site.btaSofia Hosts Discussion on Balkans in Bulgarian Foreign Policy, Media Coverage of Topic

The Balkans in Bulgaria's foreign policy and how much this topic is covered in the media were discussed at an event held at Sofia's House of Europe on Monday. The discussion was organized by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation.

A collection on the Balkans in Bulgaria's foreign policy: a priority or a parallel reality, was presented during the discussion. The book systematizes a wide set of data and presents main positions on this country's foreign policy towards Southeast Europe. The collection covers the developments and events in the Balkans after the Cold War and includes monitoring of the topic's coverage in Bulgarian media carried out between March and May 2022. 

The monitoring is based on an analysis of ten media, using the Bulgarian News Agency (BTA) as a reference media. The experts explained that in BTA the Balkans are mentioned as a topic some 2,500 times in separate articles, reports, and analyses, while in individual media such articles number between 180 and 200 on average. 

Among the main topics of the discussion was how the Balkan foreign policy looks in Bulgarian documents.

Dr Nevena Aleksieva, an expert on European affairs, said that Bulgaria lacks a national doctrine. Some countries in our region have such documents, she noted. "We fail to create such a document in which to set our goals and priorities," she added.  

In the absence of this type of doctrine, the strategic document Bulgaria relies on is the updated National Security Strategy from 2018, the first version of which dates back to 2011, Aleksieva specified. The 2018 version underscores the Western Balkans' role for the European and Bulgarian security and notes the need to intensify the EU-NATO interaction so as to promote more serious democratic changes in the region.

The discussion also noted the role of the Balkans topic in higher education establishments. European affairs expert Galin Durev said that this topic is studied mostly in the programmes of Blagoevgrad's South-West University and in Sofia's New Bulgarian University. In his words, only 55 courses are related to the Balkan Peninsula or, more specifically, Southeast Europe. There are 36 Master's programmes, such as European Studies and Political Science but only nine of them have one such course, he explained.