While Yugoslavia was occupied by the axis forces, the AVNOJ met on November 26, 1942 at Bihać (First Session), in northwest of Bosnia under Josip Broz Tito, in the hope of gaining political legitimacy, proclaimed support for:

1.democracy;
2.the rights of ethnic minorities;
3.the inviolability of private property; and
4.freedom of individual economic initiative for the different groups.

Despite the above statements, the new class had to efface many of the societal ills, as the new regime had perceived them. In the communist Yugoslavia, the ills were the fault of the “Others” who were a). The Swabian Germans; b).The Pre-War II Yugoslavism (Unitarism, Centralism, Statism, and Bureaucratism); and c). The Soviet-style socialism.

Historical Background– Swabian Germans
The incursions of the Huns in Europe forced waves of Slavs and Germans during the 4th century to migrate. Germans migrated to the Danube and the Mediterranean as early as the year 375, but the Germans of Yugoslavia migrated to their respective areas approximately 800 years ago. Between the time of their migration to Yugoslavia and WW I the Swabian Germans lived in Austro-Hungarian held territories, as Vojvodina, Croatia, Slovenia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The loss of Austro-Hungarian territories to the newly formed Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes a.k.a. Yugoslavia, Romania, and Hungary forced the Swabian Germans to separate into three different chauvinistic countries as Hungary (700,000), Yugoslavia (550,000), and Romania (350,000). The new states were not very understanding of the fact that these people did not have any contact with Germany over the centuries, making them the scapegoat that paid for the Third Reich Germans’ brutality in the eastern occupied countries.

In my essay “Skopje Contributes to its Own Instability” I had argued that the problem in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (the FYROM) is the Slavic majority of the country that monopolizes the government and all institutions, disregarding its 35% minority of Albanians, let alone all others. Instead of acting on facts, they have chosen fiction. The latest chosen drama is FYROM’s alleged victimization by Greece according to which Greece invoked its veto power to preclude Skopje NATO membership. 

NATO’s principle for enlargement has created misunderstandings and illusions for some countries that consider NATO the place that either offers security or prestige or even both. It has created misunderstandings because the FYROM Slavs feel that their membership was guaranteed “as is” without changing their modus operandi; it has generated illusions because the FYROM believes that NATO membership is going to boost their national pride. The statement of theGreek Prime Minister that “all Balkan countries would join the EU in 2014,” the so-called Balkans 2014 project, also created great misunderstandings and illusions. Immediately after the announcement, the FYROM Prime Minister declared the Project Skopje 2014, assuming that Skopje’s EU membership was also guaranteed. 

While the strategic goal of all Balkan countries is NATO membership, it does require a series of achievements of certain political and military preconditions, as well as military, economic,and security criteria. On the other hand, one could pose the question, “what could FYROM have to offer to the Alliance, considering their Defense budget is insignificant?”

Before any country is considered a NATO member, it has to fulfill certain political criteria over and above those that NATO requires; the political preparation of the candidate country has to abide by NATO Enlargement Study and Accession Process, Ch. 5, para. 72, which expects the prospective members to have met OSCE requirements before NATO even considers preconditions and criteria for membership.

Volume seven of the first Cambridge ancient history, dedicated to the centuries after Alexander (1928), has on its cover an image of the Roman she-wolf. Thus there can be no doubt that this was the period of the rise of Rome and the decline of Greek civilization. The predominant view of the age by historians of the early twentieth century is outlined in an introductory essay by W.S. Ferguson. [1] Section IV on “The large state and the polis” is a lengthy complaint about the demise of “the polis ideal,” which was seemingly on the wane even before Chaironeia due to the rise of political and economical elites and royalist oligarchies. The single most important cause of the decline, however, was the loss of political autonomy after Chaironeia: “The fatal weakness of the Greek city-states as the custodian of civilization was their incapacity to form an all-embracing coalition” (p.22); as a result, they were “completely shorn of their statehood, [lacking] municipal rights and a voice in the affairs of the realm of which they formed part” (24-25).

