🇲🇰🇧🇬🇪🇺 Narcissism of Small Differences: Southeast Europe Edition

Cristina Maza sorts out the North Macedonia-Bulgaria dispute.

Introduction (by Claire) inspired by Cristina Maza’s Lazo Letters.

North Macedonia’s parliament voted last week in favor of a deal, brokered by France, to resolve a longstanding dispute with Bulgaria.

The dispute is the kind for which to the Balkans (and American academia, for that matter) are infamous. Macedonians believe that Macedonians and Bulgarians are a separate ethnic group, each with a unique language. Bulgarians disagree. Macedonia is Bulgarian in origin, they say, and Macedonian is but a Bulgarian dialect. So strongly do Bulgarians feel that Macedonians are perversely denying their own Bulgarian essence that two years ago, Bulgaria blocked North Macedonia’s accession to the EU. They demanded Macedonia acknowledge its supposedly oppressed Bulgarian minority in its constitution (there are about 3,500 ethnic Bulgarians in all of North Macedonia) and renounce anti-Bulgarian “hate speech.”