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Crossing borders through Prespa, part I: The democratic ethos within national identities and the ethics of truth within Prespa Agreement COSTAS STRATILATIS

28 January 2019

Costas let me first thank you for accepting our invitation to have this interview. You teach constitutional law at the University of Nicosia in Cyprus, is that correct?

I also thank you very much for the invitation. Yes, that’s correct. I am an associate professor at the Law Department of the University of Nicosia. I earned my PhD in constitutional law from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, where I taught for a while philosophy and methodology of law. I have also a background in political philosophy, which I studied at a Master level in LSE during 2007 and 2008. By the way, it was in London during those studies when I met the first Macedonian I had ever known. His open-minded attitude towards me impressed me a lot. This was a sign that something had already changed in me. I mean “me” as a Greek who forms part of, and who belongs to, a cultural, historical and linguistic community, notwithstanding my resistance to the ugly aspects of such belonging and participation. The way in which the spell of the name issue was dispelled confirmed my belief that national identities are not things immovable and fixed once and for all, although they are things that precede each one of us individually. National identities are not bonds blood, or some sort of bonds which are composed by our being thrown into this or that linguistic community, due to the contingencies of history, as they are aided by the happy or by the unhappy “accidents” of geography. Nor is it only the case that we share a common historical destiny, abstractly conceived. It seems that national identities have a surplus value beyond that level, and that they retain it even in the age of “globalization”, especially in the age of globalization.

So, what is your approach to national identities?

Of course, it was always the case that national identities tend to become fetishized subjectivities through which we measure our loyalty or our disobedience not only to the “motherland”, but also to our social, ideological, political and even geopolitical situatedness. National identities are also typically the counterpart of some sort of patriotic consciousness, which is linked with our political and ideological self-understanding. This is so even when we deny this, by saying e.g. that “I am first of all Greek and then my political choices come”. This is a political and ideological stance; it may also imply ideological tendencies which are endemic to particular social classes; and it may allude to the way we perceive the position of our country within the various historical destinies of countries and peoples within geopolitics.

On the other hand, national identities should not be, and cannot be, so easily equated with a “mere” political, ideological or social question. Some among us have lately attempted to dissolve the spell of nationalism by taking recourse to the notion of “constitutional patriotism”, i.e. the sort of patriotism which focuses on the values of a constitution and on the constitution as the supreme value in our political-national identity. Even without knowing it, when using this label, “constitutional patriotism”, we wash our hands of the

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messy business of irrational passions and aspirations, of blood, the mesh of history, in fact. However, constitutions too have a history, although in their legal appearance and performance they often tend to “forget” this. Besides, for the most part, the citizens of countries which are not undergoing some sort of a crisis take their constitution or at least their core values and structures as given by some revered “constitutional fathers” of the past and as relatively unchangeable. Constitutional patriotism is certainly different, but at last instance not so different from the notion of patriotism which is connected with a common historical destiny.

In any case, patriotic consciousness can be flavored by many other elements apart from blood, language, religion, and culture, apart from an abstract notion of a common historical destiny, and also apart from constitutional patriotism. The variations in our patriotic consciousness depend upon our social, political, ideological, cultural and metaphysical situatedness. Surely, there is always a personal element in what it means to be a Greek or a Macedonian. But there is also something that supervenes our personality, even our collective personality, as it were. There is something that transcends our present situation too. There is something that exceeds us, and this “something” is not exhausted by the notions of a historical destiny, of a common language, of geography or even of a constitution. This “something” is not necessarily a bad thing either, although in real world it often is.

So, what is this “something”?

Let me attempt to track it through an account of our present situation –what I am going to say is implicitly connected with the Prespa situation.

In real political world, national identities acquire their use value mostly through the medium of passions and of emotions such as pride and resentment, hate of the “enemy” and love of the “friend”. Consider for example the imaginary bonds that unite Greeks and Serbs. These bonds were for some people so strong as to lead them to go to Bosnia and to participate in the theater of the atrocities which took place there –whether knowingly or not, whether they actually participated in the atrocities, this is another matter.

What matters here is the following: Political passions are not by definition a bad thing. Anyway, there is no meaning in trying to exorcize them. Only that an overdose of nationalistic passions may breed even a massacre, and certainly it breeds demagoguery, at the same time that it may also reinforce positive political virtues. Sometimes, this applies in our case, I mean the Prespa situation, demagoguery calls a nation into “arms”. It recruits the nation in the name of the people and even in the name of democracy. Ethno-populism, as combined with an oppressing version of democracy, conceived as a homogenous body of people, can be a very useful instrument for every sort of exclusionary politics. And it can bring about every sort of ugly things and sayings, as the ones which made their appearance in your country a few months ago and as the ones which did not accidentally pop up in my country very recently.

The combination of populism with nationalism can be poisonous. It is also a useful tool for the development of diplomatic strategies in the wider context of geopolitical maneuvers, which spread and reproduce a metaphysical sense of historical destiny on a larger scale. It is this metaphysics of our hopeless presence, that is, of our absence as rational agents, in a geopolitical theater without boundaries and horizons, in a blind geopolitical destiny, which

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breeds the resentment and the anxious expressions of national pride that nurture many populisms and nationalisms nowadays.

In any case, when we take national identities as a matter of an immovable historical or linguistic or some other patriotic or constitutional destiny, we cannot help taking them as fixed more or less. I mean as something that stays beyond our reach for the most part, as something that can be frozen in time and which can move a bit further or even explode at other times, but as something which is more or less fixed and fixated on reproducing itself, nonetheless. Even terrorist bombs are fixed, and they are also fixated. They are the definition of fixation, in fact. But I would rather compare the classic notion of national identities with ready-to-cook meals which are stored in the refrigerator of our souls, of our political ideology and of our politicians, to be defrosted when appropriate or when necessary. For example, in a blame game should the party or the cook of the day fails –fortunately, the Prespa party did not fail, but it could have failed.

