Where Vucic meets with world dictators, it is heretical to talk and write about democracy and European values. Serbia has taken off from the European gravitational field and is rapidly moving to the East. With this, we missed another opportunity to solve the Noian problems of the Bulgarian population on both sides of the Serbian-Bulgarian border with modern European means. The Bulgarians from Bosilegrad and Tsaribrod are increasingly packing their bags and moving to Sofia or the West without apparently being impressed by the anti-European and anti-Bulgarian scum that pours around the clock in the Serbian media.
And it could have been otherwise.
In the summer of 2013, Bulgarian parties and associations signed in Nis a common Platform for the protection of the rights of the Bulgarian minority, based on the European practice for solving similar cases at the borders of European countries.
At the heart of this platform was laid cross-border and transnational cooperation as a key idea of the European project.
Let us recall that the European Union rests on the need for comprehensive cooperation in all areas of life and overcoming the heavy historical legacy filled with centuries-old wars for territories. At the end of the last century and the beginning of this century, the need for economic cooperation, common road infrastructure and digitization changed the agenda of the continent. The process of European integration led to the fall of barriers to the free movement of goods, services, capital and people, which changed the nature of national borders as something inviolable.
In 2014, Serbia began the negotiation process for EU membership, and there was hope that with the help of Bulgaria and Europe, we too could ride the European wave and float ashore. Unfortunately, it still didn't work.
In European countries, cross-border cooperation in border areas is based on the paradigm of the relationship between the economically developed center on the one hand and the backward periphery on the other. In closed national borders, major manufacturing facilities and road arteries are concentrated deep inland. Therefore, border areas are usually economically backward, state borders are hard and difficult to traverse, people on both sides of the border are confrontational and often hostile, usually at risk of identity change and migration, and cooperation between states, if any, is strictly in the prerogatives of the central government. Sounds familiar, right?
With the emergence and development of the European Union, borders gradually lost their barrier functions, and the border areas are increasingly connected and united in cross-border regions that lose their peripheral role and take on an integration character.
Cross-border cooperation in Europe today is one of the most relevant and concrete forms of cooperation - economic, infrastructural, cultural, ecological, etc., which provide ample opportunities for a rational and practical approach to solving the everyday needs of people in border areas and without any historical prejudices regarding state borders.
Thanks to this approach, many points of conflict between countries have been resolved in Europe, which has led to the pacification of the continent and an unprecedented economic boom. This was possible thanks to freedom of speech, the sharing of common democratic values, mutual understanding and respect between peoples. The emergence and development of cross-border regions is becoming increasingly relevant in the new regionalization of Europe, and the creation of the so-called Euroregions turns them into key integration factors. The motto "Europe without borders" essentially means exactly this - active cross-border cooperation and uniform regional development.
Today, intensive cross-border cooperation is a necessary process and opportunity for development and solving common problems in border areas. Without the connection of these areas, there is no European unification and sustainable development, and therefore they must be the main task and goal in the process of European integration, especially at the regional and local level, of course, in cooperation with the state authorities and the support of the European Union.
Unfortunately, and if there were ever such pro-European sentiments in Serbia, with the complication of the geopolitical situation in the world and especially after the war in Ukraine, they gradually died down and there was a complete standstill in the Europeanization of the Western Balkans.
For the same reason, the cross-border cooperation programs financed by the European Union with the means of pre-accession aid were "Balkanized". From 2004 to 2020, the European Union allocated around 400 million euros, with which more than 1,600 projects on the territory of Serbia were financed, in which more than 1,000 partners participated, and more than 100,000 people were covered by the programs and their results.
Although the European Union in the last two decades has poured hundreds of millions of euros into cross-border cooperation programs with the idea of affirming European ideas and values, overcoming historical overlaps, bringing people together between the Balkan countries, creating the necessary administrative capacity for managing and developing cooperation - the results are more than modest. Hate speech and Eurosceptic sentiments in the Western Balkans intensified even more. Negotiations for EU membership have almost stopped in the last ten years. There was a stagnation in the development of democratic processes, and the European idea gave way to the Eurasian one.
