Migration and Populism in Bulgaria

Ildiko Otova, Evelina Staykova

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367752071
• eBook ISBN: 9781000504569
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Focusing on Bulgaria, this book addresses the key issues of migration and populism, which have grown to become dominant topics of debate within Europe and across the world over the last decade.

Ildiko Otova and Evelina Staykova trace the history of migration and populist discourses within Bulgaria from 1989 until the present day. The authors analyse how a lack of clear and coherent migration policies on migration over the years left Bulgaria unprepared for the 2015 European migrant crisis, thus leaving the door open for populist ideology to help shape public perceptions and narratives of migration as a menace and burden to society. Far from being confined to the extreme fringes of the political spectrum, Otova and Staykova reveal how populism has increasingly been co-opted by mainstream parties. This shift to the middle ground has led to what they claim to be a 'normalisation' in populist rhetoric, giving legitimacy to attitudes towards migration as a threat to society, which they argue, in turn, renders constructive policymaking far more difficult.

Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this book is an important tool for postgraduate students and researchers of Political Sciences, Migration Studies, European Studies and European History, as well as practitioners working in the field of international migration and asylum.

1 (Re)discovering migration – the post-1989 migration profile of Bulgaria

DOI: 10.4324/9781003161493-2

Bulgaria continues to be a state affected mostly by emigration, but neither politicians and statesmen, nor society have managed to comprehend and analyse the factors, which effected the departure of so many nationals out of the country despite the dramatic way they perceive and articulate the phenomenon in terms of a serious demographic problem verging on a national catastrophe. Even if there is still some fragile dynamics of returning emigrants, resulting, for instance, from the Covid-19 pandemic, it happens as a conjuncture of factors, without understanding the possibility and the necessity of governing the process. Substantial levels of economic emigration and the social and economic context in conjunction with the geographic location make the country a point of origin and a transit territory for the darkest phenomenon of migration – human trafficking. Another trend of recent years which should not be overlooked is the tendency of transnational civil activity developing within certain groups of emigrants.

On the other hand, the post-1989 changes, followed by the 2007 accession to the EU, have brought the country nearer to normalisation of immigration in terms of causes and forms, although in purely statistical terms it has remained at very low levels. Economic immigration, along with asylum granting, is some of the forms of migration rediscovered by Bulgaria in the course of the democratic changes. Immigration in the country is of complex and mixed nature. EU citizens, third-country nationals, old and new migration communities comprise a small but varied local immigration panorama. International commitments and the fact that the country manages the external border of the EU account for the flows of asylum seekers streaming to Bulgaria, especially after its location was found to coincide with the Balkan Refugee Route. Of particular importance to the understanding of Bulgaria’s case is the highly politicised treatment of the migration topic in the years after 2013, which found expression in a traumatic experiencing of emigration and dramatic discovery of immigration.

The first part of this chapter presents the migration panorama of Bulgaria, and the second provides a closer focus on the interpretations, chiefly of emigration processes. This is a political-science analysis, but it will also focus on some social attitudes and distances.

Migration as a watershed of two epochs

Any analysis of migration processes in Bulgaria needs to take into consideration the communist past of the country. The reason for this, above and beyond any political connotations, is the fundamental difference in migration nature and the way it is managed before and after the changes (Staykova, 2013). Comprehension of current processes would be impossible unless they were viewed within the context of this transition between two epochs, for which migration acts as a watershed. The reason is that a substantial part of the contemporary migration phenomenon is related to realities inherited from former migratory processes. Thus, for example, old migrant communities, who arrived to Bulgaria during the communist period on account of ideological propinquity or the so-called “fraternal agreements”, are seen today to attract fresh economic migration, which utilises established networks and a successful integration of the forerunners into the recipient society. The very outset of the transition was marked by a massive migration wave, and the subsequent opening of borders was definitive for the migration profile of the country as well as crucial in the formation of certain societal attitudes.

Going back to the period before 1989, the analysis should take into consideration the fact that even though communism as ideology may be perceived as a global and open movement (Ditchev, 2003), it has bred some exceptionally closed societies, which monitored tightly who crossed outside the county’s borders and who entered its territory. Nationals were expected to be static rather than mobile. Movement and mobility even within the state’s own national territory represented a controlled process and not a matter of personal freedom or wish. To a much greater extent, this applied to trans-border traffic. In view of the above, it is not a surprise that both immigration and emigration have eminently found a place within the political logical models (Krasteva, 2014b).

Immigration in Communist Bulgaria, although severely restricted, seemed less problematic than emigration, insofar it did not directly affect the liberties of Bulgarian nationals themselves. Explicably, the most numerous group was represented by immigrants from the Soviet Union, in their best part women who came to Bulgaria as wives of local nationals. Despite expectations of both Sofia and Moscow regimes that the process would in effect lead to “sovietization” of the country (Krasteva, 2014b), it has largely remained an instance of “sentimental migration” (Atanasova, 2005).

Several other groups can be cited as examples, with more ideological explanations to be sought behind them (Krasteva, 2005). The group of political refugees is not numerous, involving mostly people of leftist persuasions, with the immigrants from Greece being a specific example. Greek political migrants come in two identities – guerrilla fighters and civilians running from the war (1940–1944), as well as children, evacuated by the Communist Party towards some socialist-bloc countries (Kokinu, 2012). A small part of this group has remained in Bulgaria.