So far so good, as long as we are speaking about nationalism and national identities classically understood. Nevertheless, I firmly believe that this is not the whole story. At least, Prespa is there to remind us that this is not the whole story; and it is a powerful reminder, to say the least.

First of all, Prespa is a reminder that national identities are not only a matter of fixation onto some immovable historical truth. Prespa is also a reminder that it is not only the case that we are being thrown into our national identity without having a say, apart from the fact that we can negotiate how to split the pieces of this identity between us. Furthermore, it is not only the case that, more often than not, when the issue at stake is not related with the high politics of “national issues”, we can just leave our national identities aside. That we can just put them back into the lower selves of our refrigerator, so to speak, in order to leave space for other, more “important” things: developing low level routines of friendship out of gentleness or out of curiosity; doing business and commerce out of joint interest; doing science out of an abstract faith in the borderless nature of the so-called “academia”; and so on. National identities are always becoming. At the same time, national identities are still omnipresent. Prespa is also a reminder of that. National identities play an important role even in the most nation-less types of affairs, such as academic affairs. Ask any professor of law outside the mainstream European and American universities, who struggles to survive in a world of international rankings and of prestigious conferences of recycled academic circles, a world that marginalizes those parts of national jurisprudence which are interesting only for the “indigenous” lawyers, and she would have some things to say in this regard. Even Nobel peace prizes are influenced by the national origins of the candidates.

Nevertheless, all these things, low level routines of friendship, as you phrased it, business and commerce, and for sure academic networks help overcome waring nationalisms. After all, as you said, you met your first Macedonian friend in a university, on occasion of your studies in a university.

That’s true. In any case, what I cannot so easily accept is to understand our world as something like a colorful puzzle cut into pieces, with each one representing a national identity separated from the other before one tries to make the puzzle. The historical themes which define to a certain extent our national identities are merged, and the merge exists from the outset, so that the historical themes which correspond with certain pieces of the puzzle are as much separated as they are also destined to be united, actually to be blended.

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This is a blend that coalesces the power of each and every historical theme. For example, the evocative power of the history of the region of Macedonia, also its educative power for European peoples (and I would add its geopolitical and its economic power, meaning that this history could attract many “investments”, diplomatic as well as commercial ones, some of which could be directed elsewhere in the absence of the positive momentum of Prespa), at least the symbolic and the emotive power of the history of the region that is called Macedonia is enhanced, after all, by the so called “Balkanization” or by “the Macedonian salad”, as the Italians call it. This applies to all identities which have flourished in this region throughout the twenty-two centuries which separate the era of Great Alexander from the last decades of the 19th century, when the upper classes of the Rum millet of the Ottoman Empire began being captured by the modern notion of nationalism. The imaginary unilinear lines that today’s nationalisms draw towards the dawn of history (and even before that) are extremely imaginary in what concerns the region and the neighborhood of Macedonia. One might safely link the extremism of nationalism in Balkans with the extreme difficulty in constructing such unilinear lines here. What we neglect in this process are extremely rich, extremely interesting and complicated historical periods and instances, which I cannot even begin naming here. The Great Alexander affair among us did not produce only some kitschy aesthetics in this nice modern city, Skopje. It produced also a kitschy understanding of our history. This would be all right, if the emptiness of kitsch did not include our blindness towards a real historical treasure, which we have to share and not to distribute. It is still out there, unexplored by our national consciousness, because what our leaders taught us to be interested in was … Great Alexander!

More generally, the power of our histories cannot be accounted for only through taking recourse to the classic unilinear imagination of nationalism or to a distinction as simple as the one between enemies and friends. Nor can the power of our histories, which of course empowers or disempowers our national identities (depending upon how we take them), be reduced to a simplistic way of situating ourselves on a map of political geography. I would rather say that the power of our merged histories coalesces or diminishes by way of a constant play between the selective intensification of one or two distinctive characters and the downplaying of all other historical realities and “virtualities” –that is, historical possibilities that did not materialize, although they could have been. Our national identities have to do with our history more than with anything else. But history is ever so complicated to be distributed among nations through some sort of imaginary splitting up of the past. In Balkans this cannot be done. That’s all! I would write this on the front page of school history textbooks, if I could.

Someone could object here that what you say may very well apply to the history of the Balkans and even more to the history of Thessaloniki, your favorite city, by the way, as you told me. However, the same is not necessarily the case with other regions of the world or even with the Balkans as they are today.

That’s why I spoke of virtualities. I defined them as possibilities that did not materialize although they could have been. Let me add that virtualities are also possibilities that do not exist before our attempt to make sense of them, while they are not made out of thin air or out of merely dreamful thinking. There is something out there that allows what is virtual to become actual or to remain virtual for that matter. This is not to say that the seed already contains the possibility of a tree. Virtualities are something else. They are like fields of problematization rather than unilinear paths to solutions. The meaning of terms, of events

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and of agreements needs both solutions and virtualities that remain dormant, in order to develop over time. National identities can become fields of problematization, even without the need to add to the discussion the prospect of some re-solution. For example, today, for many amongst the Greek people, our national identity has become, not only or mainly a problem to be “solved”, but also and most importantly a field of serious problematization about our political destiny; about the role of the Church in that destiny; about the insistent power of the Golden Dawn Party, that is our Nazis party; about the influence of this insistence on the rhetoric and on the strategic moves of several other political parties; about the rise of Orbanism in our country and in Europe; about our democratic and European future, about our democratic qua European future after all. If you add to this future-oriented problematization a very troubled past, full of wounds, many of which were caused by the extremist version of nationalism, you may get a scenery full of virtualities.

