Central and Eastern Europe is expected to play a greater role in EU foreign and security policy

Vladimir Mitev, The Bridge of Friendship, 19 October 2024

Vessela Tcherneva, Deputy Director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, gave this interview on a number of issues related to the reaffirmation and regional integration of Central and South-Eastern Europe within the EU. 

She discussed the rising profile of the region’s representatives at the helm of EU’s foreign and security policy, as well as the crucial role of the security sphere in the development of relations within the region. In her view, the Three Seas Initiative has not produced convincing results. However, the general trend towards greater infrastructural interconnection in Central and South-Eastern Europe remains very important.

Vessela Tcherneva also believes that the rising salaries in Bulgaria in the midst of the political crisis are an incentive for the population not to demand too high a political price from their representatives in the protracted political crisis. She doesn’t expect Bulgaria to replace France with Hungary as a mediator in relations with North Macedonia, because Viktor Orban’s Hungary has little to offer. As for Bulgaria’s national-centric and inward-looking public discourse and state orientation, she points out that many of Bulgaria’s political leaders and influential decision-makers lack experience and exposure to international realities, and often don’t even speak foreign languages. So the shift towards internationalisation could be linked to the political rise of people with greater foreign and intellectual experience. Most likely, however, it will be encouraged by the EC’s incentives for reforms that could lead to social transformation.

I would like to welcome Vessela Tcherneva, Deputy Director of the European Council on Foreign Relations and an eminent Bulgarian foreign policy expert. We continue our regular meetings with her and discussions on changes in the region and also within Bulgaria. Today we are going to focus on the region that includes Central and Southeastern Europe, starting with Politico’s long-standing idea that there is a so-called eastward shift in the centre of power within the EU. 

There is a general feeling that Germany and France are now politically weakened after the EU elections, both domestically with the problems of their governments and also because they are at loggerheads with each other. At the same time, Poland is often cited as an example of doing the right things, for example in terms of military spending, and also in terms of asserting itself economically and in other ways as a kind of leader of the eastern part of the EU, and negotiations have also started with Ukraine and Moldova for accession to the EU.

These are all different arguments for the discourse that there is some kind of move to the east of the centre of power within the EU, but do you think that this is a real process or a real fact or is it more of a media theory?

I can give you a couple of other examples right now, such as the fact that the High Representative for Foreign Affairs is Estonian. The fact that the new Commissioner for Defence, Mr Kubilius, is Lithuanian and the Commissioner for Enlargement, Mrs Marta Kos, is Slovenian. And I shouldn’t forget, of course, that on the eve of the negotiations for the next multiannual financial framework, Mr Piotr Serafin is likely to become the first Polish Commissioner for the Budget. So this really testifies, I think, to a growing influence of Central and Eastern Europe, especially in terms of European defence policy, which is probably the biggest new area that Europe is adding to its integration project. 

This is due to the fact that all these Eastern European nations and politicians have been warning for a long time that Russia is not going to stop after Georgia in 2008 and after Ukraine in 2014. Their warnings have been neglected in the past, they have even been ridiculed by others in the EU, and now there is a feeling that Central and Eastern Europe has the right to play a greater role in European foreign and security policy.

So I would say there is a lot of truth in that theory. On the other hand, we cannot see the region as a coherent group because we have seen what the EU’s policy towards Russia and basically defending Russian interests within the EU has done to the Visegrad group. It has basically destroyed the Visegrad Four and Hungary, but also Slovakia, have become difficult interlocutors for the rest of Europe, but especially for their neighbours.

Hungarian-Polish relations are really at a very low point right now, and so we see a lot of Polish-Baltic cooperation, but also cooperation with the Scandinavian countries on things related to defence and security. And I would say that if we’re looking for an alternative to the Franco-German engine of European integration as we used to know it, it’s probably some sort of Central and Northern European coalition rather than the sort of Visegrad cooperation that we saw in the previous period.

Okay, you mentioned that the war in Ukraine is accelerating this process of, let’s call it, an eastward shift of power in the EU. How should Bulgaria and Romania, as more specific countries in the region, react to this tendency and what could be the content of a greater cooperation with these rising, but more peripheral countries compared to the core countries of Germany and France?

I think we cannot put Bulgaria and Romania in the same sentence here because for Romania the strategic imperative to defend itself against Russia has been very consistent and very clear since the beginning of the war but also before that. Now Romania is going to be home to a large international brigade, military brigade for a long time. It’s not some kind of one-off exercise and I think in general Romania’s attitude also in terms of defence but also its positioning within the EU has been really very stable and very reliable in the sense that Romania is the second largest country in our region after Poland. Romania has also gained in importance while the Law and Justice government was in power in Poland and Law and Justice created problems within the EU. So the understanding of the defence imperative for Romania and its growing importance within the EU I think makes it a very different player compared to Bulgaria.

I think Bulgaria only had a very clear position on Russia with the Petkov and Denkov governments. For the rest, it was relatively unclear because the cabinets said the right things but did not really do much. We see Russian gas coming back to Bulgaria disguised as Turkish gas.

