Frozen Peace, Returning Faultlines: What Macedonia’s Law Graduates Are Really Revealing

Students march through Skopje, May 18 -- image via video screenshot on X

By Biljana Vankovska

When law graduates and students (joined by participants from neighbouring Kosovo and Albania) marched through Skopje in recent days demanding the right to take the bar exam in Albanian, the protests quickly became something far larger than a dispute over a legal procedure. Alongside banners invoking language rights and the presence of only Albanian and US flags, the symbols of the UÇK also appeared prominently. It shifted the demonstration from a narrowly professional claim into a politically charged act of historical and regional symbolism. Namely, UÇK is the Albanian acronym for two intertwined paramilitary movements born of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. For those unfamiliar with Balkan history, this distinction matters. One UÇK was the Kosovo Liberation Army (Ushtria Çlirimtare e Kosovës), which fought Serbian forces during the Kosovo conflict and later became inseparable from the NATO intervention of 1999 and the US-led creation of the Kosovo state. The other was the National Liberation Army (Ushtria Çlirimtare Kombëtare), the Albanian insurgent formation that launched an armed conflict inside Macedonia in 2001. Officially, they were different organisations. Politically and symbolically, however, they emerged from the same geopolitical moment of Yugoslavia’s dissolution.

The 2001 conflict in Macedonia was not an isolated ethnic eruption. It was a direct spill over from the 1999 NATO war against Yugoslavia, the militarization of the region, and the empowerment of Albanian paramilitary structures that enjoyed overt or tacit Western support. Weapons, fighters, ideology, and symbolism crossed borders far more easily than diplomats care to admit.

For younger generations raised after the wars, the distinction between the two UÇKs has become increasingly blurred. In Albanian political mythology across the region, the acronym has been elevated into a transnational symbol of “liberation,” heavily romanticized through media, diaspora politics, and decades of American geopolitical patronage. Washington may have officially differentiated between ‘good insurgents’ and “destabilizing actors,” but on the ground, the symbolism fused long ago. That is why the images from Skopje matter.

The latest demonstrations are formally about allowing graduate (and graduated) law students to take the bar exam in Albanian. Their supporters present this as a continuation of the struggle for minority rights and full linguistic equality (since 1995). Yet the protests have little to do with either legal education or minority protections. Macedonia already exceeds many European standards regarding minority representation, language use, and ethnic power-sharing. Albanian is widely institutionalized across administration, higher education, municipalities, parliament, and public life. Few states in Europe have gone as far in accommodating ethnic demands within a unitary constitutional framework. The real issue lies elsewhere.

The bar exam is not an act of cultural expression. It is an entry point into the legal system itself: the judiciary, prosecution, advocacy, and constitutional practice. Law is not merely vocabulary. It is methodology, interpretation, reasoning, institutional culture, and professional precision. A future judge or attorney must understand not only legal terminology but the philosophy and internal logic of the legal order in which they operate. In any divided society, a shared lingua franca is not a tool of assimilation but a minimum condition for equal justice and institutional coherence. Courts cannot function as parallel ethnic chambers communicating through permanent translation. A legal system requires common procedural understanding, direct communication, and mastery of the language in which legislation, jurisprudence, and constitutional interpretation primarily evolve. Otherwise, justice becomes fragmented into negotiated ethnic compartments. Just like the entire political life in the country.

This is precisely why the current mobilization feels so performative. The protests are less about the practical needs of law graduates and more about political theatre within the fragmented Albanian political bloc itself. Rival factions compete to prove who is the more authentic guardian of ‘ethnic rights,’ while students become instruments in a broader struggle for electoral legitimacy. Ethnic symbolism once again substitutes for social substance. And that is the deeper tragedy of post-Ohrid Macedonia, which commemorates the 25th anniversary of its alleged “peace agreement”.

The 2001 Ohrid Framework Agreement, imposed under heavy US and EU pressure after the armed conflict, undoubtedly stopped the violence (provoked by NATO in the first place). But it did not create a civic republic; it was never the goal. Instead, Washington and Brussels helped construct a system that froze wartime divisions into peacetime governance. Ethnicity became the organizing principle of the state itself. Political representation, public employment, administration, and coalition-building increasingly revolved around ethnic arithmetic rather than social programs or democratic accountability. The model was celebrated internationally as a success story in conflict management. In reality, it institutionalized communal bargaining while hollowing out class politics, social solidarity, and civic identity. Power-sharing may prevent open violence, but it also creates permanent ethnic markets (today’s Bosnia is another good example from the region). Political elites no longer need to solve material problems; they merely need to present themselves as defenders of their respective communities. Fear becomes currency. Identity becomes capital. The beneficiaries are not ordinary citizens.

Macedonia remains one of Europe’s six poorest countries. Young people leave en masse. Public healthcare deteriorates. Labour insecurity grows. Corruption permeates institutions. Entire generations survive through precarious employment, remittances, or emigration. Yet mass mobilizations against privatization, inequality, exploitation, or oligarchic capture rarely achieve sustained momentum. Ethnic spectacle consistently overrides social struggle. This is not accidental.

Ethnic polarization protects ruling structures far more effectively than any police apparatus. As long as Macedonian and Albanian citizens confront one another symbolically, they are less likely to confront those who profit materially from a permanently fragile state. That is why waving UÇK symbols during protests over bar exams is so politically revealing. The symbolism deliberately resurrects unresolved wartime narratives and projects them into contemporary institutional disputes. What could have remained a technical discussion about legal qualifications becomes staged as an existential ethnic confrontation.

A quarter century after the conflict, Macedonia (now a NATO member state) still lives in the shadow of externally managed peace. The Ohrid Agreement never resolved the underlying contradiction: whether the country would become a genuinely civic state or remain a balance-of-power arrangement between competing ethno-political blocs. The answer, increasingly, appears obvious. Today’s protests are symptoms of a system trapped in permanent post-conflict reproduction, a system where ethnic entrepreneurship flourishes while social transformation remains almost impossible—or becomes demonised as radical.

Macedonia badly needs functioning institutions, social justice, economic dignity, and a generation capable of thinking beyond inherited wartime identities. It needs lawyers who understand both the universality of law and the responsibility that comes with interpreting it. And it needs political courage to reject the cynical reduction of citizenship into ethnic bookkeeping.

Peace without justice becomes stagnation. Stability without solidarity becomes exhaustion. And a state built entirely around managing division eventually forgets how to imagine a common future.

Biljana Vankovska is a professor of political science and international relations at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, president of Synergia Orbi: Institute for Global Analysis in Skopje, an associate of the Transnational Foundation of Peace and Future Research (TFF) in Lund, Sweden, and the most influential public intellectual in Macedonia. She is a member of the No Cold War collective.

This article was produced by Globetrotter