Troubles with Nationalism and Names: Macedonia’s Post-Communist Transition
Like many Eastern European states transitioning to a Western capitalist economic and social system, Macedonia has faced many problems. Foremost among these are economic hardship, social instability, and nationalism. Governmental promotion of fundamentalist nationalistic ideologies has deeply affected people who struggle to earn a living and, at the same time, develop a cultural and linguistic identity as something besides “former Yugoslavs.” Many Macedonians, particularly those of Albanian ethnicity, look back fondly to the time when a Yugoslav identity, government, and economy held together groups now torn apart in the infamous and unfortunately named process of “Balkanization.”
This paper examines Macedonia’s political, social, and economic situation during the Yugoslav era and its transition to existence as an autonomous state. The first section focuses on how the Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia functioned under communism, with particular emphasis on the now-prominent discourse of “ethnicity.” The second section addresses political and social problems that Macedonia has faced as a geopolitical entity (in particular, NATO and EU membership and the naming dispute with Greece) and as the homeland of many groups of people. The third section discusses Macedonia’s current socioeconomic state of affairs and the (closely linked) roles of corruption and Foreign Direct Investment.
The Yugoslav Era and the Birth of Ethnicity
Under socialism, residents of the Macedonian region of Yugoslavia were somewhat less affected by the kind of oppressive governance experienced in other countries under communist rule, and despite poverty and widespread corruption, the current flash point of ethnicity was rarely an issue (Adamson and Jovic 2004, 293). Though Tito acted erratically in foreign affairs and was often portrayed as a madman by the press, one of his main goals was to build a spirit of nationalism through a top-down program, sublimating other identities in favor of Yugoslav National Unity (Hislope 2004, 21). In the Yugoslav system, individuals were assigned an official “ethnic affiliation,” but neither Albanians nor Macedonians were allowed to claim precedence in accordance with the “non-majority, non-minority policy” whose aim was to eventually eliminate such distinctions (Adamson and Jovic 2004, 293).
Despite its intention to remove ethnic categories, the socialist government in Yugoslavia apportioned posts within the Party to individuals “representative” of the population through quotas (Adamson and Jovic 2004, 299). The 1974 constitution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) officially gave Macedonians, Albanians, and nearly all recognized ethnic groups except Gypsies, equal rights of access to social services, education, and economic opportunities (Reka 2008, 57). Job quotas were also critical to Macedonian economic production under socialism. Though the jobs in agriculture and mining that provided the base for the economy were relatively easy to secure, university and management positions were rationed on an ethnic basis (Ramet 1995, 4).
After Tito’s death, the central control of the SFRY declined, and the Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, with a majority of the population identifying as ethnic Macedonian, began to operate more autonomously. This particularly disadvantaged the large Albanian population (Reka 2008, 55). By 1985, Albanian language education was illegal in schools and almost no Albanian Macedonians attended college (Stavrova 2004, 3). When a new constitution was written in 1991, Macedonia was officially redefined as the Homeland of the Macedonian Nation, with Macedonians at the top of a hierarchy of ethnicities including Albanians, Serbs, Bosnians, Gypsies, and Turks in order of decreasing importance (Reka 2008, 59). Macedonian, written with Cyrillic script, was recognized as the only official language.
Often oversimplified by the press, the issues at stake in Macedonia’s transformation were not simply the release of “natural” ethnic tensions suppressed in the Yugoslav system. Their origins are fundamentally rooted socialist dynamics of scarcity and community connections (Gardner 2004, 8). Under socialism, shortages were the rule, and since Albanian populations were concentrated in the west and Macedonians in the east, neighbors and friends to whom individuals turned for help often shared their same linguistic and ethnic affiliation (Neu 2003, 8). By the late 1980s, Albanian mafias began to gain strength by capitalizing on the fact that many Macedonians had family in Albania to smuggle items across the border. As they were based on Albanian identity, these organizations bred increased reliance on ethnic identification (Reka 2008, 55). The Albanian National Army (ALA) that fought for independence after the breakup of Yugoslavia originally formed as a cartel that smuggled arms, cigarettes, and drugs from Western Europe via Albania in return for sex slaves, drugs, and agricultural products such as olives and Macedonia’s famous cheap, medium-quality wines (Hislope 2004, 20).
