Foreign Policy In Focus

Bulgaria naively embarked upon a ready-made Western model of change: neoliberalism.

Cross-posted from JohnFeffer.com. John is currently traveling in Eastern Europe and observing its transformations since 1989.

Bulgarians can talk at great length about what went wrong in 1989-90 and why the country didn’t immediately become economically successful and politically liberal after the end of the Cold War. Some will tell you that the politicians didn’t embrace the Western model quickly or thoroughly enough. Others will wax conspiratorial about secret Communist Party machinations.

Ognyan Minchev, a political scientist who heads up the independent think tank IRIS in Sofia, views the problem from a slightly different angle. Bulgaria’s uncritical acceptance of an outside model, in his opinion, was the original sin that contaminated the transformation.

“My perspective is that my generation, the people involved in organizing and supporting and propagating this process of change, made serious mistakes that our society had to pay for,” Minchev argues. “We were not well prepared for what happened. We took for granted the ideological schemes coming from the West. We were naive (stupid) enough to embark upon a ready-made model of change that was advocated by Western strategists. This is not to accuse the Westerners of what happened here. The Westerners (in general) could only provide us with the instruments they had available at this moment.”

The result was a strange hybrid. On the outside, Bulgarian politicians and economists mouthed all the right phrases. On the inside, the Bulgarian system managed to preserve many elements of the previous order. And, meanwhile, this hybrid beast slouched toward Brussels.

“We allowed parts of the old regime infrastructure and the old regime elite to appropriate the lion’s share of the national wealth and create a system of control of the national economy and the fragile democratic political system,” Minchev continues. “We allowed this elite to transform itself into the new oligarchy. It took us time to understand the process, to try to change the process. Now it’s much more difficult to transform this new reality, rather than if we had been adequate at the beginning.”

I met Ognyan Minchev 23 years ago when he participated in the Helsinki Citizens Assembly. On this occasion, we discussed Bulgarian nationalism, ethnic minority issues, and the mistakes that were made more than two decades ago when Bulgaria faced several paths of transition.

The Interview

Do you remember where you were when you heard about the fall of the Berlin Wall?

Of course I do. The Berlin Wall fell in the late evening of November 9 and the Todor Zhivkov regime fell on November 10. So November 10 was a particularly memorable day for me. I went back home at noon, and we were usually listening to the Bulgarian transmission of Deutsche Welle at 12:30 or so. That’s how I heard about the fall of the Berlin Wall. Two hours later, we heard about the fall of Zhivkov, so that’s a particular day that I will never forget, not until the end of my life.

What was your immediate reaction?

Happy emotions. Emotions of great expectations. We were cheerful. We celebrated in the evening, a large company of friends and colleagues. That was our reaction, among the university people I’ve been related to. 

Was there a point when you were growing up or in your early youth when you made a step in the direction of opposition to the government?

I was not happy with the government — in my particular way, at all different stages in my youth development. I was unhappy at school as a teenager when they insisted that we all have haircuts close to the skin. We were unhappy with the limitations on listening to Western rock-and-roll music. Later on, my colleagues and I were unhappy with the more or less visible censorship at the university. At the university this censorship was much milder than elsewhere, but still it was present. It was possible to see this censorship and understand it in the lectures of our professors and in the communications among ourselves.

A turning point in my intellectual and value system development was when I was in Poland in August 1980. I was there for one month on a so-called student brigade. It was an exchange of students in all communist countries. We worked for 3 weeks as workers, and in the last week we had an excursion around Poland. It was the time actually when Solidarity was created. That was my first direct taste of freedom – talking to ordinary people on the train and in the streets of Krakow and Warsaw. On my return, I tried to learn Polish better and read the Polish newspapers available in Sofia, even if they were also communist-censored. So, Poland of 1980 was the turning point of my so-called weltanschauung or picture of the world. From then on, whatever I could think or do or work for, I have not made significant changes in my viewpoints, at least not until the collapse of the regime in 1989.

And how did that change your viewpoint?

Until 1989, I had an explicit understanding of the system I was living in. I didn’t have a detailed understanding of how the Western system worked. I had a more-or-less liberal-positive ideological understanding: a rosy picture of the Western system. It was rosy because it was abstract.

After 1989, I had access to the West for the first time. I could communicate with the West. I had free access to any publication I wanted to read. I traveled. I spent a year at UCLA. So my understanding of the world changed because of the substance and structure of this new life I could live.

How did you get involved in the Helsinki Citizens Assembly?

It was more or less coincidental, as many things were in that period. In September 1990, I went to a Willy Brandt-sponsored social democratic conference in Vienna, because I was kind of an advisor of the newly born Bulgarian Social Democratic Party. In Vienna. I met certain people who invited me later to the founding of the HCA. Later on we established the Bulgarian chapter of the HCA, for which I personally worked for the next 5-6 years.

And what was the focus of HCA here in Bulgaria?

More or less the same as the organization in general. We were mostly preoccupied with the developments in ex-Yugoslavia. We did some work on the then-passionate dispute between newly born Macedonia and Greece. We worked on some other human rights issues as well.

Was there a particular moment after the collapse of the regime when you thought that things were not turning out as well as you thought they would.

All of us who were involved in the process in one way or another were learning by doing, and often by doing wrong. The real controversy of the process made us if not wiser than at least more realistic – or even pessimistic about the complexity of this process of transformation – at least because of the defeats we had to face (eventually we acquired a detailed knowledge of the process and a more realistic or pessimistic assessment of what was possible). The optimistic picture that we had in the very beginning changed very fast during those very first years of the process. My whole career, and my whole life, have been very much dependent on a reframing and reassessing of my views of the process that took place in those decades.

Where would you say your perspective is right now, after 22 years of reevaluation?

My perspective is that my generation, the people involved in organizing and supporting and propagating this process of change, made serious mistakes that our society had to pay for. We were not well prepared for what happened. We took for granted the ideological schemes coming from the West. We were naive (stupid) enough to embark upon a ready-made model of change that was advocated by Western strategists. This is not to accuse the Westerners of what happened here. The Westerners (in general) could only provide us with the instruments they had available at this moment.