It seems obvious to the author that there are interesting parallels between Curtius' narrative of the conspiracy of Bessus against Darius, and especially of Patron's role in this affair, and the Philotas affair, the most famous conspiracy, and subsequent political
trial, which took place during Alexander's expedition. In the former conspiracy Darius did not believe the informer who revealed the conspiracy among his staff, and, as a consequence, he lost his life. In the latter case Philotas did not inform the king about a conspiracy he had heard of, and Alexander only escaped danger thanks to knowledge about it which he received from another informer. The failure of Philotas to inform the king of the plot may partly be explained by his father's previous false warning of a plot by Philip the Acarnanian to poison Alexander. These parallels have so far been rather overlooked in Alexander scholarship, and the purpose of this article is to examine them. These resemblances furthermore re-open the question of which sources were available to Curtius, when reporting the last weeks of Darius III, and it is to this question we first turn.

Quintus Curtius Rufus' narrative of the last weeks of Darius III is believed to be untrustworthy in many respects. Some of the
events leading to Bessus' coup d’ état are held to be no more than literary fiction. For example the meeting of the Persian commanders at Ecbatana is considered to be one of the least plausible episodes. Modern commentator, however, make a favorable exception for the role of Patron the Phocian [1], a mercenary commander who revealed the conspiracy of Bessus and Nabarzanes to Darius, and who is sometimes supposed to be one of the authors responsible for the picture of Alexander's campaign we get from the Persian camp, one of the persons behind the so-called mercenaries’ source. It would be only reasonable to assume that Patron the Phocian plays a key role in Curtius' account because his report formed the key source utilized by that author.

In the past 35 years our archaeological and epigraphic evidence for the history and culture of ancient Macedon has been transformed. This book brings together the leading Greek archaeologists and historians of the area in a major collaborative survey of the finds and their interpretation, many of them unpublished outside Greece. The recent, immensely significant excavations of the palace of King Philip II are published here for the first time. Major new chapters on the Macedonians' Greek language, civic life, fourth and third century BC kings and court accompany specialist surveys of the region's art and coinage and the royal palace centres of Pella and Vergina, presented here with much new evidence. This book is the essential companion to Macedon, packed with new information and bibliography which no student of the Greek world can now afford to neglect.

Mary R. Lefkowitz and Guy MacLean Rogers of Wellesley College examine archaeological data, and the surviving evidence of Egyptian elements in Greek philosophy and science and explain why the notion of a "Black Athena" as proposed in the controversial three-volume work by Martin Bernal "Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization" is at best misleading, factually inaccurate and a work that borders on racism.

THE ORGANISATION of the Macedonian army under Alexander the Great, names and functions of units, effective numbers of warriors included, are fiercely debated.[1] That Alexander’s war against Persia occupies the central place in ancient military accounts has not helped scholars reach a degree of consensus. This study likewise departs from the existing reconstructions. It shares with its predecessors a belief that the Companion and Foot Companion units of the Macedonian army were arranged by geographical or tribal origin. I am unable, however, to accept discrepancies between the numbers of cavalry and infantry units suggested by previous studies, and I prefer to look for the regular and logically explicable division of this army, similar to mathematical regularity, with which known armies of Greek poleis, and especially those of federal states, were organised.

This study represents, therefore, an attempt to view Macedonia of the last Argead kings from the perspective of a historian interested in the growth of federalism in the Greek world in the fourth century B.C. This approach should not be surprising. Recently, scholars dealing with Hellenistic Macedonia have tended to stress extensive similarities between the kingdom and the Greek federal states of the period. Of course,various scholars underscore different arguments—the existence of well-organised poleis in fourth-century Macedonia (which strengthens the resemblance between the Macedonian monarchy and Greek confederacies),[2] or the fact that ancient authors list Macedonia together with Greek federal states as members of symmachies. It has been suggested that at least in the Hellenistic age Macedonia’s rulers believed that “Macedonia should not look old-fashioned in a new period of federative boom.” [3]

Preview:

Until recently, Achaemenid historiography did not show much interest in the reign of Darius III, or in the state of the empire at the time Alexander set foot in Asia Minor. It sufficed to explain everything by the convenient thesis of the "colossus with feet of clay" that had become irreversibly undermined by disorganization, overtaxation, and rebellious subjects. This thesis was, in itself, deemed sufficient to explain the Persian defeat in confrontations with the Macedonian armies. From its origins, Alexander historiography has developed two visions of the Persian adversary. One is found in handbooks and the most recent conference proceedings: that the Achaemenid empire is evanescent to such a degree that it does not even represent one of two players in the game about to be played on the Near Eastern chessboard: time passes "as if Alexander were alone...when he faced his personal quest." In contrast, other historians have attempted to reevaluate the military strategic capacities of the last Great King.

