What is the Macedonian national interest?


Nano Ruzhin

Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? This genealogical title is the name of the famous Gauguin painting created in 1898 painted during his stay in Tahiti. The association of the three titled dilemmas is also metaphorical for the situation in our country. Since independence, these issues have divided the political elites and citizens of Macedonian society and have grown into the most serious political stakes of domestic political rivals.
In the era of communism, we knew “where we came from” and “who we were”. During the transition, a new ideological matrix of Macedonian origin was gradually affirmed, which was characterized by dubious “historical” arguments. Volumes of “scientific” collections about our ancient past, “expert” and populist exaggerations were printed in history and the Bible, and a new ancient folklore as “Alexander’s Oro” instead of our authentic “Teshkoto” was produced. Domestic ancient heroes and monuments, “scientific” works that have marginalized our Slavic and Christian identities, began to be sung everywhere. This walk by those wiser was interpreted as a small romantic trance, enough to rival the Athenians. In the era of government headed by the Gruevski/Ivanov duo, our ancient origins and antiquation have grown into a fundamental “state interest – Raison d Etat” for manipulating the younger generations and the ordinary people. From Gligorov and Crvenkovski, through Gruevski and Crvenkovski to Gruevski/Ivanov, there was no political wisdom and courage to find solutions with the country’s southern neighbor and accelerate the Euro-Atlantic integration. The primary strategic value of the Macedonian state interest was preserving the name at the cost of not joining either NATO or the EU, nor ensuring border security, citizens’ well-being, good neighborly relations.
Today, following the Prespa Agreement, when we are one step away from joining the Alliance and receiving the date for accession negotiations with the EU, the mental matrix of the majority of citizens is directed towards the future: Will we succeed? Where are we going? What is our future? Did we have to waste so much time, invest so much political asceticism in Macedonian-Greek cacophony, and fight for decades during the slow circular journey to a solution that was to be gained at least two decades ago. We finally succeeded in 2018. We experienced the same plot with a different epilogue in 2001 with the Ohrid Framework Agreement. The 2001 Ohrid Agreement shattered the myth of the country’s “dreadful Albanianisation”. The Prespa Agreement of 2018 has abolished the myth of FYROM in favor of North Macedonia. At the same time, the myth of NATO and the EU’s “closed doors” for North Macedonia was also destroyed. The focus of these shifts was vocalized in the refrain of our national interest.
In our collective memory, national interest will definitely remain as an expression that is most abused by politicians. The wrong privatization and the battle against the octopus of pyramid austerity were launched in the name of the state interest, Tetovo and Gostivar mayors were arrested, Okta was sold, journalists were blackmailed, half the nation was wiretapped, forced mass rallies were organized, protests before the headquarters of the opposition, the kitsch project “Skopje 2014” was built. The previous president refused to hand over a majority government mandate, declaring amnesty to criminals, while his beloved prime minister, the master of populism and nationalism, did not stop calling on national interest. He suggested “to be arrested in exchange of stopping the attacks on national interest and Macedonia”. He called on the Macedonian people to defend the country, but he never said from whom. Just as Dobrica Chosic wrote in his book “Deobe (Divisions)” “The lie has turned into our national interest”.
Indeed, the lie continues to be interpreted as a national interest while fake news continues to be shared. The impression is that a good part of the opposition is a little disoriented. It is the third year since losing power but the old inherited tools are still being nurtured. The turmoil of various scandals and rackets fill the opposition’s fantasy of regaining power. They have been pushing the “Racket” very successfully for five months as an affair of the century in order to forget the sins of the past. Let’s be clear, crime and arbitrariness do not have political colors, the difference being that in the previous regime they were institutionalized. Otherwise, it is a publicly known secret that in some smaller municipalities, local officials continue to invoke the party, I mean state interest when blackmailing directors and imposing their own staffing solutions. As in a quiz, when you don’t know the answer, they are drawn to the eternal trump card – the state interest. This way they disguise ignorance, as well as corruption.
When there is no clear and publicly defined notion of state interest, social consensus on key perspectives is also at stake. Ordinary citizens bombarded by political mascots are confused and ask themselves the following question: what is actually the state interest of North Macedonia? Or to make it clearer, what are the social values ​​we should build as a state? Is it antiquation, boycott, intrusion into the Parliament, or are they European and Atlantic values, the rule of law, the fight against corruption, well-being, citizens’ safety, territorial sovereignty? Some of the political and intellectual elite who interpreted the deal with Greece as “patriotic” do not accept the Prespa Agreement, but ipso facto and the path to NATO and the EU. We know that it had not accepted the Ohrid Agreement before, but the emotions of the conflict were so strong that the consensus was easier to find. Certainly in that historical process the patriotic “no” was present among the great Macedonian sons just as during the Prespa Agreement process.
But what is the state interest really? This expression, often referred to by the French expression raison d’État, is a country’s goals and ambitions, whether economic, military, cultural or otherwise. In Machiavelli’s time, and this is not uncommon nowadays, national interest was a principle on whose behalf the state allowed itself to violate international law for the sake of its own interests. The first registered use of the term was attributed to the 16th century publicist Giovanni Botero. Theories of state interest were developed by Machiavelli, Jean Bodin, and Thomas Hobbes. Machiavelli believed that the government had to rely on force while the ruler was obliged to find common interests that would unite society. Political action inspired by national interest that did not take much account of morality became the basis of Cardinal Richelieu’s foreign policy (1624-1642) during Louis XIII. The national interest of North Macedonia, like any other state, is multi-valued: security and territorial integrity and sovereignty, citizens’ well-being, good neighborly relations, the rule of law, economic prosperity, the fight against corruption and organized crime… values ​​based on the axes of EU and NATO. The road to Euro-Atlantic integration was facilitated by the Ohrid Framework Agreement, the Friendship Treaty with Bulgaria and the Prespa Agreement. This is also the answer to the emblematic question of the great Gauguin: “Where are we going?”

Views expressed in this article are personal views of the author and do not represent the editorial policy of Nezavisen Vesnik