\n"}\n\n\n\nAFAICT, 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 \n\u201cAlexander the Great\u201d Airport\n\nis 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\u2019s not worth an international incident. I\u2019m sure there have been much worse naming expropriations in history.
The Macedonian naming dispute (along with all the other Macedonian disputes) is freaking hilarious.
\nTo take a (large) step back, let\u2019s start with two premises:
\n
- Ethnicities/nations, as we know them today, are not immutable facts of nature. They\u2019re 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.
\n- Nobody has any respect for anything that is too obviously new or \u201cartificial\u201d. Having origins reaching back into the mists of time lends credibility. As Nietzsche said, \u201cAs 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.\u201d So much the more for nations.
\nSome 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\u2019s been around forever (even though half the country couldn\u2019t speak French in 1860). At the other end of the spectrum, you have settler states (US, Canada, Brazil, etc.) who know they\u2019re not going to fool anyone, and instead have built their identities around some sort of shared political/historical mythology (well\u2026 some\u00a0people 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.
\nWhich 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 \u201cthose guys who used to be Romans\u201d. The millet system of the Ottoman empire just chucked all the Christians in the same bag, and for a long time, they didn\u2019t object to that\u2026 but then it all started breaking down in the early 1800\u2032s.
\nThe 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\u2019s kingdom\u2026 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\u2019s 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.\u00a0\u201cOh hey, all of us Orthodox Christians, we should really found a new Rome, this will be great, because we\u2019re all Roman.\u201d The Slavs (who saw that a Greek-dominated post-Ottoman state might not be in their best interests) weren\u2019t particularly inspired by this vision of a new Rome. So, yeah,\u00a0
\nRomanGreek 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\u2019s time to play wheel-of-nation-bulding! You get\u2026 \u201cSchool 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!\u201d.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\u00a0is, at least according to one linguist\u2019s joke, is \u201ca Bulgarian one, but written on a Serbian typewriter\u201d. 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\u00a0\u201cWhy is {{country}} ____?\u201d. For Macedonia, it said \u201ccalled FYROM?\u201d. The answer to that question is\u00a0\u201cbecause Greece refuses to recognize that Macedonia is actually called Macedonia and blocked it from joining the UN under a name that doesn\u2019t literally cause everyone to google it and find out immediately that other countries think it is so bullshit it doesn\u2019t even deserve its own name.\u201d 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\u2019t taken seriously by its neighbors\u2013\u201cis macedonia part of greece\u201d (part of it) and\u00a0\u201cmacedonia alexander the great\u201d (computer says no). Other important disputes are\u00a0\u201cthat time we were forced to change our flag because we were appropriating Greek imagery\u201d and\u00a0\u201cwe eventually came to a compromise with the Bulgarians about what our language is called where we got them to call it\u00a0\u2018the official language of the country (Republic of Macedonia)\u2019\u201d.
\nAnd that\u00a0is why Macedonia is hilarious.
\nyou don\u2019t choose the Slav life, the Slav life chooses you.