Though not always popular the government’s efforts to manoeuvre Bulgaria into a position where it could be considered for admission to the EU were effective. In December 2002 the Copenhagen conference of the EU decided that serious accession negotiations with Bulgaria and Romania should begin with a target entry date of 2007. A second huge stride forward came in November 2003 when the EU announced that Bulgaria, unlike Romania, had achieved the status of a functioning market economy. By then twenty-six of the chapters of the acquis had been closed and the prospects for Bulgarian accession to the EU at the planned date of 2007 looked better than at any other time. There was further advance in February 2004 when the European parliament also gave Bulgaria a very encouraging message whilst at the same time casting doubt on the credentials of Romania for entry into the EU. This decoupling was greeted with relief by many in Bulgaria. Finally, on 14 June 2004, negotiations for Bulgaria’s accession were concluded in Luxembourg with the expectation that the country would join the EU on 1 January 2007. The only slight cloud on the horizon was that the European Commission might decide to postpone the accession date for twelve months if there were a ‘serious risk’ that Bulgaria might not be able to implement the remaining necessary reforms on time. This was an explicit exhortation not to slacken in the reforming process and an implicit warning not to reopen the Kozlodui issue.
The path to accession to NATO was easier than that to the EU. The use of a Bulgarian base by US KC-135 Stratotankers during the war in Afghanistan in 2001 raised Bulgaria’s profile but in February 2002 the secretary general of NATO said in Sofia that although Bulgaria had made significant strides towards NATO membership ‘there is still much to be done’. One area in which Bulgaria had made, and was continuing to make progress was in slimming down the military establishment and turning the Bulgarian army from a conscript into a professional force. By November enough had been done for NATO, at its conference in Prague, to issue an invitation to Bulgaria to join the alliance and in March 2003 the sûbranie accepted the necessary protocols of accession.
At the time when this act was passed Bulgaria was enjoying an international significance unequalled since the second and perhaps the first world war. The fact that it was a member of the UN Security Council when the debate over Iraq was at its most intense gave it a higher than usual diplomatic profile. But the major enhancement came when the fighting began. Both Romania and Bulgaria gave permission for coalition planes to use their territory, in Bulgaria’s case the base at Sarafovo near Burgas, but these facilities became much more important when Ankara refused to allow US troops the right of passage through Turkey. After the war Bulgaria agreed to send troops to Iraq and five hundred were deployed under Polish command in Kerbala. In December 2003 five were killed and sixty injured in a terrorist attack. At the beginning of April 2004 Bulgaria was admitted as a member of the NATO alliance.
Plate 9.6 A female member of the US Air National Guard’s 150th Fighter Wing usually based in New Mexico working with a Bulgarian policeman to patrol Camp Sarafovo, near Burgas. In a striking declaration of Bulgaria’s new alignment with the west, the camp was used by US aircraft for refuelling operations during Operation Iraqi Freedom. The facilities offered to the coalition during the Iraq war no doubt helped Bulgaria secure admission to NATO in 2004.
Support for the coalition in Iraq occasioned some friction with France and Germany but Bulgaria moved swiftly to repair such rifts lest they endangered its progress towards EU accession. Bulgaria therefore refused American pressure to conclude an agreement exempting each other’s citizens from prosecution by the International Criminal Court, a decision which led to the temporary suspension of US military aid to Bulgaria.
Other possible impediments to Bulgaria’s EU accession were the related issues of corruption and organised crime. The king’s government took energetic action on both fronts. A national anti-corruption strategy was adopted in October 2001 and in the following February a national action plan, which included the setting up of a national service for combating organised crime, was introduced, whilst Scotland Yard was invited to help tackle corruption in the ministry of the interior and the police. This bore some fruit and in September 2003 alone two hundred officials were sacked whilst eighteen hundred were being investigated, seven hundred of the latter being from the ministry of the interior. In March 2004 the Corruption Transparency Index ranked Bulgaria 54th out of 113, more or less equal to the Czech Republic and better than Slovakia; Romania was 83rd.
