Bulgaria's NATO membership - 20 years later

Today marks exactly 20 years since Bulgaria became a full member of NATO. And if the decision were to be made again today - 56 percent of Bulgarians would vote for our country to remain a member of the Alliance, while 28 percent are of the opinion that it should be out of the pact. This is according to data from a poll of citizens of NATO member states, featured in the annual report on the state of the military cooperation organization in 2023, published a few days ago.

The beginning

For the first time the political issue of Bulgaria's accession to the North Atlantic Treaty entered the agenda of the Bulgarian Parliament on 23 June 1990. It was raised by the then MP Solomon Passy, who later became the chief negotiator for the Bulgarian membership. On 6 July of the same year, in the so-called London Declaration, the heads of state and government of the Alliance extended an invitation to Bulgaria to establish regular diplomatic ties with NATO, which Bulgaria accepted seven days later. The steps towards raising the Bulgarian flag alongside other North Atlantic Treaty Organization member states took more than a decade. And it was again Solomon Passy in 2004, but already as Minister of Foreign Affairs, who attended an extraordinary meeting of the North Atlantic Council in Brussels, where the permanent representatives of the nineteen NATO member states signed the protocols to the North Atlantic Treaty for the accession of Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia.

On 29 March 2004, the Bulgarian National Assembly ratified these documents, completing the procedure for Bulgaria's admission to NATO.

The conclusions

Two decades after that historic date, we sought the perspective of two experts on the subjects of defence and national security. Speaking to Radio Bulgaria, they commented on the challenges that the Alliance has been engaged with during this period, and they are not few - among them the Taliban, ISIS, jihadists, revolutions and the so-called Arab Spring, the religiously motivated terrorism, the influx of immigrants and refugees, the hybrid attacks and cybercrime, and the conflict in Ukraine which started in 2014 and acquired full-scale dimensions with the Russian military aggression two years ago, the war in the Middle East and tensions in the Red Sea.

The conclusion is categorical that the decision to join NATO has been a key moment in Bulgaria's recent history. And the benefits for Bulgaria are in several directions - economical, military and political, according to former Defence Minister Angel Naydenov.‎

"Politically, we can find the results in the fact that we are directly involved in shaping decisions and can influence the development of the security and defence policy of the Alliance. The second thing is that we are a country that in practice participates with its representatives in all political and military structures of the Alliance, in all commands and in all committees," Angelov points out. "In the military sphere, Bulgaria has received and is receiving the most reliable guarantees for its security. On the other hand, as a state and as armed forces we can rely on military capabilities that we cannot acquire and develop.

Besides, approximately 18,000 Bulgarian servicemen have been deployed in various missions and operations outside Bulgaria over the years. They have gained combat experience, a higher level of interoperability and the skills to work in a multinational environment. The economic dimensions, in my view, are determined by our access to resources and funds that allow modernisation, including of our defence infrastructure, which we are seeing."

However, the former defense secretary acknowledges that not all reforms in the Bulgarian army are positive.

"First of all, it was a negative phenomenon with regard to the army that the funds released as a result of the cuts in personnel and combat equipment, instead of being directed towards creating a modern, capable and efficient army, were used in other sectors in the period since 2004-2005. Let us remind the listeners that, for example, in the period 2003-2005, the level of defence spending in Bulgaria exceeded 2% and reached 2.9% of the gross domestic product, after which it fell sharply. Next, I would like to point out that even the little money that was allocated to modernisation did not go to creating combat capabilities and capacities of the types and the generations of troops, and in fact modernisation and rearmament started to happen at the end of this 20-year period of membership that we are celebrating.

So today, despite the reasons for a more optimistic view, the problems are again the long overdue modernisation, technological backwardness and personnel shortages.."

The chairman of the Sofia Security Forum, Yordan Bozhilov, recalls that besides the receipt and absorption of new equipment, an important issue for the interoperability of the Bulgarian army remains the recruitment of new personnel.

"Recruitment in the army, when economies are developing, when the private sector can provide more opportunities, is really a challenge. So we need to think about how to raise salaries, how to make the army service more attractive to people? How to elevate its importance in society so that more young people can come. And again, I will say it's not just about getting in. It's about motivating those people and making sure that we really have the guarantee that they're going to do what they're there to do, which is their military duty. That's why you really need visionary thinking."