THE MACEDONIAN QUESTION AND GREECE
The Macedonian Question would not possess from the Greek perspective at least a serious geopolitical significance despite the continuous irredentist propaganda and the ethnogenesis aspirations of the Macedoslavs. The legal status of Greece’s northern borders are safeguarded by international treaties such as those of Bucharest (1913), which ended the Second Balkan War, and the Neuilly (1919) and Paris (1947) which ended the First and the Second World Wars. Furthermore, Greece has no territorial or even minority claims against her neighbouring states despite the fact that large numbers of ethnic Greeks residing as citizens of her neighbouring states. The ethnological composition of Greek Macedonia, which at the time of Ottoman rule was an inextricable tangle of nationalities, religions and languages, is today homogeneous to an extend rare for the Balkan countries.
The Macedonian Question was part of the Eastern Question; in the first stage, the pan-Slavists and the proponents of a Greater Bulgaria pursued the dream of an autonomous Macedonian within the Ottoman Empire. Their purpose was the demise of Hellenism and the eventual access to the Aegean Sea. During the second phase, between the wars, Stalinism’s slogan was an independent and United Macedonia, aiming at the dismembering of Greece. In the third phase (1943) Tito in an attempt to weaken Serbia and Greece, did not stop short in offering the historically attested Greek name of Macedonian to a region which until then was called “South Serbia” or “Dardania”. Tito’s initiative was met with contempt by the international community. On 1944, the US Secretary of State Stretinus and the Roosevelt government described the notion of a “Macedonian” nation as a sheer demagogy stating that he would hold accountable any governments who tolerated or encouraged anti-Greek efforts of Bulgarian and Yugoslav partisans to re-invent the Macedonian Question.