National Agenda : A Nation Clinging to Peace : Tiny Macedonia is surrounded by quarrelsome countries and struggling against a Greek blockade. But its leaders stay cool.

It was hard to imagine feeling threatened by Spase Shuplinovsky, the slightly scruffy, middle-age co-president of the Assn. for the Protection and Spreading of Truth about Alexander the Great.

An eccentric, undoubtedly. But almost unbelievably, conflicting theories about a history going back two millennia have brewed up a volatile cocktail of threats for this small, landlocked country now known to the world as the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia.

Shuplinovky’s coffee grew cold at a Skopje cafe as he argued endlessly from a heavily annotated, dog-eared Croatian translation of ancient Greek chronicles. His thesis was that Alexander the Great was Macedonian, not a Greek. Whether he was spreading truth or delusion, he certainly hit the mark by summing up, “Balkan history cannot be digested.”

Neighboring tables took no notice of his talk. Few of Macedonia’s 2 million people may have heard of Shuplinovsky or his 135-member association.

But most of the majority ethnic community would agree with him that they are now ethnic Macedonians: Orthodox Christians, Slavs, but not Bulgarians or Serbs. Just Macedonians.

And that is totally indigestible for neighboring Greece.

The Greeks believe that the name renews Slavic claims on historic Macedonia, a large part of which is now the northern Greek province of Macedonia and populated mostly by ethnic Greeks. Athens has therefore applied maximum diplomatic pressure. On Feb. 16, Greece defied its NATO and European allies to impose a near-total economic blockade.

The resulting crisis is crippling the fragile Macedonian economy and may stoke unrest in the local ethnic Albanian Muslim minority.

Some diplomats fear that any destabilization of Macedonia could suck greedy regional states into a new Balkan war just as hopes are rising for an end to the Bosnian conflict to the north.

The Macedonian question, according to French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe, is still “an abscess in the heart of Europe.”

So far, the Macedonian government has reacted with the cool that has been its trademark since 1991, when it chose independence instead of life in the Serb-dominated rump state of Yugoslavia.

Macedonia was once the poorest republic in Yugoslavia, but its careful management and civilized approach matches that of much richer Slovenia. And unlike Slovenia, the Skopje government also contrived to avoid all armed conflict with Serbia.

Moderate and measured leadership by President Kiro Gligorov, a 77-year-old former Yugoslav bureaucrat, has helped keep Macedonia miraculously clear of all recent Balkan violence.

“The factors that could lead to a spreading conflict are very complex. So far there is nothing,” Defense Minister Vlado Popovski said.

But Popovski, a former law professor, knows that Macedonia has been at the crossroads of more wars than most people can count in the last century.

Stiff-backed Yugoslav generals used to monitor an extraordinary three-way microcosm of the Cold War hemming in Macedonia: the Warsaw Pact’s Bulgaria, NATO member Greece and Maoist Albania. Ideologies may have softened, but they and Serbia still make an awkward group of neighbors.

“To escape from the claws of the hawks we may have to run. . . . We must hope that the strength of any potential attack would be balanced by other pretenders (to our territory),” Popovski said.

His country has no other option, with what he said was an army of just 15,000 men, an armored brigade with no tanks and 40 air force pilots with no warplanes.

Macedonia can count on some friends to stop it from becoming the next Balkan domino to fall. Acting with rare foresight, the United States and Western countries decided early in the Yugoslav crisis to protect Macedonia by pre-positioning U.N. peacekeepers on its border with Serbia.

An initial U.S. contingent of 300 arrived last July to join a mainly Nordic battalion of 1,000 troops. Their number may soon rise to 500.

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Macedonians feel still stronger now that 60 countries have recognized their independence. Seven European Union states took the step in December, and the United States followed in February, although it stopped short of establishing full diplomatic relations.

A coalition government has so far papered over divisions between Macedonian Slavs and ethnic Albanians. And while Athens sponsored demonstrations against Macedonia’s use of national symbols claimed exclusively by Greece, Skopje remained quiet.

“People here would rather have a beer than a fight,” one local journalist said.

The multiethnic atmosphere that inspired the term Salade Macedoine can still be found in the capital’s Greek-style bars, Central European cake shops and Italian espresso cafes. The domes and minarets of a dozen Ottoman Turkish mosques rise over the low tiled roofs of the old town.

Turkish Ambassador Suha Noyan said the small remaining Turkish minority is the best-treated in the Balkans.

“I’ve not seen any violent signs of nationalism. It is possible to talk of harmony,” he said. “They don’t live intermingled, but they live together. Unless there is outside pressure, nothing will happen here.”

Outside enemies can press on two weak points--the Albanians and the economy, which had 229% inflation last year.

The Greek embargo could be devastating to Macedonia’s hopes of fulfilling conditions attached to International Monetary Fund loans it just signed. The economy was already hard-pressed by the international sanctions against its former main trading partner, Serbia.

Greece will also suffer losses from the blockade it has imposed. About 500,000 Macedonians used to holiday on Aegean Sea beaches in northern Greece. Port transit fees came to $120 million a year, Macedonian officials say.

Landlocked Macedonia is still in a tough corner. Between 50% and 70% of Macedonia’s trade went through northern Greece, including almost all of its oil supplies. Within a week, thousands of workers were out of work.

“We didn’t suppose this would happen,” Economics Minister Petrus Stephanov said. “It will be very hard. . . . Standards of living will decline.”

That could worsen relations between Macedonia’s ethnic Slavs and Albanians. The latter are the descendants of the ancient Illyrians, who textbooks say have threatened Macedonia since the time of Philip of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great. Villages near the border are suffering from bandit-style looting raids from poverty-stricken Albania. But a worse problem is a cultural divide inside Macedonia.

“Albanians are the biggest real problem of Macedonia,” said Zoran Popovski, the ethnic Macedonian manager of a luxury clothes shop in downtown Skopje. “They smuggle, they are unemployed, they want work, schools, autonomous areas, a state within a state. They have large families. There is illegal immigration from Albania.”

Servet Avziu, a senior Albanian minister in Macedonia’s coalition government, spoke carefully as he tried to explain away a growing split between impatient radicals in Albanian-dominated western Macedonia and his moderate approach.

“At the moment we live better (than Albanians elsewhere in the Balkans) because we managed to maintain the peace in Macedonia. The people in power know what peace means and the price of peace,” Avziu said.

Most worrying of all, he said, is a possible spillover of unrest in the ethnic Albanian province of Kosovo in neighboring Serbia.

“War in Kosovo means a Balkan war,” he said.

Until some crisis happens, Macedonia’s balancing act will doubtless continue.

Greek and Macedonian flags and coinage will go on with a war of symbols from the ancients. A curious standoff will continue on the Greek-Macedonian border, where signs on both sides tell visitors, “Welcome to Macedonia.”