In any case, virtualities are possibilities which open up the prospect of a problematization more than the prospect of a re-solution. It is something like the links in a text that you find in a webpage. You do not know in advance where the link will lead you, and there are many links in that text. And there is always the possibility that if you click on some among them, you will never return back to the original text. The tour may lead you somewhere else, but there was always a meaning from the outset to become virtualized. There were always some parameters that determined, and which delimited, your tour around different texts and contexts. National identities, and many other things, can be assimilated into virtualities of our historical-political past qua destiny.

Now, you mentioned Balkans and Thessaloniki, and you were correct. Yes, Thessaloniki before the Balkan Wars could be taken as the prime example of what I am speaking about –I may suggest Mark Mazower’s Salonica: City of Ghosts to whomever wants to have a clue about this. This city does not exist today, of course. But when I was reading this book, I did not allow myself to be allured by the prideful feeling that Thessaloniki was the only case falling under that class, that category which I may call multinationalism beyond the nation-state. Of course, Thessaloniki was unique. But I believe that it was not exclusive in its uniqueness. You may find versions or segments of similar histories all over the world, for example in several regions of big cities like Paris or London or Mumbai or Istanbul or Athens, if you wish. We have the tendency to call some of these cities cosmopolitan, and some of them deserve this title, but if you have the eyes to look deeper you may track what I am trying to spell out. I am speaking neither of cosmopolitanism nor of multiculturalism. I am speaking about a merge and not about co-existence, about a merge that does not attempt to pacify or to celebrate the difference as such. It only tries to pacify the extremist actions that may stem from a distorted version of the difference. It also tries to mediate the difference, not by protecting it (this is too paternalistic an approach), but by virtualizing the meanings that compose our national identities. But I am not taking multiculturalism as a good thing per se, because for the most part it is a priori premised on the clarity of the distinctiveness of ethnic or national cultures. The dialogical situation comes after, and it concerns mostly the political, legal and educative-system relations between nations, cultures or ethnicities. Besides, the primary concern of multiculturalism is to construct rights so as not to have one group oppressing another, on the one hand, and so as not to allow power-relations within one group to become oppressive within that group, in the name of the nation- or ethnicity collective rights, on the other hand. The best versions of multiculturalism are interested in a dialogical treatment of the socio-psychological background of the issues that arise in this or that situation, but for the most part multiculturalism is not so much interested in the

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blended history of nations. Therefore, it is not so useful a tool for the understanding of Balkan affairs. My approach, on the other hand, begins from the blending of the historical themes that inform each and every national identity in this region. My approach begins from this region, and not from some universalist notion of multicultural or cosmopolitan justice. Cosmopolitanism is of course by definition a universalist theory, and it is premised on a strong notion of individualism, which renders the blending of historical identities a personal issue for the most part.

Be that as it may, I do not believe that it is only the case that, at last instance, each one of us is doomed to be part of the image of one and only piece. A piece which of course participates in the larger image of the puzzle and which interacts with the other pieces, but it does so through a simple plot or through a specific scenery, which may have been designed by the masters or by the blind forces of globalization and of Europeanization or by any other forces beforehand. National identities can be assimilated to all these things, realistically speaking. But, again realistically speaking, national identities are by definition a puzzling thing. This means that they tend to become a democratic thing as well.

It is self-understood that you need to elaborate more on the relationship between national identities and democracy. Of course, every nation may be proud of its democratic institutions and of its democratic history, if it has some. But I guess that this is not all what you mean to say.

You’ re right again. What you said plays a role, but it’s not the whole story. From the democratic point of view, national identities may participate not only in democratic history, in history as a democratic thing. Democracy also opens the door for national identities to enter the world of radical imagination and of reasonable communication. The latter can be driven by the ethos of democratic and agonistic deliberation. By the ethos of open, fierce but respectful confrontation with irritating truths, with unconvenient clashes of historical truths, if we want to transfer the issue of democratic nationalism to the sphere of international relations and of identity politics within that sphere. By respectful confrontation I mean one that does not attempt to eliminate or exorcize the conflict. Even the hope that the conflict will someday disappear is virtually oppressive. At the same time, however, the confrontation with the historical truth can be democratic only if one is committed to continue the process, notwithstanding obstacles which may exceed her powers, in the sense that they may call her to overcome what she is.

This brings us again closer to our main topic, which is the Prespa Agreement, of course. So, what is your take on that Agreement from the viewpoint of national identity politics? Did we go beyond we are?

National identities cannot escape what Badiou, twenty-five years ago, called the ethics of truth. Truth, historical and democratic truth in this context, but what Badiou meant was truth in a deeper sense, truth is a stubborn process, rather than the correspondence of some words in an international agreement with a state of affairs or with an idea, if we speak of moral truths –there were several moral truths in the Prespa situation, as it evolved, but this does not exhaust the moral of the story. There was also another notion of the ethics of truth, which was related with the particular situation at hand.

