions, or actions or activities which threaten in any manner the peace, stability or security of the other Party. Each Party shall communicate without delay to the other Party any information in its possession regarding any such actions or intentions.

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Article 4 1 Each Party hereby commits and solemnly declares that nothing in its Constitution, as it is in force or will be amended in the future, can or should be interpreted as constituting or will ever constitute the basis for any claim to any area that is not included in its existing international borders. 2 Each Party undertakes not to make or to authorize any irredentist statements, and shall not endorse any such statements by those who purport to act on behalf of, or in the interest of, the Party. 3 Each Party hereby commits and solemnly declares that nothing in its Constitution as it is in force or will be amended in the future can or should be interpreted as constituting or will ever constitute the basis for interference with the internal affairs of the other Party in any form and for any reason, including for the protection of the status and rights of any persons that are not its citizens. Article 5 1 In the conduct of their affairs the Parties shall be guided by the spirit and principles of democracy, fundamental freedoms, respect for human rights and dignity, and the rule of law, in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,1 the European Convent ion for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms,2 the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination,3 the Convention on the Rights of the Child,4 the Helsinki Final Act, the document of the Copenhagen Meeting of the Conference on the Human Dimension of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe and the Charter of Paris for a New Europe, and other international agreements and instrument s to which both Parties are party. 2 No provision of any of the instruments referred to in paragraph 1 above shall be interpreted to give any right to either Party to take any action contrary to the aims and principles of the Charter of the United Nations, or of the Helsinki Final Act, including the principle of the ter­ ritorial integrity of States. Article 6 1 Aiming at strengthening friendly bilateral relations each Party shall promptly take effective measures to prohibit any hostile activi­ ties, actions or propaganda by State agencies or agencies directly or

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indirectly controlled by the State and to prevent activities likely to incite chauvinism, hostility, irredentism, and revisionism against the other Party. Should such activities occur, the Parties shall take all nec­ essary measures. 2 Each Party shall promptly take effective measures to discourage and prevent any acts by private entities likely to incite violence, hatred or hostility against the other Party. If a private entity in the territory of a Party engages in such activities without that Party’s knowledge, that Party shall, upon such acts coming to its attention, promptly take all necessary measures as provided by law. 3 Each Party shall prevent and discourage acts, including acts of propa­ ganda, by private entities likely to incite chauvinism, hostility, irreden­ tism and revisionism against the other Party.

Article 7 1 The Parties acknowledge that their respective understanding of the terms “Macedonia” and “Macedonian” refers to a different historical context and cultural heritage. 2 When reference is made to the First Party, these terms denote not only the area and people of the northern region of the First Party, but also their attributes, as well as the Hellenic civilization, history, culture, and heritage of that region from antiquity to present day. 3 When reference is made to the Second Party, these terms denote its territory, language, people and their attributes, with their own history, culture, and heritage, distinctly different from those referred to under Article 7(2). 4 The Second Party notes that its official language, the Macedonian lan­ guage, is within the group of South Slavic languages. The Parties note that the official language and other attributes of the Second Party are not related to the ancient Hellenic civilization, history, culture and her­ itage of the northern region of the First Party. 5 Nothing in this Agreement is intended to denigrate in any way, or to alter or affect, the usage by the citizens of either Party. Article 8 1 If either Party believes one or more symbols constituting part of its his­ toric or cultural patrimony is being used by the other Party, it shall bring such alleged use to the attention of the other Party, and the other Party shall take appropriate corrective action to effectively address the issue and ensure respect for the said patrimony.

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2 Within six months following the entry into force of this Agreement, the Second Party shall review the status of monuments, public build­ ings and infrastructures on its territory, and insofar as they refer in any way to ancient Hellenic history and civilization constituting an integral component of the historic or cultural patrimony of the First Party, shall take appropriate corrective action to effectively address the issue and ensure respect for the said patrimony. 3 The Second Party shall not use again in any way and in all its forms the symbol formerly displayed on its former national flag. Within six months of the entry into force of this Agreement, the Second Party shall pro­ ceed to the removal of the symbol displayed on its former national flag from all public sites and public usages on its territory. Archaeological artifacts do not fall within the scope of this provision. 4 Each Party shall abide by the recommendations of the United Nations Conference on the Standardization of Geographical Names in relation to the use of the official geographical names and toponyms in the terri­ tory of the other Party thus giving priority to the use of endonyms over exonyms. 5 Within one month of the signing of this Agreement, the Parties shall establish by exchange of diplomatic notes, on a parity basis, a Joint Inter-Disciplinary Committee of Experts on historic, archaeological and educational matters, to consider the objective, scientific interpre­ tation of historical events based on authentic, evidence-based and sci­ entifically sound historical sources and archaeological findings. The Committee’s work shall be supervised by the Ministries of Foreign Affairs of the Parties in cooperation with other competent national authorities. It shall consider and, if it deems appropriate, revise any school textbooks and school auxiliary material such as maps, histor­ ical atlases, teaching guides, in use in each of the Parties, in accord­ ance with the principles and aims of UNESCO and the Council of Europe. To that effect, the Committee shall set specific timetables so as to ensure in each of the Parties that no school textbooks or school auxiliary material in use the year after the signing of this Agreement contains any irredentist/revisionist references. The Committee shall also study any new editions of school textbooks and school auxiliary material as provided for under this Article. The Committee shall convene regularly, at least twice a year, and shall submit an Annual Report on its activities and recommendations to be approved by the High-Level Cooperation Council, as to be established pursuant to Article 12. 6 The Parties acknowledge that the abovementioned mutually accepted solutions which have derived from the negotiations will contribute to the definitive establishment of peaceful and good neighborly relations in the region, in accordance with the United Nations Security Council resolutions 817 (1993) and 845 (1993).

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PART 2 Intensification and enrichment of cooperation between the two parties Article 9 1 The Parties agree that their strategic cooperation shall extend to all sectors, such as agriculture, civil protection, defense, economy, energy, environment, industry, infrastructure, investments, political relations, tourism, trade, trans-border cooperation and transport. This stra­ tegic cooperation shall apply not only to the sectors included in this Agreement but also to those that in the future may be deemed bene­ ficial to both countries and indispensable. All these sectors should be incorporated into a comprehensive Action Plan during the course of the development of bilateral relations. 2 The existing CBMs shall be incorporated into the abovementioned Action Plan. The latter shall aim at the implementation of the provi­ sions of this Part of this Agreement. The Action Plan shall be enriched and developed continuously.

Diplomatic relations Article 10 Upon the entry into force of this Agreement: 1 the First Party shall promptly upgrade: a) its existing Liaison Office in the capital of the Second Party to an Embassy; and b) its existing Office for Consular, Economic and Commercial Affairs in the town of Bitola in the Second Party to a General Consulate; and 2 the Second Party shall promptly upgrade: a) its existing Liaison Office in the capital of the First Party to an Embassy; and b) its existing Office for Consular, Economic and Commercial Affairs in the town of Thessaloniki in the First Party to a General Consulate.

