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After 15 years of disappointment, North Macedonia finally received a green light from the EU this year to start membership talks, only to be shown the red light at the next crossroads, writes Politico.
The membership talks have been going on for years and centering on indiscriminate questions of the country’s readiness to join the bloc. But Bulgaria is delaying the start of these talks with lawsuits that pose a very different question: What is language?
According to Sofia, the language spoken in North Macedonia is not a separate language at all, but a regional version of Bulgarian. Skopje rejects this and also rejects Sofia’s request to comply with the opinion before negotiations begin.
Bulgaria’s veto has irritated diplomats from other EU countries, as a bilateral dispute delays a measure agreed to by all members and halts what many see as a strategic priority: increasing the EU’s influence in the EU’s neighbors. the Balkans, where rival powers such as Russia, Turkey, China and the Arab countries of the Persian Gulf are increasingly active.
But that is nothing compared to the outrage in North Macedonia.
“If a nation in Europe has to choose between its identity and its accession to the EU, then there is something wrong with this set of options,” North Macedonia Deputy Prime Minister Nikola Dimitrov told Politico.
Like many, he sees the linguistic dispute as a question of national identity.
“Who we are is our job. This is a matter for the Macedonian people. We believe that this should in no way be a prerequisite for our European future,” Dimitrov said.
“There is also an interest in the European Union,” he said. “The decision to start accession talks was unconditional. The way Europe handles this will send a message to the entire region about the credibility of the process.”
For North Macedonia, the Bulgarian veto is a blow to the waist. The country, perhaps the most eager candidate to join the EU, has only recently overcome another challenge to its identity and to join the bloc.
In 2019, the country changed its name to resolve a dispute with Greece, which claims that the country usurped the name of its region in North Macedonia. Athens then lifted its veto on Skopje’s accession to the EU and NATO.
Zaev announced again: we will not give up, we are Macedonians who speak Macedonian
He will wait for the elections to take place in Bulgaria, and his Bulgarian interview was for Bulgarians.
Linguistic Engineering
All 27 member states, including Bulgaria, agreed to start negotiations with North Macedonia and Albania in March without conditions.
But Bulgaria sent a memorandum to the other 26 countries, insisting that EU documents must recognize that “the official language used in the current Republic of North Macedonia can only be seen as a written regional standard of the Bulgarian language.”
Bulgarian Foreign Minister Ekaterina Zaharieva also said that North Macedonia has not implemented a good-neighborly agreement since 2017 and that Skopje has policies based on hatred of Bulgaria.
“No one disputes their right to identify themselves as a nation and call their language whatever they want. But we cannot agree that this right will be based on hatred, the theft of history and the denial of Bulgaria,” he said. Zaharieva last month.
Bulgaria ruled the region, which is now North Macedonia, for various periods from history until 1940, when it became an autonomous part of Yugoslavia.
Some Bulgarian nationalists never get over this. And the turbulent government of Prime Minister Boyko Borissov, a longtime supporter of North Macedonia’s accession to the EU, has changed its tune as it tries to calm the small nationalist IMRO party in the ruling coalition ahead of next year’s elections.
As a result, the Bulgarian memorandum makes historical claims. Among other things, it argues that the Macedonian identity was artificially created by the Yugoslav communist government and that since communism was defeated in Europe, it should not be imported into the EU from North Macedonia.
“The enlargement process should not legitimize the ethnic and linguistic engineering that took place under the former authoritarian regimes,” the memo said.
Zaharieva insists that Sofia has not opposed opposition to North Macedonia’s accession to the EU, but is opposed to starting accession talks now.
Language versus dialect
When Macedonia is a republic in socialist Yugoslavia, its leaders can define their own identity, which includes standardizing the language.
Bulgarian and Macedonian are still intelligible, but this is the case for many Slavic languages spoken in neighboring countries.
Petar Todorov, a Macedonian historian, believes that his country has indeed been punished for being a relatively young nation. He says that it is absurd to treat a country differently just because their ancestors did not separate their identity from that of the Bulgarians early enough.
“The creation of a Macedonian national identity is no different from the creation of any national identity in the world. To say that the ethnic identity of Macedonia was created only by a political decree in 1945 is not justified in modern science,” he explains. the.
Furthermore, most modern European countries, with the exception of ancient empires such as Great Britain, France and Germany or the Scandinavian countries, codified their standard and written modern languages in the 19th and 20th centuries.
After all, neither “language” nor “dialect” is a clearly defined category, and linguists are unlikely to resolve the dispute.
North Macedonia and Bulgaria have a forum to resolve at least some of their differences: the two countries established a joint historical commission in 2017 to agree on mutually acceptable interpretations of historical figures and events. (Their differences include, among others, a national hero who is claimed by both sides.)
But this is far from a quick process.
“Both countries have created stories in recent decades that are firmly rooted in the minds of the Bulgarian and Macedonian people,” said Stefan Dechev, a Bulgarian historian. “Expecting to solve these problems by December is ridiculous.”
Increasing irritation
The first intergovernmental conference between EU member states and North Macedonia was scheduled for this month. This is a key step in the accession process, but now it appears that it will not happen.
A walk through Skopje shows that Bulgaria’s challenge to Macedonian identity could ultimately provoke nationalist sentiment on the other side of the border.
Nikola Gruevski’s right-wing government followed so-called “old” policies during his rule from 2006 to 2016, effectively turning the capital into a nationalist theme park in response to continuing challenges to Macedonian identity. They redoubled their efforts after Greece vetoed the country’s accession to NATO in 2008.
As a result, huge monuments of all the historical figures North Macedonia has the right to claim, from Alexander the Great to St. Cyril and Methodius, founders of the subsequent Cyrillic alphabet, appeared throughout the city.
In North Macedonia, meanwhile, frustration is growing over the slowness of the EU accession process. Many say that while they want the country to be a member of the EU, they are fed up with their identity being questioned at all times.
“The language issue is important to us,” said Tarpe Ristoski, 49. “Our language is Macedonian and we will not accept anything else. Ordinary people cannot influence politics, but I cannot accept that the language is not Macedonian. Everything else is artificial.”
Updated
Zaev invades St. Kliment Ohridski before the EU and the UN
As proof that “Macedonians and the Macedonian language are inscribed in the treasury of the nations and languages of the world”
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