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The Prespa Agreement (PA) between Athens and Skopje was meant to be a final solution to the 'name issue'. Yet the dispute has never been only about the state name, which is proved by the 20-pages long text. A plethora of other provisions is to be implemented erga omnes (internationally and domestically). Despite the insistence of the external mediators that the name dispute has never concerned the issues of ethnicity, nationality, culture, and language, these issues indeed appear to be simultaneously central as well as the Achilles heel of the deal. This paper does not deal with conceptual and theoretical aspects of ethnicity and nationality; yet its focus is on the fact that the Agreement indeed regulates identity issues; i.e. it represents a legal intervention in spheres pertaining to both ethnicity and national identity with implications for each. The basic premise is that instead of being a final solution to a protracted identity conflict, the PA symbolically reconceives the old Macedonian Question into a new form with an old essence. Thus, it does not resolve but rather complicates the identity security dilemma.

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The objective of this paper is to outline and analyse the manner in which governments on the EU's south-eastern periphery (i.e. the Western Balkans) responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and its possible after-effects. The author seeks to shed light on three particular aspects of the crisis: the (de)securitization process of COVID-19, the geopolitics of the EU enlargement process in the post-corona world, and the Balkan way of dealing with the pandemic. Following a prologue that tries to decipher what is behind the façade of this dramatic episode, the article proceeds to characterize both the securitization of COVID-19 and the “gaslighting turnaround”. It then looks at the Balkan version of the so-called “COVID-1984”, i.e. the autocratic tendencies that have blossomed amid (and thanks to) strong security concerns.

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