The mood, in which many Bulgarians found themselves on 1 January 2007, was a bit peculiar. This date marked Bulgaria’s accession to the EU, a goal which its citizens pursued enthusiastically for more than a decade, and this gave ample reasons for celebration.
Yet, as the celebrations unfolded, there was also a whole lot of nervousness. The Bulgarians discovered that after successfully completing a major social project of such scale, instead of sheer joy and relief, what you get is a rich set of new types of problems, most of which boil down to the following: now what? Somehow, it seems, we had not really thought about it before, with all the last moment sprints to fulfill membership requirements. On January 1 all that became a distant past, and the new question simply stood there, and Bulgarians felt it, and were not sure what to expect and what is expected of them.
The Bulgarian society will, one way or another, provide the answer to the question. Whether it will happen as a result of a conscious, deliberate public debate through the democratic process, or it will be in the form of letting ourselves be carried by the prevailing winds to wherever EU as a whole is going, remains to be seen.
Georgy Ganev, Centre for Liberal Strategies, Sofia, Bulgaria