Foreign minister Timčo Mucunski said this evening the sentence rarely heard so bluntly from a Macedonian official: the solution currently on the table is unsustainable and could put the country back into blockade within a few weeks.

„Our goal is to find a solution, but not one that returns us to the same position in weeks or months. Such a solution is unacceptable”, Mucunski said in an interview with TV Sitel.

The Macedonian position, as he described it, rests on two things. The first is clear guarantees - either through constitutional amendments with deferred application, or through guarantees from the European institutions. The second is international legal reciprocity on human rights.

Reciprocity: the word that changes the frame

The second demand is the one worth reading twice. „When Bulgaria expects us to write the Bulgarian minority into our constitution, the least it can do is respect the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights concerning the fundamental human rights of Macedonians living on Bulgarian territory”, Mucunski said.

That is not a rhetorical move. The Strasbourg court's judgments on the rights of Macedonians in Bulgaria have already been handed down and are already unenforced. With that, Macedonia shifts the subject off the ground of historical commissions - where every argument is infinite - and onto the ground of specific court rulings with case names and dates of non-compliance. The game is more favourable there, because there is no room for interpretation.

The protocol that must not become an obligation

Mucunski also rejected a legal thesis that has been quietly working its way into the process: that protocols from meetings of foreign ministers constitute legally binding obligations. If that is accepted, he explained, a chain of additional obligations follows - among them deadlines for the work of the historical commission.

This is a technical debate that sounds tedious, but details exactly like these decide what something costs later. Once accepted, a protocol from a ministerial meeting stops being a record of a conversation and becomes a document to be executed.

A new enlargement model, an old trap

On the announced new EU enlargement model, Mucunski said the key demand for Macedonia is that it must not be an alternative to full membership. Enhanced cooperation and benefits for candidates - yes, but as a parallel process, not as a substitute.

He dismissed claims of secret negotiations: „There are no secret talks or talks 'under the radar'. There are talks I hold continuously with the foreign ministers of member states and with European representatives.”

What remains is the question no interview answered. If the solution on the table is unsustainable and Mucunski is saying so publicly - what exactly is on the table instead of it? Because for the country not to slide back into blockade, somebody now has to offer what nobody has offered so far.