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New Eastern Europe (14 December 2020)

Bojidar Kolov

On November 17th, the Bulgarian government officially announced that it does not approve of the EU negotiation framework for North Macedonia’s accession process and thus practically blocked the country’s membership process. What was the role of Bulgaria in supporting Skopje’s EU aspirations and what made possible Sofia’s anti-Macedonian turn in the past year? I will try to address these questions in the following analysis, with a little help from the psychoanalytic conceptual apparatus.

Macedonia’s pro-EU turn

In May 2017, the leader of the Social Democratic Union of Macedonia, Zoran Zaev, became Prime Minister, promising to change the nationalist and isolationist course conducted by his predecessor, Nikola Gruevski, for a whole decade. Less than three months after taking office, Zoran Zaev signed a Treaty of Friendship, Good-neighbourliness, and Cooperation with Bulgaria, which kicked-off Skopje’s renewed run for EU accession.

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