Jugoslav Macedonia in Transition

Abstract

The political geography of Eastern Europe has undergone many changes as a result of developments which took place during and after the Second World War. Amongst the most interesting of these changes was the emergence of Macedonia in 1945 as one of the republics of a newly federated Jugoslavia. It consists largely of that disputed frontier territory south of the Sar Mountains which came into the possession of Serbia as a result of the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, and wrhich in 1939 was known as South Serbia and formed part of the Vardarska banovina (Fig. 1). The new republic is so manifestly different both in its extent and in the character of its population from the ancient Macedonia that one is prompted to wonder who the modern Macedonians are, and by what diverse processes a republic of that name has come to be part of Jugoslavia. The tangled sequence of events which led to the formation of a modern republic of Macedonia antedates the recent war and is difficult to unravel, but certain ideas which influenced the issue are simple enough to trace. They were four in number. The first was connected with the survival of Macedonia as a place-name; the second was the concept of Macedonia as a geographical region; the third was the Macedo-Slav theory and the fourth was the idea of a Macedonian nation.