Can small nations survive in a world of civilizational giants?

Alongside the ongoing debate among scholars and expert circles regarding the most accurate terminology for the emerging global order – multipolar, polycentric, or multi-nodal – the concept of the “civilizational state” has naturally gained prominence. I first encountered this framework in the work of Professor Zhang Weiwei of Fudan University, who derives the notion from China’s long historical tradition of statehood. Over time, however, I have observed this concept increasingly applied to Russia, India, Iran, and others. Indeed, at the 2024 Valdai Annual Conference – my first participation of this kind and my first visit to Russia – I listened as a speaker from my neighboring state, who articulated Greece as a civilizational state.

Still, I begin with this anecdote because it placed me in a revealing position. During a breakfast gathering, a distinguished Indian diplomat approached me, eager to learn about my country. His first question was whether the Republic of North Macedonia draws its civilizational traditions and foundations from Alexander the Great. I was taken aback. I struggled to respond, constrained partly by my own ‘Westernized’ academic training, but more profoundly by a sense of geopolitical embarrassment. As many know, my country not only changed its constitutional name under intense external pressure, but is currently engaged in a protracted process of negotiating its history, language, alphabet, culture, and even the Constitution with a neighboring state, Bulgaria.

Without delving too deeply into what I call the ‘curious case of Macedonia,’ I wish to focus on a broader structural question. Following the dissolution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY), external actors frequently framed post-Yugoslav statehood as premature or culturally fragmented, reviving the polemical and historically distorted trope of “Balkanization.” The reality is that state-building in the Balkans has always been complex, shaped by powerful external influences and borders drawn on green tables without local consultation. At the dawn of the 20th century, Albania received a partially formed state under powerful sponsorship, while Macedonia received none. It was not until the partisan struggle of the Second World War and the historic session of the Anti-Fascist Assembly for the National Liberation of Macedonia (ASNOM) in 1944 that our statehood was formally and autonomously established.

Today, although the region remains a theater of frozen conflicts and neocolonial dynamics, the prevailing civilizational matrix of the Balkans is nominally that of the West. Yet, this alignment is neither total nor unconditional. These states are often treated as an inconvenient burden or peripheral relatives within the Euro-Atlantic architecture. The primary interest in keeping them under the Western umbrella is strictly military and geopolitical. Consequently, leaders of these small states frequently compete to demonstrate maximum loyalty to the “Western code.” In doing so, they are inadvertently abandoning the authentic Balkan civilizational matrix – a heritage marked not only by historical tragedy, but also by extraordinary cultural richness, syncretism, and forms of coexistence that are increasingly absent in the West.