For Badiou, the subject of the truth-process is an unrepeatable singularity who is herself, distinguishable among all other singularities, only that she is also what exceeds herself due

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to the fact that she is permeated by the passage in which the truth-process consists. Without this passage to what exceeds us, without our fidelity to this passage, all search for every kind of truths would be meaningless. This passage affects our subjectivity, our identity for sure. Thus, the truth-process and its ethics refer to multiple singularities who recognize each other as bearers of separate identities. But the latter are also differences, they are not mere repetitions of the same, at least inasmuch we long for a truth that may even exceed us; that is, insofar as we long for a real truth, and not for some harmless repetition or illumination of what we already could have known. The singularities who com-pose (and not co-impose) the truth are permeated by a process which is open even to a radical break with what they previously were. The truth-process requires one to be consistently present in the possibility of a passage into becoming the same qua the other or even to become someone else, to be self-less, even for a moment. This possibility is encapsulated in any truth-process –otherwise, there would be nothing out there to become true. Truth is becoming, and following Badiou, who follows Spinoza in this respect, I would say that the truth-process is the perseverance of our fidelity to be present in processes which might alter what we already are within what we are. The ethics of truth requires some sort of perseverance into our being qua becoming. It requires from us to be present and to be punctual in any process of uncovering, however hurtful, which could eventually elucidate anew and transform our subjectivities.

The ethics of truth require also our subjection to a passage which could lead to another situation, even if this needs to pass through a radical break with all previous situations. In any case, we are called to remain faithful to our desiring even what exceeds us at the present moment. We are called to remain stubbornly faithful to our partially being what exceeds us. Thus, the truth-process is also immanent to our being subjects of desiring. Desires can never be fulfilled, as everybody knows. Hence our perseverance into desiring truth is inescapable. As far as I remember, Badiou recalls here Lacan’s axiom: never give up your desire, which means: never give up the part of yourself which you do not know. The part that exceeds you as a bearer of this or that identity.

Nevertheless, the ethics of truth, the truth-process, is first of all related with changing a situation and not only or merely a subjectivity. This brings me to the Prespa condition of our situation. For me, the Prespa Agreement symbolizes the stubborn insistence, the stubborn resolution, the stubborn commitment to be punctual when being uncovered as a historical self; when uncovering the unconvenient events of your historical past, present and future. Of course, history is ever so complicated for this endeavor to have a happy end, or an ending at all. But what matters is the punctuality and the consistency in our being present in such processes of uncovering, which might even lead to a breakage with our past. Prespa did not bring about such a breakage, but what’s important is that it brought about some sort of breakage in our present political situation, in both countries and in their relationship, first of all, but also in the grey scenery of European politics and of international relations more generally. At least, we may claim that many among us were consistently present in a process of self-less composing and re-composing several political, geopolitical and historical truths. This could be taken as an expression of the ethics of truth, which is an existential condition of our (geo-)political being.

The liberal axioms of tolerance and of impartiality, the liberal value of respecting the opinion of the other; the radical democratic impulse to construct new situations or even new worlds through collective action (in the Prespa case, the said axioms, value and impulse have been

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transferred to the sphere of international relations); the post-modernist opening to otherness and to unexpected eventualities as the deep grammar of the Political; the ethos of democratic agonism, the ethos of celebrating rather than suppressing plurality, the ethos of airing discords rather than lamenting their symptoms; the political virtues which are indispensable for one to enter into a respectful confrontation with painful issues rather than letting them aside to freeze; rather than granting to this or to that political agent the opportunity to manipulate those frozen products; rather than allowing the same and the same wounds to be scratched by any given contingency; the dialogic learning process through which mutual understanding and some political settlements can be reached; all these things come after, and are in-formed by, the ethics of truth. I believe that the latter is a precious democratic thing, and that we should be stubborn in our attempt to transfer it into the sphere of international relations and of geopolitics. I believe that we should be proud of the Prespa Agreement, in the name of the ethics of truth.

There were some politicians in our countries, you and I know, four leaders in particular and tens of members of our parliaments, who were adequately stubborn and consistent and resolute, in a process which might alter what they were. At the same time, the situation tested their fidelity and perseverance to what we could become, including what exceeds us as citizens and as historical agents. No one believed that this result could be achieved so rapidly. All these people were punctual, not only in their rendezvous with history, but also in their rendezvous with the ethics of truth. And there were some hundreds of thousands of people in your country, I reassure you that there are also hundreds of thousands in my country too, who were also stubbornly and consistently punctual in that rendezvous. This opened up the democratic space necessary for all the other things and qualities and virtues I mentioned above to play a role in the construction of the Prespa Agreement.

In my view, this political-existential condition, the ethics of truth, tells much about the survival of the Prespa Agreement against the cataclysm of fake news, of fake fears, of real threats, and of ethno-populism, of demagoguery. The ethics of truth also tells much about the survival of the Prespa process against a distorted version of truth, which I would call the truth of the political moralist, as Kant distinguishes him from the moral politician. In our case, the political moralist promised gallows, not guillotines, to the traitors of his one version of our national re-volution qua repetition of the same and the same historical themes. Between the ethics of truth and the political moralist, there were millions of people who just had a vague idea of history, as they learnt it. The attitude of the political moralist transformed this vague idea into a distorted version of historical truth, or let say, for the sake of the argument, into a particular version of historical truth. The problem is that some hundred of thousands among these people began hating whomever did not want to share their version of historical truth, because of the attitude of the political moralist.

Be sure, the demagogues in both countries express a part of us as well. The difference is that some among us became able to see one simple logical truth: If our understanding and our convictions are right and justified when adopting the classical nationalist stance, then this means that we grant to ourselves a right, the right to dictate names and many other things to the other, who is portrayed, let not say as the “enemy” (though this was the case with the speeches of some members of the Greek parliament, and I guess that this was the case with some speeches in your country too), but simply as “the other”. Now, following the same logic, if we are justifiably entitled to have such a right, to call names and to raise fingers to the other, if we are entitled to such a right with the proper meaning of the word “right”,

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then the other, being a nationalist too, is also entitled to have and exercise exactly the same right. Thus, our options have as follows: either we will eternally be pointing fingers and names to each other, or we may find a solution through an imaginary war. This is their dilemma, an imaginary one, of course, but a dilemma which unleashes several destructive socio-psychological forces to play their part in this theater of sous-reality that we lived during these last months. Let us now say: This dilemma expresses a part in each one of us, a small part, if you wish, but a part, nonetheless. And let us take the responsibility to understand that the political moralist is also a member of the truth-process. He is not the exorcized other, he is part of a self-less process. Truth needs to be self-less in this sense too. The millions of people, about whom I spoke above, and the thousands of people who began hating the other, are also part of this process.

