Evangelos Kofos

http://nhw.livejournal.com/936977.html

A meaty volume of seven essays on the seven years of the 1995 Interim Accord between Greece and Macedonia agreeing to disagree on the name, and what will happen next (the authors' prediction, borne out by the facts since, being that things can go on as they are). All seven authors are Greek, and it's sad but not surprising that I find points of disagreement with most of them. There is a consistent tendency to gloss over the lasting damage done by Greece, both to the newly independent state to the north and to Greece's own reputation as a responsible international actor, in the early 1990s. It is surely unreasonable to say that Greece cannot look at its own minority issues clearly until "foreign governments stop using minorities and ethnic groups living in border zones for propaganda purposes" (p. 81).

It is all very well to state that the Yugoslav state did not officially use the word "Macedonia" to describe its southernmost territories before 1945 (p.191), but to imply that this means nobody did is utterly incorrect, as a quick glance at pages 631-831 of Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon will demonstrate. I'm stunned to find an entire essay claiming to describe "The name dispute in FYROM after the signing of the Interim Accord" which takes most of its information about the political situation in (the Republic of) Macedonia from the Greek media. The essay on the presentation of Greece in the Macedonian media and education system actually gives the media a better write-up than I expected, and in its criticisms of school textbooks rather overdoes some reasonable points. The chapter on civil society is OK.

The biggest disappointment of the book is that it doesn't really examine the reasons for the attitudes of either side in particular depth (though it's understandable as such research has not always been profitable for the researcher).… (plus d'informations)