Recent Times

Eventually, those Macedonians who had immigrated to North America and Australia began to demand and lobby the great powers of the world to help in the establishment of a free and independent Macedonia. The Macedonian Patriotic Organization (MPO)  was established in 1922 for this very reason.

Ironically, independence finally came to part of Macedonia in the early 1990s—the part that belonged to Serbia.  Serbia was one of the nations that was part of Yugoslavia, a federation of several Slavic countries.  Up until the end of World War II, Macedonia remained part of Serbia, but the new Communist post-war leaders of Yugoslavia separated Macedonia from the rest of Serbia and made it a separate state within the Yugoslav Federation. Communist authorities also gave this part of Macedonia, Vardar Macedonia, a new identity. The Slavic people of Vardar Macedonia would no longer be Serbs or even Bulgarian Macedonians. They would now be ethnic Macedonians with their own unique history and language based on the Veles dialect. From then on, their ethnicity and nationality would be one and the same. The purpose of this intervention by Yugoslav Communists was to ensure that our people in Vardar Macedonia remained loyal to Yugoslavia, even if this meant erasing references to the cultural and historic connections between the ethnic Macedonian and Bulgarian Macedonian identities. The problem was in the fact that, to a large extent, this was achieved via propaganda involving misrepresentations of historic facts and creating official historic narratives based on speculations. When Yugoslavia fell after the death of Marshal Tito, Vardar Macedonia finally became free and independent.

 
The name to be given to this newly independent nation became an issue.  The new Macedonian Republic was essentially forced to accept the following name—the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia or FYROM, instead of just Macedonia or Republic of Macedonia.  The Macedonian Republic did this as a compromise to placate Greece and Greece’s allies in order to pave the way for its acceptance as a member of the United Nations in April 1993.  In June 2018, Greece and Macedonia formally resolved the conflict with a controversial agreement changing the name of FYROM to the “Republic of North Macedonia”.  Macedonian supporters of this controversial agreement now hope it will pave the way for North Macedonia to have full membership in NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) and eventually the European Union (EU).