Romantic histories that thwart the EU Rationalist vision.

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  1. Romantic histories that thwart the EU Rationalist vision.

    February 20, 2011 by Christopher Buxton

    David Cameron’s recent attack on multi-culturalism, Belgium’s failure to agree on a government, and the squabbles that have broken out between Bulgaria and her non-EU Slav neighbours are just the random jigsaw pieces of evidence that point to the growing challenge to the EU rationalist project. The EU was founded in the hopes that the nationalist conflicts that climaxed in two World Wars could be forgotten in a characterless superstructure where materialist well being and sugary values of universal human rights would lead to ethic amnesia. This project flies in the face of the sharply contrasting versions of history that nationalists have carefully fostered over two centuries. And these histories grow in strength when hard economic conditions destroy materialistic aspirations.

    So how are Bulgarians to take the news from Serbia, that around the enclave of Bosilegrad, where the majority population is Bulgarian, a celebration of the national hero Vasil Levski has been banned? Despite protests from the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry, Bulgarian patriots have been prevented from crossing the border to join their fellows in laying flowers at the monument to the Apostle of Freedom. And how should Bulgarians respond to the news from the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia that folk who insist on their Bulgarian heritage now face violent repression?

    In EU candidate countries, Bulgarian human rights are being curtailed. In FYR Macedonia folk lose their jobs, and, worse, mothers are put in prison, for simply claiming an ethnicity that the powers-that-be do not wish to acknowledge. The worst example is Mr Zdraveiski, a former policeman, who was imprisoned and tortured before being driven out of FYR Macedonia.

    Ironically IMRO – the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization – has re-emerged as a force in Bulgarian domestic and foreign politics. They have taken over the mantle of the compromised ATAKA leader, Volen Siderov, as the sole protectors of the Bulgarian heritage in the face of perceived threats from Roma, Pomak and Turkish minorities and perceived insults from Bulgaria’s former enemies in Serbia, The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Turkey and Greece. Once again it is IMRO who from their position on the far right can decide who is a patriot and who is an enemy of the Bulgarian people.

    IMRO has a colourful history. As a quasi terrorist organisation it struck fear not just in Bulgaria but across Europe in the 1920s and 30s. Split itself into pro Serb and pro Bulgarian factions, it embarked on a series of assassinations, culminating in the shooting of the King of Yugoslavia and the French foreign minister in Marseilles. This heroic deed occurred at a crucial point of French diplomacy, aimed at frustrating a looming fascist alliance. The assassin, Mr Chernozemski from Velingrad is celebrated in IMRO folklore as a patriotic hero. The fact that IMRO was being supported by Croatian and Italian fascists is neither here nor there.

    For an example of the extremes to which partial readings of history can lead, we need look no further than the death of Alexander Stamboliiski. A radical prime minister, leader of the Peasant Party and opponent of Bulgaria’s calamitous involvement in the First World War, he was assassinated following a political coup supported by IMRO, the Military and the ethnically German Tsar. IMRO’s beef with the Prime Minister was not so much that he was striving for measures of social justice in his impoverished country, but that he had signed the Treaty of Neuilly. As leader of a defeated nation, he didn’t have much choice. However this treaty did shatter the patriotic dream of Greater Bulgaria from the Black Sea to the Aegean and Adriatic. In the treaty he gave up title to all lands occupied during the war,specifically Macedonia, Thrace and Dobrudja, territories still with large Bulgarian populations, but entirely ceded to Romania, Greece Turkey and Yugoslavia.

    Stamboliiski was hauled from his hiding place. The Rationalist who insisted on calling himself a South Slav rather than Bulgarian first had his ears cut off, then his hands – let’s not forget that he signed the Treaty of Neuilly – before finally his head was cut off and sent to Sofia in a biscuit tin.

    There are streets named after this Prime Minister in every Bulgarian town.

    It is a commonplace in Bulgaria that people do not learn from history. The problem is that there are many histories and especially in the Balkans. These histories are entirely self contradictory. Croats, Serbs, Romanians, Hungarians, Bulgarians, Greeks and Turks cling to their own history as an absolute truth and will admit no competing alternative. The power of these competing mythologies has led to the orgy of bloodletting in three Balkan Wars, the Great War, the Second World War and the civil wars in former Yugoslavia. All these conflicts involved atrocities committed by people fired by history. The victims were always defenceless civilians.

