This article, across various iterations, has benefited enormously from comments and criticism offered by many people. In particular, I wish to thank Victor Friedman, Susan L. Woodward, Keith Brown, Elina Hartikainen, Elisa Helms, Owen Kohl, Sean Andrews, Amahl Bishara, Drew Gilbert, and Susan Gal. I am also grateful to Mark D. Steinberg for his comments and support as well as to the three anonymous reviewers for Slavic Review. Research and writing was made possible by the support of Fulbright-IIE, the Institute of Sociological, Political and Legal Studies in Skopje, and a Watkins fellowship from the University of Chicago.

1. Radio Free Europe, “Macedonia's Presidential Candidates on the Campaign Trail,” RFE/RL Balkan Report 8, no. 14 (9 April 2004). The poll was conducted by the Institute for Sociological, Political and Legal Studies, part of the University of Skopje, Sts. Cyril and Methodius.

2. In Macedonia, the term Euro-Atlantic integration referred to Macedonia's efforts to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU). In practice, however, NATO membership was generally seen as a step toward the greater goal of EU membership. In this article, I reproduce the Macedonian focus on “European integration” and EU membership as the ultimate aim of “Euro-Atlantic integration” and NATO membership.

3. Böröcz, Cf. Jozsef, “The Fox and the Raven: The European Union and Hungary Renegotiate the Margins of ‘Europe,'” Comparative Studies in Society and History 42, no. 4 (October 2000): 847–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Furthermore, EU membership itself does not necessarily eradicate discussions of or anxieties about a country's “Europeanness.” See Herzfeld, Michael, Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation State (New York, 1997)Google Scholar on Greece. Rather, as with any Utopian projection or normative ideal, attempts to inhabit “Europe” force subjects to recognize the particularities that separate them from this abstract category, although the political economy of European identity ensures that some subjects experience this forceto a greater degree than others. See Asad, Talal, “Muslims as a ‘Religious Minority’ in Europe,” Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, 2003), 159–80.Google Scholar

4. In Macedonia, there was a constant slippage between the more generic “international community” (megjunarodna zaednica) and “foreigners” (strand) on the one hand and “Europe” (Evropa) on the other. As Victor Friedman mentions, even Americans could be subsumed as “European” in Macedonian equations of Europe with the west. See Friedman, Victor, “Observing the Observers: Language, Ethnicity, and Power in the 1994 Macedonian Census and Beyond,” in Rubin, Barnett R., ed., Toward Comprehensive Peace in Southeast Europe (New York, 1996), 81–128 Google Scholar. See also Herzfeld, Michael, “'As in Your Own House': Hospitality, Ethnography, and the Stereotype of Mediterranean Society,” in Gilmore, David D., ed., Honor and Shame and the Unity of the Mediterranean (Washington, D.C., 1987), 75–89 Google Scholar. Such slippages speak to the particular ways in which Macedonians actively imagined and constructed “Europe” and the “international” terrain in which the country's future was presumed to lie.

5. The constitutional amendments set out by the peace treaty focused on minority rights issues (e.g., bilingual administration in municipalities with 20 percent or more of a linguistic minority group, a state-sponsored Albanian language university, and decentralization from the federal level to the municipalities).

6. Katherine Verdery points to a similar tension in early postsocialist Romania, where European powers were portrayed either in positive terms, as models of freedom and prosperity, or in negative terms, as neoimperial threats. See Verdery, Katherine, “Civil Society orNation? ‘Europe’ in the Symbolism of Postsocialist Politics,” What Was Socialism, and Wliat Comes Next? (Princeton, 1996), 104–29Google Scholar.

7. Gal, Cf. Susan, “Bartok's Funeral: Representations of Europe in Hungarian Political Rhetoric,” American Ethnologists, no. 3 (August 1991): 440–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Verdery, “Civil Society or Nation?”

