Thank you Solomon for that warm welcome. The Atlantic Club is a longtime and valuable partner of the U.S. Embassy here in Bulgaria and I am pleased to join the distinguished list of Ambassadors who have spoken to your audiences.
As many of you know, I arrived in Bulgaria at the end of September. I have spent the past four months meeting with Bulgaria's leaders and with representatives of the opposition, with journalists, with artists, with students, and with representatives of civil society. In short, trying to get a sense of what Bulgarians think is important and especially how you would like to see the relationship with the United States develop.
The United States and Bulgaria already enjoy a productive partnership that encompasses many fields. We work together on security and science, on energy and education, on the arts and archaeology to name a few. In September of this year we will celebrate 110 years of bilateral diplomatic relations. That is over a century of U.S.-Bulgarian friendship.
Roman philosopher and statesman Seneca said that one of the most beautiful qualities of true friendship is to understand and to be understood. That expresses very well an important goal of partnership and of diplomacy in general. We strive to understand and to be understood.
But it is also true that for countries to collaborate they must have mutual interests, and for that collaboration to be sustained, they must have shared values. For the U.S. and Bulgaria these include a commitment to democracy, to a free market economy, and to equal rights for our citizens.
We share a desire for our children to have more than their parents. We value education. We embrace modernity. We have a pride in our countries' national endowments - in the case of Bulgaria the mountains, the seaside, a history as long as that of civilization. Americans are proud of our national endowments as well and, like Bulgarians, are concerned to protect them.
I am one of those who continues to believe that Europe is the United States' most important partner. It is with Europe that we have our largest volume of trade, with which we are partnered in the world's most important military alliance, and with whom we have a shared global perspective.
I hardly need to remind this audience of the value of the transatlantic partnership since the Atlantic Club played such an important role from the beginning.
Together, we are committed to keeping our Alliance strong, to protecting Western Democracies and to securing prosperity for future generations.
It is these common values and common commitments that underpin the relationship between our two countries.Since arriving in Bulgaria, I have been listening to what the people of Bulgaria want from our bilateral relationship in order to make our joint work responsive to our shared needs. As I have met Bulgarian citizens in Sofia and outside the capital, they have shared with me the things they are proud of about Bulgaria, and in moments of candor, the things they want to change, so that their children and grandchildren can inherit a more prosperous, more secure Bulgaria with strong democratic institutions. One of the messages that I hear repeatedly is that they would like more U.S. business cooperation and more collaboration. We, too, would like to make that happen.
Bulgaria is six years into European Union membership, has been a member of the NATO alliance for nine years, and is on the path towards evolution into a mature European democracy. We envisage the role of the United States to be one of a supportive partner enabling Bulgarians to achieve your own aspirations.
Coping with the challenge posed by international terrorism is another shared commitment. Recent events in Algeria, which involved hostages from eight different countries taken by militants of at least four different nationalities claiming to protest events in a neighboring African country, demonstrate the global nature of the threat and the need for collaboration amongst like-minded states, like ourselves, in countering it. The bombing in Burgas was another crime in which innocent people from another country were attacked here in Bulgaria. We are impressed by the professionalism and determination with which Bulgarian security experts have approached the investigation and we await the results.
Beyond the pure economic impact of American investment in Bulgaria is the social impact. American companies have a strong culture of corporate social responsibility. American companies bring this corporate value with them when they go abroad and create lasting and meaningful change in communities they support. Here in Bulgaria, American companies have banded together to create programs such as the American Chamber of Commerce Volunteer Days, when employees go out and work on projects around the country organized by the Bulgarian Charities Aid Foundation.
Going forward, I hope to see many more American companies attracted to Bulgaria by its highly skilled workforce and beneficial tax conditions. For companies to come here and thrive though, we all need to work together to promote an atmosphere of openness, predictability and partnership in which business truly has a voice in the country's economic vision. There are ample opportunities for U.S. investors and exporters to expand in Bulgaria. Part of growing foreign investment will be taking steps to ensure that Bulgaria continues to be seen as an attractive location, where rules are consistent and consistently enforced.
Trade between our two countries amounted to 643.3 million dollars in 2011 and could expand even more with the introduction of better intellectual property rights protection, including of copyrights. Now, I know that my saying this will not be popular with some, but it is just a fact of economic life. One last point on economic cooperation and that is the current discussion of a U.S.-European Free Trade Agreement. As the U.S. Special Trade Representative said this week, President Obama is committed to reaching an agreement to smooth trade with the European Union. Though, all acknowledge that there will be tough hurdles to overcome.
I would like to speak now about perhaps the most challenging and sensitive part of our relationship - our work together to combat organized crime and strengthen the rule of law in Bulgaria. In recent years, we have identified drug trafficking, cybercrime, ATM skimming, and other economic crimes as priority areas for law enforcement cooperation. Collaboration between our respective law enforcement services is excellent in these areas and is producing concrete results. This, in turn, has persuaded the U.S. Government to significantly increase our resources for joint law enforcement activities here in Bulgaria.
Fighting crime is a lot more than just policing. It requires an able and efficientprosecution service as well as a determined and impartial judiciary. Recent events have demonstrated that there is considerable interest in Bulgaria in having a prosecution service and a national judiciary that can truly uphold the rule of law. And there has been progress in that regard. The selection of the Supreme Judicial Council as well as the Prosecutor General involved a serious examination of the credentials of the candidates and were conducted in a more transparent manner than before, though there is still room for improvement. Most important will be whether those selected will institute needed reforms. There is a lot of work to be done. The U.S. is committed to assisting Bulgarian efforts to reform the legal system so that the process of administering justice can be efficient and effective, but ours is a supporting role - the impetus and energy has to come from Bulgarians.
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