Politics & Power Quote by Boris Trajkovski

Nation-building in the Balkans rarely gets to be abstract. Trajkovski’s line is a deliberate attempt to pry “Macedonia” loose from the region’s default political raw material: ethnicity. In a place where borders, names, and school textbooks can become zero-sum weapons, he offers a different founding myth - not blood, but rules; not ancestry, but access. That’s not mere idealism. It’s a survival strategy.

The intent is twofold. Domestically, he’s speaking over the heads of ethnic entrepreneurs who profit from grievance, insisting that the state’s legitimacy must come from what it delivers: jobs, education, language rights, religious freedom, a functioning political process. Listing these items isn’t ornamental; it’s a checklist of pressure points in a multiethnic society. “Language and educational opportunities” reads like a direct signal to Albanian citizens, for whom schooling and official language status were flashpoints. “Religious rights” nods to identity without letting identity run the show.

The subtext is that ethnic identity is real, but it cannot be allowed to become the constitution’s operating system. Trajkovski is trying to reframe citizenship as a bargain: you don’t have to dissolve your community to belong, but you do have to accept that the state isn’t owned by any one of them.

Context matters: this is the post-Yugoslav 1990s into early 2000s, with Macedonia squeezed between regional wars, internal ethnic tension, and international scrutiny. The rhetoric of “democratic ideals” doubles as a message outward - to Europe and Washington - that stability will be built through pluralism, not majoritarian dominance.