8. On the cultural politics of European integration, see Borneman, John and Fowler, Nick, “Europeanization,” Annual Review of Anthropology 26 (1997): 487–514 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shore, Cris, Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of European Integration (London, 2000)Google Scholar; Bellier, Irène and Wilson, Thomas M., eds., An Anthropology of the European Union: Building, Imagining, and Experiencing the New Europe (Oxford, 2000)Google Scholar; Balibar, Etienne, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, trans. Swenson, James (Princeton, 2004)Google Scholar; and Holmes, Douglas R., Integral Europe: East Capitalism, Multiculturalism, Neofascism (Princeton, 2000)Google Scholar. On neoliberal forms of democratic govemmentality, see Foucault, Michel, The Birth ofBiopolitics (New York, 2008)Google Scholar; and Ong, Aihwa, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On “transparency,” in particular, and its discontents, see West, Harry G. and Sanders, Todd, eds., Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order (Durham, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Mazzarella, William, “Internet X-Ray: E-Governance, Transparency, and the Politics of Immediation in India,” Public Culture 18, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 473–505 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9. Cf. CeliaLury, Brands: The Logos of the Global Economy (New York, 2004). Lury argues that a similar conception of the efficacy of brands drives contemporary marketing.

10. On the concept of “social imaginary,” see Taylor, Charles, “Modern Social Imaginaries,” Public Culture 14, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 91–124 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11. For a discussion of nation-branding and other “image-conscious” practices elsewhere in postsocialist eastern Europe, see Sue Jansen, Curry, “Designer Nation: Neo-Liberal Nation Branding—Brand Estonia,” Social Identities 14, no. 1 (January 2008): 121–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12. The question of “recognition” (priznavanje) in Macedonia is often understood in relation to competitive claims made on the Macedonian national identity by neighboring states (or their official or unofficial representatives.) For example, Bulgarian officials have denied the existence of a distinct Macedonian language and ethnicity, the Serbian Orthodox Church refuses to acknowledge the autocephaly of the Macedonian Orthodox Church, and the Greek state refuses to recognize the Republic of Macedonia under its constitutional name. While these narrowly construed struggles over recognition continue to affect Macedonian politics, I conceive of the politics of recognition here in a more general sense, as an aspiration to independence and self-determination necessarily carried out through the negotiation of one's relationships to other actors. For my purposes,whether the goal of recognition is ever achievable is less interesting than what processes the aspiration for it sets into motion. See Markell, Patchen, Bound By Recognition (Princeton, 2003)Google Scholar.

13. See Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception; and Coles, Kimberley, Democratic Designs: International Intervention and Electoral Practices in Postiuar Bosnia-Herzegovina (Ann Arbor, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14. See Asad, “Muslims as a ‘Religious Minority’ in Europe,” and Böröcz, “The Fox and the Raven.”

15. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978); Wolff, Larry, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization and the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, 1994)Google Scholar; and Todorova, Maria, Imagining the Balkans (New York, 1997)Google Scholar. See also Bakić-Hayden, Milica and Hayden, Robert M., “Orientalist Variations on the Theme ‘Balkans': Symbolic Geography in Contemporary Yugoslav Politics,” Slavic Review 51, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 1–15 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Goldsworthy, Vesna, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (New Haven, 1998)Google Scholar. That “Europe” is a concept continually (re)imagined in western European centers is also an important point; see Asad, “Muslims as a ‘Religious Minority’ in Europe.” For discussions of the EU's monopolization of “Europe,” see also Böröcz, “The Fox and the Raven,” and Friedman, “Observing the Observers.”

16. Gal, E.g., “Bartok's Funeral”; Bakić-Hayden and Hayden, “Orientalist Variations”; Milica Bakic-Hayden, “Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia,” Slavic Review54, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 917–31Google Scholar; Layton, Susan, Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy (New York, 1994)Google Scholar; Verdery, “Civil Society or Nation?”; Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, chap. 2; lordanova, Dina, “Are the Balkans Admissible? The Discourse on Europe,” Balkanistica 13 (2000): 1–34 Google Scholar; Boyer, Dominic, Spirit and System: Media, Intellectuals, and the Dialectic in Modern German Culture (Chicago, 2005)Google Scholar, chap. 5; Yurchak, Alexei, Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, 2006)Google Scholar; chap. 5; Patterson, Patrick Hyder, “On the Edge of Reason: The Boundaries of Balkanism in Slovenian, Austrian, and Italian Discourse,” Slavic Review 62, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 110–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Regarding Macedonia specifically, see Friedman, “Observing the Observers”; Brown, Keith, The Past in Question: Modern Macedonia and the Uncertainties of Nation (Princeton, 2003)Google Scholar; Brown, Keith, “Sovereignty after Socialism at Europe's New Borders,” in Howland, Douglas and White, Luise, eds., The State of Sovereignty: Territories, Laws, Populations (Bloomington, 2009), 196–221 Google Scholar; Thiessen, Ilka, Waiting for Macedonia: Identity in a Changing World (Peterborough, Canada, 2007)Google Scholar; Neofotistos, Vasiliki, “'The Balkans’ Other Within': Imaginings of the West in the Republic of Macedonia,” History and Anthropology 19, no. 1 (March 2008): 17–36 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17. On “Europe” as a “shifter,” see Gal, “Bartok's Funeral.”