We all know that the neo-liberal economic view was very powerful at this moment. Also, the perceptions of the Western pundits were not very well developed on how democracy could develop out of a totalitarian infrastructure. So, the advice we got was ideological advice. It was up to us to adapt that advice to our reality, which we knew better than the Western supporters of the process.

To an extent, though, we were ill prepared for that. It took us time before we could recognize the extent to which we were inadequate in dealing with the process of change. We allowed parts of the old regime infrastructure and the old regime elite to appropriate the lion’s share of the national wealth and create a system of control of the national economy and the fragile democratic political system. We allowed this elite to transform itself into the new oligarchy. It took us time to understand the process, to try to change the process. Now it’s much more difficult to transform this new reality, rather than if we had been adequate at the beginning.

What can be done at this point in terms of reframing the economy, social relations?

What can be done at this moment and in the future is step-by-step work on changing reality, on mobilizing popular support for different types of political action, which is difficult now, because people are not so ready to embrace new political platforms. It’s difficult to change an economic infrastructure that has already been set. It’s difficult to change the system of very direct influence that the Russian post-communist oligarchy exercises upon post-communist countries, particularly Bulgaria. So, few things can be changed overnight. It can be only step-by-step process.

What role did the ethnic minority issue play back in 1990-1?

I think the minority issue played an excessive role because of the specific environment in Bulgaria. Several years before the change, the communist government tried to forcefully rename Bulgarian Turks and forcefully integrate them into the Bulgarian ethnic mainstream. So, the first thing that was required after the end of the regime was to restore the rights of those people. It was a very sensitive issue. Part of the population was very much dominated by this ethnic scare, created by the ex-regime, that Turks and neighboring Turkey were a potential threat for Bulgaria. So it was very difficult to convince those people that restoring rights to our fellow countrymen is not scary or dreadful.

But step by step, this focus on ethnic rights has become an exaggerated and excessive part of the political process. The new ethnic party, the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF) that was created in order to reintegrate Bulgarian Turks and Muslims into democratic political life, very easily degenerated into an authoritarian ethnic political corporation where a small elite took control of the community of Bulgarian Turks and Muslims and monopolized their votes. Politically, economically, and institutionally Bulgarian Turks and Muslims have remained within the framework of authoritarian control they lived in before the democratic changes. Instead of the Communist Party, the MRF Party took monopoly control over them.

Just recently, a group has announced that is breaking away from MRF.

We don’t know whether this group will be successful in splitting the support for the MRF or whether it is just another splinter group with almost no influence on the hearts and minds of Bulgarian Turks and Muslims. We’ll see how it works. Nevertheless, the MRF leadership continues to be quite successful, because they efficiently use scare tactics, telling people that if they don’t vote for the MRF or support the MRF, that period of the forceful changing of their identity will return. This isn’t a decent approach, but it works.

What do you think is the best way of addressing far-right ethnocentric sentiments in Bulgaria?

Ataka is the first more or less popular hard nationalist party that has emerged 15 years after the process of post-communist change in Bulgaria For 15 years, we didn’t have a sizable hard nationalist political movement in this country. There were only small sects on the periphery of the system.

The rise of Ataka is the product of two basic tendencies. The first one is that Bulgarians from the ethnically mixed regions were radicalized in their viewpoints because of the behavior of the MRF. I can’t say that the MRF behaves in an ethnically radical way even if there was some evidence of that. But the MRF behaved and continues to behave arrogantly in terms of intense corruption and abuses of administrative power. Ataka was successful to a large extent because of the counter-reactions of the ethnic Bulgarians in those intermixed regions.

Second, there was a split within the communist party after 1989. After the resignation of Zhivkov, the more liberal, more reformist wing of the communist leadership took over the party. The harder fraction was in the minority and became a kind of a second periphery of the ex-communist party. Being a minority within their own party, this elite was disappointed with the functioning of the BSP, ideologically and politically. This part of the elite never went away, of course, from the political and economic scene. They were successful, some people say with some help from Moscow, to promote Ataka as a second hand of the same elite. Ataka claimed to be on the nationalist right. But these hard nationalist movements are usually intermixed between left and right.

Those are the two causes of Ataka’s emergence in 2005. What we can see lately is that Ataka was actually a one-season dancer. It is declining very fast, and we’re not certain that it will make it into the next parliament.

But you think that the sentiment behind Ataka still exists in Bulgarian society?

Yes, but this vote is split among different nationalist formations, some bigger and successful, others smaller, but none of them bigger than 2.5 percent.

What about the Roma issue? Have you seen any improvement over the last 22 years?

No, because the Roma is not an ideological issue, not a human rights issue, not a discrimination issue. Of course, there is discrimination. There is a human rights aspect. There is a political ethnic aspect. But the Roma issue involves two basic constituents. The first aspect is the cultural adaptability of part of the Roma community. This is a diverse community, and some are more successful than others in adapting to the new system. Others are culturally much more vulnerable and fragile and incapable of adapting. So, the cultural-anthropological aspect of this process is very important and the diversity among the Roma community is very important.

The second big impediment is that Bulgaria is a weak state. In order to cope with an issue like the Roma issue, you need functioning institutions capable of promoting programs that can make a difference. Of course, analogies are only partially adequate, but I’ll make an analogy to the process of integrating African Americans in the United States, including the problems of the inner cities. It took America about four or five decades, starting with the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson, half a century, in order to integrate about 1/3 or 40 percent of African Americans into mainstream U.S. society. What we don’t have here is that kind of efficient institutional arm capable of making a difference.

Do you think the EU has lately become more of an instrument of neoliberalism?

The crisis policies of the EU, dominated by Germany and some other national elites, are neoliberal, and they are neoliberal because for a long period of time there was a process of redistribution of wealth in the EU that proved inefficient. Formulated more dramatically, the EU as a developmental instrument proved inefficient because what we thought about the EU — that while bureaucratic, at least it worked as a developmental instrument with Greece, Portugal, and Spain as the main success stories – turned out to be wrong.

Now what we see in Greece and the other countries of the south means that we have a collapse of the developmental paradigm of the EU. The question is, what’s left? Neoliberalism is more or less the answer to this myth of Europe as an efficient developmental agent.