    The roots of these inter-ethnic conflicts lie in the procedures of rationaist empires. From Ireland, India, Hapsburg Czechoslovakia, Tsarist Russia all the way to Bulgaria, peoples were moved about, forced to live alongside other ethnicities and religions till come the Romantic Revolution and a weakening of a corrupt central power, all Hell broke loose.

    The EU better learn from all its histories.

  2. Other ways of saying it

    February 1, 2011 by Christopher Buxton

    “Man loves individuals. Man loves things. Man loves places. And the vagabond lover of life finds individuals and things to love in many places and not in any one nation. Man loves places and no one place, for the earth, like a beautiful wanton, puts on a new dress to fascinate him wherever he may go. A patriot loves not his nation, but the spiritual meannesses of his life of which he has created a frontier wall to hide the beauty of other horizons.”

    Claude McKay Banjo 1929

  3. Race and Identity

    February 1, 2011 by Christopher Buxton

    Is Barack Obama American? Is Ashley Cole English? Is Sophie Marinova Bulgarian? Is Dimitur Berbatov Bulgarian? Is Spaska Mitrova Bulgarian? Should Bulgaria open its EU borders to all those living in Albania,Macedonia, Moldova, Serbia and former Russian Republics, who claim Bulgarian ethnicity?

    Can a nation be represented by someone whose very appearance runs counter to national stereotype?

    I remember being told by American liberals that there would never be a black American President. But the Berlin Wall fell! We are in a world of realised “impossibilities”. Some Americans find the reality so traumatic that they are scrabbling to prove Obama is not American, without appearing to be racist. The birth certificate that places Obama’s birth in Hawaii is being hotly disputed by a considerable section of the American population – as though by a legal stroke, Obama could be wiped from official American history. Anti Obama fervour is being fomented by populists who evoke a cleaner frontier world, where white men and their feisty women in white hats shoot Indians and illegal immigrants.

    In England, the extreme Fascist right question the presence of black players in the England football team. But for most people Ashley Cole is a stereotype footballer, skilful, materialistic and about as admirable as John Terry in his private life.

    The sensitive Berbatov is a less stereotypical footballer, he’s as Bulgarian as Christo Stoichkov, but he refuses to play for the Bulgarian team.

    Sophie Marinova, arguably one of Bulgaria’s greatest popular singers, did want to represent Bulgaria in the 2005 Eurovision Song Contest. Her Roma origins provoked such a backlash that she was rejected. The veteran pop journalist Toma Sprostranov commented that she should have represented gypsies, reflecting a common view that gypsies are not Bulgarian though they have lived in Bulgaria since at least the thirteenth century,.

    The following year, after a great deal of soul-searching, Bulgaria was represented by Aziz, a Roma transvestite.

    There is much more sympathy for Spaska Mitrova who asserted her Bulgarian ethnicity in the Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia. There local nationalist passions erupted. She was denounced as a traitor and a personal custody battle became the pretext for locking her up in a Skopje gaol. Since then others who have claimed Bulgarian ethnicity have found themselves at best jobless and at worst imprisoned, tortured and driven from their homes.

    While many young Bulgarians leave Bulgaria to find more lucrative jobs in the west, at least a million people now living in Albania, Macedonia, Serbia and former Russian republics claim Bulgarian ethnicity, speak Bulgarian and uphold Bulgarian traditions.

    European border rules make it difficult for these Bulgarians to migrate to the homeland. This migration is seen by many in Bulgaria as the solution to the ticking demographic time-bomb – where low birth-rate and emigration of the dominant population is paralleled by high birth-rates in the gypsy, Turkish and Pomak populations.

    Today we are greeted by the shock headline that this year 48% of the Bulgarian Primary School intake did not have Bulgarian as their mother tongue. Bulgarian Education Minister Sergei Ignatov sought to quell anxiety by stating “We’re all Bulgarian citizens and it’s the job of education to instil national consciousness and a new European identity.” This form of political correctness will not gloss over the realities of educational provision in areas where the majority population speaks Turkish or Roma. Neither will it still the fears of nationalists who yearn for the simplicities of a time when Bulgarian heroes proclaimed their ethnic pride in the face of alien subjugation.

