After November 1989 Bulgaria was eager to be accepted as a political and economic partner of the Western world, but found progress frustratingly slow on both counts. The series of wars in the former Yugoslavia provoked a muddled response from a Western community unable to decide what its precise interests in the Balkans were, and the cultivation of Bulgaria as a useful ally in the region only ever proceeded in fits and starts. On the economic front, the Yugoslav conflict severed Bulgaria's land links with central Europe, isolating the country from trade; while the appetite for corruption and fiscal incompetence displayed by successive Bulgarian governments provided potential Western investors with another reason for giving the country a wide berth.

Membership of NATO and the EU have been the main planks of Bulgarian foreign policy ever since the early nineties, but there's little indication as to when either of these aims might be achieved. The future growth of both organizations very much depends on the existing member-states agreeing on who should be admitted and when (and as far as the EU is concerned, Bulgaria lags a long way behind Slovenia, the Czech Republic and Poland in the list of potential candidates). One positive development has been the decision by EU countries (Britain and Ireland excepted) to remove visa restrictions for Bulgarian citizens, and those with enough money to do so have been eager to make use of this new-found freedom of travel. For many Bulgarians, however, notions of Europe or the West remain just as distant as they were during the Communist era.

The picture is complicated by the fact that the Bulgarian public is by no means as pro-Western now as it was in the early nineties. The NATO bombing of Serbia during the Kosovo crisis of 1999 (during which several stray rockets fell on Bulgarian soil) was widely unpopular, not least because the conflict provoked yet another another slump in regional trade, costing the country billions of dollars in lost revenue. Two years later, the Albanian insurgency in Macedonia (with most of the Albanian guerillas operating out of NATO-controlled Kosovo) persuaded many Bulgarians that the Western powers were either unable to control events in the Balkans, or were deliberately stirring up problems in order to keep the region unstable. Throughout this period Bulgarian governments had no choice but to voice support for NATO policy (or risk being removed from the list of candidates for NATO membership), thereby leading many to argue that the country had become so craven to Western interests that it had ceased to have a distinctive voice of its own