Success Quote by Boris Trajkovski

Trajkovski is warning that legitimacy is a fragile currency: you can’t ask people to buy into “international values” if they feel the international system won’t recognize who they are. Coming from a Balkan statesman in the early 2000s, the line carries the aftershock of Yugoslavia’s collapse, ethnic conflict, and the constant bureaucratic bargaining over names, borders, minorities, and sovereignty. In that world, “international community” isn’t a warm abstraction; it’s NATO interventions, EU accession criteria, UN language, peace agreements, and the quiet power to validate or erase identities.

The phrase “lose their confidence or trust” is political realism dressed as moral concern. Trajkovski isn’t just defending identity as a cultural right; he’s arguing it as a prerequisite for stability. Denial of “personal identity” is framed as a breach that doesn’t merely hurt feelings - it corrodes the entire social contract between citizens and global institutions. The subtext is aimed upward at diplomats and neighboring states: if you treat identity as negotiable paperwork, you invite backlash, radicalization, and the rise of leaders who promise recognition through confrontation.

Rhetorically, he fuses the intimate and the institutional. “Personal identity” sounds private, almost psychological; “values and principles of the international community” sounds like policy. The power of the sentence is the bridge between them: people won’t defend a rules-based order that refuses to see them. It’s also a subtle critique of liberal internationalism’s blind spot - that universalism, when applied without regard for lived belonging, can feel like another form of domination.