Macedonia's triumphal arch, a legacy of the Skopje 2014 project, as part of the 'colourful revolution'. PAimages/Jacopo Landi/NurPhoto. All rights reserved.“Western Balkans’ potential new crisis in Europe - Macedonia,” “Macedonia on the brink of war,” “Macedonian stability shaken – threat to the stability of southeastern Europe”, a paraphrase of numerous titles that have appeared in media outlets of international standing in the past year or so. Conversely, the same fears and concerns could not be registered internally. Any local public would treat any such statement as conspiracy theory or, more likely, through their own conspiracy theory counter-thesis: “the political opponent is using it as a threat to gain power at any cost,” or “the political opponent is using it as an argument to stay in power.” In short, locally, in the period of the so-called political crisis (2015-2016), a threat to the stability and the very existence of the state has never been considered a serious possibility but rather the spin of the political opponent and “the international powers backing them.”
Hallucinogenic reason dominates the local discourse in the small, claustrophobic, xenophobic, parochially self-sufficient country: truth is never evident and the evident never true, “there is always something behind” that everyone is capable of guessing at according to his political preferences. One can only infer that paranoia is unavoidable. And indeed it is. However, “the fact that you’re paranoid does not exclude the possibility they are after you,” as Joseph Heller used to say.
Macedonia has the following issues with its neighbors: a name of the state contested by Greece, an Orthodox Church unrecognized by Serbia (and, consequently, by the rest of the Orthodox world), an official language and indistinct national identity – or rather “history” – unrecognized by Bulgaria. As the bizarre and seemingly incongruent mass of Macedonia’s problems with its neighbours surfaces in its totality, one is tempted to look for a single unifying trait in that heterogeneous sum of problems. Most of them are linked to history and the recognition of a distinct nation, whether through nation-state formation or identity claim. But given that a national identity or nationality normally derives from a nation-state and considering the fact that statehood or the very existence of the state at issue is not contested by any of its neighbors, the question remains – what in fact is being denied recognition in Macedonia and its history?
