Macedonia And Identity Politics After The Prespa Agreement

This book explores issues of national identity, history, and language in light of the 2018 Prespa Agreement. Designed to resolve a protracted and bitter dispute, the agreement signed by the Macedonian and Greek foreign ministers on the banks of the Prespa lake stipulated that the Republic of Macedonia change its name to the Republic of North Macedonia. The chapters examine the social, political, and economic conditions and events that led to the agreement and the implications and consequences for identity politics in the region. Consideration is given to the ways in which, and the reasons why, identity/identities, difference/differences, modes of belonging, and experiences of injustice and discrimination have been mobilized. By focusing on the Prespa Agreement, the collection also offers valuable insight into the processes involved in (re)making boundaries, (re)defining ethnic and national identities, (re)inventing citizenship, and (re)writing national histories. Bringing together expert contributors with intimate knowledge of, and long-term engagement with, the region, this volume will be of interest to scholars and students of anthropology, Slavic and East European studies, history, and international relations. Chapter 7 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

This book provides a broad, interdisciplinary analysis of events impacting on North Macedonia since its independence, particularly during the last decade. In the past thirty years, the country has gone through deep political, social and economic transition, along with a name change from ‘Macedonia’ to the ‘Republic of North Macedonia’ following the Prespa Agreement signed with Greece. The contributors consider Macedonia’s challenges, its multi-ethnic make-up and its ambition to enter the European mainstream through the auspices of the European Union and NATO. The volume includes chapters on international politics and North Macedonia’s place in the region’s security architecture as well as the difficulties of the privatisation of socially owned enterprises, political corruption, state capture and backsliding. The book also covers the controversial ‘Skopje 2014’ project in addition to the impact of migration along the ‘Balkan Route’ and the current wranglings with Bulgaria over identity politics.

Macedonia has been contested by its three neighbours – Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece – during and since the demise of the Ottoman Empire. But the Macedonian Question extends far beyond the contested borders of Macedonia to immigrant communities in Europe, Australia and North America. The contributors to this collection explore the contemporary repercussions of the Macedonian Question, which has long been at the heart of Balkan politics. The volume recognises Macedonia as a global issue, and focuses on the politics of identity and difference in both homeland and diaspora.The contributors argue that Macedonia as place and as concept is forged within a transnational network of diasporas, local communities, states and international institutions. They examine the increasingly important role of transnational bodies – including the European Union and human rights NGOs – in regulating relationships between states and minority groups, as well as in promoting multiculturalism and civic participation. They consider the role of scholarship and the media in defining Macedonia and its inhabitants. They also draw attention to the struggles of individuals in constructing, negotiating and even transforming their identities in the face of competing nationalisms and memories. In the process, they re-evaluate ‘ethnicity’ as a conceptual tool for understanding difference in the region, and raise questions about the implications of recognising, and not recognising, difference at the political level.

Ever sinces its independence in 1991, Macedonia has made remarkable progress towards building a pluralistic, multi-ethnic civil society. Yet if the international community supports the legitimacy of Macedonia as a state it has direct responsibility to anchor its future. No matter what view one subscribes to, one stubborn truth remains: Macedonia cannot achieve success on its own. This book provides observations that offer valuable lessons on this little known but remarkable part of Europe. This work provides a review of the historical basis for Macedonia's identity and its emergence as a separate nation during Socialist Yugoslavia (1944-1991). It takes a detailed look at the events and personalities that lead to the outbreak of civil war in 1991. This book contains aspects of the Ohrid Framework Agreement and perspectives on the contemporary situation following the elections of September 2002. Personal interviews with the first and second presidents of the Repulic of Macedonia are also included.