18. Bakić-Hayden, “Nesting Orientalism.” Cf. Irvine, Judith T. and Gal, Susan, “Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation,” in Kroskrity, Paul V., ed., Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities (Santa Fe, 2000), 35–84 Google Scholar.

19. Neofotistos, “'The Balkans’ Other Within.'” See also Dimova, Rozita, “'Modern' Masculinities: Ethnicity, Education, and Gender in Macedonia,” Nationalities Papers 34, no. 3 (July 2006): 305–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Brown, “Sovereignty after Socialism.“

20. Thiessen, Waiting for Macedonia.

21. Jansen, “Designer Nation.”

22. For a discussion of how commercial brand identities fit into cultural and national politics and how they can be appropriated or resignified from below, see Coombe, Rosemary, The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Appropriation and the Law (Durham, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Furthermore, branding tactics are increasingly used by political groups seeking to change the national status quo, such as efforts (allegedly sponsored by the Soros Foundation) to brand Georgia's “Rose Revolution.” See Manning, Paul, “Rose- Colored Glasses? Color Revolutions and Cartoon Chaos in Postsocialist Georgia,” Cultural Anthropology 22, no. 2 (May 2007): 171–213 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23. Cf. Herzfeld, “'As in Your Own House.'”

24. Marx, Karl, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Fowkes, Ben (New York, 1977)Google Scholar; Lury, Brands; Coombe, The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties; Mazzarella, William, Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India (Durham, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar;Jansen, “Designer Nation.”

25. Jansen, “Designer Nation,” 122.

26. Cf. Lury, Brands.

27. Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy, 3.

28. Shryock, Andrew, ed., Off Stage/On Display: Intimacy and Ethnography in the Age of Public Culture (Stanford, 2004), 10 Google Scholar.

29. Cf. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” The Souls of Black Folk (1903; reprint, New York, 1994); see also Povinelli, Elizabeth, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Mulliculturalism (Durham, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30. The issue of national image, of course, does not affect all members of a population equally. Certain social groups may be more or less susceptible to the politics of image based on their placement within polities variously divided by categories such as class, gender, ethnicity, and race as well as by factors such as one's profession or whether one lives in an urban or rural environment. I thank Keith Brown for emphasizing this point to me.

31. Borneman and Fowler, “Europeanization,” 496.

32. Boyer, Spirit and System, 189.

33. James Ferguson's Expectations of Modernity is an important touchstone on the role of discourse in actively constructing global inequality in contemporary capitalism. Focusing on a Zambian sense of expulsion from the modernist dreams once promised by development, Ferguson explores how imaginaries of modernity and the modern world order circulate in global capitalism, mediating “the mechanisms of membership, exclusion, and abjection upon which the contemporary system of spatialized global inequality depends.” Arguably, the use of image in contemporary global politics functions as just one such mechanism. See Ferguson, James, Expectations of Modernity: Mytlis and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Berkeley, 1999), 236 Google Scholar.

34. On publics, see Warner, Michael, Publics and Counterpublics (New York, 2002)Google Scholar; on dialogism, see Bakhtin, Mikhail, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin, 1981)Google Scholar.

35. See Borneman and Fowler, “Europeanization”; Shore, Building Europe; Bellier and Wilson, eds., An Anthropology ofthe European Union; Balibar, We, the People ofEurope?; Holmes, Integral Europe; and Asad, “Muslims as a ‘Religious Minority’ in Europe.”

