The Prespa Agreement Renames North Macedonia
Greece and Macedonia settled a twenty-seven-year quarrel about a name in June 2018, and the country became North Macedonia. The dispute began when the Yugoslav republic of Macedonia became independent in 1991 under that name. Greece objected that Macedonia is a Greek region and a Greek historical inheritance, that the name implied a territorial claim on it, and that the new state's early flag and constitution supported the reading. Greece blockaded its neighbour in 1994 and blocked its accession to NATO and the European Union for a quarter of a century; the country sat in the United Nations under the provisional label of the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, which nobody liked. The quarrel was not only symbolic on either side. A Macedonian government from 2006 spent heavily on statues of Alexander and Philip in Skopje in a programme called antiquisation, which made the Greek argument for it. The agreement signed at Lake Prespa by Zoran Zaev and Alexis Tsipras changed the constitutional name to the Republic of North Macedonia for all purposes, recognised the language as Macedonian and the citizenship as Macedonian, and had both sides disclaim any relationship between the modern state and ancient Macedonia. A referendum drew a heavy majority in favour on a turnout below the threshold, and parliament passed it by two-thirds anyway. Both prime ministers were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and both lost the elections that followed. North Macedonia joined NATO in 2020. It is one of the few cases in recent European history of an identity dispute settled by negotiation rather than left to fester, and both governments paid for it domestically. The agreement is now cited as a template, mostly by people whose own disputes are less tractable.
- Year: 2018 CE
- Category: Diplomatic
