The history of North Macedonia encompasses the history of the territory of the modern state of North Macedonia.
Yugoslavia was a country in Southeast and Central Europe that existed from 1918 to 1992. It came into existence following World War I, under the name of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes from the merger of the Kingdom of Serbia with the provisional State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs, and constituted the first union of South Slavic peoples as a sovereign state, following centuries of foreign rule over the region under the Ottoman Empire and the Habsburg monarchy. Peter I of Serbia was its first sovereign. The kingdom gained international recognition on 13 July 1922 at the Conference of Ambassadors in Paris. The official name of the state was changed to Kingdom of Yugoslavia on 3 October 1929.
Kiro Gligorov was a Macedonian politician who served as the first president of the Republic of Macedonia from 1991 to 1999. He was born and raised in Štip, where he was also educated. He continued his education in Skopje and graduated in law in Belgrade. During World War II in Yugoslav Macedonia, he worked as a lawyer and participated in the partisan resistance. By the end of the war, he was an organiser of the Anti-fascist Assembly for the National Liberation of Macedonia, the predecessor of the Socialist Republic of Macedonia as a federal Yugoslav state.
The Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization – Democratic Party for Macedonian National Unity, abbreviated as VMRO-DPMNE, is a conservative and the main centre-right to right-wing political party in North Macedonia.
The Social Democratic Union of Macedonia is a social-democratic political party, and the main centre-left party in North Macedonia. The party is pro-European.
The Rainbow is a political party in Greece, and a former member of the European Free Alliance. It is known for its activism amongst what it regards as the ethnic Macedonian minority in Greece and their descendants abroad. The Rainbow states that it sees the acceptance of the Republic of North Macedonia in the European Union with a positive regard.
Zhelyu Mitev Zhelev was a Bulgarian politician and former dissident who served as the first democratically elected and non-Communist President of Bulgaria, from 1990 to 1997. Zhelev was one of the most prominent figures of the 1989 Bulgarian Revolution, which ended the 35 year rule of President Todor Zhivkov. A member of the Union of Democratic Forces, he was elected as President by the 7th Grand National Assembly. Two years later, he won Bulgaria's first direct presidential elections. He lost his party's nomination for his 1996 reelection campaign after losing a tough primary race to Petar Stoyanov.
The name Macedonia is used in a number of competing or overlapping meanings to describe geographical, political and historical areas, languages and peoples in a part of south-eastern Europe. It has been a major source of political controversy since the early 20th century. The situation is complicated because different ethnic groups use different terminology for the same entity, or the same terminology for different entities, with different political connotations.
United Macedonia, or Greater Macedonia, is an irredentist concept among Macedonian nationalists that aims to unify the transnational region of Macedonia in Southeastern Europe into a single state that would be dominated by ethnic Macedonians. The proposed capital of such a United Macedonia is the city of Thessaloniki, the capital of Greek Macedonia, which ethnic Macedonians and the Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito had planned to incorporate into their own states.
Bozhidar Dimitrov Stoyanov was a Bulgarian historian, politician, and polemicist in the sphere of Medieval Bulgarian history, the Ottoman rule of Bulgaria and the Macedonian Question. He was director of the National Historical Museum, formerly a Bulgarian Socialist Party member, and later became affiliated with the Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria (GERB) political party.
The Party of Democratic Action of Sandžak is a political party in Serbia, representing the Bosniak ethnic minority concentrated in Sandžak region.
The use of the country name "Macedonia" was disputed between Greece and the Republic of Macedonia between 1991 and 2019. The dispute was a source of instability in the Western Balkans for 25 years. It was resolved through negotiations between the two countries, mediated by the United Nations, resulting in the Prespa Agreement, which was signed on 17 June 2018. Pertinent to its background is an early 20th-century multifaceted dispute and armed conflict that formed part of the background to the Balkan Wars. The specific naming dispute, although an existing issue in Yugoslav–Greek relations since World War II, was reignited after the breakup of Yugoslavia and the newly-gained independence of the former Socialist Republic of Macedonia in 1991. Since then, it was an ongoing issue in bilateral and international relations until it was settled with the Prespa agreement in June 2018, the subsequent ratification by the Macedonian and Greek parliaments in late 2018 and early 2019 respectively, and the official renaming of Macedonia to North Macedonia in February 2019.
