BULGARIA:Bulgaria has backed away from blocking an EU deal that promises closer ties with Montenegro, after progress in a dispute over the spelling of the euro common currency.
But Bulgarian prime minister Sergei Stanishev has pledged to raise the issue at this week's EU summit and refuse to sign off on the draft EU reform treaty in December unless Bulgaria is accommodated.
Sofia had threatened to delay the signature of the EU's Stabilisation and Association agreement with Montenegro over the right to use the Bulgarian name "evro" for the currency in its Cyrillic alphabet. The European Central Bank opposes allowing states to use their own languages because the EU treaties stipulate "the name of the common currency unit must be the same in all the official languages of the EU".
But at a dawn meeting in Luxembourg yesterday, EU ambassadors approved a declaration vowing to solve the "technical-linguistic" problem soon.
EU diplomats said the text was sufficient for Sofia to allow the signing of the deal with Montenegro, the most recent independent state to emerge from the former Yugoslavia after it broke with Serbia last year.
Mr Stanishev said it was important to find a solution to accommodate Cyrillic before the end of the month "because we wouldn't like to put obstacles to such an important political event as the European reform treaty and its ratification. That is not our intention."