This is Prespa Agreement: a confrontation of the self-less part of each one of us with history, with the possibility that history is not as we learnt it; with the possibility that history can be submitted to a truth-process; and with the fact that we make political history. Prespa is also our deliberate choice to deal openly with the wounds that will never be healed. And it is an appearance of the ethics of truth in Balkan history and in geopolitics.

Some may evade this confrontation, some may evade this choice and the ethical stance altogether, and they have every right to do so. Some others may not do so, and they have also every right to do so. Democracy decided, after it deliberated. Everyone participates in a democratic process, and the truth-process cannot afford not being somehow democratic.

Yet, whatever the result of the democratic procedures in both countries could have been, just the original signing of the Prespa Agreement would always be out there, to symbolize a gesture towards the ethics of truth. To symbolize an opening to otherness, an opening to what exceeds us, even a generous opening to “the enemy”, if you wish. Even to the enemy and even to the demagogue within each and every one of us, as a multiple singularity who is enmeshed, willingly or not, in a truth-process.

This is the “something” that constitutes the democratic surplus in our national identities.

You make it sound as if Prespa Agreement was always there. Isn’t this a very optimistic and deterministic view of history?

I wouldn’t say that this is necessarily so. The spirit of Prespa was virtually there always. And, yes, the forces and the powers that led to the signing of the Prespa Agreement were also there, not always, but since long ago. It was not only a coincidence that brought Tsipras into power, due to an economic crisis. It was not only a coincidence that brought Zaev into power, due to the culmination of a political crisis in your country. Even if Tsipras was not in power, Zaev and Dimitrov and the six hundred thousand citizens of North Macedonia would probably have been enough to reach this result or a similar one.

This is all but to say that Prespa was an easy accomplishment. Since the Agreement concerns a vital issue of national identity, and since the complications of this issue in both countries were somehow (although not to the same extent and not in the same way) very serious, an opening to otherness and to what exceeds us was certainly required on behalf of our virtuous leaders. The rapidity of the success could not be predicted by any rational calculation before the event. Furthermore, the implementation of the Prespa process was all but an easy one. In fairness, I believe that, if on the Greek side there was someone else than Tsipras and Kotzias, the impediments to the first part of the implementation process could

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be harder. I feel that if some Greek right-wing politician was in power and he was the one who had signed the Agreement, of course he would celebrate it as the biggest achievement of Greek foreign affairs politics after our accession to the Eurozone, but also it would be possible to hear public statements which would make the number of the courageous people who voted in the referendum in your country much smaller. This would affect your amendment process, and with just one vote less in your Parliament, this process could have failed. I do not think that Merkel or the other European or world powers would be able to bring about this result by themselves, as some opponents of the Agreement implicitly argue, in order to diminish what cannot be diminished in any way.

Still, I would depict the Prespa Agreement more as a long-term learning process –and it will always be a healing as well as a traumatizing process– than as a glorious or infamous moment, depending on the side you take. This approach does not necessarily deny the importance of historical moments, of momentary gestures and of momentous diplomatic decisions. The courageous attitude of the leaders who signed this Agreement was a constitutive factor for the event to materialize and then to become visible to everyone. The consistence, the stubbornness of those leaders to bring about the right blend of political commitment, of political interest and of patriotism in their parliaments, overcoming obstacles which I can only imagine, played also a significant role in the implementation process up to the point we reached now. Our eros for philosophy should not blind us to the fact that what we are speaking about is real human beings, with their talents and with their vices.

So, yes, Prespa was not always there, and it was certainly a surprising and unexpected event. Surely, the value of what our leaders did cannot in any way be diminished. Prespa does not fall under the category of painless, minor, small scale gestures; the same as offering a gift to a stranger or even of granting asylum to a refugee, so to speak. Not that I underestimate these gestures, quite the contrary. Without them all ethics is lost, and we are lost as well.

Prespa Agreement, the process that preceded it and the process that will follow it, can be depicted as a large-scale gesture, as a shaking of hands in the spirit of truth, understood as a process which was virtually there, which was empowered by the signing of the Agreement and which is to be continued in a much more favorable environment.

Also, Prespa voices a message to a much larger audience, the world audience I would say. This message will outlive its protagonists, for that, I am sure. The message is simple and clear: Even in Balkans, infamous for their strong nationalistic passions and for the atrocities that stemmed from these passions in the not so remote past, diplomacy, virtuous politicians, peaceful deliberation and the prospect of good-neighbourly relations, a process of truth can prevail. Truth-processes can also prevail over that kind of populism which invests on a waring notion of nationalism and which has produced many ugly things and many ugly sayings, even uglier silences, in both countries.

Of course, Prespa Agreement would not be translated into visible action if political and historical contingencies had not brought into power some virtuous democratic leaders in both countries. But geopolitical times matter as well. We live in a time of a particular geopolitical antagonism, whose peripheral interests include Western Balkans and the accession of the countries of Western Balkans to NATO and to the EU. Of course, this antagonism will always be there.

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Therefore, for you, the Prespa Agreement has not obliterated the difference on the name.

