The tone in Sofia in regard to Bulgaria’s recent blocking of North Macedonia’s EU path is set by the far-right VMRO party of the coalition government under the Defence Minister Krassimir Karakachanov, Greece’s former Foreign Affairs Minister Nikos Kotzias said in an interview with EURACTIV.
“Bulgaria has not realised that there has been the birth of a new nation in North Macedonia, which has its own language. Instead of respecting and contributing to the peace and friendship of the peoples of the region, Bulgaria acts in a destabilising way, pretending to be a Hercules without muscles,” Kotzias said.
He said Athens had warned the European Council that Karakachanov was pursuing a policy outside the EU framework after the Bulgarian EU Presidency placed a statue of a lion in the garden of the National Palace of Culture, which was holding a shield with the map of San Stefano reflecting the “Greater Bulgaria”.
Kotzias, the diplomacy chief in the cabinet of Alexis Tsipras, was the architect of the crucial 2018 North Macedonia name change deal that ended a long-standing dispute between Balkan neighbours.
Greece and North Macedonia reached the deal because they managed to build trust via direct contacts, with only a limited presence of mediators, and this should be a lesson for the talks between Athens and Ankara, Kotzias said.
“The presence of the mediator in certain moments when he knows the subject well is necessary, but not throughout the duration of a negotiation,” he said, adding that the “extremely noble and efficient” UN mediator Matthew Nimetz was not present in two-thirds of the negotiation.
“The mediator sometimes makes things more difficult,” he said, explaining that when two sides negotiate through a third party, both are constantly trying to convince the mediator, thereby only cementing their respective positions.
On the other hand, he said, when two negotiate directly, they are more specific: “The two sides highlight their main issues and then explore if they can put them in a positive package for both”.
Kotzias said the attacks against his family, his own life, and partly the attacks on his counterpart in North Macedonia, Nikola Dimitrov, helped both sides realise what was happening. Both in Greece and in North Macedonia, there were many opponents to any type of bilateral agreement.
“One night in Vienna we sat down to talk about those who were attacking us. We realised that the issue is not Macedonians versus Greeks, but an issue between those who did not want a solution, the so-called professionals of non-solution, and those who tried to move towards the logic of a good solution,” he told EURACTIV.
The veteran Greek diplomat has published a book entitled “The logic of solution”, where he said that in a negotiation one should not fight, but prove to the other side that there is a common interest in a productive and creative solution.
