The government in Athens at once claimed a sweeping diplomatic victory, while the opposition suggested it was a defeat, pointing out that since the Lisbon decision by the Twelve last June not to call it Macedonia was not reaffirmed, the whole matter has been now simply postponed for the poor Danes to deal with again early this year.
The diplomatic delay does not bode well if the more decisive sector played by commerce has any influence on it. The glossy atlases published at the end of last year for coffeetable giving whether by the National Geographic, Rand McNally’s or The Times, all designate that region ‘Macedonia’.
Ironically, it is pleasing to report, there has been a noticeable shift of opinion in Greece’s favor on this subject in the last month or so. The government should take note of this, since it has contributed very little to it, and might learn something from it.
The fact is the Skopje issue as a propaganda device has been notably ill-handled at the official level. When, for various reasons, emanating from abroad but mainly in Greece, the matter of the name began being drummed up at the end of 1991, it was, reasonably, referred to as the ‘Macedonian Problem’. Six months later it had been largely turned around abroad and dubbed the ‘Greek Problem’ – hardly a diplomatic triumph.
In pursuing any line of propaganda successfully, it is necessary, one, to know what the truth is in the first place whatever is done with it and, two, to translate one’s statement of the truth in a way that others will understand and be convinced by. To say in public exactly what one says to one’s intimates in private is, in propaganda, a very poor policy. It is necessary to woo the public to one’s point of view, as Machiavelli pointed out long ago.
Designating the whole Skopje issue as revolving around a name is perfectly all right for Greeks, but it is all wrong internationally. Greeks know where Macedonia is; they are familiar with its recent history in the context of Slavic expansionism, they are convinced of its ancient Greekness.
Most foreigners have no more idea where Macedonia is than Mongolia. To them, at best, it is a kind of dessert. Whether Alexander the Great spoke the King’s Greek or Finno-Ugric is to most of man and womankind a matter of supreme indifference.
Furthermore, trying to make parallels where there are none has only confused the issue further and unnecessarily. Bretons simply aren’t going to get excited about Great Britain’s stealing their name, and the good people of York don’t seem to have any particular suspicions about the intentions of New Yorkers. By such specious reasoning, the government only succeeded in making Greeks appear as hysterical chauvinists – a totally unjust description of a people who may get a bit excited now and then, but who have a long and admirable history of tolerance.
Had the government made it clear from the beginning that there was justifiable Greek apprehension of the propaganda which has been manufactured from Skopje since World War II, that was enough. It isn’t necessary to go back to the Bronze Age or to prove King Kuwait is Greek because a Hellenistic tetradrachm has been unearthed there. Events from 1944 will do. People who react in self-defense don’t need at elaborate justifications. Their fears are understood. The Stalinist idea of a Greater Macedonia, effectively taken up by Tito, its expansionist aims for an outlet to the Aegean, the seizure of the Star of Vergina as an emblem for the Skopjian flag, the printing of a Skopje bank draft with the White Tower of Thessaloniki engraved on it; the maps it prints (unlike Western atlases) of an ‘irredentist’ Slav-dominated Macedonia, extending halfway down Greece:
these are the things that should have been emphasized by the government in the first place. For Greeks themselves the name became understandably the symbol for all these provocations, which meant nothing but eccentricity abroad since they had never been defined for international consumption.
In the euphoria immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, not only did an innocent academic in the US announce ‘the end of history1 but others, who should have known better, naively took up the slogan. History -the repository of all that is undead – is having its revenge now, and nowhere better than in the Balkans. It is partly in recognition of this determining effect of the past felt so strongly on the present in ex-Yugoslavia that academics are now thinking twice about dropping history from the curriculum – and putting it back on the fast track in this unfamiliar, history-ridden post-Cold War world.
The immediate terrors as well as the easy simplicities of the Cold War, at least for now are over – that 45-year struggle which began in Greece with the establishment of the Truman Doctrine, artificially cutting the country off from the rest of the Balkans and attaching it closely (and, at times, too closely) with the West.
Now, in the wake of that great conflict, Greece could – and should – play a pivotal role again. It has a longer experience of history than any other western country, and a greater familiarity with the Balkans because it is a part of them.
As the struggles in the Balkans became uglier and more complex, and the fear of their spreading grew during 1992, a shift of thinking has, it seems, led to the realization that the Greek point of view regarding the Balkans needs greater understanding and respect. 1993 is the time for Greece to rise up to this occasion of responsibility, and to shed its totally unwarranted image of paranoia, special pleading and semantic nit-picking.