Legally speaking, I would say that it almost obliterated it, though there are many things to be settled according to the less prominent articles of the Agreement –the ones which have to do with trademarks, the ones which have to do with textbooks of history and some other ones. But yes, politically speaking, the Prespa Agreement has not obliterated the difference on the name. How could this be so, as long as the difference is there, now in the minds and after some months in the memories of many people in both countries? The difference is out there and here, and it will not be obliterated from the attitudes that are going to stay obedient to these memories for many years to come. Causing troubles, or not, this is not the issue here. In any case, I hope that if troubles emerge, they will be minor ones, not so big as the ones of the past –I never forget that when we were celebrating our heroic resistance to ghosts, you were starving out of our embargo, and our black marketeers were there to take advantage of the situation too. But surely, an international agreement cannot obliterate an identity issue from the minds of the people, at least not from the minds of those who choose to stubbornly stick to their own version of historical truth –there is no inch of irony in my words here, quite the opposite: these are also subjects participating in the truth-process I was speaking about. They have every right to be insistent and consistent in their own version of the truth. Politically speaking, they have every right to do so, as long as they respect the fact that there exists out there an international agreement. This agreement provides for some other processes, which should not be frustrated by illegal acts, such as an attempt to bring violence into the Parliament. Apart from that, everyone can choose to remain blind or indifferent to the truths that historians of his own country keep revealing. That’s a democratic right as well, and again I mean it as much punctually and seriously as one can. We cannot afford becoming ironic towards the ones who lost this battle.

Be that as it may, the ethics of truth that prepared the Prespa Agreement was operative since several years ago. And it will always be there to mediate whichever difficulties within, or even differences between, the two countries may arise in the future.

On the other hand, Prespa Agreement has already transferred us to another, to a more promising stage. To a more promising age as well, since Prespa is also an expression of historical maturity, not only for the Balkans, I hope. The benefits of its message apply not only to Greece and to North Macedonia, not only to the other Balkan countries, but –I hope—to other corners of our wider neighborhood. To say the least, Prespa is a message that leadership committed to truth, good foreign affairs technocrats (why not?), political virtues and the courage of some hundreds of thousands of people matter even in such cynical times, if the blend and the timing of all these elements is the right one.

At the same time, Prespa Agreement is one of the happiest instances of internationalization and of transnationalization; an example that globalization is not always bad, I would say. Why should we not say this as well? Happy smiles are here, and they are ones which should be shared with all lovers of peace and of transnational democracy worldwide. Globalization is this thing too.

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Crossing borders through Prespa, part II: The constitutional aspects of the Prespa processApart from globalization, you used the terms “internationalization” and “transnationalization”. Could you elaborate a bit more on them? Should we now say that our constitution is an internationalized or a transnationalized constitution? Is not this an affront to our national sovereignty, is not this compromising our democratic autonomy? At least, I guess that many people who read this text believe or suspect that this is the case. Besides, last Friday, the Prespa Agreement was ratified by the Greek Parliament, and I guess that Greeks take this as an expression of your national sovereignty, of your democratic autonomy within the premises of your constitution. On the other hand, the Republic of Macedonia had to undergo a constitutional amendment process which included a referendum and whose main content was the changing of the name of our state. The motivation was of course our hope that your state will not block the accession of our state, the state of North Macedonia from now on, to the EU and to NATO. What do you think about all these things in your capacity as a constitutional theorist?

Very-very interesting questions. I should take them one at a time, since things are very delicate on this ground.

Let me first just mention that it is not true that all Greeks perceived the ratification of the Agreement by the Greek Parliament as an expression of our national sovereignty, and of democratic autonomy. Quite the opposite, in what concerns the opponents of the Agreement. Some among them evem claimed, or implied, that the ratification of the Agreement was beyond the powers of this Parliament, or of any Parliament. But let me not expand upon this. I find more interesting the constitutional implications of the Agreement for North Macedonia.

Yes, you phrased it correctly, when you said that the Agreement changes the name of your “state”. To be more precise, we could say that the Agreement provided for an amendment process through the name of your state was changed. In any case, legally speaking, and before everything else, the Prespa Agreement is an agreement between two states (that is, an international agreement) whose primary aim is to settle the differences that are described in two Security Council Resolutions. Reading these Resolutions, you don’t find some complicated mysteries of legal science. The so-called “differences” can be broken down into the following words: a difference between Greece and the state which was admitted in the United Nations with the provisional name “the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia” over the name of that second state. And it is a difference “which needs to be resolved in the interest of the maintenance of peaceful and of good-neighbourly relations in the region” –this is the wording of Resolution 817 (1993) of the Security Council. Therefore, simply stated, Prespa is an international agreement about the name of one of the two contracting states.

Admittedly, this makes it a rather weird agreement. Nevertheless, it is not an agreement about how the people in your country should perceive their national, ethnic or any other identity. This is very clear, and it would anyway be contrary to international law, if the self-understanding of the citizens of North Macedonia, as bearers of whichever national identity they wish to bear, was dictated by the Agreement. The same applies for Greek citizens, of course. The most one could argue is that, mainly through Article 7 of the Agreement, the

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state organs of the two Parties are required to abstain from action which would jeopardize the distinction between the historical and cultural heritage of the two nations. If Article 7 has anything to do with national sovereignty, then it certainly empowers this sovereignty. This applies to both parties. This is a win-win and not a warlike legal situation. I should add, second, that, although Article 7 certainly touches the issue of national identities, inasmuch this issue concerns the action or even the inaction of state organs, it does so by illuminating the national identities rather than by curtailing or by offending them. An opponent of globalization could even argue that to illuminate your national identity nowadays empowers your nation, in the sense that it makes it even more distinct in an era in which all distinctions are blurred. I do not agree with this approach, I hope that this was made clear in the first part of this interview. What I am just saying is that there is no reason to construct a danger for your national identity out of thin air; much less, when this air became clearer.