Of course, the EU has always been an elitist endeavor. It's never been popular or democratic. There’s never been a European demos, as Ivan Krastev wrote a few months ago. If you don’t have a coherent popular attitude capable of making democratic decisions, then you have a corporatist elitist infrastructure where democracy works at a national level and administrative autocracy works at the common European level.

The EU has always been very flexible in coping with its problems. It was flexible because it has always been cautious in terms of change. This time, the “big bang” enlargement lacked caution. That makes it difficult to predict how the EU will be able to adapt to this new reality.

When you look back to 1989 and evaluate everything that has changed since then, what number would you give it on a spectrum from 1 to 10, with one being most disappointed and ten being least disappointed?

I think this is a counterproductive reduction of a very complicated process. Some aspects of the process of change have been very positive. Others have been very negative. Others have been moderate in the middle.

A lot of people would say 5 in such a situation.

I wouldn’t say that.

Well, okay, the second quantitative question is your personal life over the same period and along the same scale.

In terms of financial status, my personal life has improved. Which is connected to my career and not just the change in the political and social system. But of course the change might have contributed to that.

Finally, when you look into the near future and consider the prospects for Bulgaria over the next couple years, how would you evaluate this?

This depends very much on whom we are talking about. This society has passed through a very intense process of reorganization with income polarization and status polarization. Large portions of society went down. Very few went up. About 10-15 percent generally improved their status as the new middle class. In the near future, I don’t presume any dramatic changes in the situation that we’ve developed over the last few decades.

Sofia, October 4, 2012

A major change that has taken place in East-Central Europe in the last few years is the emergence of a new left.

Cross-posted from JohnFeffer.com. John is currently traveling in Eastern Europe and observing its transformations since 1989.

In the same way that the New Left in the United States distanced itself in the 1960s from the old-style Communist Party and its fellow travelers, this new left in Eastern Europe has taken pains to distinguish itself from the Communist Party politics of the Cold War era.

Partly this is a generational shift. Young people who did not live through the era of Todor Zhivkov and Wojciech Jaruzelski don’t automatically associate socialism with massive human rights abuses and failed economic planning. Partly too it’s a thorough disenchantment with what liberalism has brought – austerity economics, a widening gap between rich and poor, hollow democratic institutions, a disregard for environmental issues. Many people in the region have come up against these shortcomings of liberalism and veered right, into nationalism. Another group has struck off in the opposite direction to create a new kind of progressive politics.

Georgi Medarov, soft-spoken and pony-tailed, is part of this new generation of activists. He works at an environmental NGO in Sofia and also participates in a group called New Left Perspectives. “We accept the liberal position on human rights, but we don’t think it’s enough,” he says. “We don’t accept the militarism and capitalism that a lot of liberal organizations accept.”

Medarov joined the movement in Bulgaria against the U.S. war in Iraq, though he and his cohort made sure to distinguish themselves from the hard-line communists and hard-line nationalists that also came out for the demonstrations. The wars of the Bush era have faded into the background. The new left’s critique of austerity, however, has proven perhaps more enduring, as the economic crisis itself has stubbornly remained front and center. Here, the experience of East-Central Europe is cautionary and could provide lessons for other movements resisting austerity measures.

Similar austerity measures, Medarov points out, “were applied here in this region in the 1990s, and in a more radical way than in Greece or Portugal. So in a way we can witness the long-term effects of what will happen in western Europe if they continue with these austerity measures. The difference is that the resistance to austerity is much more organized. Here in Eastern Europe, the resistance was misguided. For instance, there was a general strike in the 1990s in favor of neo-liberalism.”

The economic hardship that so many people are experiencing in Bulgaria, and elsewhere in the region, has produced a certain nostalgia for the old days. Unfortunately, in Bulgaria, that nostalgia conceals a soft spot for authoritarian rule. “In the group I’m part of, we are trying to understand this nostalgia, but we’re quite critical of it,” Medarov explains. “This nostalgia is about oppression of ethnic minorities, about a strong state. It’s not so much nostalgia about human rights, about minority rights or about the social achievements of the past. There was some improvement of minority rights during the socialist era. But they’re not nostalgic about that.”

Unlike the Leninists of old and the Putinists of today, the new left has no illusions about authoritarianism. It has embraced many aspects of the social movement politics of the 1960s and 1970s: civil rights, feminism, LGBT activism. With a few exceptions, such as the Palikot movement in Poland, the new left in East-Central Europe has not registered yet in the electoral realm. In Bulgaria, the new right and the old left continue to dominate the political realm. But in the environmental protests that recently mobilized thousands of people against unrestrained economic development or the annual Pride marches that have gained in numbers and visibility, a new political sensibility is taking shape in Bulgaria. It shares many of the same perspectives as other new left groups in the region, such as Krytyka Polityczna in Poland or the organizers of the Subversive Festival in Croatia.

But as Georgi Medarov explained to me one night in October in the loud, crowded café attached to Sofia’s Archaeological Museum, Bulgaria’s new left has a sensibility all its own. My conversation with him is an important reminder that if I restricted my interviews only to the people that I talked to 22 years ago, I would miss many critical aspects of the current East-Central European reality.

The Interview

Do you remember when you heard about the fall of the Berlin Wall?

I remember when I was in first grade in 1989: we had to change the way we were calling our first grade teacher from “comrade” to “mister” and “missus.” I found this strange. Throughout the 1990s, I don’t have proper political memories. I remember the 1997 political mobilizations but as something distant.

Do you remember when you became politically conscious?

In the latter part of high school, during the war against Serbia. It was a negative experience that my country was involved even indirectly in this war. I thought that this was an unjust war. It doesn’t mean that I had a proper reflection on this. Some bombs even fell by accident in Bulgaria, on Sofia, and I found this stressful.

Perhaps when I was 20 I started to become involved in the environmental movement, and I was going to environmental protests. I was also involved in some small initiatives – especially after the invasion of Iraq, we were doing Food Not Bombs in Sofia in 2004-5. We were doing this initiative with an environmental organization. We were going to anti-war demos in Sofia as a separate bloc of people because we didn’t really agree with everyone at the demo. Part of the protesters were hardline communists and some were hardline nationalists – so we had a separate bloc together with the anarchists.