Such figures indicate that corruption is not a purely Bulgarian phenomenon. What is distinctive about Bulgaria, however, is the linkage between the criminal groups and corrupt elements in business and the administration, especially at the local level. One NMSS member of parliament declared that Bulgaria was unique amongst small countries in the high profile enjoyed by heavily armed criminal gangs. These gangs were generally believed to be responsible for the series of violent gang-land crimes seen in the first half-decade of the new millennium, crimes which included the shooting dead in March 2003 of Iliya Pavlov, one of Bulgaria’s richest businessmen and a boss of the Multigroup conglomerate, and the death of four people when a bomb exploded in a Sofia lift in January 2004. Pavlov was killed one day after testifying in the trial of those accused of murdering Lukanov in October 1996.
The murder of Pavlov was one of a number of incidents which cast the judiciary in a poor light. Another was when the deputy prosecutor general made accusations of corruption and criminality against his boss, the prosecutor general. Yet another was the murder in December 2002 of a high ranking prosecutor, Nikolai Kolev. There were suspicions that his death was the result of feuding and personality clashes within the prosecution service, and whether such rumours were true or not the very fact that they could circulate harmed the image of the judiciary. More damage was done in January 2003 when general Boiko Borisov, the chief secretary of the ministry of the interior and the head of the nation’s police services, accused the country’s leadership and the judiciary of not supporting him in his efforts to combat organised crime. In April, after the attempted murder of another businessman, his ministry prepared a report which, Borisov told the media, contained photographs of meetings between former and current politicians, magistrates, and members of the underworld. Rumours, revelations, and accusations such as these added yet more pressure on the beleaguered judiciary but at the same time made it easier for the government to push ahead with its plans for judicial reform.
There is no doubt that the twin problems of crime and corruption adversely affected public morale in Bulgaria where by 2003 there was a distinct feeling that ‘the mafia’ had reappeared. What was important was the reappearance. Initially it was hoped that the problems of crime and corruption had been contained and the depression arose from the feeling that they had staged a comeback.
Public morale was also depressed by economic factors because, as is usually the case, macro-economic gain meant micro-economic pain. For most people the gains which impressed the external agencies and the EU were imperceptible. The USAID Annual Report for 2003 declared that the average Bulgarian ‘is plagued by poverty, unemployment, and low living standards’. The average working salary was only $134 per month and the average pension $50 per month whilst GDP per capita was still only a quarter of the EU average. And if unemployment was falling slightly in 2002, long-term unemployment was depressingly high at 11.9 per cent; in the same year, whilst the overall unemployment rate was 18.1 per cent, the rate for the under-25s was 35.6 per cent. The bleak prospects for future employment and the much wider opportunities, to say nothing of the higher salaries, to be found abroad meant that many educated young people continued to emigrate. In 2001 it had been reported that since the fall of communism an estimated 700,000 people had left the country, many of them young, whilst an opinion poll in 2002 revealed that between 12 and 15 per cent of those under twenty-nine intended to emigrate in the near future. Emigration of the young, together with, in the mid-1990s, the lowest birth-rate in Eur
ope, has brought about an alarming shift in the age pyramid. Whereas in 1976 16.0 per cent of the population had been over 60, in 1999 the figure was 19.1 per cent. The implications for pension provision are alarming. The immediate loss to the country could be made up if a significant number of these young people return later with enhanced skills and personal wealth to invest in the country. What cannot be made up, however, is the impact on families and friends; parents will no doubt understand and rejoice in the fact that their children have greater chances for self-advancement, but most will nevertheless be depressed by the break-up of the nuclear family, the more so in the Balkan context where family ties have historically been so strong and so important.
The sense of national depression was also increased by the fact that whilst the majority of the population felt little, if any, improvement in their circumstances a very small minority was becoming extremely wealthy. For a nation with a long and deeply ingrained egalitarian tradition this was difficult medicine to swallow.