Cooperation in the context of International and Regional Organizations and Fora Article 11 The Parties shall cooperate closely, bilaterally, and within regional Organizations and initiatives with a view to ensuring that Southeastern

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Europe becomes a region of peace, growth and prosperity for its peo­ ples. They shall promote and collaborate on shaping cooperation at regional level as well as, inter alia, on mutual support of candidacies in the context of international, multilateral and regional Organizations and institutions, such as the United Nations, the OSCE and the Council of Europe.

Political and societal cooperation Article 12 1 The Parties agree to reinforce and further develop their bilateral politi­ cal relations through regular visits, meetings and consultations at high political and diplomatic levels. 2 The Parties shall establish a High-Level Cooperation Council (“HLCC”) of their Governments, jointly headed by their Prime Ministers. 3 The HLCC shall convene at least annually and shall be the com­ petent body as regards the proper and effective implementation of this Agreement and the ensuing Action Plan. The HLCC shall take decisions and promote actions and measures for the improvement and upgrading of bilateral cooperation between the Parties and shall address any issues that may arise during the implementation of this Agreement and the ensuing Action Plan, with a view to their resolution. 4 The Parties are convinced that the development and strengthening of people-to-people contacts are essential for building friendship, coop­ eration and good neighborliness between the Parties and their people. They shall support and encourage contacts and meetings between their citizens at all appropriate levels. 5 The Parties shall support and encourage contacts between their civil societies, as well as their institutions and local authorities, including youth and student cooperation activities and exchanges, with a view to developing better understanding and cooperation between their peoples.

Economic cooperation Article 13 Having regard to the fact that the Second Party is a landlocked State, the Parties shall be guided by the relevant provisions of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea as far as applicable both in practice and when concluding agreements referred to in Article 18 of this Agreement.

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Article 14 1 The Parties shall further develop their economic cooperation in all areas. Particular emphasis shall be placed on the strengthening, enhancement and deepening of their bilateral cooperation on agriculture, energy, environment, industry, infrastructures, investments, tourism, trade, and transport. To achieve this objective, the Parties shall capitalize on and utilize the existing CBMs, constituting a mutually beneficial coop­ erative platform, which will evolve into an Action Plan. 2 The Parties shall encourage mutual investments and shall take all necessary measures for their effective protection, including measures against excessive bureaucracy and for overcoming institutional, admin­ istrative and tax barriers. The Parties shall place particular emphasis on the cooperation between companies, businesses, and industries of each Party. 3 The Parties shall refrain from imposing any impediment to the move­ ment of people or goods between their territories or through the territory of either Party to the territory of the other. The Parties shall cooperate to facilitate such movements in accordance with international law. 4 The Parties shall develop and boost their cooperation, with regard to energy, notably through the construction, maintenance and utiliza­ tion of interconnecting natural gas and oil pipelines (existing, under construction and projected) and with regard to renewable energy resources, including photovoltaic, wind and hydro-electric. Possible pending matters will be addressed promptly by reaching mutually beneficial settlements taking into serious consideration the European Policy on Energy and the acquis communautaire. The First Party shall assist the Second Party with appropriate transfer of know-how and expertise. 5 The Parties shall promote, extend and improve cooperative synergies in the areas of infrastructure s and transport as well as on a recipro­ cal basis, road, rail, maritime and air transport and communication connections, using the best available technologies and practices. They shall also facilitate the transit between them of goods, cargos and mer­ chandises via the infrastructures, including ports and airports, in the territory of each Party. The Parties shall adhere to international rules and regulations with respect to transit, telecommunications, signs and codes. The First Party shall do so insofar as, and in a manner compli­ ant with, its obligations deriving from its membership in the EU and other international instruments. The Second Party shall do so insofar as, and in a manner compliant with, its obligations deriving from its memberships in international, multilateral or regional institutions or organizations in which it is a member on the entry into force of this Agreement, as well as its membership of the EU, following its proposed accession thereto.

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6 The Parties shall seek to improve and modernize existing border crossings as required by the flow of traffic and to construct new border crossings with a view to boosting touristic and commercial flows between them. 7 The Parties shall take measures to ensure the protection of the envi­ ronment and the preservation of the natural habitat in the trans-border waters and the surrounding space, and shall cooperate in seeking to reduce and eliminate all forms of pollution. The Parties shall strive to develop and harmonize strategies and programs for regional and inter­ national cooperation for the protection of the environment. 8 The Parties shall support the broadening of tourist exchanges, and the development of their cooperation in the fields of alternative tourism, including cultural, religious, educational, medical, and athletic tourism and shall cooperate in improving and promoting business and tourist travel between them. 9 The Parties shall establish a Joint Ministerial Committee (“JMC”) in order to attain the best possible cooperation in the abovementioned sectors of economic partnership, including through the organization of joint busi­ ness for convening at least once a year, the JMC will steer the course of bilateral economic cooperation, the comprehensive implementation of the relevant sectoral actions, agreements, protocols and contractual frame­ works as well as all future relevant agreements. The Parties encourage the closest possible interaction between their Chambers of Commerce.

Cooperation on the fields of education, science, culture, research, technology, health, and sports Article 15 In the age of the new industrial revolution and second age of machines, the deepening of cooperation amongst States and societies is necessary now more than ever, in particular with respect to social activities, technologies and culture, both in a narrow and a broad sense. In furtherance thereof: 1 The Parties shall develop and improve their scientific, technological and technical cooperation as well as their collaboration in the area of edu­ cation. They shall intensify their exchanges of information and of sci­ entific and technical documentation and shall strive to improve mutual access to scientific and research institutions, archives, libraries and similar institutions. The Parties shall support initiatives by scientific and educational institutions as well as by individuals aimed at improv­ ing cooperation and exchanges in the areas of sciences, technology and education. 2 The Parties shall encourage and support events as well as scientific and educational programs in which members of their scientific and aca­ demic communities shall participate. They shall also encourage and

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support the convening of bilateral and international conferences in these areas. 3 The Parties attach great significance to the development of research into, and the implementation and utilization of new technologies, including digital technology and nanotechnology, in a manner that is environmentally friendly and upgrades the skills, capacities and overall well-being of their citizens. To that end they shall develop the coopera­ tion amongst their research centers, researchers and academic institu­ tional systems. 4 The Parties shall place special emphasis on the development of cultural relations between the two States, their societies and their social groups, having particular regard to arts, dance, cinematography, music and theatre. In this regard, particular importance shall be given to sports. Bilateral collaboration on the domain of health, including health care, shall be promoted.

