As Minister of Foreign Affairs, I was pleased to hear the two speeches: that of my predecessor as Minister of Foreign Affairs, Evangelos Venizelos – and I thank him very much for all of his thoughts – and that of the President of ‘Potami’, Stavros Theodorakis. I thank him for his thoughts and the critical observations he makes. I want to thank both of them, and of course I want to thank the author of the book. Of late, we have dedicated many hours trying to find the common point that will rally the majority of the Greek people, not regarding yesterday, but regarding tomorrow. As always, I want to thank the interpreters. Thanks to them, the foreign Ambassadors who don’t speak Greek – many of them do – can listen our conversation today.
Nikos Mertzos hails politically from the exact opposite space from me. But I would say that we have something in common: fortitude and frankness. We say what we believe, however irritating this may make us. And as much as some people want to shoot us down, they can’t get to us. Nikos Mertzos has extensive knowledge of the Macedonian issue, to which he is dedicated. And I must say that, every day, with courage, he discovers how he can convert his knowledge of the Macedonian issue and his experience into an outlook that helps the country in the current conditions. I would say that he is a bold traveller of Macedonia, of Greek Macedonia. A bold traveller in a country, like ours, that lies in a region of great instability, with multiple dangers; where our every step must be very cautious, in an era when traditional power relations, as we knew them – at least as I did when I was young, or at least after 1989 – no longer apply, because the world is going through great changes. The West that we knew is not the West we see before us. And the power of the U.S. is not the same it was in decades past.
We are also living at a time when the major problem of the Middle East no longer begins and ends with the Palestinian problem and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Nowadays, stark divisions exist between Shiites and Sunnis, there’s fierce antagonism between Islamic countries such as Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. We are in a region of great changes, especially since 1989, that were not perceived in depth. In our region, here in Southeast Europe or the Balkans – whatever you want to call it – we often dealt with these changes arrogantly, carelessly, without thinking about tomorrow.
In this landscape, we also have to deal with the problem of our relations with our northern neighbour, with whom we are in talks regarding the name issue. In this context we have to respond as to what we want and what we prefer. Do we want a neighbouring country that sees us as good friends –and do we want to be good friends– or do we want an unstable country that can dissolve, while other countries with other brands of irredentism intervene in this process? Or do we want a country that is part of Turkey’s pincer in the region, that trains its military, its elite, to build institutions of religious faith, in such a way as to increase the hostility against us? When I was in Skopje recently, my Albanian friends told me that one of their big problems is that, while their identity is national, some people want to convert it to a religious identity, and I mean a moderate national identity being changed to religious fundamentalism.
As an old Marxist, I would say that we can categorize struggles in society in two ways, two types: as classic social struggles – in other words, class struggles – or as what has been named “culture wars”, since in Bismark’s 19th century Germany, in the first period, before the appearance of the Social Democratic Party, but also in 20th-century U.S. and even today. They are two different things, reflections of one another. But one is the struggle between day-to-day life, labour, wages and capital, and the other revolves around the rights of women, the right to bear arms, the right to religious freedom, and so on.
If you look at this in a certain way, this is also reflected – we can’t say it is an exact copy – in foreign policy issues, at least as I understand them, in our environs. We have problems of tough struggles that are geostrategic, geopolitical. Like the ones with Turkey. And we have problems that have to do with culture, with identity, with heritage, like the ones that concern our northern neighbours. It is crystal clear that the latter problems play a very, very big role in the citizen’s day-to-day life. The determination of what I am, where I am going, who that is, what my heritage is, what is exclusively mine. But, in terms of the long-term life of the state, our nation, our homeland, the former, the geostrategic problem, is the most important. Ensuring that no one can dispute our sovereignty or our national independence. This applies especially if one considers size.
By this I want to say that I fully respect people who defend what they feel as their identity. I fully respect people who believe that the most important thing they carry is a cultural element, an element of their faith, an element from the country’s history. But, for the country as a whole, this does not suffice to classify your friends and your enemies. For the country as a whole what’s more important is who is disputing your existence, or who is disputing a piece of your existence, or who is trying to claim something of yours as his own, something real, tangible, and who is trying to self-determine precisely what his origins are, what his nationality is.
