GREECE IS REMINDING THE WORLD THAT IT TOO IS A Balkan country, the inhabitant of a region where history often induces hysteria. In his policy toward the disaster zone that used to be Yugoslavia, Greek Prime Minister Constantine Mitsotakis is well on his way to deepening and widening the war there.
When Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina declared independence and appealed for international recognition last year, Macedonia had no choice but to follow suit. Otherwise it would have been swallowed up by Serbia.
A commission of the European Community established criteria for recognition, stressing respect for the rights of ethnic minorities. Macedonia passed the test. Its population is a mixture of nearly a dozen nationalities, but its political system is democratic and pluralistic.
The E.C. was quick to recognize the other breakaway republics, including Croatia, whose regime discriminates against local Serbs. But the Community stiff-armed Macedonia. Why? Because Greece objects to the name and exercised a veto in the councils of the E.C. Macedonia is the birthplace of Alexander the Great and the name of Greece's northern province. Therefore Athens thinks it has a 2,400-year-old trademark on the word.
Last week the Greek Foreign Minister Michalis Papaconstantinou was in Washington, and I had a chance to ask him about this whole business. He maintains that for Macedonia to "adopt a Greek name" is a "provocation" that "implies territorial claims against us."
Never mind that Macedonia's constitution explicitly disavows any such claim. Or that its army consists of about 6,000 ragtag troops armed with pistols and rifles, while Greece's is more than 25 times larger and is equipped with tanks, heavy artillery and jet fighters. Or that there is neither precedent nor justification in international law for one country to tell another what it can call itself.
Partly because the Greek position is so preposterous, the suspicion persists that the complaint about the name camouflages a revival of Greece's own age- old expansionistic ambitions. Several European governments have relayed to Washington reports that Mitsotakis has secretly discussed the partition of Macedonia with Serbia and perhaps with Albania and Bulgaria as well.
Papaconstantinou denies this charge "categorically: I have never seen any document or heard anything of this sort. We want them ((the Macedonians)) to exist ((as a separate state)); we want them as a buffer zone" between Greece and Serbia. "The authorities in Skopje ((the Macedonian capital)) can change their name to anything except Macedonia," and that will remove "a point of friction in the Balkans."
Another recent visitor to Washington -- Jane Miljovski, a minister in the Macedonian government -- offers a persuasive rebuttal: "As citizens of a newborn, almost defenseless nation, we are afraid that if we can be bullied into changing our name, we will next come under pressure to change our borders."
^ Privately, most Western officials acknowledge that Miljovski is right. Yet publicly the E.C. and the U.S. have, in effect, sided with Athens on the ground that there are other, overriding interests at stake.