Police and civil protection cooperation Article 16 1 The Parties shall cooperate closely in the fight against organized and trans-border crime, terrorism, economic crimes, having regard in par­ ticular to crime related to the illicit trafficking and/or exploitation of human beings; to crimes related to the production, trafficking and/or trade of narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances; to the illicit man­ ufacturing of and trafficking in firearms, their parts and components and ammunition; to the illicit import, export and transfer of ownership of cultural property; to offences against civil air transport; and to crime related to counterfeiting and/or smuggling of cigarettes, alcohol or fuels. 2 The Parties shall cooperate closely in the civil protection sector, placing particular emphasis on preventing and dealing with natural and manmade disasters and on disaster relief. Each Party may utilize the special education and expertise of the other Party, and whenever needed and possible each Party shall provide to the other its special infrastructure, particularly in fire-fighting. The Parties may examine the establishment of a relevant mechanism to assist in the implementation of this Article.

Defense cooperation Article 17 The Parties shall reinforce and expand their cooperation in the area of defence, including through frequent visits and contacts between the politi­ cal and military leadership of their armed forces, the appropriate transfer

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of know-how and capacity-building, the cooperation in the areas of pro­ duction, information and joint military exercises. Special emphasis shall be placed on personnel training which the Parties could provide to each other.

Treaty relations Article 18 1 Upon entry into force of this Agreement, the Parties shall in their rela­ tions be directed by the provisions of the following bilateral agreements that had been concluded between the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the First Party on June 18, 1959: a) The convention concerning mutual legal relations, b) The agreement concerning the reciprocal recognition and the enforcement of judicial decisions, and c) The agreement concerning hydro-economic questions. 2 The Parties agree that, upon entry into force of the present Agreement, all international documents binding on the Parties bilaterally shall remain in force, unless specifically terminated by this Agreement. 3 The Parties shall consult with each other in order to identify other agreements concluded between the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the First Party that will be deemed suitable for appli­ cation in their mutual relations. 4 The Parties commit to explore all possibilities to conclude additional bilateral agreements needed with regard to areas of mutual interest.

PART 3 Settlement of disputes Article 19 1 The Parties shall settle any disputes exclusively by peaceful means in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations. 2 In the event that a Party considers that the other Party is not acting in accordance with the provisions of this Agreement, this Party shall first notify the other Party of its concerns and shall seek a solution by negotiation. If the Parties are unable to resolve the matter bilaterally, the Parties may agree to request the Secretary-General of the United Nations to use his good offices to resolve the matter. 3 Any dispute that arises between the Parties concerning the interpreta­ tion or implementation of this Agreement and not resolved according

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Appendix 1 to the procedures referred to under Article 19 (2), may be submitted to the International Court of Justice. The Parties should first seek to agree upon a joint submission to said Court regarding any such dispute. However, if agreement is not reached within six months, or such longer period as the Parties shall mutually agree, then any such dispute may be submitted by either Party individually.

Final clauses Article 20 1 This Agreement shall be signed by the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the two Parties. 2 This Agreement is subject to ratification, according to the sequencing procedure set out in Article 1(4). 3 Upon completion of the necessary internal legal procedures for the entry into force of this Agreement as set out in Article 1, the Parties shall, within two weeks and in writing, notify each other. This Agreement shall enter into force on the date of receipt of the last notification by the Party concerned. 4 Article 8(5) shall apply provisionally, pending the entry into force of this Agreement. If this Agreement does not enter into force, this Agreement, in its entirety and each of its provisions individually, shall have no fur­ ther effect or application, provisional or otherwise, and shall not bind either of the Parties in any way. 5 The difference and the remaining issues referred to in Security Council resolutions 817 (1993) and 84S (1993) shall be considered as having been resolved upon entry into force of this Agreement. 6 As soon as possible upon entry into force of this Agreement, the Parties or one of the Parties shall inform the Secretary-General of the United Nations of the entry into force of this Agreement, including the date of its entry into force, for its implementation at the United Nations. 7 This Agreement is not directed against any other State, entity or per­ son. It does not infringe on the rights and duties resulting from bilateral and multilateral agreements already in force that the Parties have con­ cluded with other States or international organizations. 8 The First Party shall apply this Agreement in accordance with its obli­ gations deriving from its membership in the European Union and its membership in other international, multilateral or regional institutions or organizations, as well as other international instruments. Similarly, the Second Party shall apply this Agreement in accordance with its obligations deriving from its membership in international, multilateral or regional institutions or organizations, including the EU, following its proposed accession thereto.

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9 The provisions of this Agreement shall remain in force for an indefinite period of time and are irrevocable. No modification to this Agreement contained in Article 1(3) and Article 1(4) is permitted. 10 This Agreement shall be registered with the Secretariat of the United Nations pursuant to Article 102 of the Charter of the United Nations as soon as it has entered into force. IN WITNESS WHEREOF the Parties have, through their authorized rep­ resentatives, signed three copies of this Final Agreement in the English language. Representative of the First Party

Representative of the Second Party

: JS Minister for Foreign Affairs

Nikola Dimitrov Minister for Foreign Affairs

WITNESSED, in accordance with the

Security Council resolutions 817 (1993) and 845 (1993), by:

Personal Envoy of the Secretary General of the United Nations

DONE at Prespes, on the June 17, 2018

Signature 1 Signature 2

Notes 1 United Nations, Official Records of the General Assembly, Third Session, Part I, p. 71.

