NATIONALISM : Balkan Neighbors Battle for Right to a Name : Macedonia, the southernmost Yugoslav republic, asserts its independence. But Greece says history entitles it to keep the designation.

What’s in a name? Altogether too much if the name is “Macedonia” and it is the Greek government that contemplates it.

This week, with European countries recognizing some of the republics seceding from the splintered Yugoslav federation, Greece ordered its consulates to deny visas to all applicants claiming Macedonian nationality.

Like Slovenia and Croatia farther north, Macedonia, southernmost of Yugoslavia’s six republics, asserts its independence. But Greece is asking its partners in the European Community--which on Wednesday recognized Slovenia and Croatia--to deny recognition to Macedonia unless the government of that republic on Greece’s northern border agrees to change the country’s name.

Greece argues that Macedonia is the historic name of a larger region, most of it in Greece, and that for a newly independent country to call itself after the region is implicitly expansionist. Macedonia, in fact, is the name Greece uses for its northern region.

The government of conservative Prime Minister Constantine Mitsotakis also complains of “cultural aggression”--an attempt by Macedonia’s government in Skopje to usurp basic elements of Greek history and culture, including the figures of Philip II of Macedonia and his son Alexander the Great, who extended Hellenic rule and culture through the Middle East and deep into Asia.

The Macedonia affair is at the core of a deeper Greek concern that rapid political change in the Balkans may leave Greece surrounded by hostile Muslim neighbors dominated by Turkey. In a country where left and right seldom agree on anything, geopolitical alarm cuts across political differences.

“Look at the map. We are threatened. I’m not imagining that,” said former Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou, a Socialist, in an interview. “Turkey is expansionist. It’s becoming a big power. The Ottoman Empire begins to live again.”

Greece and Turkey, nominal Atlantic Alliance partners, have long been at daggers drawn over the disputed island of Cyprus. Greece has a strong lobby in the United States, but Greeks now see trends in the volatile region moving in Turkey’s direction.

In last year’s Persian Gulf crisis, Turkey, with a population six times that of Greece, emerged as a key U.S. ally. Greece, where anti-Americanism was a government trademark during the eight years of Papandreou’s rule, played no active role in the war. Since then, Turkey’s shadow has grown in the wake of collapsing communism. Greece, by contrast, wrestles with political polarization, economic malaise and unwanted Eastern refugees.

“Turkey is moving rapidly into the Balkans, politically, economically and militarily, and also into the Muslim areas of the former Soviet Union,” Papandreou noted.

Elections in neighboring Bulgaria have produced a government that relies for its support on a large Muslim minority. “There used to be a sort of Greece-Sofia axis. Now it is Turkey-Sofia,” Papandreou said. Albania, another troubled Greek neighbor in the Balkans, has agreed to have Turkey rebuild its armed forces, he added.

In the Yugoslav republic of Macedonia, population 2 million, Greece fears that independence will add more ethnic turmoil to the historically quarrelsome Balkans.

What was ancient Macedonia is now part of three countries, with the proportions established after a war between Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia that ended in 1913. By Greek count, some 51% of historic Macedonia is in Greece, 39% in what became Yugoslavia and the rest, except for a handful of villages in Albania, is in Bulgaria.

The current Republic of Macedonia was created by Yugoslavia’s Marshal Tito to curb Serbian power during World War II. Under Tito, Communist Yugoslavia affirmed Macedonian nationality for the Slavic people who lived in the region. It stimulated a Macedonian national language--which Greeks insist is only a western Bulgarian dialect--and allowed formation of an independent Macedonian Orthodox Church.

All that, in the Greek view, was falsification of history, a spurious attempt to form a nation from what is simply one part of a geographic region historically Greek.

Talks in Athens earlier this month ended in deadlock when representatives from Skopje refused to discuss any name change. As a result, Kofos said, “Greece considers that Skopje has failed to meet the Community’s conditions for recognition.”