Macedonia: Challenges of Interethnic Powersharing and Integration
Macedonia: Challenges of Interethnic Powersharing and Integration

Summary/Abstract: Abstract. Contrary to other successor states of the former Yugoslavia, Macedonia has achieved independent statehood and democratic consolidation without major warfare. Macedonia’s reforms have been focused simultaneously on state building as well as legal and economic reform. Macedonian political elites have established practices of interethnic power sharing but are now faced with the challenges of Euro-Atlantic integration and the Greek objections to their country’s name. Macedonia was not invited to join NATO at the Bucharest Summit in April 2008. Athens insists that Macedonia must add a “qualifier” to its name in order to differentiate the country from the northern province of Greece bearing the same name. At the snap elections held in June 2008, the conservative Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization – Democratic Party of Macedonian Unity (VMRO-DPMNE) single-handedly won more than half of the seats in parliament – 63 out of 120 deputies, and formed a new coalition with the strongest ethnic Albanian party, the Democratic Union of Integration (DUI).

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