Still, what we have is a weird agreement, I mean an unpreceded one, as regards its main subject-matter. Prima facie, it becomes even more weird when one reads Article 1, paragraph 4, whereby the Second Party (this means the state which was until then provisionally named as the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia) undertakes the obligation not only to commence but also to conclude in toto a constitutional amendment procedure, which could optionally be preceded by a referendum. The contents of this amendment procedure are specified in paragraph 12 of the first Article of the Agreement: Your state undertook the obligation to incorporate the name and the terminologies of the previous paragraphs into your Constitution. Your state also undertook the obligation to proceed to the “appropriate amendments” of its Preamble, of Article 3, which has to do with the procedure of changing borders, and of Article 49, which has to do with the care of the Republic for the diaspora. And in Article 4 your state, this time also the Greek state, declared that no amendments and no interpretation of their Constitutions will ever form the basis for territorial claims and for interferences with the internal affairs of the other state “in any form and for any reason, including for the protection of the status and rights of any persons that are not its citizens”. A weird clause, for the innocent third, which I will not comment here.

My interest lies in the fact that we experienced a constitutional amendment which brought about serious revisions, at least prima facie. This is so not only because of the change in the name of the state, but also because the amendment revised the Preamble, which is a very delicate and always a puzzling issue for constitutional theory, not least with regard to the question of whether it is an operative part of a Constitution. In view of these facts, a constitutional theorist would say that, through this amendment, your state organs brought about a change in the constitutional identity of your country. This term is also a complicated one, and I will not enter this discussion here. I can only state my strong view that, despite appearances and despite the claims of the leaders of VMRO, there has not been a change even in the constitutional identity of your state, at least not a significant one. I am ready to elaborate on this issue, if needed. On the other hand, certainly, some very serious changes in your Constitution took place. And they were ones which had to do, indirectly, with your national identity, although, as I said, from a legal point of view, the contents of the Agreement did not touch this identity in any way other than illuminating what it should be for state organs.

Therefore, one could argue that in the case of North Macedonia, the labeling of amendment power as derivative constituent power is justified. Amendment power is a constituted

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power, in the sense that it is exercised in accordance with the provisions of the Constitution. In this regard, the amendment power is similar to the ordinary legislative power. However, the amendment power changes the Constitution, and not ordinary law. It is a reminder, one could say, of the original constitution-making power of the people. This reminder is symbolically expressed in the provisions that require special procedures for an amendment. In many countries, the Constitution even prohibits the amendment of basic constitutional principles or of certain constitutional clauses, while in most countries the amendment process is more “demanding” than the ordinary legislative process. In your Constitution the process which is prescribed by Articles 129-131 includes the well-known two-third majority votes in your Parliament; that is, the procedure which I am sure that you closely followed during the last months. However, there is no provision expressly prohibiting the revision of this or of that substance of your Constitution. Thus, everything went in accordance with the rules of your democratic Constitution. Therefore, formally speaking, you lost nothing in what concerns your constitutional and democratic autonomy.

Of course, this is just a formalistic legal account of the process. There is always the question: Ok, we followed the procedures that our Constitution provides, but whatever we did was done under the pressure of another state, which was effectively blocking our accession to NATO and which would block our accession to the EU. One could add: Everything was done under the pressure of the international organizations which were interested in the outcome of this dispute, not to mention the states which were also interested in the accession of your state to NATO.

So, how one deals with these issues, from the point of view of constitutional theory?

Let me begin by saying that, although it did not produce binding results, the referendum was very important from the point of view of constitutional theory. The turnout of your last parliamentary elections was 1,191,832 votes, that is, 66.79 % of the registered voters. I know that there have been claims that the number of registered voters does not reflect the reality. Let us generously leave this claim aside. What we had was 609,427 voters who voted in favor of the Agreement, despite the fact that many among them, I suspect, were not able to distinguish the issue of national identity from the issue of the name of your state as easily as I did above. Still, these people accepted the changing of the name of their state, and their number exceeded the 50% of the people who voted in your last parliamentary elections, which were “heated” ones, not to forget. I believe that these facts allow us to claim first that your people did not reject the changing of the name of your state. This is very important, inasmuch as it allows us to say that there was at least popular acquiescence in, if not some sort of more or less passionate acceptance of, the Agreement. In all these, I left aside the fact that the opposition chose not to participate on the referendum –arguably, a very efficient way to provoke a significant decrease in the number of voters.

What I therefore argue is that this amendment or derivative constituent power which was exercised by your Parliament in the name of your people and which changed the name of your state was a democratically legitimate power. This is so not only because the members of your Parliament were democratically elected and because they followed the procedures of a Constitution which was the democratic product of a democratic people in 1991. The products of the amendment process were democratically legitimate also because there was popular acquiescence in them, to say the least.

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Then, one might argue that what you did was, by and large, done in order to become members of two very important international organizations. EU is also a transnational organization. In fact, it is a very idiosyncratic organization, which resembles a federation in many aspects (for example, you will have rights derived from your status as European citizens), while remaining an international organization in other ones (this means: an organization whose power and authority is derived from the consent of equally sovereign states). That’s why I spoke both about internationalization and transnationalization before. Actually, in 2004, you signed a Stabilisation and Association Agreement with the EU. Thus, you entered, let say, the preliminary stage of an accession process to the European integration process. When your state becomes an ordinary member, and even before that, during the accession process, you will be gradually finding out that it will be the organs of EU that will be legislating and design public policies for large sectors of your economy, of your society and even of your public administration. Therefore, you had already assented to enter a process through which some parts of your state sovereignty will be compromised. Of course, at the same time you will have your representatives in the European Parliament, which is one of the two partners of the ordinary legislative organ of the EU. The other partner is the Council, in which again you will be represented by your Ministers and by your Prime Minister.