We do not really do enough action to stop Russian influence here and we see the growth of the pro-Russian party. So I think all this makes Bulgaria look much more vulnerable and much softer on Russia than Romania.

Okay, if I could paraphrase the question a little bit. I think this supposed shift of power in the EU to the East creates some opportunities for the peripheral countries. So even though Bulgaria and Romania have their peculiarities in terms of their relationship with Russia, there is also this thing that there is a lot of Western European investment in Romania as well as in Bulgaria, I guess, and maybe if there are to be relations with other countries other than the core countries in the EU, there have to be some economic reasons and some other reasons, not just the reasons related to defence. So do you think that there is a real chance of some new relations and some new dynamics being created between Bulgaria and Romania and these countries that are now emerging on the periphery of the EU beyond the core?

I am aware that we try to separate the defence issues from the rest, from the economic issues, from the cultural issues and so on and so forth, but the fact is that nowadays we talk about security in many areas. We talk about border security, we talk about energy security, we talk about economic security, we talk about food security and that is why I think this kind of aspect is important. But if we look at the EU context, Bulgaria and Romania have a role in the sense that they, and perhaps not only they, but also Greece and Croatia together. You and I have talked about this before. This regional kind of coordination is one thing that is missing and that we should do more of. So I would say that this role of connecting the Western Balkans with the Black Sea region will become increasingly important for the EU in strategic terms.

It has to do with connectivity, it has to do with reassurance. It can increase capacity in terms of renewables, and of course you have the military mobility aspect and so on and so forth. But that brings us back to defence and security.

After the start of the war in Ukraine and all the processes that have unfolded we see that there is a push for greater infrastructural connectivity as you said and also greater cooperation in defence and security. I’m just curious, is this aspect of security and defence the only aspect that could bring our region together or should there be some other areas where some other change agents can be found? I mean people who are not necessarily associated with defence but can also have some agency of their own and what could be those areas where the push for greater regional integration takes place?

But I think it’s what I just mentioned, it’s mainly about infrastructure connectivity but also about energy security and energy dependence on Russia and this whole debate from the Draghi report, the debate about competitiveness through lowering energy prices in Europe has a lot to do with the European South. In that respect I think we could play quite a role in our region. And then I would say the whole changing geography of industry in Europe, bringing it closer to renewables and renewable energy sources, I think that is the future of European growth.

Poland used to promote the Three Seas Initiative, especially during the time when sovereignist parties were in power, as a kind of cooperation initiative to promote regional integration and better infrastructure connectivity. How do you assess Poland’s interest towards the Three Seas Initiative now under the Tusk government? To what extent has their interest in greater integration and cooperation in the region remained, and to what extent has it changed?

First of all, the Three Seas Initiative did not bring the benefits that it was supposed to. So if you look back at the Three Seas Initiative, there were a number of summits, a number of projects, but not a large number of projects that were supported by the Three Seas Initiative. So I think overall it has not had the catalytic effect that it was supposed to have in terms of integrating the region. I think mainly because of the funding mechanisms which were not so successful, which is why I think the current Polish government does not put the Three Seas Initiative very high on its agenda.

On the other hand you cannot have regional integration without political will. I mentioned the role of Hungary and to some extent Slovakia especially in the EU context but also in blocking or at least trying to block all the measures and the instruments that support Ukraine. I mean this role has become detrimental to regional cooperation in Central and Eastern Europe. If you don’t have good relations with your neighbours it’s very difficult to create large infrastructure projects together and Mr Orban of course shows that his interests lie elsewhere. So he’s much more interested in building large infrastructure projects with Mr Vucic than investing much in this kind of regional cooperation as it was envisaged in the Three Seas Initiative.

You mentioned Ukraine. Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova have been candidates for EU membership, but recently even Poland has had some reservations and has raised some historical issues with Ukraine that might somehow create obstacles to its integration into the EU, so I would like to ask you in this regard, will the candidate countries from Eastern Europe start to have some problems the closer they get to the EU? Will the attitudes that we have seen in Bulgaria and Romania against our accession to the EU somehow start to become more visible in relation to the new members that are now applying?

I think European public opinion was very much in favour of enlargement last year, or more so than in all the years before the war. Europeans understood very well that there were geopolitical reasons why the EU needed to extend its zone of security, especially to Ukraine and Moldova to the east. During this period, the Western Balkans also resumed their efforts to move closer to the EU, but not energetically enough in my view.

Right now it seems that we’re at a bit of a plateau in terms of public support, but also in terms of political enthusiasm. If you look at the Austrian Freedom Party, for example, which won the elections in Austria, they are afraid of enlargement, and so I think it would be difficult now to imagine how enlargement will be accelerated, because you have such governments in other places as well. You have similar political actors in the Netherlands, in France, you also have the rising AfD in Germany.

That is why I think that when we talk about enlargement, we should actually talk and think about it in smaller steps. It’s not a binary process – you’re either out or you’re in, but there are elements that you can adopt and you can become part of certain levels of integration and then not be part of others. For example, the Common Agricultural Policy caused a lot of public backlash in Poland against Ukrainian agricultural production, and not just in Poland. There were six countries in Central and Eastern Europe that signed that memorandum at the time, and Bulgaria was one of them.