Macedonia’s position at the intersection of historical north-south and east-west Balkan trade routes gave it a reputation as a smuggling hub within Yugoslavia, a fact that engendered some resentment from countries outside the former SFRY (Schmidt 1998, 2). These tensions were especially potent in Greece, where they were accentuated by memories of Tito’s failed 1949 campaign to invade the Greek province of Macedonia (Smith 2008, 20). Perceptions of Macedonia’s unreliability after the breakup of Yugoslavia mixed with Greek nationalism to produce a series of embargoes and vetoes pendant on the changing of Macedonia’s name. Ironically, prohibiting legal trade often increased the amount of goods smuggled across the border (Stavrova 2004, 3).
In the current crisis of EU accession, the Greek president Kostas Karamanlis has even threatened to use his state’s EU veto power unless the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) accepts a name other than “Macedonia” (Reka 2008, 63). In light of less-publicized but nonetheless important concerns over corruption and smuggling, it seems likely that the Greek government perceives other disadvantages than just a “dangerous” name if Macedonia, whose border police are known as the “Green Mafia,” is admitted to the borderless EU (Nanevska 2002, 7).
Post-Socialist State Policies and Geopolitics
Following its admission to the United Nations in 1993 issues of ethnic identity at both state and regional scales became critical for the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. In 1995, Slobodan Milosevic attempted to annex the newly independent state and re-form the old Yugoslav bloc, distributing propaganda that referred to Ethnic Macedonians as “Southern Serbs” and encouraging intolerance of Albanians and minority groups, calling them “seditious foreigners” (Ramet 1995, 1). Ironically, internal ethnic tensions during this period were relatively minor. The newly-established government gave much more attention to asserting the independence of the Macedonian state than to determining who had the right to belong in that state. The 1998 elections even gave the Albanian Democratic Union for Integration (DUI) many, though not a majority, of the legislative seats (Neu 2003, 7). When the United States donated ten million dollars to update Macedonian tank communication systems in 1996, observers praised the Macedonians’ “ethnic unity” in the face of a common enemy (Schmidt 1998, 3).
With the end of the Serbian conflict in 2000, questions of national identity within the “sovereign” Macedonian state began to flare up. Nationalists in the government, using rhetoric almost identical to Milosevic’s, said that Macedonia should be an exclusively ethnic Macedonian homeland and that the Albanian minority should not be included, since the Albanian nation already had a state of its own (Adamson and Jovic 2004, 295). Albanians, particularly in areas where they represented a majority of the population, asserted that they had no control over where the border was drawn and objected to the term “minority.” The ensuing armed conflict between government forces and the ALA, known alternately as the Albanian National Uprising or the Fight for National Freedom, brought the country to the brink of civil war (Nanevska 2007, 6). The conflict was only partially resolved when the internationally mediated Ohrid Framework Agreement, signed in 2001, decentralized power and once more provided governmental quotas for certain ethnic groups (Reka 2008, 56).
Success in the mediation of conflict appeared to be on the way when the first post-Ohrid elections in 2002, supervised by international advisers, brought in a government that represented a mix between the Macedonian-ethnicity Social Democratic Union of Macedonia (SDSM) and the DUI (Bodusynski 2004, 20). In 2004, however, the concepts of nationality and territory were again confused to disastrous effect when the new government proposed giving all Albanian-speaking districts a greater degree of independence from the central government (Stavrova 2004, 1). The Macedonian nationalist and current Prime Minister Nicola Gruevski called the plan “national treason” and began a successful smear campaign against the Ohrid Framework (Savrova 2004, 3).
Rocketed into office in 2006 amid a flurry of nationalist sentiments, Gruevski and his Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (MRO)-SDSM alliance party expressed discontent with foreign intervention in state affairs (Reka 2008, 69). This pro-sovereignty attitude seemed to contradict the government’s continued and potentially successful efforts to join the EU and NATO. When Macedonia submitted its application to the EU in 2004, there seemed little chance of success, but EU investments continued to pour in, indicating that Western governments were interested in helping Macedonia (Gardner 2004, 11). Macedonia’s name is not recognized by Greece, and Bulgaria does not acknowledge the existence of Macedonian language or ethnicity, but once these problems are cleared up, ethnic tensions, anti-foreign sentiments, and economic underdevelopment do not appear to be issues in EU accession (Reka 2008, 68).