36. Milanova, Verica, “Evrointegracija kje bide uspesno samo ako ja vklučuva javnosta,” Kapital, no. 217 (17 January 2004): 21 Google Scholar.

37. On competitive constructions of ethnic identity in postsocialist Macedonia, see Neofotistos, Vasiliki, “Beyond Stereotypes: Violence and the Porousness of Ethnic Boundaries in the Republic of Macedonia,” History and Anthropology 15, no. 1 (March 2004): 47–67 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Neofotistos, “The Balkans’ Other Within'”; Dimova, “'Modern’ Masculinities”; Brown, Keith, “In the Realm of the Double-Headed Eagle: Parapolitics in Macedonia 1994-1999,” in Cowan, Jane, ed., Macedonia: The Politics of Identity and Difference (London, 2000)Google Scholar; Brown, “Sovereignty after Socialism“; and Thiessen, Waiting for Macedonia.

38. Seejansen, “Designer Nation.”

39. The consequential involvement of the “great powers” in southeastern Europe is long and well attested, as is the idea that these “great powers” lay behind political goingson in the region. On the former point, see Jelavich, Barbara, History of the Balkans, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Eng., 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the latter point, see Friedman, “Observing the Observers.”

40. Greece defends the exclusivity of its claims to the name “Macedonia” on the grounds that Macedonian use constitutes an irredentist politics. This position is patently ridiculous; even if a tiny minority of Macedonian nationalists support a Greater Macedonia, there is no credible threat of a Macedonian landgrab in the northern regions of Greece. Rather, the Greek insistence on exclusive rights to the name Macedonia can be linked to the desire to monopolize Alexander the Great as a national symbol and a marketing lure. While the divisive legacy of the Greek civil war and Greece's desire to concealits treatment of its own ethnic Macedonian minority is also part of the picture, the name dispute between Macedonia and Greece is largely a politics of image, or, in this case, a politics over image.

41. Most countries recognized the Republic of Macedonia in 1994-95, although many did so under the “temporary” name provided by the United Nations rather than the constitutional name. The United States recognized Macedonia's constitutional name in 2004, but, as of June 2010, the EU still has not done so.

42. For in-depth analyses of Macedonia's first years of independence, see Brown, The Past in Question; Roudometof, Victor, ed., The Macedonian Question (Boulder, Colo., 2000)Google Scholar; Pettifer, James, ed., The Nexu Macedonian Question (New York, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shea, John, Macedonia and Greece: The Struggle to Define a Nexu Balkan Nation (Jefferson, N.C., 1997)Google Scholar; and Woodward, Susan L., Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War (New York, 1995)Google Scholar.

43. The convergence of the discourse of imidž and the representational politics of war in Macedonia has roots in the earlier Yugoslav wars. See lordanova, “Are the Balkans Admissible?” Dubravka Ugrešić also noted the role of image-management during Croatia's war of independence from Yugoslavia: “The image, which is more important than the truth, is being worked on by government organizations, the Ministry of Information, offices for the promotion of Croatia in the world, but also by newly formed nongovernmental organizations such as, for instance, ‘The Croatian Anti-defamation League.’ Maintaining that Mies about Croatia have been spread for decades,’ the president of the League recently announced: ‘We shall endeavour to alter world public opinion in favour of Croatia, using the truth as our strongest and sole argument. It is the duty of each one of us to defend our country, and that is our most important task. Slander is a more powerful weapon than a gun, a tank or an aeroplane.’ Looking at the local newspapers the uninformed reader might think that we were not involved in a real war but in a battle for our image in the world.” Ugrešić, Dubravka, The Culture of Lies, trans. Hawksworth, Celia (University Park, 1998), 75 Google Scholar (emphasis in the original).

44. For representative examples of this sort of criticism toward the international news coverage of the conflict, see Profiloski, Ljube, Mediumskata vojna protiv Makedonija (Skopje, 2002)Google Scholar; and Damovski, Aleksandar, “Foreign Media Coverage: Manipulation or Ignorance?” in Crighton, Alistar, ed., Macedonia: The Media and the Conflict (Skopje, 2003)Google Scholar.

45. Böröcz, “The Fox and the Raven.”

46. Kežarovski, Tomislav, “Ljube Boškovski komunicira so iztražniot sudija od Hotel Ambasador,” Utrinski Vesnik, no. 1463 (4 May 2004)Google Scholar.