And of course, I must say, the issue with our friendly northern country is chiefly historical, cultural; an issue of identity. It is inaccurate to say that we are in the process now of giving them the name “Macedonia”. I said somewhere, on the radio, in one of the rare interviews I give, that this process isn’t a baptism. The child exists and is called “Macedonia”. They have been calling themselves a “Macedonian nation” for at least a century now. And they have existed as “Macedonia”, consolidated in a political entity of various forms, for 70 years now.
And this debate began, I remind those of us who are more specialized in this subject, in the 1920s, when, following the failed revolutions – the Spartacus uprising in Germany and the Republic of Councils in Hungary – the Communist International gave birth to the idea that the centre of the of the revolution would be the multiethnic Macedonian environment, the multiethnic Macedonia. And it was only after Stalin’s clash with Dimitrov and the downfall of the ideas of multi-ethnicity did the claims on the whole of geographical Macedonia dissipate. And Dimitrov imposed his stance, that this entity of Macedonia, of the region, is not essentially multiethnic, but consists of Islamized Bulgarians. Who, in their contact with the other Slavs, somewhat ‘bastardized’ their language. In the end there was a major clash, from 1932-1934, between Tito and Dimitrov, with Stalin paradoxically siding with Tito and, in a manner of speaking, granting the region of what would later become the Socialist Republic of Macedonia to Yugoslavia, which in a sense already controlled the area after World War I, but didn’t call it “Macedonia” in the inter-war years.
This is the history. And the Socialist Republic of Macedonia appeared, thus, in the context of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. So it seems that the people who want to throw bombs at me or shoot me never noticed that in the name ‘Socialist Republic of Macedonia’ included the term ‘Macedonia’! And that, when the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia collapsed, the term ‘Socialist’ was removed from the name ‘Socialist Republic of Macedonia’, as was the fashion in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and remained as the ‘Republic of Macedonia’. And to be frank, we have the European Economic Community documents of the time, in which proponents of great nationalism, such as the Minister of Foreign Affairs at the time, signed as the ‘Republic of Macedonia’. And they say they cannot stomach the word ‘Macedonia’ anywhere, in no composite name.
But this word, ‘Macedonia’, through the passage of time came to be recognized by 142 states. The recognitions – I say this as a citizen, not as a Minister – are preponderant internationally in any foreign newspaper you read, on any foreign radio station or TV channel, this is what it is called. And suddenly, because we are again making a major effort – this isn’t the first one – to resolve the issue, everyone has discovered that we are going to surrender the name, that it was an unbaptised child. It wasn’t called the ‘Socialist Republic of Macedonia’, it wasn’t called ‘Macedonian’. It’s as if we found, for example, the Central Balkan Republic and decided to call them ‘Macedonians’. Oh, what a crime...
And lurking behind this, they say that anyone who wants to give the name ‘Macedonia’ as part of a compound name – I have received about 800 such letters – aspires to hand over Macedonia and Thessaloniki as well. In reality however, these are the people who identify the geographical space of Macedonia with Greek Macedonia, who believe that if you acknowledge that a third of geographical Macedonia can have the word ‘Macedonia’ in a compound name, you are implying that Greek Macedonia belongs to them too, and not vice versa. So the name has existed for 70 years now as a political entity. It existed in the federal state of Yugoslavia. And then, during the same era, the so-called ‘Macedonian language’ was formulated. Because you know, a written ‘Macedonian language’ did not exist until the 1940s. It was packaged. And this language that was packaged was recognised by the UN, in 1977, as ‘Macedonian’. And where was this language recognised as ‘Macedonian’? At the UN Conference in Athens – let’s not kid ourselves. And when some people wanted to transfer the name ‘Macedonian language’ into ISO and all of the systems for acronyms, abbreviations and so forth, between 1992 and 1994, there was no Greek voice, no representation in the three years of those negotiations.
That is the truth of the documents we have. And it was only in 2010 that the Greek state endeavoured to transform it, to change it, to bring it back at least as ‘Makedonski’, the word for it in their language, but this didn’t move ahead at the time. This is, in brief, the history of Macedonism.
