Macedonia's NATO membership will be beneficial for all member-states, including Greece, since it would share common borders only with member-states. The Visegrad Group has the best credibility and the best position to promote further enlargement, because the four countries have benefited a lot from their EU and NATO membership, says Foreign Minister Nikola Poposki in an interview with web-magazine "Visegrad Revue", reflecting the positions by four member-states - Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia.

"We now have a new ruling of the International Court of Justice, which has brought more legal certainty into the issue. In 2008, at the NATO Bucharest summit, Greece blocked our accession to NATO [because of the dispute on the name issue]. Now the ICJ, the highest judicial UN body, has said that this was illegal, and has rejected all of the claims from the Greek side on possible violations from Macedonian side. This is what we are trying to communicate with our partners and all NATO states: that everybody will benefit from that additional factor, including Greece. Getting us into NATO would mean that Greece would share common borders only with member states", says Poposki.

Pertaining to the effect of the Greek economic crisis on bilateral relations, the FM says it has not helped in the name issue efforts.

"Given the long lasting bilateral difference between our countries, many people thought that the economic crisis might ease the process to find an acceptable solution. I believe that it is quite the opposite. It has affected us on the political side, because Greece has focused on dealing with the debt crisis. Moreover, we also suffered economic losses. Greece has been one of our main trading partners. Greek companies are very important investors in Macedonia, in some of the crucial strategic sectors such as petrochemicals, retail business or banking. And the fact that demand is shrinking and the Greek economy is going down isn’t something that makes us happy, obviously quite the opposite", stresses Poposki.

He expects the V4 group to resume its support to Macedonia's Euro-Atlantic integration.

"I think that the V4 has the best credibility and the best position to promote further enlargement, because the four countries have benefited a lot from their EU and NATO membership. I believe that from that perspective, the V4 is in a much better position than anyone else to promote further enlargement in the Balkans and to have a leading role in that. What has been proven with respect to the Balkans in the past is that most of the decisions were made in a crisis management basis and whenever there was a crisis, then the attention shifted to the region. I think from the V4 perspective, it is much easier to be proactive and to bring up more often the agenda of getting the Balkans into the EU sooner rather than later, because this will be a confirmation that the process is irreversible and that what we have seen in central Europe can also happen in the Balkans. Knowing that is not a solution to all questions, but it is a very good basis for our countries to develop and to be more prosperous. What is very important at this stage is that these messages are sent by the V4 countries and that these topics are not only left to discuss when there is a crisis situation emerging somewhere", says Poposki.

He assesses that the euro crisis has had an impact on Macedonian public opinion about the EU, resulting in a drop of confidence in Union institutions.

"It has awakened quite a lot of people who had a perception that the EU is a quick fix to all problems. They would think ‘we just need to join the European Union, everything will be solved and someone else will take care of it’, which is a fundamentally wrong perception. So there was an awakening that, wow, you can be in the EU and still have problems. But no one has so far proposed a better model than the EU, which provides a framework for prosperity in Europe. It should not be undermined. In fact, Macedonia is the most Europhile country in Europe. Something close to 90% of respondents say that they are in favor of joining the European Union. Yet in the latest polls we’ve noted a drop in confidence in EU institutions, due to two factors. The first one is due to the fact that the European Commission keeps recommending since 2009 to start accession negotiations with Macedonia, but because of Greek opposition in the Council, we were not able to move forward. So, people start raising questions on the credibility of this process. The other aspect was that in the latest Commission progress reports, under pressure from Greece, the term Macedonian was avoided, referring to our name and language. That has stirred a lot of negative emotions, as one can imagine", emphasizes Poposki.

According to him, the Visegrad Fund model could be used in practice on the Balkans.

"Before, in our regional cooperation we were happy we just had meetings. Now the principal functioning of the Visegrad group that you have membership countries that contribute to the fund, that generate concrete projects, is really one step forward. The fact of everybody contributing to the fund, distributing to projects is a very new concept to our regional cooperation. We are really looking forward that during Macedonian presidency of the South East European Cooperation Process we will start to introduce similar processes. We will see whether we can build on your experiences in our case", underlines FM Poposki in the interview.