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TEHRAN, June 20 - When Greece and Macedonia signed an agreement Sunday to bring an end to their vicious, three-decade diplomatic dispute, the story had an unlikely hero.
TEHRAN, Young Journalists Club (YJC) - Yes, the force that finally brought an end to the poisonous conflict that had long kept Macedonia out of NATO and the European Union was not bold political leadership or a savvy negotiator. Or at least, it wasn’t only those things.
It was also a single, lowly modifier.
It was the word north.
Specifically, Macedonia agreed that it would officially change its name to “North Macedonia,” a nod to the two countries’ shared claims over the history of the ancient kingdom of Macedonia.
That move puts (North) Macedonia in a rarefied global club, of countries who have officially changed what they call themselves – and how the world knows them as well. In April, the tiny southern African kingdom formerly known as Swaziland announced that it was undergoing a name change to eSwatini, or “land of the Swazis” in the local siSwati language. And in 2016, the country you may know as the Czech Republic formally changed its English short-form name to Czechia.
Although there isn’t a single set of reasons why a country might want a new name, many name changes follow a familiar pattern, says Steven Gruzd , head of the governance and foreign policy program at the South African Institute of International Affairs in Johannesburg. They are a way to start over.
“It's about asserting independence, distancing [yourself] from colonialism, evoking history, trying to clean the slate,” he says.
In Africa, for instance, many countries changed their names at independence to create space between themselves and their former colonial overlords. So the Bechuanaland Protectorate became Botswana, or the “land of the Tswana.” The Gold Coast became Ghana, or “warrior king.”
And Southern Rhodesia re-styled itself Zimbabwe – a nod to the Great Zimbabwe civilization that ruled from the 11th to the 15th centuries.
But the decision to change a name is almost always at least as much about the present as the past.
Take the 27-year dispute between Greece and Macedonia, purportedly over the origins of Macedonia’s name. Greeks say the word belongs to them and them alone, since the ancient kingdom of Macedonia ruled by Alexander the Great was largely based in modern-day Greece. Macedonians, meanwhile, say that same kingdom contained much of their modern country, and so they have just as much claim to the name as the Greeks do.
But the standoff was never just about ancient history. Since Macedonia splintered off from Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, Greece suspected that the small new country secretly harbored ambitions to expand into its territory – specifically, into a northern Greek region that shared a name and a near-identical flag with Macedonia.
Source: Christian Science Monitor
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