2 United Nations, Treaty Series, vol. 213, p. 221.

3 Ibid., vol. 660, p. 195.

4 Ibid., vol. 1577, No. 1-27531.

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Appendix 2

Samples from the three dialect atlases mentioned in Chapter 3 (§5) This appendix contains three sets of samples. The first is the complete OLA map for ‘lips’ (Králik and Waniakowa 2009, 66–67; Figure A2.1) together with the list of data (Figure A2.2) and the list of data points (Siatkowski and Waniakowa 2009, 19–24; Figure A2.3). As it so happens, Siatkowski and Waniakowa (2009) was produced after the Bulgarians were allowed to rejoin OLA, so the Bulgarian data and data points are inte­ grated into their original intended positions. Figure A2.1 does a good job of displaying the diversity in the realization of this basic lexical item in the Slavic-speaking world. Note that the symbols given on the map in Figure A2.1 are keyed to Common Slavic reconstructions, given in phonetic tran­ scription, while the actual dialectal realizations are given in Figure A2.2, also in phonetic transcription. Loan forms are given in parentheses in Figure A2.1 with etymological information. The second set of figures has the recently published equivalent map and data explanations but utilizing only the Macedonian OLA points. Figures A2.4 and A2.5 were authored by Sonja Milenkovska as published in Markovikj (2020: Map 43), and the list of data points in Figure A2.6 is adapted directly from OLA. These figures use Cyrillic rather than phonetic transcription because the intended audi­ ence is the broader Macedonian public, and the explanations in Figure A2.4 are more detailed than those given in OLA. At the same time, Figure A2.4 makes it easy to focus on precisely the specifically Macedonian aspect of this lexical item. Note especially that in the southwest and the southeast, the word for ‘lips’ is a borrowing from Albanian and Turkish, respectively.1 This is arguably a demonstration of the long-term presence of Albanian in what is now northwest Greece, and the significance of Turkish in parts of Greece where Muslims were expelled after World War I. The third set gives a map from the MDA. For the MDA, it so happens that I have a list of the points using the Latin alphabet, and therefore, although the MDA itself is entirely in Cyrillic, I am using the Latin alphabet as this will be easier for readers of this article. Figure A2.7 gives the general map from Gajdarova (2008:40) and Figures A2.8 the data points based on Gajdarova (2008:33-39). Figures A2.9a–c give maps for the lexical item meaning ‘ugly’ as published in Markovikj (2018), since the full volumes of MDA are still in preparation.

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Figure A2.1 OLA map of “Lips” (Králik and Waniakowa 2009, 67)

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Figure A2.2 OLA data “Lips” (Králik and Waniakowa 2009, 66)

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Figure A2.3 OLA data points (Siatkowski and Waniakowa 2009, 19–24)

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Figure A2.3 (Continued)

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Figure A2.3 (Continued)

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Figure A2.3 (Continued)

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Figure A2.3 (Continued)

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Figure A2.3 (Continued)

Figure A2.4 OLA-MDA map “Lips” (Markovikj (2020, Map 43)

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BK-TandF-NEOFOTISTOS_9780367407292-200164-Appendix2.indd 277

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Figure A2.5 OLA-MDA data “Lips” (Markovikj 2020, Map 43)

278 Appendix 2

Figure A2.6 OLA-MDA data points based on Markovikj (2020, 1)

BK-TandF-NEOFOTISTOS_9780367407292-200164-Appendix2.indd 278

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Appendix 2

279

Figure A2.7 MDA basic map Gajdarova (2008, 40)

BK-TandF-NEOFOTISTOS_9780367407292-200164-Appendix2.indd 279

09/11/20 3:13 PM

280

Appendix 2

Figure A2.8 MDA data points based on Gajdarova (2008, 33–39)

BK-TandF-NEOFOTISTOS_9780367407292-200164-Appendix2.indd 280

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Appendix 2

281

Figure A2.8 (Continued)

Figure A2.9 (a) MDA “ugly” detailed (Markovikj 2018)

BK-TandF-NEOFOTISTOS_9780367407292-200164-Appendix2.indd 281

09/11/20 3:13 PM

282

Appendix 2

Figure A2.9 (b) MDA “ugly” generalized black and white (Markovikj 2018)

Figure A2.9 (c) MDA ‘ugly’ generalized color (Markovikj 2018)

BK-TandF-NEOFOTISTOS_9780367407292-200164-Appendix2.indd 282

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Appendix 2

283

Note 1 The attentive observer will note that the Albanian form also occurs in OLA points 130–131 and the Turkish in point 132. Point 132 is actually in Pirin Macedonia and forms part of the Macedonian continuum. Points 130–131 are in a region whither both Macedonian and Albanian speakers migrated dur­ ing the 16th-18th centuries for economic reasons. Some speakers of the vari­ ous languages subsequently migrated further north and east via Dobrugea to Ukraine, where there are still Albanian speaking villages (see, for example, Novik et al. 2016; Kotova 2018). The Macedonian speakers did not migrate, but their dialects added to the local dialectal picture.

BK-TandF-NEOFOTISTOS_9780367407292-200164-Appendix2.indd 283

09/11/20 3:13 PM

Index

A1 (television station) 187

Academy of Arts and Sciences of North

Macedonia (MANU) 9–10, 81, 83

Aegean Macedonia 3, 7, 44

Agrarian Party 131

Albania 1, 5–6, 28, 31, 33–37, 39, 41, 51,

53, 60, 65, 69, 71n12, 75, 81–82, 84,

233

Albanian National Liberation Army (NLA) 11, 24n17 Alexander the Great 9–10, 14, 23n13, 41,

45, 55, 78, 133, 135, 150, 152, 154, 166,

176, 184, 186, 199, 199

anatomy of Prespa Agreement 54–56

Ancient Macedonians 8–10, 41, 78,

85n7

Anderson, Benedict 14, 23n10, 182

Andoniadis, Ioannis 139

Antifascist Assembly for the

National Liberation of Macedonia

(Antifašističko Sobranie na Narodnoto

Osloboduvanje na Makedonija, or

ASNOM) 6

Antiquity 54–55, 79–80, 149–150, 162,

165–166, 176, 184, 258

antiquization 9; Freedom Square and

28.03.09 185; and reshaping the Macedonian public 184–190; Skopje 2014 185–190 Antoniadis, Yiannis 140

Anzaldua, Gloria 51–52

Aristotelian University of

Thessaloniki 31

Aristotle 135

Article 1(3c) of the PA 76–77

Article 7(4) of the PA 77–79

Article 8(5) 80–82

Articles 7(2, 3) of the PA 79–80

Avgi 137

BK-TandF-NEOFOTISTOS_9780367407292-200164-index.indd 284

Babri Masjid 182

Balibar, Etienne 15, 208

Balkan civil society organizations 241

Balkan Green Belt 39

Balkan migrant organizations 241

Balkans: and Byzantine Empire 30;

delimiting borders of 33–35; irrevers­ ibility of the immigrants’ connec­ tion to 241; and Ottoman Empire

2; Russian influence in 17; Slavic

migrations to 10

Balkan Wars 3, 6, 21, 29, 115n15, 131,

134

Banac, Ivo 22n6 Basaran, Nuray 237

Basil II, Emperor 31

beylerbeylik 86n10 Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s

Party, or BJP) 182

Big Prespa 22n1; see also Greater Prespa Black Lives Matter movement 203n11 “#bojkotiram” (#IBoycott) 194