There are few observers, either in Bulgaria or in the wider world, who would argue that Bulgaria had any alternative but to pursue a policy of further integration into the Euro-Atlantic structures. Nor would many seriously doubt that admission to NATO and the closure of negotiations with the EU were major achievements for the king’s government. There are fewer who would recognise the importance of potential conflicts between the values championed by the Euro-Atlantic community and the social and psychological values nurtured by Balkan nations such as the Bulgarians. The conflict between the enrichment of the few and the poverty of the many is but one of the many problems which will have to be resolved when Bulgaria has settled into its new position as a full member of the European Union.
Conclusion
At the time of writing, almost a decade and a half has passed since the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. The ‘post-totalitarian’ era has seen its own brand of cynicism and disillusion as the hopes for rapid material advance were disappointed and economic reform exacted a heavy social price. But in Bulgaria there is an extra dimension to the puzzlement and disillusion of post-totalitarianism.
It is significant that for more than half a decade after 1989 the Bulgarians were not able to agree upon a new state emblem. There was, it seemed, a sense of doubt as to their national identity and their place in the contemporary world. There have been many articles and books dealing with this issue. An excellent example is Ivan Elenkov and Rumen Daskalov’s compilation, Zashto nie sme takiva; v tûrsene na bûlgarskata kulturna identichnost, published in Sofia in 1994. The title means ‘Why are we like we are? In search of Bulgaria’s cultural identity’, and the book is a collection of fifty articles written by nineteen authors and published in Bulgarian journals between 1898 and 1943. All the articles try and define what it means to be Bulgarian, what is specific about ‘Bulgarianness’. At a time when the future contains many challenges as well as many possible rewards it is to the past that many present-day Bulgarians look for clues as to their true identity, for grid references to plot their position in an increasingly unstable and unsure world. What, then, can their own history tell the Bulgarians of their national identity and their place in the contemporary world as they are about to enter the European Union?
One of the themes in Bulgarian history is the dichotomy between an eastward and a westward orientation. This we can see in the great debates over whether to align with the western or the eastern branch of Christendom. In later centuries early nationalists debated the merits of relying on Russian or central/west European assistance, and this debate was continued in intensified form in the fierce and frequently violent political struggles between the russophobes and russophiles of the Bulgarian state after 1878.
Inevitably the debate over external orientation was linked, consciously or subconsciously, with the process of modernisation. Somewhat paradoxically, both traditionalists and extreme radicals could find role models in Russia, the former primarily in the church and the latter in revolutionary movements from the narodniks to the bolsheviks. For the newly emerging bourgeoisie and intelligentsia, however, the west had more to offer. Economic and trading ties with Russia were weak. Russia and Bulgaria exported similar commodities and therefore there was little trade between them; both also looked to central and western Europe for capital to rebuild and modernise their economies. But it was not only for economic help that the Bulgarians looked westward. Before the first world war Bulgarians knew that they had to adapt to western manners and customs if they were to integrate into that world. One of the most famous of Bulgarian literary creations is Aleko Konstantinov’s Bai Ganiu, a peasant who visits the wider world, an encounter which produces bemusement and puzzlement on both sides but in which Bai Ganiu’s raw, peasant cunning serves him well. It was in order to distance themselves from the unsophisticated Bai Ganiu image that those few Bulgarians who could afford to do so sent their children to be educated abroad; but very few of those children went to Russia and most went to Germany, Austria or France. Of the nineteen authors in Elenkov and Daskalov’s compilation, one did not go to university at all, three did so in Bulgaria, one studied in both Russia and the west, one in Russia alone, and thirteen in the west.
