EDITOR’S COMMENT ON THE CURRENT MACEDONIAN ISSUE BETWEEN SKOPJE AND ATHENS
I have invited several distinguished academic scholars to express their views on the incredible dispute between Macedonia and Greece regarding the name of the country – Macedonia. I had hoped to see impartial, objective analysis about the origin of the dispute, its history from 1991 until today, and what the perspective is to find a solution...
SHAMEFUL BEHAVIOR OF THE OFFICIALS OF THE EUROPEAN AGENCY FOR RECONSTRUCTION
A sublime goal, to stimulate the protection of the minority rights in Macedonia, has ended up in the exactly opposite direction: with violation of the human rights by the officials of the European Agency for Reconstruction (EAR)...
The politician, the diplomat and the people: Macedonian foreign policy experiences
The optimism, and even the euphoria with which the peoples of Eastern Europe marked the end of the Cold War and the fall of one-party dictatorships, has vanished. It was thought that it will be difficult for communism to fall and very easy to create a democratic society, but it all turned the other way round. The international and the domestic challenges facing the countries of Eastern Europe and the Balkans were huge. At the level of international society, the tide that sucked Russian power behind its borders, created a vacuum in which some thirty new states, many without state tradition, found themselves.
Malthus, Mayhem and the Myth of Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia, particularly the place that rose mythically from the ruins of World War II in the "experiment" of Marshal Josip Broz Tito, marked perhaps better than any nation or region the clash of identity and difference between "East" and "West" in Europe since the end of the Cold War. Indeed, such identities and alignments formed the core arguments that Slovenia and Croatia used in claiming to be different and "Western" in 1991 as they sought to break free from the hegemony of "Eastern" and "Ottoman" Serbia. Declaring their independence and freedom from the repression of then Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, the actions of Slovenia and Croatia deeply influenced (and in some ways forced) the Yugoslav republics of Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina to assert their own independence and freedom.
WITH THE EYES OF THE “OTHERS”
In this issue of the magazine, we publish articles by the Bulgarian historians and sociologists Kiril Kertikov, Mihail Ivanov, Vrban Todorov and Marija Bakalova (all from Sofia), as well as the text of Stefan Troebst, an anthropologist and historian from Leipzig, Germany.