North Macedonia

The territory of present-day North Macedonia has been continuously inhabited since prehistory, and in classical antiquity it formed part of the historical region of Macedonia. Before Greek and Roman influence reached the area, it was populated by Paeonian and Dardanian tribes, whose small kingdoms occupied the Vardar valley and the surrounding highlands. From the fourth century BCE the region fell under the expanding kingdom of Macedon, the polity from which Philip II and Alexander the Great launched their campaigns, and by 148 BCE it had been incorporated into the Roman Republic as part of the province of Macedonia. Roman rule brought the construction of the Via Egnatia and the urbanisation of settlements such as Stobi and Heraclea Lyncestis, and after the partition of the empire the territory passed to Byzantine administration.

Slavic peoples settled the region in waves during the sixth and seventh centuries, gradually displacing or assimilating the earlier Romanised population. From the late ninth century the area lay at the contested frontier between Byzantium and the First Bulgarian Empire, and in the late tenth century Tsar Samuel established a powerful state centred on Ohrid, where an autocephalous archbishopric was founded that would shape the religious life of the region for centuries. Byzantine reconquest under Basil II in 1018 was followed by Serbian expansion in the fourteenth century under Stefan Dushan, whose empire briefly made Skopje its capital. Ottoman armies defeated the local Christian principalities by the end of the fourteenth century, and the territory remained under Ottoman rule for roughly five hundred years, during which Islam took root alongside continuing Orthodox Christian and Jewish communities.

The Ottoman period ended through the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, after which the geographical region of Macedonia was partitioned among Serbia, Greece, and Bulgaria. The portion corresponding to the modern state, often called Vardar Macedonia, was assigned to Serbia and subsequently incorporated into the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, renamed Yugoslavia in 1929. After occupation by Axis forces during the Second World War and a partisan resistance led by communist forces, the territory emerged in 1944 as the People's Republic of Macedonia, one of six constituent republics of socialist Yugoslavia under Josip Broz Tito. During this federal period a standardised Macedonian literary language was codified and an autocephalous Macedonian Orthodox Church was proclaimed in 1967.

As Yugoslavia disintegrated, the republic declared independence on 8 September 1991 following a referendum, becoming the only successor state to leave the federation without significant armed conflict. International recognition was complicated by a long dispute with Greece over the country's name and symbols, which led to admission to the United Nations in 1993 under the provisional designation "the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia." A brief internal conflict in 2001 between government forces and an ethnic Albanian insurgency was ended by the Ohrid Framework Agreement, which expanded minority rights and decentralised governance. The Prespa Agreement of 2018 with Greece resolved the name dispute, and the country was renamed the Republic of North Macedonia in February 2019, joining NATO in 2020 and continuing accession negotiations with the European Union.

Today North Macedonia is a parliamentary republic with a unicameral legislature, the Sobranie, and a directly elected president whose role is largely ceremonial, with executive authority vested in a prime minister and council of ministers responsible to parliament.