Bojkotiram (“I Boycott”) campaign 16

Bolsonaro, Jair 173

bombi (bombs) 10

Borderlands/La Frontera: The New

Mestiza (Anzaldua) 51

Borisov, Boyko 13

Boševski, Tome 10

Boškovska, Nada 22n5 Bourdieu, Pierre 112–113 Boxer, Diana 168

Brexit 173, 177

British Broadcasting Corporation

(BBC) 79

“Brotherhood of Serres Dopii Cyril and

Methodius” 19, 103, 104

Brown, Keith 22n4

29/10/20 5:09 PM

Index Bucharest Treaty 52

Bulgaria 1–6, 12–13, 17, 19, 21, 32,

35, 52, 69, 75, 81, 209–210; admit­ ted to European Union 232; and

Agreement for Good Neighborly

Relations 171n39; Bumblebee in

the ointment 82–84; and ethnic

Macedonian citizens of North

Macedonia 84; and KKE 132; and

Macedonian language 85; and

Macedonian Struggle 130

Bulgarian Academy of Sciences 13

Bulgarian Empire 30, 46n7;

capital of 30–33

Bulgarian nationalism 19, 75

Butler, Judith 15, 96, 97, 208

Byzantine Empire 30–31, 33

Caton, S. C. 59

Catsadorakis, George 40

censorship: creative aspect of

96–97; penetrating power of 100;

self-censorship 93, 96, 99, 101;

surveillance and multiple levels of

95–98

Christianity 30, 185

Christian Orthodox militant

nationalism 8

citizenship: Macedonian 235–238;

“rightful” 238–243

“citizenship shopping” 228

“citizenship with benefits” 232

CLIM-HYDROLAKE project 61

Coalition of the Radical Left

(SYRIZA) 12, 19, 52, 114n6, 122–126,

128–129, 137, 139–142

Cold War 18, 35–37, 110

Colorful Revolution (Šarena Revolucija)

23n16, 56, 192–193 Common Slavic 85n3 Common Slavic Linguistic Atlas (Macedonian Opštoslovenski lingvis­ tički atlas, OLA) 80

Communist Party of Greece (KKE) 57,

122–123, 126, 129, 132–134, 136–137,

140–141

Communist party of Yugoslavia 6

Conference of Ambassadors 33–34

Council of Europe 1, 80, 250, 259, 261

COVID-19 lock down 107

Cowan, Jane 4

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) 151,

168n2

BK-TandF-NEOFOTISTOS_9780367407292-200164-index.indd 285

285

cultural intimacy 99, 109, 116n20

Cultural Intimacy (Herzfeld) 116n20

David, Isabel 237

Deca Begalci (child refugees) 127

deep state 141–142

Delcev, Goce 13, 165, 171n39

Delimitation Commission 33–34

delimiting, borders of the Balkans

33–35

Demetriou, Olga 44

Democratic Army of Greece 35

Democratic Army Radio 35

dialect atlases 80–82

DiCarlo, Rosemary 54

#digitalsoyagaci, (#digitalfamilytree)

227

Dimitrov, Nikola 1, 12, 42, 54, 147–148,

154, 159–160, 164, 267

Diploidou, Sophia 105, 106

dopia language 93, 95–96, 99, 101,

106–107, 110, 114n2

dopii 5, 19, 93, 95–98, 101, 103–113,

114n2

Dragoumis, Ion 131

Dragoumis, Philippos 121, 129–135, 141

Dragoumis, Stefanos 131

dual-citizenship: and fantasies

of Macedonian 227–228;

post-territorial nationalism and

229–231; and Turks 227, 237

Duterte, Rodrigo 173

Dyer, Donald L. 84

Eastern Orthodox Christian religion 12

elections in Florina: Accord and discord 138–141; deep state 141–142; overview 121–122; patrons and clients 129–138; Rainbow promises 126–129; topoi and actors 122–126 Embirikos, Leonidas 107

Erasmus Agreements 238

erasure 75, 79

Eriksen, T. H. 69

European Commission 65, 87n28, 210

European Community (EC) 7

European Convention on Human

Rights 128

European Council 17

European Court of Human Rights 107,

128, 138

European dream and postsocialism 207–211

29/10/20 5:09 PM

286

Index

European Economic Community 38

European Free Alliance-European

Political Party (EFA-EPP) 126

“European Free Coalition-Rainbow”

126; see also Rainbow Party

European Great Powers 2

European Green Belt 40

European Macedonia: Colorful

Revolution (Šarena Revolucija) 23n16, 56, 192–193; contours of 190–193; “I HEART GTC” (Go Sakam GTC) 192; mass protests and student ple­ nums 191–192 European naturalists 38

European Parliament 121, 126–127

European Union 1, 7, 11, 21, 29, 59, 61,

65, 87n28, 124, 140, 168, 179, 208, 210,

215–216, 227–229, 232–233, 253, 266

EU Western Balkans Enterprise

Development and Innovation

Facility 215

Exarchist Statistics 71n7 Eyalet of Rumeli 80, 86n10 Facebook 98, 106, 214, 220–221

fantasies of citizenship: elusive search for Macedonian citizenship 235–238; kin-state clause as an exclusionary mechanism in North Macedonia 232–234; overview 227–229; post-territorial nationalism and dual-citizenship 229–231; “right­ ful” citizenship 238–243; Turkish engagement and reticence in North Macedonia 234–235 Federal Union of European nationali­ ties (FUEN) 126

Federation of Macedonian People’s

Cultural Associations 19

Federation of World Pan Macedonian

Associations 43

Fčerašni Novosti (Yesterday’s News) 179

Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood

(Karakasidou) 113

“Final Agreement for the Settlement of the Differences as Described in the United Nations Security Council Resolutions 817 (1993) and 845 (1993), the Termination of the Interim Accord of 1995, and the Establishment of a Strategic Partnership between the Parties” see Prespa Agreement

First Archi-Brigade 191

BK-TandF-NEOFOTISTOS_9780367407292-200164-index.indd 286

First Archibrigade (Prva Arhi-Brigada) 187

First Balkan War 33

First Bulgarian Empire 18, 30

First World War 3

“flexible citizenship” 228

Florina: elections in see elections in

Florina; violence erupted in 134; and Yeorgios Modis 134–135

Florina 130

Florina Prefecture 142n2; European

election results for 128; July 7, 2019

national elections results in 139; and

Rainbow Party 128

former Yugoslav Republic of

Macedonia (FYROM) 1, 8–9, 54

Freedom Square (Ploštad Sloboda) 185;

and 28.03.09 185

“Free Greece” 30, 36

Friedman, Victor A. 18, 21, 83

Friendship Agreement 82

Friends of Music Society (Syllogos ton

Filon tis Mousikis in Greek or SFM) 98–100 Fund for Innovation and Technological Development (FITR) 215–217 Gal, Susan 75, 79, 85

Gatzoulis, Nina 43, 115n16

Gavroglou, Kostas 102

Geertz, Clifford 2

Geographical Institute of Florence 34

George II, King 114n7

Georgievski, Ljub?o 12

Geroski, Branko 191

Gingeras, Ryan 239

Global Financial Crisis of 2007/08 210

“Global Investment Fund” 68

Gokcek, Melih 240

Golden Dawn 86n8, 94, 104–105, 107,

114n4, 114n5, 115n17, 138

Google 214

Google AdSense 221

Gradski Trgovski Centar (GTC) 192

Greater Prespa Lake 1, 22n1, 28

Great Powers 31, 33

Great Prespa Lake 22n1; see also

Greater Prespa Lake Greece: Axis occupation of 35; Hitler’s

army invasion of 35; identity politics

in 1–2; invisible multilingualism

in 18; Macedonian identity in 5;