This book is about the geographic space as an inseparable component of a nation’s historical memory, territorial awareness, geopolitical visions, and obsessions. The empirical part of the book focuses on the critical analysis of first-hand sources containing representations of the imagined spaces and places of Bulgaria and Bulgarians from a long-term perspective. The research results are structured in accordance with the author’s model of an imagined national space. It contains three general domains: possessed national space, the ethnogeopolitical neighbourhood, and ancient and legendary spaces. The book also explores how Bulgarians’ historical and ethnic spaces are linked with specific geopolitics, such as passive internal geopolitics, soft revisionism, non-intervening geopolitical claims, blocking international integration as a disguised form of old territorial claims, and emerging historical geopolitics. It examines how the imagined national space is approached by statesmen, politicians, academics, and other creators of ‘high’ geopolitics. The book also pays attention to the role of spatial imaginations in growing ‘low’ (popular) geopolitics, which includes media, popular culture, and national mythology. Written in an interdisciplinary manner, this timely book will attract the interest of scholars and students in geopolitics, human geography, international relations, nationalism studies, and ethnic history.

The Routledge Handbook of Borders and Tourism examines the multiple and diverse relationships between global tourism and political boundaries. With contributions from international, leading thinkers, this book offers theoretical frameworks for understanding borders and tourism and empirical examples from borderlands throughout the world. This handbook provides comprehensive overview of historical and contemporary thinking about evolving national frontiers and tourism. Tourism, by definition, entails people crossing borders of various scales and is manifested in a wide range of conceptualizations of human mobility. Borders significantly influence tourism and determine how the industry grows, is managed, and manifests on the ground. Simultaneously, tourism strongly affects borders, border laws, border policies, and international relations. This book highlights the traditional relationships between borders and tourism, including borders as attractions, barriers, transit spaces, and determiners of tourism landscapes. It offers deeper insights into current thinking about space and place, mobilities, globalization, citizenship, conflict and peace, trans-frontier cooperation, geopolitics, "otherness" and here versus there, the heritagization of borders and memory-making, biodiversity, and bordering, debordering, and rebordering processes. Offering an unparalleled interdisciplinary glimpse at political boundaries and tourism, this handbook will be an essential resource for all students and researchers of tourism, geopolitics and border studies, geography, anthropology, sociology, history, international relations, and global studies.

Unions and unionisms are important because they offer an alternative form of politics to that of nation-states and nationalisms. They allow a wider variety of relations between a plurality of peoples, opening prospects of resolving territorial politics. But unionisms, as state- or polity-centred perspectives, are also typically power-centred, often using the resources of the polity to resist assertion by their members, thereby turning democratic challenges into secessionist ones. Unionisms in Times of Change: Brexit, Britain and the Balkans focusses on these two faces of unionisms: the flexible alternative to the nation state, and the assertor of central power. This book is particularly timely at a period when the unions of the British Isles and of Europe have been disrupted by the process of British exit from the European Union, creating new dilemmas and options for unionisms in Northern Ireland. The chapters in this volume map the conceptual structure of unionisms; the ways unions are defined and defended in Northern Ireland, the United Kingdom, the European Union, the Balkans and Moldova; the ways they deal with challenge, conflict and change; the prospects of negotiation; the ways unionisms move from flexibility and accommodation to repression and back; and the opportunities for agreement and conflict resolution. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Irish Political Studies.

Focusing on Italy, Spain and Greece, this book explores the extent of polarisation, as well as its causes, characteristics and consequences. It investigates varied manifestations of polarised politics including leader polarisation, policy polarisation and affective polarisation as well as providing case studies of polarised elections taking place at multiple levels. In recent years, polarisation has been a key feature of South European politics. Deep antagonism has moved party leaders against each other, hindered parliamentary and governmental cooperation, and triggered a cascade effect of harsh divisions among elites and citizens. Beyond the left-right axis, the chapters in this volume highlight multiple dimensions around which parties and voters polarise: the split around sovereign bailouts in Greece, the territorial cleavage in Spain, the divisions around immigration and European integration in Italy. This volume offers essential understanding of the specific features of polarisation in different national contexts and the consequences for political competition and government instability. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of South European Society and Politics.