Tuesday 5 August 2008

Next round in the Greek-Macedonian nonsense war of words

Different news sources (also here) report that Greece and Macedonia, or in diplomatic terms, the "Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia" (FYROM), will return to the negotiation table on 14-15 August to try to resolve the pending name dispute between both countries.

For those of you who are not aware of or not familiar with the issue, I recommend reading the respective Wikipedia article on the naming dispute.

For me, this is ridiculous diplomatic nonsense!

It is a waste of time and money, a typical play of over-nationalistic or over-regionalistic politics that are used by the political idiots of our days to avoid the real issues hidden behind this proxy war of words. And both sides are equally responsible. If some basic intelligence would rule, this kind of things would stop happening.

But I have the feeling, that those narcissistic politicians together with sophisticated diplomats prefer to remain stuck on nothing than to actually work on something...

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Addendum:

You really want to get into it? Then have a look at this!

2 comments:

Antal Dániel said...

Although this is a nonsense debate, I think it is not fair to be impartial in the debate. It is an EU and NATO member country, Greece, that is obstructing international relations with not letting a sovereign, EU and NATO candidate country to name itself the way its people, its neighbors and the rest of the world calls it.

I find it also alarming that it is the U.S. (under a UN mandate at least) who tries to do something about this unworthy affair.

By the way, I really liked the Czech proposal to dedicate their presidency on EU efforts to help resolving frozen international conflicts on EU borders, such as Transdnistria, Kosovo, Cyprus, etc. I think these nationalistic conflicts draw a lot of diplomatic and military energy out of Europe without any positive outcome. I really believe that the EU can never be a global power if it can allow such in its neighborhood.

Julien Frisch said...

Well, what is impartiality...? I agree with you that main factor for this conflict is Greece, but I think that the conflict remains a conflict only because on both sides there are actors using the issue and related questions (land, minorities etc.) as basis for continued blame-games and/or political threats. De facto nonsense, no matter which side to take.

But a full agreement concerning your last question, although some of the questions go well beyond mere local solutions that could be found within one presidency.