  4. Rationalism and Romanticism Materialism and Faith in Balkan Politics

    January 12, 2011 by Christopher Buxton

    When I see a couple of kids
    And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
    Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
    I know this is paradise

    Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives–
    Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
    Like an outdated combine harvester,
    And everyone young going down the long slide

    To happiness, endlessly.

    This is Philip Larkin’s skeptical response to the notion of rational progress leading to the perfection of human life.

    For Romantics, what does not change is human susceptibility to crimes of passion – most notably the recent killings in Arizona. Rationalists cannot account for these crimes and therefore try to sweep them under the carpet.

    In the Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia a special needs teacher asserts his Bulgarian ethnicity. He is called a traitor to his people and is sacked from his job. A mother involved in a bitter custody battle finds herself in a Macedonian gaol. Is it coincidence that she has publicly asserted her Bulgarian ethnicity? Finally, the Zdraveski family arrive as political refugees in Blagoevgrad. Mr Zdraveski is a former para-military policeman, who fought Albanian Separatists in the early years of the new century. More recently he was imprisoned and tortured by his fellow Slavs – because he asserted his Bulgarian heritage.

    Slav turns against Slav – even without all the tortuous claims and counterclaims on the true ethnic origin of “Macedonians”.

    My former student Asen Yordanov has set up a support group for this family which now numbers over a thousand members.

    We can be sure that dramatically opposing views on these events will be found in Macedonia and Bulgaria – causing great quakes below the seemingly placid surface of everyday public politics. As mainstream newspapers and politicians in both countries ignore these stories and bask in the approval of EU functionaries and American ambassadors, there is a geyser of fury building up in the internet.

    Faced by the nationalist broo-ha-ha in both Bulgaria and Macedonia, the rationalist feels helpless. How in this European, social-democratic, multicultural, materialistically cosy world can people get their knickers so passionately twisted? Humanist medicine fails in this case as it does in the USA, Pakistan and Belgium.

    People trust their powerful emotions.

    As Hamlet says to Horatio:
    “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
    Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

    Or as my mother-in-law put it more succinctly:
    “You’re so alienated.”

    Rationalists need to recognise the power of the Romantic position:

     Material comfort is a distraction from the inevitable ennobling struggle between clear right and wrong.

     Poor people are happier than the rich because they have hope and faith.

     We are individuals but we must remain loyal to the traditions of our family, our tribe, our religious beliefs and show no tolerance to those who threaten these.

     We should be rightly suspicious of foreigners who seek to influence the way we behave. They have no understanding of our soul. They are contemptuous of all traditions that stand in the way of their materialist projects.

     Our version of History is the key to understanding present difficulties. We should never lose the opportunity to explain the present in terms of a glorious past of moral certainty.

     Dostoevsky was right about the moral superiority of the primitive over the sophisticated.

    An Englishman, born into the warm hands of the newly founded NHS, told by my Prime Minister that “I’d never had it so good”, taught in schools where the map of the world was coloured red, it was difficult for me to resist a rationalist view of the world – particularly as a crowded pub in my then home town was blown up by the IRA.

    But then there is Philip Larkin’s sly debunking of the “Progress” myth. What’s the good of material comfort if it leads to oblivion sitting lonely in a chair in an old people’s home, I am feel vulnerable to Bulgarian suggestions that my culture is poisonously deficient. As a citizen of the world, I fell in love with a community living through difficult times. I shared songs, passions and anger, unfelt in my anaemic homeland.

    And as that daddy of English Romanticism, William Blake posited: “Without opposites, there is no progression.” Rationalism has to be opposed by Romanticism. And while a shrinking generation of honest hard working Bulgarians hold on to the hope that with help from the rational great powers and new muscular politicians, economic well being will conquer all the problems, the nationalist romantics let loose strident sirens of alarm about:.

