Well I've just spent the last week in Bulgaria, eating casseroled rabbit; drinking local grappa and sharing entry into the EU. Bulgaria, no differently to any other Balkan state, has a very mixed past: wars, foreign occupation, political assassinations and ethnic tensions. Pretty average for the region, but Bulgaria has emerged smiling. With a population of 7 million and roughly the size of Liberia or Iceland, it's never going to change the world, but it has carved its own image as the responsible Balkan. No mean feat given, the region's history.
Entry to the EU may be considered a poisoned chalice to the sceptics, but it will ease investment restrictions, develop further its infrastructure (Bulgaria isn't short of building sites - most of which are idly waiting for that extra bit of cash to be injected). It also benefits the EU, in its eastern expansion (the Black Sea has been touched at last - Turkey further bordered) and circles its neighbours allowing a good view of EU offerings, making ascension more irresistable.
But Bulgaria has a long way to go. Whilst the metropolitan generation is upwardly mobile and reaching out to Western Europe, its political class are treated with cynicism and its rural classes isolated and uninterested. However the contrast to 17 years ago and also to the economic crises of the 1990s is uplifting to most Bulgarians. Whereas Czech and Hungarian entrance to the EU mainstream was swift, Bulgaria has been slow but it is better for it. Bulgaria has lived under two of history's greatest empires - Ottoman and Soviet - only to feel at home once again under another dominant structure.
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