Jeffrey Sachs Tells Europe to "Wake Up" and Integrate Macedonia: Advice Addressed to Brussels, Not Skopje

In a video address to the School for Young Leaders of former president Gjorge Ivanov, American economist Jeffrey Sachs got a question that could hardly have been more specific. Ivan Ivanov told him Macedonia had changed its name to open the road to the EU and had become a NATO member, yet the road to the Union stays blocked. What should a small country and its leadership do?

Sachs didn't say what Skopje should do. "My advice to Europe is to wake up and accept reality. That, of course, means integrating your country, Serbia and the other candidate countries into the European Union," he said. The address is Brussels. Macedonia, which has been waiting at the Union's door for years, got support out of this, but not a plan.

The economist went further than enlargement. He believes Ukraine should also become an EU member, but as a neutral state, and that Europe is making "a huge mistake, perhaps a catastrophic one" if it defines itself through opposition to Russia. In his view, NATO lost its original historic reason to exist with the collapse of the Soviet Union, a position many in the West strongly dispute.

This is where the speech gets uncomfortable for the very country listening to it. Macedonia paid for NATO entry with its name, and is now being recommended a Europe that isn't built on military force. Whether Sachs is right about the Union is one debate. Whether anyone in Brussels will wake up because of a video address in Macedonia is another thing entirely.

"I believe in the European Union, but not in the way it currently functions," Sachs said. Everyone waiting at its door knows that sentence by heart. The difference is that he can say it from far away, while the price of the blockade keeps being paid here.