June 22 is the Day of the Civil Servant. The date was chosen, as one might expect for such an occasion, bureaucratically. Then the Law on Civil Servants was adopted. In fact, today civil servants are not at all fashionable. By all accounts, we are the bad guys in the state - we were swindlers, generally dishonest people who have to go through special integrity tests every year, because for us the hypothesis of innocence does not apply. In fact, it is very convenient to declare civil servants the bad guys, much more convenient, let's say, than the oligarchy that has spread its tentacles or the criminals that you cannot catch. The civil servant is a gentle person and, moreover, he tolerates a lot of fighting.
This is noted on "Facebook" Dobrin Stanev.
My topic for today is Bulgarian diplomacy, which is part of the civil service.
The diplomatic service has its own specifics - it is the service with the highest entry criteria and the lowest salaries for staying. The graph speaks for itself. The diplomatic service is by law part of the national security system, but for some reason it is never mentioned together with the defense, the police or the others, called "services" for short. In reality, given the current state of international uncertainty, I am hardly revealing any secret by claiming that we protect ourselves first and foremost with diplomacy. I don't even think about it if we have to do something else.
Frankly speaking, our diplomacy has not always been in such a miserable budgetary state.
The old dogs still remember the golden years of the EU and NATO accession negotiations, when the Foreign Ministry was not only respected, but also solidly budgeted.
Paradoxically, our long period of unceasing decline began precisely with our accession to the EU,
when we “turned the game“ of international relations, instead of realizing that we have simply moved to the next level of higher difficulty.
Then came the lean pizza budget, embassy closures, staff cuts, the fading of international ambitions, and the depersonalization of interests to the point of parroting learned mantras that we cannot back up with real action. This is not because of some inner conviction in the power of community consensus, but because singing in a choir is easier than performing solo. That way you can even open your mouth without saying anything, no one will notice, and it hardly matters in reality. On the other hand, however, all our international partners have always realized that no one has the obligation, much less the desire, to defend your interests for you.
The momentum to dig deep will remain with us in the current budget procedure, where the Ministry of Foreign Affairs must once again look for where to cut back on its already depleted capabilities.
The best thing to do is to renovate our already huge and crumbling building stock behind borders, estimated at hundreds of millions of euros. If the economy recovered relatively quickly after the last crisis, it would have taken the Foreign Ministry 14 years, equivalent to raising a high school student, to reach its pre-crisis years with all the conventions of what we managed to restore (certainly not a single embassy that was closed at the time).
In this uncertain world, in which the Prime Minister calls for giving way to diplomacy, I would ask him what way he will give Bulgarian diplomacy with his insistence on mass layoffs.
We need not layoffs, but investments. Diplomacy is an integral part of national sovereignty.
It cannot be outsourced, privatized, leased, or at least destroyed. Without strong diplomacy, we cannot have a strong state. Everything else would turn us into a colony without a colonizer. A colony of carelessness and negligence. This is precisely what we must not allow, in order to avoid the foretold death of Bulgarian diplomacy.