Description
After years of stalled integration into Euro-Atlantic structures due to the Greek veto and internal democratic backsliding, the successive SDSM-DUI governments set out to resolve external blockages between 2017 and 2024. Yet, the moves aimed at securing the country’s progress externally – embodied in the 2017 Treaty of Friendship, Good Neighbourliness and Cooperation with Bulgaria, the 2018 Prespa Agreement with Greece, and eventually the accepted 2022 French Proposal – deepened domestic polarisation, provoked conservative mobilisation, and ultimately led to the electoral collapse of the ruling coalition.
The paper examines this paradox in North Macedonia’s recent political trajectory though the vernacular ontological security approach (Croft & Vaughan-Williams) – the vernacular level is placed at the centre of analysis, and elite discourses are examined primarily in terms of how they travel into and are rearticulated through everyday talk. This is done through qualitative textual analysis of elite and religious public discourse (ruling coalition, opposition, the Macedonian Orthodox Church – Archdiocese of Ohrid) and vernacular public discourse (online commentary), all with the aim to demonstrate how international politics seeps into everyday life, shaping how ordinary people understand who they are, what is being threatened, and what feels worth defending.
