Speaker
Description
During the 2018 Bulgarian Presidency of the Council of the European Union, the Bulgarian government placed the integration of the Western Balkans into the European Union as one of its top priorities of its agenda. The GERB and United Patriots coalition government (2017-2021) had likely seen an opportunity for Bulgaria to assume an active role on the international scene through its promotion of West Balkans’ EU integration. Bulgaria symbolically used its own national motto as the presidency’s motto – “United we stand strong,” and organized the first EU-Western Balkans summit meeting since the 2003 Thessaloniki meeting (Matias, 2018).
It was only two years later, however, that the same government that had hosted the Council of the European Union in Sofia and pioneered for further EU expansion would impose a veto on North Macedonia’s EU accession process. On October 10, 2019, heated discussions took over the Bulgarian Parliament’s Plenary session. Despite the absence of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ekaterina Zaharieva and Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defense, Krasimir Karakachanov, parliament unanimously passed a declaration, characterized by different media outlets as “tough”, which introduced further challenges ahead of North Macedonia’s EU accession aspirations (Gotev et al., 2020).
What makes the case even more intriguing is that it was Krasimir Karakachanov, then Minister of Defense and leader of VMRO (the biggest party inside the United Patriots national alliance), who first announced Bulgaria’s decision to put a stop to North Macedonia’s EU integration. Karakachanov, a historian by education, is an experienced specialist on the Macedonian issue. He graduated History in Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski and holds a PhD from South-West University “Neofit Rilski” with a dissertation on “The Foreign Policy Activity of IMRO (1893 – 1918)” (Brunnbauer, 2022).
Less than 16 months after the end of the Bulgarian Presidency of the Council of the European Union, the same Bulgarian government had drastically changed its position on North Macedonian EU accession. One approach in trying to understand the fundamental shift in the Bulgarian government’s positions and the sharp foreign policy turn it took is to investigate the intra-coalition relations between the parties in government – GERB and United Patriots. Part of the explanation for Bulgaria’s decision to veto North Macedonia’s EU accession may lie within the internal coalition dynamics between GERB and the United Patriots alliance.
In order to develop a better understanding of Bulgaria’s decision to take a sharp turn in its foreign policy trajectory by vetoing North Macedonia’s EU accession, I will focus on observing the intra-coalition dynamics between GERB and United Patriots, utilizing existing literature on coalition government foreign policy, cases studies design and methods, discourse analysis, and literature on Bulgarian-North Macedonian relations.
This case study will utilize the triangulation case studies method, outlined by Robert K. Yin in his Case Study Research: Design and Methods, and approach the issue from several different ways – namely by looking at archival records, secondary literature, and discourse analysis of political actors’ statements in an attempt to remove bias and increase the credibility of the research.
