argumate:

stumpyjoepete:

femmenietzsche:

AFAICT, Macedonia the Former Yugoslav Republic is just a bunch of Slavs who sort of live in the area of what once was Macedonia the ancient kingdom and have no real connection to the area beyond that. Doing stuff like calling your airport the “Alexander the Great” Airport is legitimately cultural appropriation in the annoying sense and you can see why Greece, which is culturally much closer to Macedonia of old would be irritated.

That said, come on. Get over yourselves and live with it. It’s not worth an international incident. I’m sure there have been much worse naming expropriations in history.

The Macedonian naming dispute (along with all the other Macedonian disputes) is freaking hilarious.

To take a (large) step back, let’s start with two premises:

• Ethnicities/nations, as we know them today, are not immutable facts of nature. They’re relatively recent entities, brought about through some combination of deliberate action (often coercive) and the network-effecty incentives that come with building a modern state and economy. If you drew a map of the languages or cultures of the ancient world, it would look like a Jackson Pollock painting. If you did that for Europe today, it would look at least something like the actual map.
  
• Nobody has any respect for anything that is too obviously new or “artificial”. Having origins reaching back into the mists of time lends credibility. As Nietzsche said, “As men after all only respect the old-established and slowly developed, he who would survive after his death must not only provide for posterity but still more for the past.” So much the more for nations.

Some countries got lucky by going through everything earlier. France seems like an ok example of this. France has been recognizably France for long enough that everyone can just pretend it’s been around forever (even though half the country couldn’t speak French in 1860). At the other end of the spectrum, you have settler states (US, Canada, Brazil, etc.) who know they’re not going to fool anyone, and instead have built their identities around some sort of shared political/historical mythology (well… some people think they can fool everyone I guess). The most screwed are the countries that found themselves playing the nation-building game much later than their neighbors.

Which brings us to the Balkans. The Balkans got to live inside the pre-national stasis field of the Ottoman empire for a looonggg time. While the rest of Europe was busily engaged in the hard work of sorting themselves into ever-so-slightly more homogenous geo-ethno-religio-political configurations one bloody war at a time, everyone in the Balkans was hanging out just being “those guys who used to be Romans”. The millet system of the Ottoman empire just chucked all the Christians in the same bag, and for a long time, they didn’t object to that… but then it all started breaking down in the early 1800′s.

The Greeks drew the metaphorical golden ticket. Not that there was ever really a pre-Roman pan-Greek state that was analogous to modern Greece. There was the Macedonian-dominated League of Corinth, but all the city states hated Macedonia (and maybe also each other). There was Alexander’s kingdom… for like 5 seconds, before it became a bunch of warring satrapies. The Greeks were united for the longest time as Rome. And in fact, that’s what they called themselves (and what the Ottomans and everyone else called them). Romans. In the early stages of Greek nationalism, it was just Roman nationalism. “Oh hey, all of us Orthodox Christians, we should really found a new Rome, this will be great, because we’re all Roman.” The Slavs (who saw that a Greek-dominated post-Ottoman state might not be in their best interests) weren’t particularly inspired by this vision of a new Rome. So, yeah, Roman Greek nationalism worked out pretty well. It might have been a rebranding, but the Greeks had had a common high culture attached to a state (albeit not a Greek one per se) for a long time, and they were standing on top of the freakin mother lode of historical credibility. Oh hey, it’s time to play wheel-of-nation-bulding! You get… “School children across the world will be taught that your country (that was founded in 1830) invented democracy, geometry, and philosophy! Lord Byron will write poems about how kickass you are and inspire the Brits to support your independence!”.

Macedonia drew a flaming bag of shit. They were (and are) a bunch of Slavs who speak a dialect of Bulgarian but live all the way over in the region of Macedonia, which immediately borders Greece. Bulgaria and the Serbs were the actual political players in the region, and Macedonia (along with the rest of what was once Yugoslavia) got sucked into the Serbian orbit. Their language was standardized at an embarrassingly late date, and is, at least according to one linguist’s joke, is “a Bulgarian one, but written on a Serbian typewriter”. Macedonia became independent in 1991 (which makes it younger than Terminator 2), and has been fighting an upward battle to be taken seriously since then. I actually learned all of this crap indirectly from a Google autocomplete map on tumblr. It showed all the of the countries in Europe with “Why is {{country}} ____?”. For Macedonia, it said “called FYROM?”. The answer to that question is “because Greece refuses to recognize that Macedonia is actually called Macedonia and blocked it from joining the UN under a name that doesn’t literally cause everyone to google it and find out immediately that other countries think it is so bullshit it doesn’t even deserve its own name.” Or something like that. And if you click on the search box again, you get some helpful suggestions on other ways to learn about how Macedonia isn’t taken seriously by its neighbors–“is macedonia part of greece” (part of it) and “macedonia alexander the great” (computer says no). Other important disputes are “that time we were forced to change our flag because we were appropriating Greek imagery” and “we eventually came to a compromise with the Bulgarians about what our language is called where we got them to call it ‘the official language of the country (Republic of Macedonia)’”.

And that is why Macedonia is hilarious.

you don’t choose the Slav life, the Slav life chooses you.