Eleven years after Bulgaria’s accession to NATO, the question of the future of the alliance and of Bulgaria as a member is once again on the agenda. The country joined NATO on 2 April, 2004 after efforts stretching over 10 years; in becoming a member the country was guided by the consideration that the organization was Bulgaria’s strategic solution in view of the challenges in the Balkans and that no country can cope with the escalating events and security threats by itself. The NATO membership agreement guarantees collective security in the event of an attack on any member country.

The new security challenges now – terrorism, cyber attack, refugee flows, energy security and especially events in 2014 in the immediate proximity of the country with the annexation of Crimea and the destabilization of Eastern Ukraine and the advance of the Islamic State as an embodiment of terrorism – have tipped the strategic balance in Europe and the world, bringing about fundamental changes regionally as well as internationally. This has meant taking another look at the role and the tasks of the Alliance today and the adoption of a Readiness Action Plan in Wales in September 2014. “Russia's actions in Crimea and eastern Ukraine demonstrated the readiness of Russia to begin a process of change in the sovereign borders of sovereign states by force, which was a major deviation from internationally accepted legal norms,” said Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe, General Adrian Bradshaw during his visit to this country in March. He praised Bulgaria’s participation in the Alliance’s operations and its readiness to build, on its territory, a centre liaising between the Bulgarian armed forces and the forces of NATO. The centre will coordinate joint international exercises and possible action by the NATO Response Force, as part of the measures for guaranteeing security and deploying Alliance forces as a crisis-response measure in the region of NATO’s Eastern flank.

The volatile situation in Ukraine and the Middle East shows that Bulgaria’s NATO membership is an essential guarantee of the country’s security, said for Radio Bulgaria Solomon Passy, chair of the Atlantic Club in Bulgaria and foreign minister at the time of the country’s accession to the Alliance, after the official presentation of the book “The future of NATO’ published by the Bulgarian Diplomatic Institute, the G.S Rakovski National Defence Academy and the Atlantic Club.

The book includes the reports by Bulgarian and foreign participants in the 2014 International Conference dedicated to the 10^th anniversary of Bulgaria’s accession to the Alliance as well as the addresses by President Rossen Plevneliev, NATO’s Assistant Secretary General for Political Affairs and Security Policy Terry Stamatopoulos, the Prime Minister of Bulgaria at the time of the country’s accession Simeon Saxe-Cobourg-Gotha (2001-2005), former and current foreign ministers, the US ambassador to this country Marcie Ries and others. The book is released on the eve of three important dates – 11 years since Bulgaria’s NATO membership, 66 years since the founding of the Alliance and 24 years since the founding of the Atlantic Club in Bulgaria. In the words of Solomon Passy, the cold war now really does seem to have evolved into a rehearsal for war, as NATO called the Russian full-scale military exercises, but it is now taking place much more in the domain of the electronic media than by tanks or submarines:

“The past 11 years since Bulgaria’s accession to NATO have shown that with the passage of the years NATO has grown to be a more important and more responsible organization. Our expectations that NATO may become trivial, commonplace, a mere fixture have not come to pass. Events in Ukraine show that now NATO carries even more weight than at any other time in the past 25 years,” said in conclusion Solomon Passy.

English version: Milena Daynova