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Unbefitting Behavior
by
TOL
4 April 2008
If NATO cannot pressure Greece to lift its childish
blockade of Macedonia’s membership bid, the EU should.
Amid the fanfare of an agreement over US missile defense
plans and the rejected membership aspirations of Georgia and
Ukraine, news on NATO’s Bucharest summit largely overlooked
the fate of Macedonia – or the Former Yugoslav Republic of
Macedonia (FYROM), as the country has been ingloriously called
since it joined the United Nations in 1993.
While
Albania and Croatia both received invitations to join the
alliance, Macedonia was left waiting outside after Greece, to
the chagrin of NATO’s leadership, blocked Skopje’s bid. There
were no claims from Athens of a lack of military readiness on
the part of the Macedonians, only a refusal to budge in the
long-running debate with the country over its constitutional
name. Since 1991, after Macedonia gained independence from the
former Yugoslavia, Greece has protested again the use of
“Macedonia” and “Republic of Macedonia” because it sees the
name as implying a territorial claim on Greece’s northern
Macedonia province.
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| Macedonia’s future in
NATO looked bright when the hosts’ flag proudly flew
alongside the alliance banner at a conference of
alliance members and partners at Ohrid in 2007.
Macedonian government
photo. |
A NOT SO GREAT
DISPUTE
The claim that Macedonia has designs on
northern Greece appears patently absurd. Even the most fervent
nationalist would be hard-pressed to explain how a poor
country of 2 million could ever possibly hope to conquer a
neighbor so much larger, richer, and more powerful. And
precisely NATO membership serves to contain territorial
ambitions and historic animosities.
The Greeks don’t
need to look far for an example: NATO’s wise decision of 1952
to accept both Turkey and Greece has surely been a key factor
in preventing disputes over Cyprus, as well as Aegean airspace
and sovereignty, from escalating into war. More recently, the
entry of Hungary, along with the other Central European
states, helped assuage regional fears over Hungarian
irredentism. If anything, Greeks would have less to fear if
Macedonia joined the alliance.
Clearly, there is more
at stake here, and it would be difficult not to assume that
the wildly unpopular government of Greek Prime Minister Kostas
Karamanlis has continued to use the name dispute to fuel its
own flagging support and preserve its narrow parliamentary
majority. A recent poll showed that 84 percent of Greeks
approved of Greece vetoing Macedonia’s NATO bid if no
compromise could be reached in time. The opposition, seeing
the opinion polls, has also shamelessly sided with the
government.
Yet, as TOL has reported, Greeks and Macedonians
that deal with each other on a daily basis have no such
problems getting along and hardly care about the name issue.
They just want to get on with business.
The
Macedonians haven’t really helped matters either. The decision
in December 2006 to rename the airport in Skopje after
Alexander the Great, whom the Greeks consider a central part
of their heritage, was predictably viewed as a provocation.
Was it really that difficult to pick another name, especially
when the Greeks already have Megas Alexandros International
Airport at Kavala in the neighboring Greek region of
Macedonia? And this past week, in a case of extremely poor
timing, billboards appeared around Skopje showing the Greek,
blue-and-white-striped flag with a swastika instead of the
classic cross. While the authorities were not responsible –
the posters advertised a private art show – their reaction was
slow, and only in response to an official diplomatic
complaint.
LET COOLER HEADS PREVAIL
The
repercussions of a delayed NATO bid are very real. For many in
Macedonia, the name issue festers, heightening their feelings
of insecurity and defensiveness and feeding their
nationalistic inclinations. Before the Bucharest summit,
approximately 90 percent of the population supported
membership. The decision to send soldiers to Iraq and
Afghanistan was largely supported as a fair price to pay for
possible acceptance into the alliance. And, importantly, the
common goal of membership served to unite the country’s two
main ethnic groups, the Slavic Macedonians and Albanians,
whose skirmishes in 2001 nearly erupted into a fully-fledged
war.
Now all bets are off and the future unclear. The
disappointment in Skopje gave rise to countless
interpretations over what had transpired in Bucharest and what
should be done. Some ethnic Macedonians – already much more
inclined than Albanians to say the name issue is more crucial
than NATO membership – have called for an end to any
negotiations over the name and even suspending the agreement
that allowed the country to enter the United Nations under the
FYROM designation.
Others have
talked of bringing the soldiers back, cutting off all ties
with Greece, and forgetting altogether about membership in the
EU and NATO. They see Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of
independence and subsequent recognition by much of the
international community and wonder why they shouldn’t try to
gain recognition of the country by its constitutional name.
Not surprisingly, support for NATO has sharply fallen.
Hopefully (and probably), cooler heads will prevail
and the sting of rejection will wear off in a matter of weeks,
if not days. NATO membership should remain front and center in
Macedonia’s ambitions – even if it won’t obviously be a quick
fix for all of the country’s ills, especially its 35 percent
unemployment rate. But, as proponents of enlargement
tirelessly argued before several Central European states were
accepted in 1999, membership does convey a very real sense of
reliability to the outside world, including potential
investors. It is also, at least psychologically, a big
stepping stone on the way to membership in the EU, both for
the country itself (progress does have its rewards) and EU
member states (if they joined one elite club, they might be
ready soon for ours).
BALL NOW IN BRUSSELS’
COURT
At every other instance of nationalism in the
Balkans, in Central Europe, and elsewhere, there is incessant
hand-wringing in Brussels, followed by a flurry of communiqués
condemning the alleged perpetrators, calling for calm, and
threatening this or that state that its actions could impede
possible membership. Greece, on the other hand, has gotten
away with blocking a country’s movement toward stability and
prosperity over nothing more than a name that harms its pride
over its glorious history and supposedly suggests territorial
ambitions.
Are there really no buttons to push to force
the Greeks to concede? While one may not agree with the view
of some NATO states to postpone membership for Georgia and
Ukraine so as not to antagonize Russia, it is surely an
opinion to be taken seriously. But Greece? We are hardly
talking here about a European powerhouse that drives the
continent, politically or economically – a country to fear one
way or another.
We have now reached a point where the
EU, supposedly all about quenching such disputes on its
territory, should consider isolating Greece. Only eight years
ago, after Jörg Haider’s far-right Freedom Party joined a
coalition government in Austria, EU member states stopped
cooperating with Vienna. While the effectiveness of those
“political sanctions” has been debated, something of the sort
should at least be considered for an EU member state clearly
engaging in a nationalistic, populist game with public opinion
– a member state twice condemned by the European Court of
Human Rights for its attempts to ban an association and a
political party representing the Macedonian minority.
A
precedent for a hard-line stance with Greece does exist. Back
in 1994, Greece imposed a trade embargo on Macedonia over the
name issue, cutting off the country from the port of
Thessaloniki. Angered about the impact on Macedonia, already
suffering because of an existing UN embargo on Yugoslavia to
the north, the European Commission took Greece to the EU’s
European Court of Justice, doubly embarrassing because Greece
headed the EU presidency at the time.
Similar pressure
today could, in the end, also serve as a face-saving measure
for the Greek government. To be fair to today’s politicians,
their intransigence is a product of the poor diplomacy of
their predecessors and their tendency to play the nationalist
card. Pushed into a corner over the name issue – where
compromise would be viewed as failure – Karamanlis could
instead blame the EU. He could say he had no other choice but
to compromise, or face isolation. After 17 years, it’s time
for a change in tactics.
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