And I want to make a second point. I know I distress people sometimes: while the government in 2008 managed, exceptionally, to create a large alliance based on our positions, I would have expected it, historically, to celebrate this major alliance it created, with 17 of the 26 NATO member states at that time backing the Greek government’s positions from the outset, it constructed another myth. The minutes of the meeting in Bucharest of 2008, show that Sarkozy was the first to speak, and Merkel was third, fully supporting Greece’s positions. That is, we celebrated a veto we didn’t exercise. We may have said at some point that we were prepared to use our veto, we may have put pressure on them, and we were right to put pressure on them, and we got the majority, but we didn’t use our veto. And then we were ruled against by the Court in The Hague and we were carrying the weight of this ruling on something that didn’t happen exactly that way, to put it politely, and that now the other side is invoking. Because any future difficulty would have not only the difficulty of interpreting the Interim Accord, but also the difficulty of a Court ruling that was anything but in our favour.
If I had to deduce a single point from this whole story – which is much longer, but this isn’t the time – I would say that what always hurt us in this case, as in our History, if I want to put it briefly, is that loud voices have a cost, especially if they are off key. In 1897 and in the Asia Minor Catastrophe, and in other cases, they have cost us.
I think we have to understand this historically. There is a wider region, geographical region, that is called ‘Macedonia’. It doesn’t wholly belong to us. It wasn’t shared out by our generation. It was shared out in 1913, in a way, in the Treaty of Bucharest. There we got a large portion of this geographical region that is called ‘Macedonia’. As was correctly stated earlier, Albania got a very small part. It is like Kashmir, of which China got a very small part when it was divided up. Bulgaria got a larger piece, what they call ‘Pirin Macedonia’. And the relatively larger piece of the three other than Greece’s, went to the political entity that was created and made part of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. This region is called ‘Macedonia’, and this region belongs to three states. Do the people living there have the right to feel they are ‘Macedonians’? That is the question. If you go to ‘Pirin Macedonia’, in Bulgaria, they feel they are ‘Macedonians’ and this includes many Ministers of their government. ‘Macedonian Bulgarians’. ‘Macedonians’ hailing from the geographical region, from such and such a village, such and such a prefecture.
What complicates the case? That our friends in Skopje are, or are trying to become, the newest European state. The newest European nation, if we leave out Kosovo. And they are trying to find a historical identity in a way that we see as distorted. And rather than limiting this identification to their being a people comprising different communities, the majority being Slavic, the second largest being the Albanians, with Vlachs and so on, they tried to unify, to cement their existence through a national history they did not have, with reference to ‘Macedonism’ in their history and our identity. And from here irredentism was born. And it is clear that the problem of the name typifies irredentism. It is typified in history, education, symbols; it is typified in the way the day-to-day consciousness of our northern neighbours is rationalised; but it is also typified in special symbols such as the airport, the roadway linking the Greek border to Skopje.
And I think it was a major step – and we, too, took positive steps – that these symbols have started to come down, to be limited. And I don’t think it is courageous of those who, in the minutes of their discussions in the past, saw the changing of the airport’s name as a fundamental negotiating point not to acknowledge this. Just as I don’t think it is politically correct for them to raise issues they say we should be negotiating, when they never raised these same issues in the negotiations they carried out. Because they have had the experience of governing. We know how they negotiated. And they very often did so in a way that I would not like to criticize publicly, because it won’t help in any way.
Moreover, we promoted the exceptionally important confidence-building measures, aka CBMs. Measures for cooperation between universities, research centres; cross-border cooperation, fire-fighting in the region. Measures for linking up natural gas pipelines and cleaning the old oil pipelines from Thessaloniki to Skopje. We started with 11, we got to 20, we are now moving towards 30. Measures that overcame prejudices. Not completely, not all of them, but they help – the name says so – to build confidence. What kind of confidence I mean? The first time I went to Skopje and spoke about their irredentism and the profound error they are making in identifying geography with their national existence, they told me that we wanted to break up fYROM. There was the sense that we take a dim view of their very existence. And our answer was very simple: this state – I said it teasingly – is a creation of God, but with the wrong Godfather. In other words, we, as a country, want this country to exist. We don’t want it to fall apart. We don’t want new conflicts in our region. We don’t want it to bow to the will of third countries. We want it to exist in peace and common development with us. And this is why, when we re-opened the name issue and everything that follows from that issue, no one pressured us into doing it. We’re lucky, too. It was a time when the U.S. wasn’t paying much attention to the region, when Germany was without a government for months. And they aren’t in a position to exert pressure, nor do they want to.
