Guiding Macedonia to the EU: Walking Over European Values

Abstract

Being located on the global fault-lines in geopolitical terms, Macedonia is a part of a Balkan ‘turbulent frontier’. From its onset, the EU accession process has been a means rather than an objective goal: troublesome states in the region (including Macedonia) were meant to be civilized and pacified after the Yugoslav imbroglio - yet not necessarily fully integrated. Up to 2019, the so-called name dispute with Greece served as a good excuse for the long drawn out process. Once the Prespa Agreement was signed and Macedonia renamed North Macedonia, Euro-optimists believed that all the obstacles from the road had been removed. However, the 2019 EU October summit uncovered a deep-rooted lack of enthusiasm: the states such as Macedonia and Albania (among others, also B&H and Kosovo) are internal Other to the EU. The basic premise of this text is that the Brussels elites have been using the attracting and normative power of the EU as an incentive and legitimation of the state-building process in its near neighbourhood, which has been carried out in concert with the US. The iatrogenic effects of the EU state-building medicines are a vastly marginalized issue. The end result is a series of stabilitocracies that live in a geopolitical limbo. The chapter focuses particularly on the Prespa Agreement that allegedly resolved the decades-oldname dispute’ between Athens and Skopje as an example of making European values both collateral damage to geopolitical interests and simultaneously weakens the state that is supposed to be Europeanized.