This article examines how a discourse on international image animated Macedonian politics following the country's 2001 conflict and how it reflected a broader cultural politics of European Union expansion. Contrasting with the continual deferral of recognition that characterized European integration in Macedonia, the Macedonian discourse on image (imidž) anchored a social imaginary where a national project of marketing could facilitate Macedonia's accession into the European Union and concretize its belonging to "Europe." The analysis developed here centers on the ambivalences in this discourse and the practices it authorized. By incorporating both orientalist distinctions and key concepts from the European Union's own process of integration, the discourse of imidž supported the neoliberal reform associated with Macedonia's postconflict restructuring and European integration. But the discourse on imidž also provided Macedonian political actors with an idiom in which to imagine, respond to, and capitalize on the larger political forces engendered by discursive constructs of Europe and the international community.