What is your argument, then?

What I am saying is that, yes, the amendment process was somehow internationalized, but it was so not only or mainly because of the “Greece factor”. It was so also, I would say mostly, because of a story which belongs to a much larger image. The amendment process was internationalized inasmuch as you had already entered another process, the European integration process, which will internationalize, and which will trans-nationalize, many of the thorny issues that your society faces. Without this motivation, to accede to the EU, I do not believe that you would have amended your Constitution, changing the name of your state. Of course, the same applies to some other changes in your Constitution, which would not have been brought about in the absence of the international community, and more specifically of those sectors of the international community which partially coincide with NATO and with EU; that is, the two organizations in which you are going to become members through the Agreement and through the constitutional amendment process.

Most importantly, all these factors do not imply some mysterious forces which are absent from the Agreement, which just form its political background or its (geo)political framework, if you wish. On the contrary, all these factors are an integral part of the Agreement itself. This part is incorporated in the provisions of Article 2. In particular, Article 2 stipulates that Greece “agrees not to object to the application” of North Macedonia to any international, multilateral and regional organization of which Greece is a member. Greece also undertakes the obligation to ratify any accession agreement of North Macedonia to such organizations. With respect to NATO, Greece undertakes the obligation to ratify the relevant Accession Protocol, while with regard to EU Greece undertakes the obligation to support the opening of the accession negotiations.

In view of all these facts, one might conclude that yes, politically if not legally speaking, you had to adopt the Agreement because another state blocked your accession to NATO. Still, there is a much larger image. Still, you are already partners with that state within a very complicated process which is called pre-accession and accession process to the EU. And you

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are going to become equal partners with this state in these two very important organizations.

The picture is much larger than the one which represents the truism that you had to change the name of your state in order to satisfy the unjustified, let say for the sake of the argument, worries of another state. They were worries which in reality affected good-neighbourly relations, after all. In any case, if one considers this larger picture, she may realize that the dilemma that your people faced was not so simple as it prima facie looked. At the same time, it was not so harsh as it looked, not so dilemmatic, as it were. In any case, in most cases, I mean in most constitution-changing cases in many other countries, crucial constitutional decisions involve dilemmas and hard choices. The Prespa Agreement was an exceptional case, but it was not an exception from some global democratic standard.

If you read Article 5 of the Agreement, whose first paragraph enlists the guidelines which will direct the Parties in the conduct of their affairs, you will see the term “democracy”. What this might mean in the sphere of international relations? What else than the democratic processes which were followed, and which are to be followed, in both countries, as linked through the democratic ethos with which I connected the Agreement before. This ethos gives meaning not only to the procedures that have been followed so far, but also to the procedures that are going to determine the relations between the two countries in the future, within a wider post-national constellation. The legal counterpart of this account is specified in Articles 8 to 19 of the Agreement, which are also significant, in my view.

I believe that this democratic ethos also explains why the Agreement, and its drafters of course, did not choose to hastily resolve the name issue, bracketing or silencing the fears and the worries which inhere in it. Instead, detailed procedures are prescribed by Article 8, on the basis of the clarifications which were explicitly, openly and very clearly, drafted in Article 7. For me, this is the core of the Agreement, and I am happy that our leaders did not evade, but they arranged as clearly as they could the thorny issues which are related with our historical and cultural heritage. Having said that, I would also like to remind what I said about the merge of the historical themes, and the power that each theme may derive from its affinity with the other. I would also like to remind that international law treats historical and cultural heritage and education issues mostly as a matter of universal concern and as a matter of human rights respectively, and not so much as a matter of sovereignty.

All these elements enable me to finish my analysis by just mentioning the most important, in my view, concept of constitutional and of international law theory through which the amendment process in your country could be perceived and analyzed. The term is “internationalized pouvoir constituant”, that is, internationalized constituent power. It was coined by international law scholars, and until Prespa it was used with reference to cases such as Bosnia, Iraq, East Timor, Kosovo or even Cyprus. I cannot proceed here into an analysis why this term is also appropriate for our conception of the constitutional aspects of the Prespa Agreement –this is already the subject-matter of an article I am writing. I can only say, first, that Prespa clearly shows that the internationalization of the constitution-making and/or the constitution-changing process is not (only) a dangerous, but it may (also) become a very productive and even a democratic process. A process which transfers not only the ethos but also the procedures of democracy into the sphere of international relations. This conclusion could be reached through an analysis of global constitutionalism, also in view of some other cases of internationalized pouvoir constituant. What distinguishes Prespa from

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these latter cases is the fact that it came out of a process in which not even a drop of blood was shed –I do not forget of course the suffering and even the blood that was shed in connection with the so-called Macedonian issue during the first part of the previous century.

This has paramount importance for global constitutionalism and for the conception of the various constituent powers of globalization. It seems that democracy and the democratic ethos can be functional in the international sphere, so why should we not try to enhance the institutional aspects of democracy in the international organizations as well? The case of North Macedonia is a happy exception within the class of cases which fall under the category of internationalized pouvoir constituant. No one ever promised that happiness does not involve hard, even existential, choices.

Thank you very much, Costas. I think that this analysis will be helpful for many amongst our audience, and I think that the issue deserved your long monologues.

I apologize for them, and I thank you as well.