Bulgaria’s Foreign Policy and EU Sanctions against Russia

Abstract

The adoption of the EU sanctions on Russia provides a good case study to assess Bulgarian foreign policy under the conditions imposed by EU membership. This paper emphasizes the limits of both the foreign policy and Europeanization approaches when looking at national foreign policy and EU membership. It underlines the need to develop alternative approaches. These alternative approaches relate, in the first area, to the use of the concept of politicization of EU foreign policy; and in the second, to the conduct of a small country’s foreign policy within the EU framework. Although each of these approaches taken separately accounts poorly for the understanding of how EU membership affects the conduct of national foreign policy, each of them offers potentially interesting insights, without however being entirely conclusive.

It's security stupid! Politicisation of the EU’s relations with its neighbours

“…Scholars dealing with the politicisation of EU foreign policy have noted that various aspects of the EU's actions enter public debate, mostly visible in areas such as trade (De Bièvre et al 2020) and climate (Petri and Biedenkopf 2021). Other issues, including development aid (Hackenesch et al 2021), sanctions (Crombois 2019), multilateral governance and security (Barbé and Morillas 2019) have also recently been analysed. Moreover, the politicisation of foreign policy issues is already located at three levelsdomestic, European and internationaland the interconnections between them are mainly overlooked in the literature (Zürn 2019.…”

Lilliput Effect Revisited: Small States and EU Foreign Policy

“…For the purposes of this paper, we define small states as those that combine an awareness of their small status, anchored in their historical experiences of great-power dependency, with a sense of helplessness on the international stage. Such a definition could include countries such as the Baltic states and Bulgaria (Vaicekauskaitė 2017;Crombois 2019).…”

“…In other words, Bulgaria has never fully embraced the sanctions as part of EU foreign policy, but has viewed them from a strictly national perspective. At the EU level, the country has not tried to influence or engage with the issue by using the assets outlined in the previous section, such as making a strong commitment to EU decisions, building alternative alliances, asserting its expertise on the issue or acting as a knowledge broker (Crombois 2019).…”