One night in the summer of 2006, I took a flight from Belgrade to Skopje, leaving at 9:30 p.m. After an hour's delay and a taxi ride into the center of the city, I reached my hotel after midnight. The night clerk asked me my business and when I mentioned that I was a political science professor, he directed me to the couch in the lobby. He proceeded to lecture me on the unique contributions of the Macedonian people and land for three hours. He produced a litany of events starting with Alexander the Great and leading through Cyril and Methodius and up through revolts against the Ottomans. He railed against those who would turn Macedonians into “nothing,” some nondescript group of Slavs with no independent history or contributions of their own. The situation had been made worse, he continued, by Albanians. The international community had sided with Albanian “terrorists” and kicked the Macedonians from the second row of the bus to the third. Macedonians had always been second-class citizens in the world, he complained, but now, even in their own country, they were behind Albanians.

The history and political lesson went on until 3 a.m. I listened partly out of curiosity about how long it could go on, but more out of sympathy for some of his views. I knew enough about regional history to know that surrounding peoples had seen Macedonians as “nothing,” or at least Macedonia as something less than a full-blown nation. The Greeks deny their name; the Serbs deny that they have their own church; the Bulgarians say they do not have their own language. As this chapter will show, Western powers have indeed worked to improve the position of Albanians in Macedonia.