     Foreign control of the media, subverting traditional orthodox values, leading to the “gypsification of culture”;
     The imposition of a politically correct discourse urging tolerance for gays, ethnic minorities and alien religions;
     Western hegemony where home grown politicians bask in the approval of their new American/European masters;
     Wilful amnesia by the elite of past wrongs – particularly atrocities and ethnic cleansing committed by the Ottoman Empire, and the historic attempt by the Greek Patriarchate to destroy the independent Bulgarian Orthodox church.

    Be sure that there are similar romantic movements in every Balkan country – and as I discovered when once caught sitting on a sofa between a Serb and a Croat, the truths that these movements enunciate are radically different, but passionately justified.

    The strength the romantics draw on is their version of the past – and they will talk about the present as though nothing has changed. Truth is impermeable. Thus, one commentator will characterise the present day as a new “Time Apart” – referring to Anton Donchev’s novel about the enforced Islamification of the Rhodopes centuries ago. This commentator would have us believe that Bulgaria’s neighbour, NATO partner and candidate for EU entry still poses a threat of Genocide. Like the American Tea Party with their evocation of a frontier gun-law past, Bulgarian romantics quote Haiduks and gun toting revolutionary leaders.

    We should not underestimate the power of Romantics. After all in the nineteenth Century they brought rational Empires crashing down and shot the starting pistol for the First World War.

  5. Arrogance

    December 6, 2010 by Christopher Buxton

    I was recently castigated by a former student for becoming yet another foreigner to “treat Bulgarians as though they were aborigines”.

    I learn from the comments appended to an article on the early release of Michael Shields, that “the English have always treated Bulgarians as if they were aborigines.” You may remember that Michael Shields was the English football fan, who was imprisoned in Bulgaria for the grievous maiming of a Bulgarian citizen, but then was transferred to serve the remainder of his sentence in a British Gaol.

    In the right wing “patriotic” press, American Ambassador James Warlick, who has the temerity to comment on Bulgarian internal affairs, is routinely described as “regarding Bulgarians as aborigines.”

    I have been searching for some history of this most surprising of comparisons. I would like to know whether any foreign commentator has ever compared Bulgarians with Aborigines.

    Apart from the fact that both peoples have suffered from Imperial repression and a degree of cultural isolation, there are no points of similarity beyond common humanity.

    What may be true is that those Bulgarians who perceive the world as an ethnic league table would identify aborigines as occupying the lowest position. Patriotic Bulgarians would also hold as an article of faith that history or even malign world conspiracy has handed Bulgarians the outrageously unjust fate to be placed on a lower position than that enjoyed by other “advanced” nations.

    Anyone from one of these supposedly “advanced” nations, who lives in Bulgaria will, like me, be tempted to comment on the joys and challenges of everyday life. Bulgaria’s entry into NATO and the EU makes it inevitable that Bulgaria will become the object of report and even advice.

    The problem is that any critical comments will be construed as patronising and arrogant.

    In England, the failure of the World Cup Bid has led to a storm of self-righteous fury. Accusations of corruption in the British popular press, feature FIFA Third World representatives, Russian kleptocrats and oil rich Sheiks. How dare the world ignore the whiter than white combination of Prince William, David Beckham and David Cameron?

    Ha! Ha! Ha!

    I would imagine that in the rest of the world, people are quite pleased by this very public punishment of perceived English arrogance – even while admitting the fallibility of FIFA as an institution.

    Arrogance involves the assumption by the individual of some superiority. Arrogance is perceived by others – seldom by the individual. And I admit that as an English citizen I have to try to monitor myself when daring to comment on another country even though I live in that country and am affected by social and legal issues.

    Seizing on some comments I had made about attitudes to homosexuals and gypsies, my former student last year launched a diatribe against the horrors perpetrated by the English over the centuries. I could have written this part of his article for him. I could be accused of arrogance if I stated I could have written it better.

    There is a kind of arrogance which is based not on a feeling of social superiority, but on a tortured sense of persecution. This sense of persecution, however justified, will foster entrenched opinions and stereotypes. Thin skinned sensitivity and perhaps a commercial need to pander to a like-minded audience may lie behind the oft-repeated accusation that Bulgarians are being treated as if they were aborigines.

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