MULTICULTURALISM AND ETHNICITY IN THE PLURALISTIC ENVIRONMENT IN THE REPUBLIC OF NORTH MACEDONIA.

The Constitution subsumes all citizens, regardless of their affiliation, under "national affiliation". According to international law, every person is guaranteed their individual right to freely express their national affiliation (of a nation or a minority), and the Macedonian Constitution also contains such a solution. Starting from the Constitution, all laws and by-laws should be harmonized with the Constitution, which should clearly and unequivocally determine the affiliation of the Macedonian people and the affiliation of parts of other nations. Ethnicity is a phenomenon that penetrates the domain of research interests of several scientific disciplines. One of them is social psychology. Her research results are of special importance for sociology because they represent additions to her own research and a basis for setting new assumptions. When it comes to ethnicity, it reappeared in the form of political mobilization in the second half of the 20th century. All analyzes of the causes of this phenomenon speak of the emergence of ethnicity as a response to disadvantaged cultural groups within large nations and federations and of ethnicity as a reaction to the inability of the political leadership of nationstates to provide sufficient space for the cultural development of smaller cultures. Inevitably, questions about the development of policies to prevent ethnic conflicts followed. The question of whether and how cultural groups should be recognized in politics is back on the agenda. As Professor Atanasov (2017) states, multiculturalism as a concept appeared in the general public of the USA at the beginning of the 80s of the 20th century, bringing demands for greater diversity in universities and greater participation in state institutions. Multiculturalism as a movement sought to preserve the differences between ethnic and cultural communities without blending them into the majority and to enable equal respect for different cultures, and as a policy it required the recognition of cultural groups and their articulation in the public sphere, as well as the prevention of discrimination that the members of the smaller cultural groups were exhibited. This paper elaborates and analyzes multiculturalism and ethnicity, and gives an overview of the pluralistic environment of party pluralism in the Republic of North Macedonia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]