Much later I started thinking about the Berlin Wall. The impressions I got from my family were quite contradictory. My parents are very apolitical; they look at both systems quite ironically and are negatively disposed to both. My sister, ten years older, was involved in the political movement of the 1990s. My grandparents were communists of various types. So there was this contradictory thing between my sister and my grandparents. But I had no opinion.

I suppose I’m on the left now, whatever this means. I have had a very ambivalent position toward the past. Personally, my parents were lucky enough that I never experienced extreme poverty in the 1990s. They were educated in Sofia and were able to adapt. For most of the people, it was a loss. There’s not much to lament about the past from my perspective. But many people are quite nostalgic about state socialism because they lost everything.

In the group I’m part of, we are trying to understand this nostalgia, but we’re quite critical of it. This nostalgia is about oppression of ethnic minorities, about a strong state. It’s not so much nostalgia about human rights, about minority rights or about the social achievements of the past. There was some improvement of minority rights during the socialist era. But they’re not nostalgic about that.

There’s a displacement in people’s memories. Their nostalgia for social achievements has been displaced by a nostalgia for a strong authoritarian state.

But this nostalgia comes not because of some kind of totalitarian mentality. It’s a reaction to the last 20 years. In 1989, everyone was excited – both the people who were on the left and those in the democratic movements. Both social movements were enthusiastic. No one was happy about what was happening in the 1980s. But no one really expected what happened in the end.

Can you describe this new left here in Bulgaria?

We use this term to try to carve out space between the old left — what we call the hardline communist left, which is nostalgic about socialism in a conservative, nationalist way, because the socialists became nationalist and kicked 300,000 people out of the country for basically racist reasons — and the Social Democratic party, which became quite neoliberal and quite conservative at the same time. So, we are trying to distinguish ourselves from this hard-line left and the social democratic one.

But at the same time we try to distinguish ourselves from liberals. We accept the liberal position on human rights, but we don’t think it’s enough. We don’t accept the militarism and capitalism that a lot of liberal organizations accept. We were thinking in the beginning that if we offend too many people, everyone would hate us. It’s a very negative way of identifying ourselves. But it turns out that many people are open to us. They come to our events and engage in discussions. There is a social need for this stance.

In the last couple years it’s happening not only in Bulgaria, but in Eastern Europe. There has been a rise of new left groups, with various levels of radicalism. It’s particularly strong in Croatia. The Subversive Festival is attended by a thousand people! They invite mainstream radical and left intellectuals, and they hold discussions throughout the day. It’s not only the festival. There are lots of publications, demonstrations. It’s a mainstream thing, and it gets mainstream media attention. There was a summer school that some people from my group were involved in in Budapest in July: the idea was to gather critical activist groups that are more academic-oriented. We want to make something similar in Sofia.

What is being experienced throughout Europe in terms of austerity measures are perceived as something unique. But actually they were applied here in this region in the 1990s, and in a more radical way than in Greece or Portugal. So in a way we can witness the long-term effects of what will happen in western Europe if they continue with these austerity measures. The difference is that the resistance to austerity is much more organized. Here in Eastern Europe, the resistance was misguided. For instance, there was a general strike in the 1990s in favor of neo-liberalism. We had a general strike in 1997 that was organized by trade unions but which undermined trade union organizing in the long term. They basically lost their membership.

Is there much cooperation between NGOs and social movements east and west? Is there still an imbalance of power between the two?

Cooperation between eastern and western European NGOs is rather difficult even on the NGO level. It’s partly for financial reasons: we don’t have the resources to travel to western forums. But there are various other reasons.

Sometimes bigger NGOs, for example, they impose ready-made schema on the Bulgarian context. The Greens – which were formed here after 2007 –was very promising in the way it grew out of civil society. It was an honest initiative. But there was also an unequal exchange of ideas between west and east. The way they organized their grievances was to import ready-made policies, which were sometimes neo-liberal understandings of what policy should be, especially in realms not connected to the environment, like education. It doesn’t mean that the members really endorse this. But they see politics as a technocratic endeavor, that there are good policies and bad policies, and we should just adopt the best policies of the West and everything will be okay. But it’s more complicated than this. Many people feel that they don’t have to reflect, they just have to copy what western Europe is doing.

The NGO I work for, an environmental organization called Za Zemiata (For the Earth), is funded mostly by the European Commission. I would not call it “left,” but it definitely is quite critical and it is very open to progressive social movements and groups.  The EC requires cofunding where you have to raise 20-30 percent locally. But it’s more difficult here than in western Europe. We don’t have vast memberships with fees. We’re very pressed in financial terms. So, it’s difficult to reflect and think because you don’t have time. I see this problem in western Europe too, but here’s it’s more extreme. Because we don’t have public funding here, we’re dependent on western donors.

Some of the more critical NGOs in the west are interested to see the eastern European experience of neoliberalism because they think this experience will be useful to understand what’s happening in the west. But it’s also a critical tool to use against certain trade agreements. We in Za Zemiata wrote a report on water liberalization in Bulgaria that was used as part of the international and European water movement. They need examples to see what will happen, since water privatization is now an issue in western Europe. But it was something we experienced in the 1990s.

Za Zemiata was established in 1994. Before it was more grassroots and more radical as well, but now it has become more of an expert policy organization working with the government. It tries to work on both levels. For instance, we wrote two textbooks on ecological education that were approved by the government and adopted by the school system. But we still have grassroots activities. Every year there is a clean-up of the mountains org annually. It’s very volunteer; no one funds it.

We also take part in movements like the anti-GMO (genetically modified organisms) movement.  Six years ago, the Bulgarian government tried to liberalize the legislation connected to GMO food production. Za Zemiata and other NGOs managed to stop this through a protest movement. Then two years ago, the current government tried to liberalize it once again. But there was an even stronger movement against this, with support at every level of society, and once again, there was success. The movement was quite varied, involving many types of groups, such as those raising health issues. At Za Zemiata, we tried to complement this activity by focusing on other related problems, such as patents and intellectual property rights. We invited Canadian farmer (and anti-GMO activist) Percy Schmeiser to Bulgaria to meet with farmers and university students.

How do Bulgarians feels about NGOs these days?

