A half-closed window

C.P. Cavafy wrote of the "great relief" of an open window in his poem "The Windows" - that is before slipping back into his familiar guarded melancholy and the fear of the "new things" the window may expose.

Today, international political circumstances are being hailed by the government and a part of the opposition as a "window of opportunity" for resolving the decades-old dispute with the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) regarding its name: Washington appears eager for a solution, for its own usual reasons, and the new government in Skopje appears to reject the irredentist policy of its nationalist predecessors - irredentism that was also expressed via the antiquity-inspired kitsch monuments imposed on FYROM's capital by the former prime minister, Nikola Gruevski. Nevertheless, caution is still necessary. It is mandated not just by the "new things" that may be...