Bulgarian Minister of Defence Krasimir Karakachanov. Photo: Arno Mikkor (cc) wikimedia.org
On November 17th,
the Bulgarian government officially announced that it does not approve of the
EU negotiation framework for North Macedonia’s accession process and thus
practically blocked the country’s membership process. What was the role of
Bulgaria in supporting Skopje’s EU aspirations and what made possible Sofia’s
anti-Macedonian turn in the past year? I will try to address these questions in
the following analysis, with a little help from the psychoanalytic conceptual
apparatus.
Macedonia’s pro-EU turn
In May 2017, the
leader of the Social Democratic Union of Macedonia, Zoran Zaev, became Prime