Day: April 20, 2015
The Greece-Macedonia name dispute
I spoke at Harvard Friday about the Greece-Macedonia name dispute, along with Matt Nimetz and Boshk0 Stankovski. Here are the speaking notes I used.
1. Thank you for that kind introduction. The opportunity to speak at Harvard Law School is truly an honor. Harvard’s Project on Negotiation is a mecca for all who would like to see disputes managed peacefully.
2. That is what Matt Nimetz has done for more than 20 years. I am honored to meet him. We should not minimize his extraordinary achievement: an issue that in the early 1990s threatened to throw Macedonia into the Balkans cauldron with Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo has steadily lost its saliency.
3. I confess that I’ve even referred to it as the most boring dispute in the Balkans and therefore promise to speak less than 20 minutes more about it.
4. Let’s start with the obvious: this dispute is not really about the name. If it were, Greeks would long ago have accepted my citing the 1257 places in the United States that use the name “Macedonia” as dispositive. They would celebrate, not denigrate, the compliment from their neighbor.
5. Washington, DC was founded explicitly as the “new Rome.” I’ve never met an Italian who objected. The Italian government has even donated a few statues to beef up that image.
6. There were, however, already a lot of Americans dressed in togas adorning statuary hall in the Capitol, a building that is a blatant 18th-century attempt to imitate the glory of the ancients. Not to mention the National Gallery’s rip-off of the coffered ceiling of the Pantheon.
7. No, if this dispute were about the name and the statues, Greeks would be pleased that a non-Greek people who have come to occupy land that was once ancient Paeonia have adopted Greek antecedents as their ideal.
8. But if it is not about the name, what is it about? Read more
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