47. While Boškovski claimed that the murdered men had plans to bomb the American, German, and British embassies in Skopje (i.e., the purported targets were both American and European), his use of an American-dominated discourse on terrorism risked alienating some European audiences. The Boškovski case is thus a good example of how the dialogism inherent to image politics can as easily fracture as unite audiences.

48. On the concept of interpellation, see Althusser, Louis, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Brewster, Ben (New York, 1971), 127–86.Google Scholar

49. Macedonian politics is dominated by three major parties. The left-leaning Union of Social Democrats (SDSM or Socijalnodemokratski Sojuz na Makedonija) and the right-leaning Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization-Democratic Parry of Macedonian National Unity (VMRO-DPMNE or Vnatresna Makedonska Revolucionerna Orgnanizacija-Demokratska Partija za Makedonsko Narodno Edinstvo) are the country's two largest parties. The Democratic Union for Integration (BDI/DUI or Bashkimi Demokratik për Integrim/Demokratska Unija za Integracija) is the third key party in Macedonia and the country's chief ethnic Albanian party.

50. Macedonian Information and Liason Service, “MILS News” (24 March 2004); Radio Free Europe, “Macedonia's Presidential Candidates.”

51. Radio Free Europe, “Macedonia's Presidential Candidates.”

52. E.g., in a joint EU, NATO, and OSCE press conference, the EU spokesperson explicitly made the connection between the election and its impact on EU evaluations of Macedonia: “The elections are not only to vote for a particular politician or party; rather, they will broadcast a very important message to the EU about the aspirations of the country for Euro integration.” Reported in Tamara Grncaroska, “Spored EU, NATO, i OBSE: Izborite uste edna predizvik za Makedonija,” Utrinski Vesnik, no. 1437 (1 April 2004).Macedonian politicians similarly emphasized the importance of democratic elections without irregularities. See, e.g., “Političarite posakaa fer i demokratski izbori i masoven oddziv,” Utrinski Vesnik, no. 1448 (15 April 2004).

53. See Friedman, “Observing the Observers,” for an insightful analysis of international monitoring during Macedonia's 1994 census. On elections and international aid workers, respectively, in Bosnia, see Coles, Kimberley, “Ambivalent Builders: Europeanization, the Production of Difference, and Internationals in Bosnia-Herzegovina,” POLAR2b, no. 1 (May 2002)Google Scholar: 1—18; and Coles, Kimberley, “Election Day: The Construction of Democracy through Technique,” Cultural Anthropology 19, no. 4 (November 2004): 551–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

54. One key factor named in the defeat of the referendum was the U.S. recognition of Macedonia under its constitutional name just days prior to the vote. The move was seen as a gesture of support for the SDSM-led government and thus as a sign of American disapproval of the referendum.The timing of the decision also indicates how foreign governments and organizations in Macedonia would leverage imidž's authority to pursue their own goals.

55. For an insightful account of the humiliations and frustrations generated by one such similar encounter in Serbia, namely, waiting outside foreign embassies in pursuit of visas, see Stefjansen, , “After the Red Passport: Towards an Anthropology of the Everyday Geopolitics of Entrapment in the EU's ‘Immediate Outside,'” Journal ofthe Royal Anthropological Institute 15, no. 4 (December 2009): 815–32.Google Scholar

56. Cf. Crapanzano, Vincent, “Reflections on Hope as a Category of Social and Psychological Analysis,” Cultural Anthropology 18, no. 1 (February 2003): 3–32 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

57. Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy.

58. See Borneman and Fowler, “Europeanization”; Shore, Building Europe; Bellier and Wilson, eds., An Anthropology of the European (7?i2on;Balibar, We, the People ofEurope?; Holmes, Integral Europe; and Asad, “Muslims as a ‘Religious Minority’ in Europe.“

59. Cf. Böröcz, “The Fox and the Raven”; Victor Friedman, “Observing the Observers”; and Coles, Democmlic Designs.

60. Cf. Ferguson, James, “Of Mimicry and Membership: Africans and the ‘New World Society,'” Cultural Anthropology 17, no. 4 (November 2002): 551–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.