REFRAMING SOCIAL POLICY: Yesterday and today we celebrate the 50 th anniversary of the Faculty of Social Work of the University of St. Cyril and Methods here in Skopje, in the same year as the European Union celebrate its 50 th anniversary. The Faculty was founded by a Yugoslavian State that throughout the post-war period itself was caught in between East and West. Nevertheless, Tito´s Yugoslavia tried to break out of the encircle­ment policy of West and East, and early on showed an ambition to create new friends on his/its own terms. The Neutrals of Western Europe were one such friendship, and an exchange started also in the field of social policy, social work and the social sciences. At the start of the Schools that began in Yugoslavia in the early 1950s there was an exchange with Northern Europe. From a Scandinavian perspective, in focus were of course the capitals and universities of the North: Beo­grad, Zagreb and Ljubljana. How many Scandinavians who made their way to Skopje during the early post-war decades, is still open to inquiry. In any case, the Social Science Faculty of this University survived the disasters of Nature and Mankind, an earthquake(1963) as well as the dissolution of a Nation-state almost thirty years later. It has continued to train people in the ambiguous twin services of bureaucracy and humanity. It is still here, with us today well alive with an eye or two to excavate the future. Common Paths For fifty years this republic has remained outside an ever larger Union of nation­states in Europe. With the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the peoples and nation-state of Macedonia entered a new and difficult path. So far, Macedonia has avoided the spectre of ethnic cleansing(Mann 2005). Most likely, it is a path towards Europe, and the European Union. Step by step, the former Yugoslavian republics have en­tered the House that the Union and its Peoples are building. Slovenia belonged to the early entrants, and as of January this year also part of Euroland, first among the Central European members of 2004 and ahead of Poland, Hungary and the Czech republic; a true“turning point”?(Stanojevic 2007). To most Union insiders and observers, Croatia is a most likely member-state while the fates of Albania, Bosnia­Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia are wide-open. The Ot­toman-Russian shadow is hanging over Balkan although both Romania and Bul­garia succeeded to pass the door early this year, to my mind a most promising event. Also for those of us involved in social policy, social work, social science and social politics. From the late 1990s I was part of a Norwegian“peace” initiative aimed at univer­sity cooperation in the social sciences between the former Yugoslav republics. Thereby I had the opportunity to preach the virtues of welfare state institution building and discuss the vices – welfare, state, institutions, and building – of the same project. In Northern Europe, not only on academic and elite levels but also among all those who have(had) a special relationship to this part of Southern Europe, there is a genuine interest in the fate of the new Balkan, though at times 22