Prespes deal saw rise in public flag display, study finds

The number of national flags hung from the balconies of private homes in the streets of the Greek capital grew sharply in the wake of the contentious name deal between Athens and Skopje, according to a new study which explores the impact of symbolic conflict resolution on nationalist sentiment. 

According to the study, which was printed in the Journal of Conflict Resolution under the title “Symbolic Conflict Resolution and Ingroup Favoritism,” the effect was more pronounced in Greece’s northern port city of Thessaloniki, which is also the capital of the country’s Central Macedonia region.

The experts, Elias Dinas of the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, Sergi Martinez of Princeton University, and Vicente Valentim of the University of Oxford, conducted extensive on-site survey with a team of research assistants, counting the number of flags (the Greek national flag and that featuring the Vergina Sun) hanging from the windows and balconies of private residences in more than 300 randomly selected streets in Athens, three days after Parliament ratified the treaty. The figure was then compared against pre-treaty data on the sampled streets that was collected with the help of Google Maps’ Street View feature. The experts applied a similar methodology in the case of Thessaloniki, this time around eight months after the ratification of the agreement. Lisbon, the capital of Portugal, was used as a control group. 

According to the study, flags in Athens almost tripled after the Prespes deal compared to Lisbon, an estimated 197 percent increase. Meanwhile, in Thessaloniki, where the accord was seen as posing a greater symbolic threat, the number of flags multiplied by a factor of six, or by 450 percent.

‘More contagious’

Dinas is keen to draw attention to the public manifestation of nationalist sentiment.

“The public expression of nationalism can be more contagious because it can alter perceptions about how popular one’s own preferences and views are,” he says. 

“A sentiment that may feel marginal or even stigmatized, like chauvinism for example, may be perceived as more socially acceptable or even desirable. Finding oneself in a more friendly setting for one’s ideas, one is more likely to express these ideas more clearly – which may sometimes lead to more extreme behavior,” he says.

Signed in June 2018 by the two foreign ministers, Nikola Dimitrov of the ex-Yugoslav republic now known as North Macedonia and Nikos Kotzias of Greece, in the presence of Alexis Tsipras, Greece’s leftist prime minister at the time, and his North Macedonia counterpart, Zoran Zaev, the deal was according to opinion polls opposed by the majority of the Greek public, who rejected it as an appropriation of Greece’s ancient cultural heritage. New Democracy, now in government, voted against the agreement in January 2019, with party leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis calling it “a national defeat… a national blunder that is an affront to the truth and history of our country.” His conservative party went on to win the July 2019 elections with near 40 percent of the vote. 

Dinas says that the Prespes accord accentuated nationalist sentiment because individuals understood it as a threat to their group’s distinctive self-understanding.

“The deal shook our group status as it questioned a rigid assumption of exclusiveness that shapes our group identity,” Dinas says. 

“This challenge to the monopoly on the Macedonia title produced an almost spontaneous reaction, namely that of doubling down on protecting and strengthening the group identity through an emphasis on the community’s distinguished cultural traits, such as songs, language and history,” he says, adding that the backlash was reinforced by the lack of elite consensus on the issue.

Left-right division

The fieldwork in the study was backed by an analysis of voting patterns which confirmed increased party polarization over the issue, especially in the Greek region of Macedonia. While falling short of significantly influencing the 2019 election outcome, the deal was found to have intensified the left-right dichotomy of the political system.

“It seems to have brought about, or at least contributed to, a very subtle but crucial change in Greek public opinion and party competition, namely formulating an all-encompassing and rather heterogeneous anti-SYRIZA front,” Dinas says.

“In a way, the Prespes deal brought back the good old left-right regularities the country’s political system had been built upon, thereby breaking with the crisis-laden context where attitudes toward the EU, for example, served as a more appropriate shortcut than the standard left-right division to understand Greek politics.”