The profile of NGOs has fallen dramatically. NGOs supported the most neoliberal measures and still do — even the Open Society foundation in Bulgaria. It’s a different kind of organization in the United States, more progressive and not as right wing as it is here. It’s not conservative in terms of being racist but in supporting economic policies and foreign policies that most people radically disagree with. But the problem is that Bulgarians don’t have a language to express this disagreement. So you get a lot of conspiracy theories about the Open Society foundation that are anti-Semitic, anti-American.

There is a hatred of NGOs here, but the way it’s formulated is horrible. There is a reason for this hate, however stupid it is. In that sense, there is a lack of belief in NGOs. People tend to believe that if you’re an NGO you just want to take money from the west, you don’t care about real social issues. They think it’s a really easy job and you get paid a lot of money, which is a misunderstanding of course. But in the public imagination, that’s the way NGO-type language sounds.

My personal opinion is that it’s impossible to make social change as I imagine it, in a more critical way, as a professional activist in an NGO. The simple reason is funding. Za Zemiata works with the European Commission, which is quite conservative, but still we can do things, there is no direct limitation on what you can say or do. But in general, you have to adopt Euro-bureaucratic language and this bureaucratic mentality. And especially if one does not have any other language, another way to see the world, one ends up accepting the Euro-technocratic ideology for one’s own. That’s the reason that it’s impossible to have something more radical. So, grassroots mobilization is the way forward, though these movements have to work closely with NGOs.

But what’s left out are intellectuals. Both NGOs and the grassroots often disregard the importance of serious analysis that exists in universities, in Bulgaria as well. The cooperation between these NGOs, grassroots movements, and intellectuals is really important.

I am involved in an initiative called New Left Perspectives, comprised mostly of Ph.D. students. It’s a project for political education, funded by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation – they would never tell us what to do and it’s easier than with the NGO job. Together with most of the same people from that project we are engaged in running a social center in Sofia, where Za Zemiata also participates. We don’t have a long-term vision. We think mostly a year or two ahead. Our long-term plan would be how to make a publication, like a monthly publication, or to develop our website, which would be a year or two ahead.

Can you tell me about LGBT organizing here in Bulgaria?

There’s been a Pride march every year since 2008. Each year there are attacks. The first year was the harshest when skinheads threw Molotov cocktails. But the government decided to defend the march. There was a heavy police presence. That’s why no one dares to attack now.

The first year was about 200 marchers and maybe 100 far-right skinheads and some representatives of religious organizations. Now there are 2,000 marchers. In this sense, the event is quite accepted. I’m not saying that people are tolerant in general, but they are tolerant about this type of march.

However, after every march, someone is attacked on the way home. These militant far–right groups attack not only gay people but leftwing activists, asylum seekers, Roma, Black people living here. There is a lot of this type of violence. There was recently a march in commemoration of a boy killed four years ago in Sofia. The murderers said that they killed him because they thought he was gay. This was their defense! So, they admitted the crime, but they have not been charged, even though it took place already four years ago.

The government deploys the police for the Pride march, but it charges the movement. LGBT activists have no critique of this, they accept this as normal: “They provide us security and we pay for it, and that’s okay.” But this is ridiculous. LGBT people pay taxes.

There is also an artistic Queer Forum, organized as a part of the New Left Perspectives project I mentioned, that is going to take place at the end of November, where we want to push a left understanding of the queer movement.

How would you evaluate the level of extreme nationalism in Bulgaria? The political party Ataka, for instance, has lost a lot of its support.

Ataka disintegrated for personal reasons. This sentiment still exists, though the political spectrum is very divided. There are many parties and groups on the far right. Four years ago or less, Ataka gave its full support to the ruling party. Two years ago, it still had this cooperation when supporters of Ataka attacked a mosque here in Sofia in 2011. People asked the ruling government – what about this coalition with Ataka? “Oh, this isn’t a coalition, it’s just cooperation,” the government said. But if Ataka or a similar party gets 10-15 percent of the votes in the next election, the ruling party will have to make a decision about forming a coalition with them again.

In 1990, the far-right movement split from the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) on the decision to return Turkish names to ethnic Turks here in Bulgaria. The BSP managed to integrate them afterwards. But the Union of Democratic Forces (UDF) also had a far-right dimension. UDF people say, “Oh, we didn’t know that Volen Siderov [the leader of Ataka] had these ideas when he was editor of the UDF newspaper Demokratsia.” But Demokratsia was very involved in historical revisionism that said that there was no fascism in Bulgaria, that denied Bulgarian participation in Holocaust. The opposition worked on Turkish rights because it was against communism. But they also engaged in whitewashing Bulgarian history. And the anti-communist coalition included a group formed by former legionnaires, who were involved in pogroms in Jewish neighborhoods during World War II. These democratic forces were not totally innocent.

So, in a sense, Ataka is not a surprise. It’s not just Siderov. Many other members were ex-members of the democratic forces, such as Rumen Vodenicharov. Usually the far-right is presented as an attempt to restore totalitarianism. It is not seen as an outgrowth of the anti-communist movement.

A year ago, there were neo-Nazi riots all over the country after the case in the village of Katunitsa. There was a guy there, a gangster, a Roma oligarch basically who had been doing extremely illegal stuff for last 20 years, like producing illegal alcohol.  The local villagers hated him. He had an argument with a Bulgarian family, the family of the ex-mayor I think, and he threatened the son of the woman. A year later, the son was killed. The villagers protested against him. Initially it was not a racist riot, but it was provoked by the fact that he was an oligarch and could do whatever he wanted, that he was on good terms with all political parties over the last 20 years.

But then some football fans and various far-right youth groups saw this protest on television. They went to this village, along with some bikers, and they burned down one of this guy’s houses. The reason behind this attack was completely racist. It was because he was Roma and nothing else. The police allowed them to burn the house. It looked like a pogrom. Many far-right groups got very excited about it. In every city there was a racist march, and there many attacks against Roma. Some young kids, as young as 12 years old, were chanting, “Kill the Roma.” This type of extreme nationalism was not possible 20 years ago. I think this type of sentiment is increasing. The government is afraid to do anything against this.