Macedonian minority in 7, 19, 104;

Macedonian otherness in 19; and

29/10/20 5:09 PM

Index Macedonian Question 2–7; non-

Greek people in 57; socio-political

schisms in 104

Greek citizenship 6

Greek Civil War 5, 6, 18, 23n11, 29, 30,

35; ground zero of 35–37

Greek Communist Party 5, 35

Greek cultural heritage 6

Greek Government Legislative Edict 57

Greek Macedonia 5, 23n9 Greek National Army 35

Greek national identity 4, 6

Greek nationalism 6

Greek Orthodox Church 31

Greek Parliament 1, 16, 23n11, 103

Green, Sarah 43

Gritsenko, Elena 168

Gruevski, Nikola 8–10, 23n16, 54, 78,

173–174, 178–179, 181, 184–194, 195,

203n11, 210–215

The Guardian 15

Guli, Pitu 22n2 Guterres, António 16

Hahn, Johannes 1, 54

Hastrup, K. 66

Hellenic civilization 14

Hellenic League for Human Rights 105

Hellenic Ornithological Society 38

Hellenization, policy of 4

Herzfeld, Michael 14, 109

Hindu nationalism 178, 187

Hitler, Adolf 35

Hobsbawm, Eric 14, 150

Hoffman, Julian 40–41

“hostile neutrality” 5

Iasonidis, Panayiotis 115n16 identity: Agreement as a threat to 160–163; disambiguated 158–160; preserved 158–160; protected 158–160 identity politics: defined 2; method­ ological considerations-food for thought 108–113; mobilization of the judiciary 102–108; overview 93–95; within party discourses 154; reac­ tions caused by the study 98–108; speaking about silence 108–113; sur­ veillance and multiple levels of cen­ sorship 95–98; systematic triggering and management of protest 98–102 “I HEART GTC” (Go Sakam GTC) 192

Ilinden Uprising 3, 4, 13, 22n3, 29, 57

BK-TandF-NEOFOTISTOS_9780367407292-200164-index.indd 287

287

“imagined communities” 23n10 IMF 213

innovation: and its challenges 218–222; in North Macedonia 214–218; postPrespa 218–222 innovation after Prespa: innovation in North Macedonia 214–218; next for Macedonia’s innovation ecosystem 222–223; overview 206–207; postPrespa innovation and its chal­ lenges 218–222; postsocialism and European dream 207–211; “selling” Prespa without nationalism 211–214 innovation ecosystem, Macedonia 222–223 Institute for Macedonian Language 81

Institute of Balkan Studies 131–132 Integrated Mediterranean Programmes

38

Interim Accord 8–9, 22n1, 55, 250–252 Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) 3; founded in 3; “Macedonia for the Macedonians” (Makedonija na Makedoncite) 3; see also VMRO Internal Macedonian Revolutionary

Organization-Democratic Party

for Macedonian National Unity

(VMRO-DPMNE) 10–12, 20, 54, 56,

70n2, 78, 147–154, 160–162, 164–166,

174, 184, 186, 192, 212, 214

International Committee of Slavists 80

International Court of Human Rights

83

International Court of Justice (ICJ) 9, 23n14 international environmental organiza­ tions 38

International Union for the

Conservation of Nature 39

Ioannidou, Alexandra 105, 106

Iosifidis, Vasilis 131

Irani, Lilly 220

Iron Curtain 39

Irvine, Judith T. 75, 79, 85

Ivanov, Gjorge 11, 23n16, 148, 161, 174

Johnson, Dana 223n2

Jovanovski, Borjan 191

judiciary, mobilization of 102–108

Juncker, Jean-Claude 17

Kalingas, George 99–100

Kammenos, Panos 103

29/10/20 5:09 PM

288

Index

Karakasidou, Anastasia 23n9, 102, 103, 113 Karatzios, Christos 115n16 Karipoglou, Panayotis 105 Karsambas, Polychronis 106 Katharevousa 143n15 Kezarovksi, Tomislav 187 King Alexander of Yugoslavia 4 kin-state clause as an exclusionary mechanism in North Macedonia 232–234 Knott, Eleanor 234 Kočev, Ivan 82–83, 84 Kočeva, Ana 82–83 Koeva, Svetla 83 Kofos, Evangelos 5, 23n10 Kolind, Tornsten 66 Kollia-Tsaroucha, Maria 102 Kondoyiannakis, Eliza 131 Kostopoulos, Tasos 130, 143n13 Kostov, Ivan 12 Kotzias, Nikos 1, 12, 42, 54, 103 Koutavas, Spyros 136 Kruševo Republic 3 Kurir 188 Latas, Dragan Pavlovi? 188 Lesser Prespa Lake 22n1, 28, 30, 38, 40 Lianis, Yiorgos 121, 129, 135–136 Libertas 188 Liebich, Andre 231 Lithoksóou, Dimitris 132 Little Prespa 22n1; see also Lesser Prespa Macedonia 1–22; declaration of inde­ pendence 7; denationalization law 242–243; post-independence develop­ ments 7–13; Prespa Agreement and Macedonian Question 2–7; recogni­ tion of 76–77; road to Prespa 7–13; terms of Prespa Agreement 13–17; as a transboundary place 43–45 “Macedonia is Greece” 86n8 Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts (MANU) 9–10, 81, 83, 161 Macedonian Bank 161 Macedonian citizenship: and denation­ alization law 242–243; elusive search for 235–238; Turkish media articles on 229 Macedonian Conflict 41 Macedonian Constitution 16, 163, 166

BK-TandF-NEOFOTISTOS_9780367407292-200164-index.indd 288

Macedonian Dialect Atlas project (MDA) 80 Macedonian dialects 6 Macedonian emigrants in Turkey Macedonian language: problem of erasure 79–80; question of dialect atlases 80–82; recognition of 76–77; as a South Slavic language 77–79 Macedonian national identity 7, 10 Macedonian Orthodox Church 6, 185 Macedonian Parliament 7, 158 Macedonian Philharmonic Orchestra 197 Macedonian political parties: contours of national identity 149–163; and framing of Prespa Agreement 147– 168; identity politics within party discourses 154; overview 147–149 Macedonian public, antiquization and reshaping 184–190 Macedonian Question 75, 94, 122, 130, 132; and First World War 3; in post­ 1945 period 6–7; Prespa Agreement and 2–7 Macedonian revolutionary activism 22n3 Macedonian Struggle 29 Macedonia’s 1991 Founding Constitution 24n17 Macron, Emmanuel 16 Mademlis, Kostas N. 102 Makedonska Asocijacija na Novinari (The Macedonian Association of Journalists) 189 Marie Curie Career Integration Grant 61 Markovikj, Marjan 82, 85n6 mass media 182–183 mass protests and student plenums 191–192 Melas, Pavlos 133 Merakou, Stephania 100 Merkel, Angela 207 Mešan Brak (“Mixed Marriage”) 179 Metaxas, Ioannis 4, 19, 35, 95, 114n7, 131 Metcalf, Peter 101 Michas, Takis 8 Mickoski, Hristijan 148, 161, 162 Middle Ages 78 Mihailov, Ivan 4 Mijalkov, Sašo 10, 212 Miloševi?, Slobodan 8