Economics, Corruption, and Current Social Issues
In the wake Macedonia’s turbulent independence and the nationalist conflicts of 2001, many Macedonians, particularly in regions of dominant Albanian ethnicity, were trapped in what international affairs scholar Philip Gounev called a “cycle of underdevelopment” (2003, 233). This cycle is best illustrated by the roles of education and the black and gray economies. With the 1980s and 1990s bans on minority language education, few young Albanian-speakers were able to read and write their mother tongue, and Albanians, representing 25% of the state’s population, comprised a meager 2.3% of students enrolled in Macedonian universities in 1995 (Gounev 2003, 237). Facilitated by family and linguistic connections with people in other states, illicit trade involving the Albanian and Bulgarian Mafia proliferated, representing an alternative to participating in a legal economy with 33% unemployment and an unstable political structure not conducive to economic or social success (Neu 2003, 7).
Though Albanian and Turkish were permitted to be taught in schools after the Ohrid Agreement, and Albanian enrollment in universities increased to almost 15% by 2004, the gray and black economies remained a profitable way to make a living (Reka 2008, 63). In the newly decentralized governmental order, a huge number of petty officials throughout the country were invested with the power to demand bribes and get kickbacks from smuggling and other economic ventures (Reconstruction 2007, 4). Even the state-sponsored Macedonian Orthodox Church (suppressed under communism) became involved in this alternative economy, acquiring land, money, and in one unusual case, several dozen military bunkers along the Albanian border (Nanevska 2002, 5).
As a whole, people in Macedonia appear relatively unconcerned with rampant corruption, perhaps because they see economic and social benefits in the system, just like under Yugoslav rule. One study in 2002 showed Macedonians were more concerned with poor pay and unemployment than corruption and crime. In the same survey, Macedonians ranked judges, members of parliament, police, and doctors as the most corrupt professions, followed closely by customs and tax officials (Nanevska 2002, 2). This practical attitude explains in part why even reactionary politicians seek to be included in organizations such as the EU and NATO that might provide economic security. According to polls in 2003, Macedonians felt that “EU and NATO membership are the best way to achieve the overall priority for Macedonia: A strong economy” (Boduszynski 2004, 22).
The transition to Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and a capitalist economic model has been extremely difficult in Macedonia. In the first years after independence, lawlessness, crime, and conflicts with Serbia prevented all but 330 of the 1517 companies slated for privatization by 1995 from undergoing the process (Ramet 1995, 3). In this unstable situation, pyramid schemes proliferated, epitomized by the 1997 TAT hoax in which trustees of the Macedonian National Bank and the Bulgarian Mafia defrauded investors of $60 million (Schmidt 1998, 9). EU “reconstruction” money has often met the same fate, serving to supplement the incomes of participants in legal and semi-legal markets. Of the 293 million Euros invested by European companies in 2007, less than half have been accounted for (Sandrin 2007, 3).
One highly publicized FDI project that may benefit the gray and black markets involves the construction of a 35 million Euro “Corridor X” to transport goods from the Serbian border to Greece and “return Macedonia to its former role a trade hub” (Sandrin 2007, 5). In conjunction with Macedonia’s notoriously lax border security and possible EU membership, this development could allow for greater ease of cross-border smuggling of arms, tobacco, drugs, and many other products (Hislope 2004, 19). EU development funds have also been used to install hydroponic “grape growing” systems in regions on the Albanian border known for their wine (and cannabis) production (Sandrin 2007, 5; Reka 2008, 60). Despite political and social divisions, Macedonians are working together to develop new and creative ways of making a living in difficult circumstances.
Conclusion: A Bright but Troubled Future
In its short history as an independent state, Macedonia has confronted issues of violence, corruption, war, and fundamentalist nationalism. There are no simple solutions to any of these problems, and it is clear that time, education, and economic development will be necessary before any progress toward a Western European mode of social organization can be made. The orthodox Structural Adjustment answer of “Democracy and Capitalism” will clearly not suffice; such an approach completely fails to address basic cultural, historical and economic factors at play in this context. However, in light of the momentous changes in this small landlocked country since 1993, the inhabitants of Macedonia should have great hope for the future. Many people, and even a few government officials, have overcome divisive ethnic tensions through a variety of economic strategies. If Macedonia can sort out its name issue with Greece and play down its corruption, membership in large-scale organizations like the EU and NATO is likely to bring many economic, social, and political benefits.
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Whew, that was long.
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