During and after the Greek Civil War of 1946–1949, members and or supporters of the defeated Communist forces fled Greece as political refugees. The collapse of the Democratic Army of Greece (DSE) and subsequent evacuation of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) to Tashkent in 1949 led thousands of people to leave the country. It has been estimated that by 1949, over 100,000 people had left Greece for Yugoslavia and the Eastern Bloc, particularly the USSR and Czechoslovakia. These included tens of thousands of child refugees who had been forcefully evacuated by the KKE. The war wrought widespread devastation right across Greece and particularly in the regions of Macedonia and Epirus, causing many people to continue to leave the country even after it had ended.
Ilirida or the Republic of Ilirida is a proposed state in the western regions of North Macedonia, declared twice by the politician Nevzat Halili, once in 1992 and again in 2014. The proposal has been declared unconstitutional by the Macedonian government. The secessionist concept of Ilirida emerged in the early 1990s and was advocated by some Albanian politicians as a solution to concerns and disputes the Albanian community had regarding constitutional recognition and minority rights within Macedonia.
Slavic speakers are a minority population in the northern Greek region of Macedonia, who are mostly concentrated in certain parts of the peripheries of West and Central Macedonia, adjacent to the territory of the state of North Macedonia. Their dialects are called today "Slavic" in Greece, while generally they are considered Macedonian. Some members have formed their own emigrant communities in neighbouring countries, as well as further abroad.
North Macedonia, officially the Republic of North Macedonia, is a landlocked country in Southeast Europe. It shares land borders with Greece to the south, Albania to the west, Bulgaria to the east, Kosovo to the northwest and Serbia to the north. It constitutes approximately the northern third of the larger geographical region of Macedonia. Skopje, the capital and largest city, is home to a quarter of the country's population of 1.83 million. The majority of the residents are ethnic Macedonians, a South Slavic people. Albanians form a significant minority at around 25%, followed by Turks, Roma, Serbs, Bosniaks, Aromanians and a few other minorities.
The Insurgency in Kosovo began in 1995, following the Dayton Agreement that ended the Bosnian War. In 1996, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) began attacking Serbian governmental buildings and police stations. This insurgency would lead to the more intense Kosovo War in February 1998.
Anti-Greek sentiment refers to negative feelings, dislike, hatred, derision, racism, prejudice, and/or discrimination towards Greeks, the Hellenic Republic, and Greek culture. It is the opposite of philhellenism.
Albanian nationalism in North Macedonia traces its roots in the wider Albanian nationalist movement which emerged as a response to the Eastern Crisis (1878) and proposed partitioning of Ottoman Albanian inhabited lands in the Balkans among neighbouring countries. During the remainder of the late Ottoman period various disagreements culminated between Albanian nationalists and the Ottoman Empire over socio-cultural rights. The Balkan Wars (1912–13) ending with Ottoman defeat, Serbian and later Yugoslav sovereignty over the area generated an Albanian nationalism that has become distinct to North Macedonia stressing Albanian language, culture and identity within the context of state and sociopolitical rights. Pan-Albanian sentiments are also present and historically have been achieved only once when western Macedonia was united by Italian Axis forces to their protectorate of Albania during the Second World War.
Anarchism in Albania was first introduced by the Italian anarchist volunteers who fought during the Albanian revolts against the Ottoman Empire and later opposed the Italian military occupation of the country. Native Albanian anarchists first organised themselves within the rising communist movement during the 1920s, but libertarian tendencies were eventually supplanted by Marxism–Leninism, which became the leading tendency by the 1930s. After World War II, a People's Republic was established by the communists under Enver Hoxha, which briefly implemented socialist self-management before drifting towards an anti-revisionist form of Marxism–Leninism. When communist rule collapsed, the country went through rapid liberalization which caused an insurrection against the state, leading to renewed anarchist analysis of the situation in Albania and the rise of anarchist sympathies among Albanian migrants abroad.