In the political arena decisions on whether to align with Russia or its adversaries could and did prove critical. In 1913 and 1915 and again in 1941 Bulgaria chose to defy Russian interests with ultimately catastrophic consequences for Bulgarian aspirations towards full national unification. After 1944 Bulgaria’s rulers opted for close relations with Russia at enormous cost to the political liberty of the Bulgarian citizen, as well as to the long-term economic and environmental well-being of the country. In the immediate aftermath of the changes of 1989, Bulgarian foreign policy swung around full circle. Close association with the EU became the ultimate goal of Bulgaria’s foreign policy-makers and there was a wave of intense pro-American feeling. A malign fate meant that shortly before Bulgaria began to make its most concerted effort ever to integrate with the states of central and western Europe, it was cut off from those states by economic sanctions against Serbia and Montenegro; a new curtain descended over the Balkans and as far as many western Europeans were concerned Bulgaria seemed to have dropped off the edge of the map. Bulgaria was reintegrated into the western world during the Afghan and Iraqi wars and the politicians of Sofia showed considerable skill in ensuring that their commitment to helping the US-led wars did not seriously or lastingly impair their standing in the EU. By the summer of 2004 Bulgaria was experiencing a new form of integration with central and western Europe as citizens from the EU poured into the country not only as holiday-makers and tourists but as prospective property purchasers; the British and the Italians were prominent in this process.
The crassness of modern mass tourism and frustration with the exacting conditions laid down in Brussels and, at times, with the seemingly arrogant and insensitive attitude of negotiators led a few Bulgarians to feel Bulgaria might be better off developing links with the middle east, north Africa and the states of the Black Sea littoral. There was a historical precedent for this, though few Bulgarians would welcome it. The economic revival of the Bulgarian communities in the nineteenth century was based mainly on the expansion of trading relations not with central and western Europe but with the rest of the Ottoman empire, that is with European Turkey and Anatolia. Liberation in 1878 meant exposure to what the Bulgarians of the day would have called ‘European’ competition, bringing widespread economic dislocation and the destruction of much of the existing manufacturing system: and here is another obvious parallel with the post-1989 situation.
The dichotomy between an eastern and a western orientation has been an inevitable consequence of Bulgaria’s geographic position and her historical development. These two factors have dictated that Bulgaria, occupying a nodal position between Europe and Asia, will always be on the edge of both the east and the west. In the present world that could be a distinct advantage. If land transportation between Asia and Europe is to
continue developing as the planners seem to intend – witness the building of the second Bosphorus bridge and the plans for a rail connection between European and Asiatic Turkey – then Bulgaria will be a crucial link in the European–Asiatic transportation chain. Three other projects will reinforce Bulgaria’s importance in the world’s trading and transportation structure. The first is the plan to build a highway from Durres on the Adriatic through Macedonia and Bulgaria to Istanbul, which will provide the first new east–west route across the Balkans since the Romans built the Via Ignatia. The second is the intended new road leading from the Greek frontier northwards through Bulgaria to the new bridge to be built over the Danube to Romania. And the third is the pipeline which will take Russian oil and gas from Burgas to the Greek port of Alexandroupolis. In these circumstances neither Russia nor the other European states, nor indeed the nations of the middle east, could afford an isolated or an unstable Bulgaria. Europe will then need Bulgaria just as much as Bulgaria will need Europe.
If Bulgaria is to be integrated into Europe it will have to continue to conform to the democratic practices established in the post-totalitarian years. Does an examination of Bulgarian history give reason to believe that this will be the case? Is the capacity to build and sustain a democracy part of Bulgaria’s cultural identity?
In the first place it must be recorded that since 1989 Bulgaria has had five general and three presidential elections. It has experienced minority government by the BSP, government by the UDF, government by two non-party technocratic cabinets, government by the BSP with a majority in parliament, by a UDF government with the same advantage, and by a government of the former king. Changes between governments have twice been precipitated by widespread extra-parliamentary action but incumbent cabinets have seen that bowing to popular pressure is a wise policy in such circumstances. That indicates a respect for the popular will which can be an important safeguard in a functioning democracy. At the same time individual liberties have largely been respected and efforts have been made to improve the well-being of the ethnic minorities. The press and the electronic media have at times been subjected to governmental influence but in the majority of cases this has been resisted and the press, together with the trade unions and other institutions has remained free.
A Concise History of Bulgaria Page 27