I'm back home on holiday from school, reading a recently published book of a Bulgarian journalist and graduate of my high school, whom I've always admired. The man was already in his eighties when I first learned who he was. I recall a tall, well-groomed, evidently intelligent elderly man giving interviews against a background of the purple-and-golden American College of Sofia diploma. The same one graces my grandma's living room right now. The idea that the erudite journalist and I shared a common educational background has always tickled my self-confidence.
Reading his book, I realized however that ACS in his time, in the 1930's, before the school was closed during the Bulgaria's communist era, had much more influence on its pupils than it did when I attended it, or than it does now. He speaks of single-sex residence halls, strict curfews, and punctual punishments, we knew nothing of in our frivolous days of high school. Anyhow, ACS and the contacts you make there have a way of sticking with you for life. It has been true for the author of the book; it has so far been true for me. This is not really the motivation behind my blog post.
The writer's surprising short-sightedness on some issues is. Born and raised in the perfect centre of Sofia, educated in law, with a career in news reporting, who managed to never join the Communist Party, and stay, from what I am reading, critical of his time and his politicians, he shares some astonishingly flat views on the Balkans. Perhaps I have lost my taste for nationalism, more precisely I have never had one, but his account of Macedonians as a nation towards which Bulgaria should take a strict lack of tolerance policy, and Serbs as the arrogant man of the Balkans who is now left in Europe's back yard, bothers me.
The reasons are few. It does bug me when Macedonian press denies the presence of Bulgarian minority on their territory, of course it does. But leading a foreign policy based on threats, mimicking the IR farce Greece has been promoting for years now -- that's petty and counterproductive. If Macedonians see themselves as different ethnic group, let them. Their entry into NATO or the EU is not a matter of what the official name of their country is. It's a matter of ethic stability and economic indicators. Simples.
Then there is the story of meeting this Serbian Associated Press reporter in the 1970s the writer shares. He was full of himself, he concludes, because he spoke to him in impeccable British accent, refusing to speak in Serbian. Well I speak English with my Serbian friends. It IS easier. And it is in English that I've found out their views on Balkan politics, their sometimes inexplicable to me national pride, other questions on which we disagree, and quite a few things we share and which have made us very close. What I really don't enjoy is this incentive for comparison of nationalistic egos that the Balkans so successfully foster. So I am more critical of my country than you might be of yours. This doesn't make our institutions more democratic, our political leaders better versed, or our judicial systems more transparent. And we're not fooling anyone, except, perhaps, each other.
Coming to the end of this book makes me wonder, was the destiny of a critical intellectual living his most active years in communist Bulgaria bound to come down to believing that everything around you is idiotic, including the transition years and all international conflicts. Quite possibly living with the schizophrenic five-year plans of the Red Party leaders, a truly twisted take on economics as I learned by a bear-of-a-Russian professor of economics in Haverford College, Pennsylvania, really makes one an irrevocable skeptic, adamantly believing that human stupidity and herd like behavior is the root of all evils.
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