The ability of these sentiments to mobilize people is much stronger these days. It’s not just the 15-20 percent always voting for far-right parties. They have managed to poison the discourse of all political parties. The parties have all adopted racist language at all levels. The BSP has campaigned together with the far-right party in support of nuclear energy. Rank-and-file members of the BSP have accepted these far-right movements. In this way these far-right arguments become mainstream.

It is quite clear what is happening. There are many examples of political parties cooperating with the far right. For example, some members of the democratic parties proposed to replace street names with the names of Nazis from the inter-war period. The most extreme propositions like this don’t go through. But it’s become normal for municipal member to make such proposals.

What about the Movement for Rights and Freedom (MRF)?

The sentiments against the MRF have become very extreme. People say, “We are not against the Turks, but we are against their party.” This is still racist, because it’s against the political organization of the Turks. Yes, this party is corrupt, just as corrupt as the other parties. But the attacks against the MRF, shared by democratic parties as well, are very extreme. These attacks were started by far-right groups, but they have been adopted even by some people who consider themselves anti-racist or liberal.

You mentioned groups here working on refugee issues. I’m curious whether there has been any effort to link the experience of refugees and immigrants here in Bulgaria with the experience of Bulgarians emigrating to other countries?

There are NGO groups that are engaged in refugee rights, but they would never make the connection between Bulgarian migration abroad in the 1990s and the migration inwards, like with refugee seekers. I don’t know if it’s possible to build solidarity on this basis. It’s not attempted at a mainstream level.

But there are some small, more grassroots-oriented groups working on refugee rights activism. They work with the NGOs, but they also try to make this connection. There was a project, for instance, called Repositions. In the first part of the project, they took pictures of houses squatted by undocumented refugee seekers. These were then screened in various parts of Sofia. It was a Bulgarian-German project. In the next part, they will do the same thing with Bulgarian migrants in Germany. They are trying to bring forward this argument, understanding migration through the perspective of Bulgarian migrants abroad.

There were other attempts as well. There were a few events connected to solidarity, with Konstanina Kuneva, a Bulgarian syndicalist in Athens who was attacked with acid in 2008 because of her trade union work. Some people in Bulgaria were trying to bring forward her case, speak about it. There was also recently one event at the Red House where they screened an interview with her, and compared environmental activism in Bulgaria with other places, such as the Greek protests and the U.S. Occupy movement.

Cross-posted from Warscapes.

No crisis of economy would be complete without a couple of cents from Jeffrey Sachs. The godfather of shock-turned-bleeding heart advocate for poverty eradication has simply dominated development economics -- in both theory and practice -- for the better part of the past two decades. From his days pimping out neoliberal privatization programs to the world’s poorest countries, to his more recent stint as passionate advocate of kinder, gentler, but equally fraught policies of external debt cancellation, Jeff Sachs -- as he never tires of telling us -- has been all over the map.  

Sachs is best known as a crusading activist for eliminating poverty who enlists the help of folks like Angelina Jolie and Bono. But his fame circumvents an understanding of his economic theories, which have been applied with disastrous consequences. He first came to global prominence in the mid-1980s as the wunderkind of Harvard University’s econ department. He became one of the school’s youngest tenured professors at twenty-eight, and quickly sold himself as an advisor to struggling governments dealing with crises of hyperinflation, a topic about which Sachs boldly claimed to know “just about everything that is needed to be known.”

It was during this period that the young economist fashioned his unique brand of shock therapy -- a free market fundamentalism of privatization, deregulation, and government subsidy-slashing for commodities such as oil, met with debt relief and foreign aid -- that would later take shape as the Washington Consensus and be subsequently savaged by the likes of Naomi Klein, William Easterly, and Dambisa Moyo. Despite massive policy failures in countries that followed his advice, Sachs has successfully avoided accepting any responsibility for suboptimal outcomes of his theory. On the contrary, he has reinvented himself as an economic tutor to the stars, and now with his new book on how to fix the American economy, his position as the most influential commentator on economic crises is more secure than ever.  

So it shouldn’t be a surprise to find the tirelessly self-promoting Sachs holding forth on the recent Nigerian crisis in the op-ed pages of the New York Times, despite the fact that the former boy wonder of development theory has been, well, wrong on just about every major crisis since the collapse of the Soviet Union.  

Wasting no time in publicizing his own elite status in the current crisis in Abudja, Sachs argues that despite continuing demonstrations against the government’s surprise decision on New Year’s Day to halt state subsidies of oil for millions of Nigerians, things aren’t as bad as they seem.      

Meeting with the president and his economic team in Abuja last week, in the midst of protests against the subsidy removal, confirmed my view that the Nigerian government has an unprecedented opportunity to clean up its act and win back the support of a long-suffering population. The president spoke of taking the tough medicine necessary to build the foundations for long-term growth. His lead economic architect is Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, newly returned from a top spot at the World Bank.

What should raise the eyebrows of even the most casual observer of political economy – that policy is now being shaped by a World Bank alum -- is for Sachs precisely the “glimmer of hope” in an otherwise bleak landscape of corruption, political instability, and staggering nationwide poverty. At the core of the subsidy dilemma, Sachs correctly argues that corruption and elite free-riding represent the most formidable roadblocks preventing equitable reform.

When a country depends excessively on one or two key resources like oil, gold, or diamonds, politics too easily descends into megacorruption and a brutal struggle over the resource earnings…Oil exporters like Nigeria very often keep domestic oil prices low as an easy sop to powerful local interests. Nigeria’s oil prices were among the lowest in Africa until the subsidies were abruptly ended January 1. According to the government’s estimates, the oil subsidy in 2011 amounted to a staggering $8 billion, roughly 4 percent of GDP…Nigeria’s well-to-do households, with their cars and large diesel generators, and also some adroit oil smugglers, captured much of the subsidy. 

These observations are largely correct as far as they go. What’s instructive, however, is that when dishing out prescriptions to help remedy the situation, Sachs does not suggest that the government reform its own rotten institutions or prevent poaching by the nation’s wealthiest families. Instead, we’re told that the vast majority of the country’s poor -- who depend on oil subsidies to make possible everyday things like getting to market and keeping cool -- should be forced to shoulder the lion’s share of sacrifice as Goodluck Jonathan pursues market reform under heavy pressure from the International Monetary Fund. 