29/10/20 5:09 PM

Index Mitsotakis, Constantine 7

Mitsotakis, Kyriakos 124

mobilization of judiciary 102–108 modern Macedonian language: Article 1(3c) of the PA 76–77; Article 7(4) of the PA 77–79; Article 8(5) 80–82; Articles 7(2, 3) of the PA 79–80; Bulgaria 82–84; inconclusive con­ clusion 85; Macedonian as South Slavic language 77–79; overview 75; problem of erasure 79–80; question of dialect atlases 80–82; recognition of Macedonian 76–77 Modi, Narendra 173

Modis, Georgios 121

Modis, Yeorgios 129, 130, 134

Mogherini, Federica 1, 15, 54, 207

Moutsopoulos, Nikos K. 31–32 Mukoski, Krsto 56

Muren, Zeki 240

Museum of Byzantine Culture in

Thessaloniki 32

Mussolini, Benito 4, 35

Myrivili, Eleni 30, 43

nation, defined 14

national identity: Agreement 154–158; Agreement as a threat to 161–163; Agreement as a threat to identity 160–163; Agreement as a threat to sovereignty/statehood 161; con­ tours of 149–163; data presentation 154–160; identity is disambiguated, preserved, and protected 158–160; identity politics within party dis­ courses 154; methodological design 152–153 nationalism: post-territorial 229–231;

“selling” Prespa without 211–214

National Liberation Front (NOF) 57

National Radical Union party (ERE)

135

NATO 1, 7, 138, 140, 174, 184, 198,

210, 213, 228, 255–256; Bucharest

summit 54; Macedonia’s bid to

join 9, 13–16; and recognition to

Macedonia 7

Nedelkovski, Milenko 188

Negri, Antonio 208

Nema Pravda, Nema Mir (No Justice,

No Peace) slogan 56

Neo-Ottomanism 234

Neškovski, Martin 192

BK-TandF-NEOFOTISTOS_9780367407292-200164-index.indd 289

289

“Nikogaš Severna, Sekogaš

Makedonija” (Never North, Always

Macedonia) slogan 16

Nimetz, Matthew 8, 12, 54

Nimitz, Matthew 42

North Macedonia 1; innovation in

214–218; kin-state clause as an exclusionary mechanism in 232–234; Turkish engagement and reticence in 234–235

NOVA TV 188

Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandra 173

Ohrid Framework Agreement 24n17,

232, 244

Oktay, Metin 240

Orban, Viktor 23n16, 173

Organization for Economic

Cooperation and Development (OECD) 215

Orlove, B. 59

Orthodox Christianity 30

Orthodox Christian refugees 4

Orthodox Church 22n3, 30, 137

Ottoman Empire 2, 31, 80, 154

Owen, Lord David 8

Panayotaros, Elias 103

Panhellenic Federation of Macedonian

People’s Cultural Associations

(Panellinia Omospondia Politistikon

Syllogon Makedonon in Greek, or

POPSM) 94, 98, 100–101, 103–107,

114n3

Panhellenic Socialist Movement

(PASOK) 23n11, 36–37, 129

Pan-Macedonian Association of

Canada 115n16

Papandreou, Andreas 7, 103, 135

Papandreou, Yeorgios 129

Papataxiarchis, Evthymios 109

Papathanasiou, Christos Amyntas

115n16

Papathanasiou, Haralambos 142

Paraskeviotis, Alexandros 106

patrons and clients 129–138

Pennas, Thomas 102

Perka, Theopisti (Peti) 19

Philip of Macedon 14, 23n13

Pijpers, R. J. 69

Pinto, Corte-Real Gabriela 237

Pirin Macedonia 3, 7, 283n1

Pliocene Epoch 28

29/10/20 5:09 PM

290

Index

political polarization: antiquization and reshaping Macedonian public 184–190; from bubbles to doubles 182–183; contours of European Macedonia 190–193; doubled identity 178–181; Freedom Square and 28.03.09 185; mass media and 182–183; popular culture and 182–183; Prespa Agreement 194–200; puzzle of doubles 173–178; from recognition struggles to representa­ tion struggles 178–181; Skopje 2014 185–190 Politics, Press and Place (Zagos) 129

Politics After Television: Religious

Nationalism and the Reshaping of the

Indian Public (Rajagopal) 182

Pontic Greek Associations 139

popular culture: mass media 182–183; and political polarization 182–183 post-independence developments 7–13 post-Prespa innovation and challenges 218–222 postsocialism and European dream 207–211 post-territorial nationalism 229–231; and dual-citizenship 229–231 Pougaridis, Stefanos 134

Prespa Accord, and discord 138–141 Prespa Agreement 1, 22n1, 154–158;

anatomy of 54–56; Macedonian

political parties and framing of

147–168; and Macedonian Question

2–7; political polarization 194–200;

signing of; terms of 13–17; as threat

to identity 160–163; as threat to

national identity 161–163; as threat

to sovereignty/statehood 161

Prespa Lakes: materiality of the lake 58–66; between nature, politics, and history 56–57 Prespa region: Bulgarian Empire, capital of 30–33; delimiting borders of the Balkans 33–35; Greek Civil War, ground zero of 35–37; between lake, the Agreement, and place of abandonment 66–70; Macedonia as a transboundary place 43–45; map of 29; post-independence devel­ opments 7–13; Prespa: “The Lake of Reconciliation” 41–43; “Three Countries, Two Lakes, One Future” motto 37–41; transboundary Prespa Park 37–41