This double orientation in modern historiography is, to some extent, the latest avatar of a double-sided image of Darius handed down by the Greco-Roman tradition and continuously running through modern European historiography: Darius is either portrayed as a despot characterized by weakness and lack of drive, a man incapable of facing the danger that the Macedonian invasion presented to his throne and his empire; or he is glorified as a king possessing virtues and all kinds of admirable qualities, yet confronted by an enemy of such overwhelming strength that he stood no chance of gaining victory over him. This second image, of a man both capable and courageous but overcome by a peerless adversary (presented by Bossuetas early as 1681), was adopted by Droysen from 1833 on, and the same conclusion is reached by a recent study by Badian (2000b: 265)

Read the entire paper on Academia.edu
(c) Pierre Briant: Collège de France, Chaire d'histoire et civilisation du monde achéménide et de l'empire d'Alexandre and Emeritus

Preview: 

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries historians and scholars collected the heritage of Classical antiquity, a corpus in which, traditionally, Greek vigor and Macedonian strength were contrasted with the weakness of the Persian empire. The latter was usually defined by its state of political and territorial disorganization, by its corrupting luxury, and by its irreversible military inferiority, in short by, to use the traditional expression, “Achaemenid decadence.” According to a tenacious stereotype, which can be traced back to Greek authors, this empire was wealthy and weak at the same time.(8) It suffices to examine a single example, the Histoire ancienne by Charles Rollin, which was published from 1730 onward to exceptional acclaim in all European states. Influenced by Bossuet (1681), Rollin developed a catastrophic view of the Persian enemy and its continuous decline from Xerxes to Darius III. Based on the same pedagogical and political presuppositions (the values to be impressed upon a prince), Rollin condemned Alexander’s excesses, which he saw corrupted by Asian luxuries:(9) “In imitation of the Persian kings he turned his palace into a seraglio, filling it with three hundred and sixty concubines (the same number Darius kept) and with bands of eunuchs, of all mankind the most infamous” (Rollin 1791: 168)

Read the entire paper on Academia.edu
(c) Pierre Briant: Collège de France, Chaire d'histoire et civilisation du monde achéménide et de l'empire d'Alexandre and Emeritus

Secondary sources have informed us that a comedy, “Macedonians,” written by Strattis circa 410 BC contained a piece of conversation between an Attican and a Macedonian, each speaking in his own dialect. From the few saved words and other lexical evidence, Hoffman and Ahrenshad identified the Macedonian speech as Aeolic, similar to Thessalian and Lesbian. Romiopoulou (1980) thought that Doric might have been a second dialect in pre-Hellenistic Macedon in addition to a Macedonian dialect.

The lead scroll known as the Pella katadesmos, dating to first half of the 4th century BC,which was found in Pella (at the time the capital of Macedon) in 1986, and published in the Hellenic Dialectology Journal in 1993, changed this view. Based on this scroll, Olivier Masson expressed his opinion in the Oxford Classical Dictionary that the Macedonian dialect was one of the northwestern dialects, an opinion that is echoed by Emmanuel Voutyras (cf. the Bulletin Epigraphique in Revue des Etudes Grecques 1994, no. 413). Brixhe and Panayotou (1994: 209) agree, although they have not ascertained whether it was the dialect of the whole kingdom. James L. O'Neil (2005) categorized the dialect as 4th century BC Northwestern, whereas Prof. Edmonds of Bryn Mawr College suggests a 3rd century BC date.

On the historical side, Hammond has expressed the view that Upper Macedonians, being Molossian (Epirotan) tribes, spoke a northwestern dialect while Lower Macedonians spoke Aeolic. He based his opinion on archeological and literary evidence of ancient sources referring to Hellenic migrations before and after the Trojan War. Heurtley (BSA 28 (1926), 159-194), also basing his theory on archeological evidence, cites the specific migration of the Macedonians through the Pindus mountain range to Pieria as ending by the mid-11th century BC.

Katadesmos proves to be a challenge due to the deteriorated condition of the scroll, the vocabulary, grammar, and syntax of its dialectal form, as well as the location in which it was discovered. Nevertheless, the fourth century BC spell written in a Northwest Hellenic dialect reinforces Livius' statement in the History of Rome that “Aetolians, Acarnanians and Macedonians [were] men of the same speech.” In this paper, I will appraise the scroll, analyze the script from a linguistic standpoint, and compare and contrast it with other Hellenic dialects, while stressing the significance of the Dorian migrations in the Hellenic dialectology.