Welcome to Shock Therapy 2.0. The effects of the entirely unexpected subsidy removal were profound. The price for fuel doubled overnight, inflationary pressures quickly took hold as the price for basic commodities skyrocketed by as much as 100 percent, and people poured into the streets in protest. But for Sachs, these are simply the spasmodic death throes of the country’s old, decrepit order giving way to a “new day for Nigeria.” The rewards for short-term pain, Sachs tells us and as advocates of austerity always promise, will arrive down the line in the form of long-term socioeconomic improvement. Says Sachs,

The government ended the subsidies to redeploy the 4 percent of GDP toward long-term development needs, including health, roads and power. The reform logic is sound. Using the 4 percent of GDP in a strategic manner can do far more for Nigeria’s poor and the country’s long-term growth than haphazard giveaways of cheap oil.

Trouble is, none of this is true. Nigeria’s “new day” looks increasingly like days of old when the country suffered under military rule. Faced with growing street demonstrations, Jonathan emptied the barracks, ordered the arrests of lead activists, and threatened to charge citizens with treason if they didn’t abandon their protests and get back to work. Thus far, at least twenty people have been confirmed killed in the protests, with hundreds more sustaining injuries at the hands of Nigerian soldiers charged with suppressing dissent.  

And to suggest, as Sachs does, that Jonathan’s administration can be trusted to carry out the sort of reforms promised is to ignore reality entirely.  “When Nigeria won relief on its external debt in the mid-2000s,” Sachs argues, “the savings on debt service were actually redirected to meaningful social investments in the states and local governments. The government is now promising to turn the outlays on subsidies into outlays on specific and closely monitored investments in health care, infrastructure, job training and other areas.” Sachs’ embedded embrace of austerity -- implicitly suggesting that debt relief schemes, when managed successfully, allow governments to accumulate reserves of public trust that can be drawn down on at a later date to soften the blow of social spending cuts -- is as troubling as it is based in fantasy. Nigerians have seen little improvement of the sort Sachs suggests, even as the government continues to lavish grotesque sums of capital on itself.

After difficult negotiations this past weekend, the Jonathan administration reversed itself on the question of subsidies. The government reinstituted subsidies to roughly half their previous levels prompting labor unions to call for an end, if only temporary, to nation-wide strikes which had brought the country’s economy to a halt. Nevertheless, as CNN reports, “heavy military presence was still evident in [Lagos’] streets in the evening, with armed checkpoints set up at most key bridges and along major roads in the city.”

Interestingly, the compromise seems to have shaken Sachs out of his development reverie. When I asked Sachs, via Twitter, to comment on Jonathan’s about-face Sunday, he responded that he was “glad there was compromise reached today. The whole episode was very poorly managed. Nigeria needs more basic reforms.” I responded that it was messy, and pressed him on what I take to be his application of a double-standard -- raging against neoliberalism this past fall in Zuccotti Park but defending policies of austerity and “shared sacrifice” for Africans. Sachs replied that he “wasn’t calling for shared sacrifice and austerity in Nigeria. I was calling fr [sic] end of subsidies to rich and targeting poor.” When I pointed out that he explicitly employed the rhetoric of shared sacrifice (“To share the pain, the president has ordered cuts in top salaries in the government…”), Sachs clarified that he “meant to be saying that the subsidy removal was causing pain, not to be recommending pain! Perhaps badly phrased.”  

Badly phrased, indeed. My suggestion that he write a follow-up editorial making his new position clear was met with silence. Perhaps he was otherwise engaged: Sachs got pounded repeatedly throughout the day by Nigerian bloggers and other informed observers for his defense of Jonathan’s original policy posture in the matter. This morning, in a flurry of tweets, Sachs retreated from his editorial, noting that he “spoke too fast, too soon, without knowing the details,” that he “had nothing to do with the policy, learned of it after,” that “he knew nothing of about [the policy] beforehand,” and that his “comments were misjudged,” but managed to slap a Band-Aid on the mess by noting that “I always try, but I do not always get it right.”     

Unfortunately for everyone else, there will be no penalty or meaningful censure for such profoundly dangerous sloppiness. Sachs’ most recent fit of poor judgment will be quickly forgiven -- rewarded, even, with future opinion pieces in the world’s most influential editorial section. For this very reason, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the important lessons to be drawn from this episode: Sachs had no idea what he was talking about, his knee-jerk response to the crisis celebrated policies of austerity and economic shock, and the Grey Lady gave none of it a second thought. Neoliberalism, it would seem, is alive and well. 

The narrative seems simple enough: on December 18, 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi, an over-educated but under-employed Tunisian fruit seller, immolated himself in protest and died at the age of 26. His act touched off a wave of activism that toppled the governments of his own country, neighboring Egypt, and (in different circumstances) Libya. The revolutionary wave touched most countries considered to be part of the Arab World, along with many others, and continues to place the governments of the region in precarious positions. Directly and openly inspired by this, a Canadian magazine called Adbusters issued a call for similar tactics to be used in the United States, specifically targeting the Wall Street financial district in New York City. This led to the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, which in turn spread across the United States and thereafter to many other locations around the world.

After taking a step back and examining all of this from a larger perspective, the chain of events is still evident and accurate, though much less linear. During the height of the Egyptian Revolution in late winter and early spring, thousands of citizens of the state of Wisconsin occupied the state’s Capitol building and the surrounding grounds in order to protest a contentious anti-union law. Demonstrators drew parallels between their situation and that in Egypt, and the Egyptians noticed, sending orders of pizza and other assistance in solidarity. Similarly, during the past year Israel was roiled by extraordinarily large (and tactically similar) demonstrations focused on deteriorating living conditions, and anti-austerity protests swept most of Europe, notably including the occupation-style tactics of Spain’s Indignados. A large anti-corruption movement emerged in India, masses of Mexicans indicated that they feel the Drug War must end, and Evo Morales’s Bolivian government’s construction program drew the ire of some of its indigenous supporters. This is just a sample.