Our countries will probably not allow Ukraine, with its huge agricultural sector, to become part of the Common Agricultural Policy as it is now structured, so this will have to wait for some time. On other issues, such as Erasmus or, I don’t know, roaming and so on, there will be a special kind of track for these countries to be able to join and participate.

We have been observers and we have seen a political crisis in Bulgaria that has lasted too long. Soon Bulgaria will be voting in its seventh parliamentary election in three years. This political crisis is also linked to the difficulty of forming a majority to pass laws to implement reforms, even if the state is perhaps functioning at a lower level than its potential? How does this affect Bulgaria’s role and activities in the EU and the region?

First of all, I think we have to ask how it affects the Bulgarian citizens. The fact is that the Bulgarian economy is growing and the Bulgarian citizens do not really feel very hurt by the continued inability of Bulgarian politicians to take responsibility. I have to say right away that I’m talking about part of the Bulgarian political parties, because there has been a clear winner in the last three elections and they have constantly denied the responsibility to form a government – the GERB party. If there’s someone to blame, we have to attribute the blame in a correct way and not just say that all politicians are to blame.

Given that Bulgarians are not worried about the power vacuum, the political price for its continuation is actually not high. So I would not be surprised if GERB decides not to form a government again after the next elections, simply because they do not have to take responsibility. Iince the caretaker government is largely influenced by them, they can take some of the benefits, so to speak. In terms of Europe, Bulgaria looks like a place that does not want to govern itself, a country that is giving up its own kind of statehood or at least its own ambition to produce a political process that is somehow constructive.

For the region, I think our neighbours think that this is not that much of a change, given that the last three Borissov governments, which were the last governments that sort of fulfilled almost a full mandate with one or two exceptions, were not very active in terms of foreign policy or in terms of regional policy. I mean, with the exception of the Macedonian veto that the last Borisov government imposed, there is very little that can be said about Bulgaria’s role in the region.

So I would say for Europe, if we talk about different waves of integration or different areas of integration, Bulgaria is moving closer to the periphery in terms of integration – not in terms of geography. And for our neighbours, I think it’s basically more and more the same, or maybe with the exception of the two political governments of Petkov and Denkov.

You mentioned that the last Borissov government imposed a kind of blockade on North Macedonia. You were involved in overcoming that blockade, and that was thanks to the so-called French proposal for resolving the situation at that time. Now there is another proposal by Viktor Orban to be a kind of mediator between Bulgaria and North Macedonia.

Do you think that Bulgaria, having relied on France for support, could turn to Hungary for some kind of support in its relations with North Macedonia?

I do not know the content of the Hungarian proposal. The only thing I know is that I read in the media that Mr Orban wants to be in a picture together with a Bulgarian and a Macedonian leader, but what this meeting is supposed to achieve I haven’t seen, I haven’t read. So from a Bulgarian perspective I think there is very little that Mr Orban can achieve and bring to the table. It’s Bulgaria’s position now, and it has been since 2022, that this is a new issue that should be dealt with by North Macedonia. So until the parliament in Skopje approves the constitutional changes, there will be little progress. I do not believe that any Bulgarian leader will want to renegotiate the negotiating framework offered to North Macedonia by the EU. Frankly, it was more about minority rights than anything else. Progress on those rights is measurable, and unless there is significant progress, I don’t think anybody’s softening is going to be useful there.

Finally, I have another question about Bulgaria. You probably follow our media. My own feeling is that there is a lot of national centric approach in what we have as media or as public discussions. So I am curious if there could be a greater ambition in Bulgarian society to look beyond Bulgaria, an ambition to get to know neighbours or other countries in the region in the EU.

What do you think the chances are that in the coming years Bulgaria will somehow become less introverted and develop a real ambition to be part of something bigger, either the region or the EU or, if you like, even the world, just overcoming what I call national-centric thinking?

I think most of the debates in Europe these days are national centric. That is probably only natural. When people are worried, their politicians use those fears for political gain and I think that is largely the case here. You also have a tradition of focusing inwards, of course, simply because a lot of the people who have been in power are not interested in the rest of the world, some of them don’t even speak foreign languages, and so when you have that level of mediocrity in your leadership, people who know more or have wider interests tend to stay away from the media and from public attention, simply because they seem somehow out of tune. 

How could all this change? I think if we start by electing people who know what options there are for Bulgaria in the regional and European context, that will be very helpful for the development of our economy, our culture, our education and so on. But we also have to make a number of painful reforms and I think we will probably need help to make these reforms possible.

For example, we now see that in the Recovery and Resilience Plan there is this condition that Bulgaria has to reform its Anti-Corruption Commission and the Prosecutor General’s Office. These are concrete reforms for which the EU is basically creating an incentive for us, an incentive in the form of six billion euros, which is quite a lot of money. So I think it is inevitable that Bulgaria will have to move towards the reforms and towards more European orientation and debates.

Photo: Vessela Tcherneva (source: Vessela Tcherneva)

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