By Denko Maleski
Never, since independence, have Macedonian politicians behaved this way. I keep asking myself: where do the president and the prime minister of Macedonia find the courage—if not the sheer brazenness—for the way they communicate publicly with senior EU officials? “Balls,” “high-fives,” and similar cynical remarks… I remember the hard early years of independence, when we were guided by the saying: “A good word opens an iron door.”
I won’t even speak of the situations when, in the interest of the people and of a state still in the making, you had to say it was raining even when someone was spitting on you—rather than complaining to the public that you had been spat on. But back then, we were an internationally unrecognized state. Often, my meetings with counterparts from America and the EC/EU would end with the words: “Please, help us.” And they would respond quite honestly: we can help you with this and this, with that it’ll be harder, and with the other—not at all.
I wonder whether such conversations still take place at official meetings, away from the public eye, or whether everything has now been reduced to “European diktat” and “Macedonian defiance.” It seems to be the latter. And again: where does this sudden “courage” of the Macedonian political leadership come from?
The root of this behavior, I believe, lies in the withdrawal of American engagement from the continued construction of the EU project. The days are gone when American foreign policy, acting in tandem with Europe, could dictate and impose policies, and when Europe could show, by example, how things should be done. America’s power—the only superpower of the 1990s—was unquestioned, and all of us in Europe, big and small, bent in the direction the American wind was blowing. Their embassies and ambassadors in Skopje, for example, took care of that bending (toward the American direction).
Overall, those were good times for Macedonia. The lack of domestic capacity for reform—more precisely, the lack of liberal capacity—was compensated by pressure from outside. Things went so far that when Macedonian politicians, or those from other Eastern European countries, could not keep up with the changes, they were forced to leave the political stage. This happened to two presidents of VMRO-DPMNE: the first so that constitutional changes could proceed, saving the country from civil war; the second so that the path toward NATO membership could open. These were the times when, as part of the project of a peaceful Balkan integrated into the EU and the Euro-Atlantic zone of peace, Macedonian nationalism was placed “in a bottle” by America—and kept there.
With the arrival of the new Trump administration, the American interest in joint action with Brussels in advancing the project of spreading liberal democracy in Europe and the world evaporated. The contempt that the new American “transactional” President Trump shows toward European politicians—and toward the idea of “democracy as a global process”—is so obvious that I believe our politicians felt emboldened to imitate him.
With Trump’s arrival, the party of Macedonian nationalists came out of the “bottle” and found itself in a comfortable position compared with all its previous leaderships. Not only is there no longer a liberal hegemon pressing for liberal solutions; today’s leadership enjoys Trump’s tacit support for nationalist solutions—political as well as economic. After all, that is the essence of Donald Trump’s politics.
The fact that the current American president has no idea what such a policy means in a multinational community, or what the absence of the EU project means for a small state and economy like Macedonia’s, is not his concern. That is the concern of Macedonian politicians. Just as it should have been Zelensky’s concern to preserve peace in Ukraine instead of defying Russia, so it is the concern of Macedonian authorities to stop, Trump-style, defying the EU and instead seek diplomatic solutions to our problems.
And the crown will not fall from their heads if, instead of picking fights, they say: “Please, help us.” Anyone who knows the “specific weight” of our country in real international politics would do exactly that.