In other words, 2011 has been a busy year, and much of the aforementioned activity crossed national (and ethnic, and religious) boundaries, with activists in different countries communicating with one another and coordinating their activities internationally, or at least acting in solidarity with those they see as their brethren. This stands to reason. All of these movements are battling neoliberalism, the guiding principle of Western governments and their foreign satraps for over three decades. Under the guise of such slogans as “free markets,” “free trade,” and the like, the end result is privatization of gains and socialization of risk, or, to put it another way, welfare for the rich and free markets for the poor. Corporations and the wealthiest classes receive tax breaks and subsidies in ordinary times and bailouts in emergencies, all under the stated rationale that this will result in increased investment, thereby spreading prosperity to the rest of society through a “trickle-down” effect. Meanwhile, various social programs and measures designed to protect workers, the environment, and the disadvantaged are weakened or eliminated entirely, in the name of austerity, among other things.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, these trends were initiated by those who grew up with all the advantages they sought to remove. By the 1970s, most of those on both sides of the North Atlantic who had struggled, often in the face of lethal opposition, for such things as labor rights, progressive taxation, workplace safety, universal education, environmental protections, and the like were dead, and their descendants had known nothing but the resulting broad-based prosperity that followed, at least in peacetime. Either a lack of appreciation for these struggles created an environment where they could be lumped in with “big government” in general as the cause of the stagflation and other economic problems of that era, or reactionary elements finally saw an opportunity to roll back changes they had violently opposed for generations, or perhaps both scenarios are true.

In any case, the 1980s saw Margaret Thatcher declaring “there is no alternative” to the neoliberal prescriptions of the era, while in the United States, the Reagan Administration famously pursued “trickle-down economics,” also known as “Reaganomics.” The change seems striking when one considers that Reagan's Republican predecessors such as Eisenhower and Nixon dismissed such policies in their terms in office, and even his own Vice President, George Herbert Walker Bush, had earlier referred to neoliberalism as “voodoo economics.” In other developed nations around the world, neoliberal reforms similarly flew in the face of a hard-won social compact, and while such reforms were most enthusiastically pursued in the United States and United Kingdom, they proceeded apace almost everywhere, to varying extents.

Resistance was immediate, with activists pointing out that the First World was now experiencing what the Third World had experienced for centuries at the hands of foreign imperialists and their local collaborators. A perfect example is the British de-industrialization of the Indian subcontinent, with its motive to protect the fortunes of British industrialists and resulting in calamitous effects that are still being felt today. This was the general pattern for Euro-American-Japanese-etc. imperialism for ages. The phrase “local collaborators” is crucial, because very often the elites of the colonized nations were indispensable to the process of empire, and as time went by, imperialists dispensed with colonization (or even direct rule) entirely, instead ruling through compliant clients. This has been the preferred method of the United States (notwithstanding Hawaii, the Philippines, and elsewhere,) and thus it is fitting that the first successful resistance to neoliberalism emerged in Latin America.

In late February of 1989, massive urban strife embroiled Caracas, the Venezuelan capital. The unrest was touched off by an attempt by President Perez to implement a package of neoliberal reforms at the behest of the International Monetary Fund. The Washington-based IMF and the Perez administration sought to take advantage of Venezuela's economic problems in order to restructure the country along neoliberal lines. These events were unique in neither circumstance nor scale, but they did occur at a precipitous time: the Cold War was ending. During the Cold War, attempts by Latin American activists (labor unions, peasants' organizations, religious groups, and armed rebels) to challenge the state of affairs in their countries were met with accusations of Communism, followed by state violence and repression, usually with funding, training, and sometimes direct military assistance from the United States.

Red-baiting not a necessary excuse for intervention, but after decades of stating that intervention was necessary to combat a Communist menace, it became politically problematic to wage such interventions when the Communist menace no longer existed. After decades of repression, culminating in the especially brutal 1980s, and in the face of unfriendly regimes, Latin American social movements began to regain their momentum, and by the end of 2010 much of Latin America was (or had been) ruled by leftist (often “left populist”) administrations for the first time in the history of many countries.

Poverty and inequality are still ubiquitous in much of the region, but at the same time these and other social ills have been under intensive attack. For example, in Brazil, the administration of President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, a former metalworker and trade unionist, embarked on social programs that would likely have brought an aggressive response from right-wing Brazilians and their backers in Washington and elsewhere. This is exactly what happened to President Joao Goulart in 1964. Lula, in contrast, finished his term having overseen steep drops in poverty and inequality, and also worked to deepen the process of Latin American economic integration.

None of the governments in the “new Latin America” have entirely pleased the social movements responsible for their elections. Lula's administration compromised with international financial institutions, and also participated in the occupation of Haiti after the controversial toppling of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, though Lula did oppose the coup against Honduran President Manuel Zelaya (the Cold War is over, but reactionary forces remain.) The recent problems of Bolivia's Evo Morales were mentioned above. Meanwhile, and perhaps ironically, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's “Bolivarian Revolution” is in serious economic trouble. The point is that the people of Latin America have shown what is possible, and the issues that motivate their struggles are the same of most people around the world. On October 25, a “Solidarity Statement from Cairo” appeared on the website of Occupy Wall Street, making similar assertions. While some have questioned the statement's veracity, the aforementioned gestures of support during the Wisconsin imbroglio, recent visits to American demonstrations by Egyptian activists, and a march from Tahrir Square to the American embassy in solidarity with embattled Occupy Oakland all show the global solidarity that characterizes this “movement of movements.”

“Movement of movements” was one phrase used to describe the collection of environmental, labor, and trade groups (though their opponents, and the mainstream media, used the label “anti-globalization”) that achieved considerable prominence by the late 1990s in their struggle against neoliberalism. Their struggle was/is international, actually global, with abundant participation from the Global South. Such a focus on international solidarity goes back as far as 1864 and the founding of the International Workingmen's Association (aka the First International,) if not earlier. The focus has always been to remind the world's masses that those who rule them always seek to divide or distract them along national, racial, religious, ethnic, and other lines. This is essentially what happened in the First World War, among other occasions, but in contrast, if people are able to organize, sustain their activities, and support one another locally and globally, there are few limits on what can be achieved. That is exactly what the Occupiers and every allied struggle worldwide have in mind.

Scott Charney is an intern at Foreign Policy in Focus.