The second group comprises students from “fraternal communist countries”, or the so-called “Third World”, who have received scholarships for study in Bulgarian universities. Bulgaria granted government scholarships to young Africans by virtue of interstate arrangements. The only research made so far on migration of Africans into the country (Kamenova, 2005) states that the period after the 1970s saw an average of about 360 students come to the country, and by the end of the period educational stipends began to be granted also by other structures, such as the Fatherland Front, the Central Cooperative Union, the Academy for Public Sciences and Social Management, the Committee for Solidarity with the Peoples of Asia and Africa. Immigration from the Middle East was more numerous and followed the same logic of relations with “fraternal countries” – among them Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian Territories, Iraq, Jordan, Iran, Afghanistan (Krasteva, 2014b). Very few of the African students stayed in Bulgaria, and those from the other group have remained mainly because they had contracted marriages, some of them eventually returning to their native countries after 1989.

There is an example of economic migration with inherent ideological aspect represented by the expatriate workforce from Vietnam, employed primarily in the field of construction works (Krasteva, 2014b) upon signing the labour pact between the two countries in the late 1970s (Mitseva, 2005). It is noteworthy that by the end of the regime and in the first years after 1989, the Vietnamese were “expelled” from the country (Apostolova, 2017).

Emigration at the time was little and very limited. Exit visa system with its exceptionally selective and restrictive accessibility (Krasteva, 2014b) represented the most distinctive manifestation of migration policing in Communist Bulgaria. Exceptions were few. A “naturally chosen” destination was the Soviet Union – for purposes of education and employment. At the end of the 1970s, pursuant to agreements with other socialist states, as well as some North African regimes, few “elect” were able to travel and work to these foreign locations as experts in the field of medicine or engineering sciences, or as workforce for a specified employment term (Krasteva, 2014b).

Emigration from Communist Bulgaria, however, has lingered permanently in the collective memory precisely for its selectivity and for its status of discriminately accorded privilege. Its traumatic images are no less vivid. The communist regime coined the term “nevuzvrashtenets” (a “defector”, a “non-returnee”). Even legislation from the 1948 to 1989 period penalised various forms of unauthorised departure from the country – initially by divesture of citizenship and expropriation of the entire property, later by a ten-year term of imprisonment and a forfeiture of 50,000 leva, and after 1953 it began to treat it as a “treason of the motherland” and to punish it with death. The period in the 1970s following the events in Czechoslovakia was marked by an upsurge of new measures designed to combat emigration (Kiryakov, 2011). As a result, Bulgarian citizens moved abroad mostly as refugees.¹ About 20,000 Bulgarians left the country between the end of the 1950s and 1989. By contrast with other countries of Central and Eastern Europe, which saw dramatic outflows of refugees, figures for Bulgaria indicate that numbers remained stable over time: about 370 persons annually (Sultanova, 2006).

Another example of emigration during the period of the communist regime was of forcible character. At the end of the 1980s authorities commenced the so-called “Revival Process”.² During a massive exodus euphemistically labelled “Grand Excursion” in the spring of 1989, over 350,000 Bulgarian nationals of Turkish origin were forced to leave the country (Maeva, 2006). The collapse of the regime in November of the same year was marked and – in the opinion of some – accelerated by these events and the substantial wave of forced ethnic migration.³

The democratic reforms in Bulgaria marked a radical change in the country’s migration picture. One of the earliest changes which followed the collapse of the communist regime was related precisely to the freedom of movement – the abolition of the exit visa system.⁴ Freedom of movement became one of the first and most eagerly consumed freedoms (Krasteva, 2016). In the following years, the logic of politics would get mixed with purely economic considerations (Hristova-Balkanska, 2012, p. 93).

Due to economic transformation taking place at the time, attended by soaring inflation, unemployment, and political instability, many people decided to emigrate in search of better personal opportunities (Mancheva and Troeva, 2011; Staykova, 2013; Petrunov, 2014). Krasteva (2019) describes the situation, on the one hand, as a loss of demographic, social, educational, and democratic capital, but, on the other hand – as a way to contribute to the country’s development through substantial money amounts being remitted back home. The economic and political chaos of that period also engendered an environment conducive to the emergence of organised criminal groups, seeking to cash-in on people’s desire to find employment and to organise human trafficking networks (Petrunov, 2014). This tendency of emigration of both high-skilled and low-skilled workers was only intensified by the accession of Bulgaria to the European Union in 2007 (Mancheva and Troeva, 2011). Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes remind us that nevertheless

we should keep in mind not only the significant difference in standards of living between West and East and the logistical ease of the move but also one of the least discussed legacies of communism, namely the memory of how bureaucratically difficult it had been to change one’s place of residence.

(Krastev and Holmes, 2019, p. 56)

In this sense, the symbolic impact of mobility and migration is of no less consequence and exerts no smaller influence on societal attitudes.

The total number of Bulgarian nationals living abroad, by various estimates, vacillates between a little over 1 million and nearly 2 million and a half. However, in the last three decades, the data indicate a tendency of significant decrease in the number of people leaving Bulgaria. The average net annual rate of migration, indicating 66,000 departures in the late 1980s, decreased to about 27,000 people in the 1990s and to 17,000 people between 2001 and 2011 (Angelov and Lessenski, 2017a). Eurostat data indicate that between 2013 and 2019 the number of Bulgarians leaving the country registers a gradual increase, with the number doubling over a five-year period – from 16,000 in 2013 to 31,000 in 2018 (Eurostat, 2020).

The largest number of people left Bulgaria when there were visa restrictions, when the country was in the negative Schengen list and there were considerable impediments to labour migration. Conversely, the last decade saw a decrease in net migration d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: migration and populism. Bulgarian specifics
• 1 (Re)discovering migration – the post-1989 migration profile of Bulgaria
• 2 Post-1989 migration policy in Bulgaria on paper and in practice
• 3 Refugees in Bulgaria after 1989: statistical reality and institutionalisation of the phenomenon
• 4 Located on the Balkan Refugee Route amid rampant dominating populism – when politics kills policies
• 5 When policies are absent, is solidarity present?
• Conclusion: Bulgaria's lessons, European tendencies
• Index