Also, we did not open the issue because we have other kinds, metaphysical, fears. We did it because we believe it is in our national interest for this country to exist in peace, stable, in security, and to have the best possible relations with Greece. We did it because Greece, like all states, has interests, but one more thing that has to characterize our interests is a sense of responsibility. We are a very small country on the world map, a tiny country. We probably don’t count for much in most global events. But in our region, in Southeast Europe, we are – as Nikos Mertzos explains in his book –the most powerful country. One and half times the GDP of the Balkans states, twice the GDP of the Western Balkans. And as the most powerful country, we have a powerful responsibility for the region’s security and future.
A region that flourishes economically and grows with us as we emerge from the crisis is in our interest. We are emerging from the crisis. And as we emerge from the crisis, we will emerge in the best possible way if the region is stable and is drawn along with our growth. We are emerging from the crisis, which means that we aren’t imposing ourselves on anyone, but we want them beside us, so we can grow. We are emerging from the crisis, which means we must not allow Balkan policies to be developed without us. Because the mindset that inertia will help us, that is that we should do nothing in our foreign policy, because they will come and bend the knee before us, is deeply flawed in the age of globalization. Because, as you saw, any country that didn’t behave well towards another country in the region – this third country found support and economic opportunities elsewhere. In a globalized world, your neighbour isn’t the only one with whom you can grow and become stronger.
We also aspire – and this is in our interest – to have done with the legacies of history that are holding us prisoner. We have a foreign policy with a positive agenda. Even in the negotiations we are carrying out with Skopje, we promote the need for any solutions to be included in a positive agenda that will lend prospects to our peoples for cooperation in sectors from culture to universities, from the day-to-day citizen and civil society to matters of security. We want to have a positive agenda and concentrate on the real problem. Because there is a certain ‘madness’ in the region. The same business owner who waits for Skopjans to come and shop at his store likes to go to demonstrations, and demands: “don’t recognize them, don’t accept them”. It is the same person who waits for them to come to his shop. We get about 1 million tourists from them, and they mostly go to Central Macedonia, some go to Kavala, others to Katerini. The same person who anxiously awaits them so he can rent them a room, once he hears what they call themselves, he suddenly sees them as enemies.
This is a paradox. And I believe that those who demonstrated and many of those who didn’t demonstrate are living in this paradox. Some see things more from one side, some from the other. To rid ourselves of this mad paradox, to take our responsibility as a power in the region, to have the responsibility we should have, we have to make compromises. Our geographical neighbour isn’t our neighbour across the street who plays loud music, wakes us up in the afternoon, and we don’t talk to him again. I will never invite to my house a neighbour who bothers me from morning to night. But, in foreign policy you have to talk to the person, even though you may not like everything about him. You will talk to the person who bothers you and whom you bother. Remember that it’s not just that they bother us, we bother them too. And we have to deal with them with a sense of self-confidence.
Powerful Greece, the Greece with its long history, the Greece of Alexander the Great, the Greece of great history, philosophy, Aristotle, etc., cannot be afraid of making a compromise with a small state that has yet to find its identity. We cannot be afraid to show responsibility in the region. Of course, the compromise cannot be rotten. We can’t go and agree that this country will be called ‘Macedonia’ or ‘Macedonia (Skopje)’, as they might like to see us do at some point. The name we agree on will have to be free of irredentist elements. Because, these irredentist elements must go. This name must have a geographical qualifier. A qualifying adjective. It has to have a qualifier and, consequently, be a compound name. Because lots of people say, “no, let’s not give them anything,” let me remind you of what we heard a number of times today: this country is called the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. This is among the most compound names in the world. Instead of two words, it has four. Let’s say that Afghanistan and Pakistan have two, and so on. And in this present name, this compound name, there exists the term ‘Macedonia’.
