It was December 2005, Montenegro had called a referendum on independence from Serbia, and the European Union was worried about another flare-up in the Balkans. Javier Solana, the EU’s foreign policy chief, decided to send an envoy. But when the moment came to name Miroslav Lajcák, he peered at his paper, hesitated and, rather than attempting to pronounce his name, finally said he had decided to name “somebody”.

This debut on the international stage still amuses Miroslav Lajcák, now Slovakia’s foreign minister. But the episode could easily be read as symbolic of the difficulties of a small country trying to make an impression internationally – and a sign that Lajcák had accepted a poisoned chalice.

That was not likely to put off a man who had wanted to be a diplomat from the age of ten and who was, until this weekend, a top tip among diplomats to be EU’s next foreign policy chief. Slovakia has instead chosen to re-nominate Maroš Šefcovic to the European Commission. But Lajcák’s name is still likely to crop up in talk about other, non-EU posts.

In his teens, Lajcák’s siblings’ sporting ambitions prompted his parents – a university lecturer and a primary-school teacher – to leave Stará L’ubovna, a small town near the Tatra mountains, for Bratislava. Miroslav’s own diplomatic ambitions then took him to one of the Soviet bloc’s elite schools, Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO), via a year in a special preparatory school and – at MGIMO’s insistence – a year at university in Bratislava, where he studied law.

MGIMO gave Lajcák what it gave many others, including two current European commissioners, Štefan Füle and Šefcovic: intense schooling in small classes, top-class diplomatic training and multiple languages (including, in Lajcák’s case, English, German, Russian and Bulgarian). But it also transported Lajcák to a different world, from the stark late-Czechoslovak version of communism, to Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika. “All of a sudden…you realise that you have been seeing with just one eye,” recalls Lajcák. In Moscow, he could watch the films of the banned Czech writer Milan Kundera and read revelatory press reports. When he returned to Czechoslovakia, in 1988, to a foreign-ministry post in Prague, MGIMO graduates were told that they smelt “too much like perestroika”, he recalls.

A fresh MGIMO degree, though coupled with Communist Party membership, was easier on the nose for the dissidents who led 1989’s Velvet Revolution, and in 1991, when Lajcák returned to Moscow, it was as chief of staff to Rudolf Slánský, the ambassador-son of one of Czechoslovak communism’s most prominent victims. That post gave him a seat in meetings with Gorbachev, and with Russia’s first president, Boris Yeltsin. The pattern of early responsibility continued: Lajcák spent four of the next eight years heading the private offices of Slovak foreign ministers and a prime minister, and, aged just 31, was made ambassador to Japan.

A Czech expatriate recalls him as very popular with the Japanese, and Lajcák’s ability to establish a rapport, untainted by arrogance, is also noted by critics. That hallmark helped Lajcák put Slovakia on the business map: the first major Japanese investments came during his stint in Tokyo.

To see value in Slovakia, investors needed to see past the politics, for this was the era of Vladimír Meciar, a prime minister whose strong-arm ways resulted in 1997 in the EU and NATO declining to start accession talks with the country. Those rebuffs spurred a period of national mobilisation that transformed Slovakia. Lajcák argues that Slovak diplomacy started in 1993 with a double handicap: perceived as responsible for the division of Czechoslovakia, and damned as a suppressor of minority rights. After Meciar, the diplomatic corps was depoliticised. Foreign ministers have since generally been career diplomats, and a crop of Slovak diplomats are now prominent internationally.

Curriculum Vitae

1963: Born in Poprad, Czechoslovakia

1981-82: Studies law at Comenius University, Bratislava

1982-88: Studies international relations, Moscow State Institute of International Relations

1988-91: Czechoslovak foreign ministry, Prague

1991-93: Service in the Czechoslovak (then Slovak embassy) to Russia, Moscow

1993: Director, private office of Slovak Foreign Minister Jozef Moravcík

1994: Director, private office of Prime Minister Jozef Moravcík

1994-98: Ambassador to Japan

1998- Director, private office of foreign 2001: minister Eduard Kukan

1999- Assistant to the United Nations 2001: secretary-general’s special envoy for the Balkans

2001-05: Ambassador to Republic of Yugoslavia (later Serbia and Montenegro), Albania and Macedonia

2005: Organised summits in Bratislava with the presidents of the United States and Russia

2005-07: Director-general for political affairs, Slovak foreign ministry

2005-06: EU envoy for Montenegro’s independence referendum

2007-09: High Representative/European Union Special Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo

2009-10: Foreign minister

2010-12: Managing director for Russia, eastern neighbourhood and the western Balkans, European External Action Service

2012-: Foreign minister and deputy prime minister

Lajcák’s platform has mainly been the Balkans, an area in which he had specialised at MGIMO. His diplomatic entrée to the region came as the right-hand man of Eduard Kukan – a UN special envoy to the Balkans as well as Slovakia’s foreign minister – and continued as Slovakia’s Belgrade-based ambassador to Yugoslavia, Albania and Macedonia.

He was, then, well prepped when Solana asked him to head to Montenegro, tasked in part to ensure the EU’s role was beyond reproach. The role showed some of his strengths: a willingness to work hard, an ability to master details and to establish relationships, and immaculate command of the language(s) once known as Serbo-Croat.

According to a leaked US diplomatic cable, Montenegrin leaders exempted Lajcák from the anger they directed at the EU, noting that they “have found him to be a fair, if tough, interlocutor”. The toughness could be seen in the double threshold that he persuaded Montenegrins to accept for their referendum: a 55% ‘Yes’ vote on a turnout of at least 50%. The outcome was close – 55.5% – but unquestioned, and unquestionable given the huge turnout (86.5%).

Unsurprisingly, Solana turned again to Lajcák – by then the political director of Slovakia’s foreign ministry – in 2007 when the double post of the international community’s high representative and the EU’s special envoy to Bosnia became vacant. The post of high rep invested him personally with great powers to intervene in Bosnian politics, and early on he seemed inclined to use them. But he was isolated: the EU wanted a light touch, and favoured disbanding the Office of the High Representative (OHR), the international agency created to help build peace. When he left in 2009 to become foreign minister in a coalition government, he could claim a success – Bosnia signed an EU agreement in 2008 – but his 21 months left Bosnia little changed, and the OHR unhappy. He too was unhappy. In parting, he said he had “no ambition to ride a dead horse”.

He had prodded the horse hard for signs of life. But a tendency to meet political leaders privately without the presence of note-takers irked many. To some, it seemed the personalised approach of a man used to working in a small foreign ministry.

Solo diplomacy was not, however, his modus operandi as a managing director in the European External Action Service. He talks appreciatively of his 16 months there, and ruefully of so swiftly uprooting his two children and his wife (a television presenter) to return to Bratislava in 2012 to serve in a centre-left government. A dynamic boss, subordinates say he made sure EEAS policies were aligned, was very knowledgeable, and was good at listening, at delegating, and seeing the bigger picture.

Others speak less of Lajcák’s strategic vision than of his ability to calibrate what is needed to achieve results and to be credible diplomatically. It is a measure of Slovakia’s confidence in Lajcák that it believes he can compete for the very top jobs.

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