They Balked

While polls had shown more than 90 percent of voters supporting the name change, only 36.9 percent of eligible voters turned out, making the referendum legally invalid. The hardline opposition’s call to boycott the vote is widely perceived as having won.

An array of dignitaries had visited the former Yugoslav Macedonian capital, Skopje, to support the yes vote, including Defense secretary James Mattis and German chancellor Angela Merkel. Had the yes vote prevailed, it would have clinched approval of the Prespes Agreement, named after the border-straddling lake on whose shores it was signed, solving the 27-year dispute between Greece and former Yugoslav Macedonia. More important, it was to have inaugurated a new advance for Western institutions.

E.U. enlargement stalled after the addition of Croatia in 2013 and was reversed with the departure vote of Britain in 2016. NATO enlisted Montenegro last year, but it has faced Russian military incursions in larger aspiring members Georgia (2008) and Ukraine (2014). These have appeared to define the alliance’s limits, and the limits of American hegemony.

In a visit to Athens last December, E.U. commissioner for enlargement Johannes Hahn stressed the importance of Greece’s role in shepherding the six Western Balkan nations into the fold. “We have to close a gap which exists when it comes to connectivity and border cooperation,” Hahn said. “Greece has very strong economic ties to the region in trade and foreign direct investment. It’s important for . . . foreign investors to have stability in the region. This is only possible [in the E.U.]”

The European Commission in February announced its goal to induct the countries of the western Balkans by the mid-2020s. Greece launched a flurry of diplomatic activity to settle decades-long disputes with neighbors. It is delineating its continental shelf with Albania and ending a technical state of war with that country that has existed since 1940.

A political earthquake in former Yugoslav Macedonia made a rapprochement there possible as well. In December 2016, the hardline Macedonian Internal Revolutionary Organization (VMRO) fell after a decade in power. The country’s VMRO-affiliated president, Gjorge Ivanov, refused to swear in the opposition, a coalition of social democrats, liberals and minorities under Zoran Zaev. When the speaker of parliament invited Zaev to form a government, VMRO thugs attacked Zaev, who appeared on television with blood streaming down the side of his head. His swearing-in after a U.S. diplomatic intervention ushered in a new era.

“There was an extremely big optimism surrounding us,” says Miroljub Sukarov, a respected economics professor at South East European University in Skopje. “Things started in a perfect way. The government adopted several laws in the economy, encouraging private investments and making no distinction between foreign and domestic investors.”

Sukarov contrasts this with the previous, politicized economy, in which jobs, licenses, and bank loans often depended on good terms with the ruling party. “[VMRO] had a lot of instruments to force companies to be their members or financiers. If you did not deal with them, they sent you an inspection and shut you down.”

The change of government and the reopening of talks with Greece in January appear to have produced spectacular economic results. Foreign direct investment tripled in the first half of this year compared with the same period last year. Exports soared. Job creation rose 6 percent year over year, and salaries grew by 5.3 percent.

Sukarov doesn’t now expect the government to reach its growth target of 3.2 percent this year because of political uncertainty. Despite the disappointing turnout in the naming referendum, Zaev has vowed to try to push the Prespes Agreement through parliament, where he needs a two-thirds majority. His coalition controls 68 seats in the 120-seat chamber, so he needs 12 more votes.

“There is no possibility of any MPs of the VMRO to give legitimacy to this Prespes Agreement,” says VMRO spokesman Naum Stoilkovski. “The people voted, or did not vote, against this agreement . . . so this does not have any legitimacy.”

Zaev has mined the opposition for votes and managed to pick up three, but none from the VMRO. “The big question is how to get nine from the VMRO,” says veteran political analyst Hristo Ivanovski. “Maybe they can manage two or three, because they are involved in corruption scandals and [the government] can start legal procedures against them. At the same time VMRO had a kind of internal policy, unofficially, that every single MP has signed a bank check of about 250,000 euros [to the party]. If they want to change their political camp that check will be automatically activated. So to get nine means 2.25 million euros. It will not be easy [for Zaev] to find that kind of money.” The government’s final play would be to hold an election in November, the defense minister recently revealed, and hope thereby to achieve a coalition that would ratify the Prespes Agreement.

Officially, the sole purpose of the Prespes Agreement was to find a mutually agreeable name for the former Yugoslav Macedonia. In fact, the agreement cuts to the heart of the identity issues that divide Greek and Slav Macedonians.

Referendum abstainers objected to the stipulation that “the official language and other attributes of [former Yugoslav Macedonia] are not related to the ancient Hellenic civilization, history, culture and heritage [of Greece].”

In other words, those who self-identify as ethnic Macedonians must abjure all claim to Greece’s Hellenistic heritage—the empire of Alexander the Great and its aftermath—which Greeks see as a vital component of their nationhood. After all, it was Alexander who spread the Greek language and learning across Asia.

This stipulation was included on Greek insistence, to sweeten the pill of sharing Macedonian identity with their Slav neighbours, something most Greeks object to. They want it made clear that non-Greek Macedonians are so named by virtue of shared geography, not heritage.

The academic consensus favors the Greeks on the questions of identity and geography. “In antiquity, Macedonia was the area that is now the northern province of Greece,” says Stephen Miller, professor of archaeology at the University of California, Berkeley. “There is a geographical, geological distinction: the range of mountains that divides that from the area of Skopje. The area where Skopje is in ancient times was called Paeonia. It was a kingdom. We don’t know a lot about it. We know that Philip, father of Alexander, defeated the king of Paeonia and incorporated it into his kingdom. . . . But it was a distinct area. It wasn’t Macedonia, it was Paeonia.”

That geography was immaterial until the age of the nation-state, and the issue was settled in favor of the Greeks in 1913 when they took the Macedonian capital of Thessaloniki just hours ahead of Bulgarian troops and established today’s national border between Greece and its northern neighbors. The formation of Yugoslavia after World War I dampened identity issues but did not eradicate them.

In the quarter-century since the fall of communism, former Yugoslav Macedonia has been recognized by more than 100 countries by its constitutional name, the Republic of Macedonia. Greece has failed to quell Slav Macedonians’ claim to the M-word, but has accepted a composite version with a qualifier, such as Slav or Northern Macedonia. This compromise has divided Slav Macedonians. Many would like to move on.

Others agree with the VMRO’s Stoilkovski that the Prespes Agreement is “a capitulation.” “There are a lot of things [in the Prespes Agreement] which are hard simply to read. . . . Would you have said to some other country to change their history books, change their code, change their name? . . . Macedonia has to take all these steps and Greece has only one—to not block Macedonia’s integration.”

NATO and the E.U. are sorely needed in southeast Europe, where the rule of law is weak and foreign investors hesitate to commit to countries with an arbitrary and vindictive political climate. Building the political will to summon them is another matter.