Paradoxically, where the most funds were poured into European programs, hate speech and Euroscepticism in Serbia increased dramatically. For example, the municipality of Surdulica, which is known for the successful absorption of funds under cross-border programs that visibly changed it, under the influence of the Serbian Orthodox Church and the ruling nationalist parties, is increasingly asserting itself as a center of anti-Bulgarian, and thus anti-European, propaganda. Reference, see the annual celebrations of the so-called "Martyrs of Surdulitsa" and the resistance to the resolution on Srebrenica.
On the other hand, the backward Bulgarian municipalities on both sides of the border, which have been a source of tension in bilateral relations between Bulgaria and Serbia for decades, remained outside the scope of European programs. Namely, the funds from the European programs were to be channeled into them, and it was from here that the "Europeanization" of the border areas had to start, not only to improve the living conditions of the local population, but also to remove the source that burdens the Serbian-Bulgarian relations. Instead, the cross-border programs skipped the real problems at the border and went inside Serbia, respectively inside Bulgaria, and the problems at the border continued to fester and threaten the lives of the Bulgarian population, thus exacerbating relations between the countries.
The governing bodies at the Ministry of Planning and Development in Bulgaria and at the Ministry of European Integration in Serbia usually justified themselves by the strict European rules and the lack of well-trained personnel at the local level who could make European projects and implement them. This is undoubtedly the case. Not only is the local government not prepared, it is also not interested in working according to European rules and pursuing European goals. This further complicates the problem and further increases the need for funds under cross-border programs and adaptation of project requirements according to Balkan problems. The current strict formal requirements, in practice, led to the skipping of the real problems that continue to divide and oppose the countries and people on the border, and the programs and funds go to the developed areas.
Even where there is administrative capacity to make and implement projects according to European requirements, the programs do not achieve the set sustainable goals and results for normal European cross-border cooperation and rapprochement of people. At least judging by the intensifying anti-European and anti-Bulgarian rhetoric in Serbia and North Macedonia and Euroscepticism.
According to the European Charter for border and cross-border cooperation, the objectives of cross-border cooperation are: new character of borders as meeting places; mitigating the differences between peripheries and developed areas; overcoming the shortcomings of border areas and exploring their possibilities; protection of the environment and nature in border areas; promotion of cross-border cultural cooperation; application of the principle of subsidiarity and partnership.
The form of the projects had to pursue precisely these cross-border goals. Unfortunately, the formalities became an end in themselves, and the real goals took a back seat. Making projects has become a separate, expensively paid profession, design bureaus that profit from it have come to the fore, ad hoc NGOs have appeared, and the feeling of corruption and political protectionism in the winning and implementation of projects has marred a truly valuable European an idea.
Gradually, the idea of a "Eurobalkan" Euroregion (Nis-Skopje-Sofia), which on the initiative of the Council of Europe in 2002, created 30 municipalities in Serbia, 20 from Bulgaria and 16 from Macedonia with the aim of cooperation in the field of economic development, protection of environment, culture, education, media, infrastructure and information systems.
Despite the complex situation in the Western Balkans, cultural, informational, economic and other European processes naturally impose a new agenda in which cooperation and free movement across borders is without alternative. Regardless of the old nationalist mantras, which are pouring in the media around the clock, the anti-European rhetoric and the Eurasian illusions - time is turning people more and more and they dream more and more to get out of their own totalitarian states and get their hands on European universities and large industrial centers.
At the same time, in their place near the Bulgarian border, Russian and Chinese mining companies are established, which, along with dirty technologies and widespread environmental pollution, have recently increasingly discussed the import of labor from distant China and India. /BGNES
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Ivan Nikolov is a poet, writer and public figure. Chairman of the Bulgarian Cultural and Information Center in Bosilegrad. Chief and editor-in-chief of "Bulletin" magazine. Author of four poetry collections and the book "Bulgarians in Yugoslavia - the last Versailles exiles". Ivan Nikolov's analysis was written especially for BGNES Agency.