BK-TandF-NEOFOTISTOS_9780367407292-200164-index.indd 290

Prilozi 10

print-capitalism 14

protest, systematic triggering and man­ agement of 98–102

#protestiram (#IProtest) 192

Protocol of Florence 33, 34

Protogerov, Aleksandar 4

Provisional Democratic Government of

Greece 30

“public sphere” 143n7

Radio Slobodna Evropa (Radio Free

Europe) 189

Radio Slobodna Makedonija (Radio

Free Macedonia) 189

Rainbow Party (Vinožito) 107, 122–123,

126–129, 136–137, 141–142, 143n12

Rainbow promises 126–129

Rajagopal, Arvind 178, 182, 201

Rajnov, Vasil 82

Rama, Edi 24n22

Ramsar Convention 38

Ram Temple Movement 183

Ranger, Terence 14

Rasmussen, M. B. 63, 66–67

recognition of Macedonian 76–77

“recognition struggles” 178

“refugee children” 5

“régime of difference” 109

Rencher, Marlo 220

Republic of Macedonia 9; see also

Macedonia Republic of North Macedonia see North Macedonia

Republika 188

“Revival in 100 Steps” (Prerodba vo

100 čekori) document 184

“rightful” citizenship 238–243

right-wing organizations 10

Rosetta Stone 10

Rossos, Andrew 2, 5, 23n7

Royal Society for the Protection of

Birds 38

Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland 113

Sanders, Bernie 173

Saxecoburggotski, Simeon 32

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy 101, 113

SDSM (Social-Democratic Alliance of

Macedonia) 20, 52

Second Balkan War 3, 6

Second Bulgarian Empire 31

Sela, Ziadin 11

29/10/20 5:09 PM

Index self-censorship 93, 96, 99, 101

“selling” Prespa without nationalism

211–214

Seltsas, Kostas 19, 125, 129, 137

Sen, Ali 240

Serbia 2–9, 33, 52, 75, 81, 87n24, 132,

223n2

Serbian Empire 31

Serbian Patriarchate 6

“Serres and Meleniko History and

Folklore Society” 102

Shekerinska, Radmila 11

Sidiropoulos, Christos 143n11

Šijak, Arna 199

Siljanovska-Davkova, Gordana 161

Singing Skopjeans (Raspeani Skopjani)

187

Skopje 2014 project 9, 13, 185–190

Skoularikis-Gennimatas law 138

Slotta, James 183

Small Prespa 22n1; see also Lesser

Prespa

Smith, D. Anthony 149

SNOF (Slavjanomakedonski Narodno

Osloboditelen Front, or Slavo­ macedonian People’s Liberation

Front) 133

Social Democratic Union (SD) 10, 147

Socialist Federal Republic of

Yugoslavia 6, 31, 181, 208, 265

Society for Macedonian Studies 132,

135

Society for the Protection of Prespa (SPP) 38, 46n21

“Southern Serbia” 4, 6

“South Serbs” 6

sovereignty/statehood, Agreement as a

threat to 161

Spitulnik, Debra 182

Stabilisation and Association Process

(SAP) 65

Stankovic, S. 61

Star of Vergina 8, 23, 41, 43, 45, 175, 175,

199, 199, 202n5

Startup Europe–Western Balkans

Network 216

Statement of Preliminary Findings and Conclusions of the International Referendum Observation Mission in the Republic of Macedonia in September 2018 16 St. Elias Uprising see Ilinden Uprising

Stohos 138

Stoler, Laura Ann 231

BK-TandF-NEOFOTISTOS_9780367407292-200164-index.indd 291

291

student plenums and mass protests 191–192

Sunni Islam 234

sun/star of Vergina 23n13

surveillance and multiple levels of cen­ sorship 95–98 SYRIZA (The Coalition of the Radical

Left) 12, 19, 52, 114n6, 122–126,

128–129, 137, 139–142

systematic triggering and management of protest 98–102 Tange, Kenzo 192

Tatsios, Georgios 98, 115n16

Tentov, Aristotel 10

Terleki, Paraskevi. 135

Terzopoulou, Miranda 100

Theophilidou, Ergina 106

“Three Countries, Two Lakes, One

Future” motto 39

Tito, Josip Broz 23n10, 135, 238

topoi and actors 122–126

Transboundary Prespa Park 18, 30,

37–41

transnational migrant communities 230

Treaty of Bucharest 3, 80

Treaty of Lausanne 80, 86n11

Treaty of London 33

“True Finns” 201

Trump, Donald 173, 183

“The Truth about Macedonia”

(Vistinata za Makedonija) 10

Tsar Samuel 30–32, 45, 46n7

Tsipras, Alexis 1, 11, 12, 42, 52, 103, 140

Tsitselikis, Konstantinos 105

Turkey 1; engagement and reticence

in North Macedonia 234–235;

Macedonian emigrants in 227–245;

Muslim emigrants to 21; post-terri­ torial nationalism of 21

Turkish Broadcast Foundation (Turkiye Radyo Televizyon Kurumu—TRT) 235

Turkish Cooperation and Coordination

Agency (Turk Isbirligi ve

Koordinasyon Idaresi Baskanligi—

TIKA) 235

Turkish engagement and reticence in North Macedonia 234–235

TV NOVA 188

Twitter 227

Uber 214

UNESCO 69, 77, 80, 259

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292

Index

United Democratic Left (EDA) 135

United Nations (UN) 1, 8

Urban Artistic Action (Urbano­ umetička akcija) 187

Ustaše (Croatian fascist organization) 4

Vance, Cyrus 8

Vardar Macedonia 3, 7

Vecernji List 162

Veles-Prilep-Kičevo-Brod 84

Verdery, Katherine 14

Versailles Treaty 33

Vikings 84

vilayet 86n10 VMRO see Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) Vnatrešna Makedonska Revolucionerna Organizacija see VMRO Voskopoulos, Pavlos 127

Voskopoulos, Yiannis 136

“Vote for a European Macedonia” campaign 157–158 voters and clients: Accord and discord 138–141; deep state 141–142; over­ view 121–122; patrons and clients 129–138; Rainbow promises 126–129; topoi and actors 122–126 Voutsis, Nikos 103

BK-TandF-NEOFOTISTOS_9780367407292-200164-index.indd 292

Warner, Michael 201, 203n12 Wilkinson, Henry Robert 3

Wodak, Ruth 151, 168n3 World Bank 213, 215

World Intellectual Property

Organization (WIPO) 8

World War I 6, 18, 30–33, 81, 268

World War II 5, 35, 78, 132, 238–239

World Wars 29

World Wildlife Fund 38

Xhaferi, Talat 11

Yugoslav Macedonia 5, 23n7, 44,

135–136

Yunus Emre Foundation 234–235 Zachariadis, Nikolaos 57

Zaev, Zoran 1, 10–13, 16, 20, 42, 54,

69, 137, 148, 154, 156, 158, 162, 164,

174, 194, 196–197, 207–208, 212, 214,

216–217, 219, 222

Zagos, Christos 129–130, 131

Zapranis, Achilleas 102

Združenje na Novinarite na Makedonija

(The Association of Journalists in

Macedonia) 189

Zezov, Nikola 161–162, 170n31

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