This country must be distinct. And the phrasings of the name should be such that a third party can discern it from Greek Macedonia. And I think it is a major issue, which one should focus on, that today the people in our neighbouring country to the north admit that the word ‘Macedonia’ and ‘Macedonian language’ do not concern Alexander the Great, do not concern our antiquity. Even the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Nikola Dimitrov, said that their language is Slavic. And that is what it is. We often call them Slavomacedonians and their language Slavomacedonian. The Albanians don’t want this, because it would be as if this was a state that belonged only to the Slavomacedonians, and not to the Albanians of fYROM.
Consequently, we have to find a compound name that expresses the particularity and the geography of this state, and at the same time doesn’t insult either side. Because it is my deep belief – and I have understood this from history and experience – that if you carry out negotiations and you impose a solution that the other side doesn’t want, this gives rise to historical revisionism, a desire to change everything. Remember, the way we handled the outcome of the First World War, took us to the Second World War. I believe that a good, honest compromise will contribute towards increasing, multiplying our relations with this state; it will contribute to stability and security in the region, to improved international status for our country, and it will bring us closer to the other peoples of the region.
And when I started the negotiations – and I still say this – I said a single phrase to Mr. Nimetz: We, and I personally, hand on heart, want a solution. An honest one. They won’t impose anything on me, and I won’t impose anything on them. I want an honest compromise. It could contain the name ‘Macedonia’, but it must be clear that this ‘Macedonia’ bears no relations to the heritage of Greek history. If they admire this heritage, it’s fine with us. And that this ‘Macedonia’ should have a geographical qualifier, because it is part of a wider region, a geographically defined region. And that we have to resolve the issue with our hands on our hearts. And that the other side, too, will have to respond with its hand on its heart: Does it truly want a solution, or does it believe it can find other ways to achieve its goals?
And I say “hand on heart” because I have a view on what patriotism is. Patriotism is loving your homeland. Patriotism is loving your history, your culture, your people’s achievements, your people’s struggles, the beauty of your people, the beauty of your homeland. It is dreaming of going to the beach in the summertime, to an island you love, which is part of your homeland. It is dreaming of dancing Greek dances, and knowing foreign ones as well, singing along to Greek songs, feeling that your people have done many great things of which we are proud, with all our weaknesses. But patriotism does not amount to refusing the other side the right to be proud of its history. Its real history, not counterfeit history. Because this amounts to Chauvinism, to extreme nationalism. In effect, you deny the other the right to identify with his history – his real history, not a fake one. He, too, has the right to identify with his culture. But his culture, not the one of third parties.
So for me, patriotism means a compound name. This compound name has to be in effect. Examining the negotiations of the past 20 years, I often noted a certain confusion as to whether this name should be in effect only for International Organizations, whether it should be in effect for inter-state relations. Many people call this ‘erga omnes’, but real erga omnes is its being in effect for everyone and in all relations; in other words, domestically as well. It should be in effect, and this should be expressed by the international agreement we make with the UN, and by the inter-state agreement we make, and by the amendments they need to make to their constitution. Why? Because we mustn’t allow new problems of this kind to arise in the future. Because if we don’t make it erga omnes, we will have daily arguments over domestic documents that are used internationally, with us chasing after them and saying, “violation of the Treaty,” and them thinking of ways to get around the treaty and use their domestic documents, which won’t have the international name, internationally. Because without erga omnes we will have invested in future day-to-day frictions that will build up to many more problems than we have right now. And what’s more, because the amendment of the constitution is necessary not only to give us assurances – as was correctly observed here, and I agree – but also for them. Because the next ‘Gruevski’ will challenge them as to what right they had to negotiate an international name that is contrary to their Constitution. There is also this perspective.
This is why the agreement we make – and hope for and work and fight for – must have stability. It has to be able to weather difficulties. To develop trust between the two sides, and not distrust. It has to be able to make the lives of our people and their people and our states easier, friendlier, more peaceful.
Greece is a responsible country. Greece is a small country with greater responsibilities in its region. Because it has relatively great capacities, great traditions, a great history, great capabilities, but all of this means also great responsibility. Foreign policy is not a game. Our relations with other countries are not a game. These aren’t next-door neighbours we have fallen out with. It is our responsibility to contribute to the development of the region and our country, to stability and security.
Thank you very much.
March 30, 2018