The ethnic and non-ethnic politics of everyday life in Bulgaria's southern borderland

Abstract

Ethnicity is found in real-world contexts where non-ethnic forms of identification are available. This conclusion is drawn from an empirical study carried out in the multiethnic town of Kurdzhali in Southern Bulgaria, where members of the Bulgarian majority live alongside the Turkish minority. Drawing on the “everyday nationhood” agenda that aims to provide a methodological toolkit for the study of ethnicity/nationhood without overpredicting its importance, the study involved the collection of survey, interview, and ethnographic data. Against the expectations of some experienced scholars of the Central and Eastern Europe region, ethnic identity was found to be more salient for the majority Bulgarians than for the minority Turks. However, the ethnographic data revealed the importance of a rural–urban cleavage that was not predicted by the research design. On the basis of this finding, I argue that the “everyday nationhood” approach could be improved by including a complementary focus on non-ethnic attachments that have been emphasized by scholarship or journalism relevant to the given context. Rather than assuming the centrality of ethnicity, such an “everyday identifications” approach would start from the assumption that ethnic narratives of identity always have to compete with non-ethnic ones.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Sherrill Stroschein, Cathy Elliott, Charlotte Johnson, Andreea Udrea, and two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful and stimulating comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

Some of the theoretical texts referenced in this article refer to “nationalism” and “nationhood,” while the article mostly addresses “ethnicity.” This analytical overlap is justified on the basis that there is a “conceptual overlap in the way that ordinary people use such terms in their everyday lives” (Fox and Miller-Idriss 558). This paper therefore privileges the usage of the subjects of the study, who often use these concepts interchangeably. I favor “ethnicity” and its derivatives in the paper to avoid confusion for Anglophone readers who may possibly perceive the positive orientation to the Bulgarian state advocated by ethnic-Turkish politicians (and some non-elites) as “Bulgarian civic nationalism,” although I have never heard these policies referred to in terms of “nation” or “nationalism” in the local context. A succinct justification for the analytical conflation of everyday practices of ethnicity and nationalism can be found in Brubaker et al. (14–15).

I have referred to the town in both Bulgarian and Turkish spellings for reasons of symbolic impartiality. However, for the sake of brevity, I will hereafter use the Bulgarian spelling only, by which the town is better known internationally. It should be noted that the Bulgarian Cyrillic form of the place-name may be variously transliterated as “Kardzhali,” “Kardjali,” and so on.

The Pomaks are a population of Bulgarian-speaking Muslims who form a local majority across large parts of the Rhodope mountains in Southern Bulgaria. They form a proportionately much smaller minority in Kurdzhali town.

The initial period of fieldwork was carried out between 18 July and 29 September 2008 and was followed the next year by a shorter stretch between 2 June and 13 July 2009, a period which straddled the Bulgarian parliamentary elections of 5 July 2009. During the initial period of fieldwork, I lived in a flat in the Vuzrozhdentsi quarter of Kurdzhali as well as teaching at a local high school and playing for a local football team in order to “participate” in the life of the town in the manner of traditional participant observation research (Bernard; Eriksen, Small Places).

With regard to Tables 5 and 6, I am referring in both cases to an aggregation of the three “Bulgarian” categories that are differentiated in the table.

An aggregation of three “Bulgarian” categories that are differentiated in the table.

An aggregation of three “Bulgarian” categories that are differentiated in the table.

I am aware of some skepticism among statisticians about the calculating of a mean for Likert scale responses, which implicitly treats them as a continuous variable, which they, arguably, are not. However, my interest here is in the relative rather than the absolute values of Turkish and Bulgarian attitudes, which mean scores do indicate. Furthermore, it should be noted that political scientists such as Kolsto have used the mean scores of Likert data in their analyses.

Ivan Kostov, a former UDF prime minister of Bulgaria, then sitting in the national assembly as the leader of the right-wing Democrats for a Strong Bulgaria, but not actually in the governing coalition.

Sergei Stanishev, BSP prime minister of Bulgaria at the time.

UDF: Union of Democratic Forces (Sayuz na Demokrakichnite Sili, SDS), the largest center-right party in Bulgaria during the 1990s, out of government since 2001.

Indeed, it is probable that such a willingness to discriminate between individuals may have been decisive in relation to the wide margin of victory enjoyed by the ethnic-Turkish incumbent mayor, Azis of the MRF, in the local elections of 2007, who was able to increase his share of the vote by a quarter, romping home with 61% of the vote against just 26% for the broad BSP-led coalition of Bulgarian parties. I found no evidence of Bulgarians who actively claimed to support Azis, so the fact that the MRF claimed 61% in a district where only 53% of the population identify as Turkish is likely to have resulted from a higher turnout among Turks than among Bulgarians.

Chalga is actually the colloquial name for the Bulgarian-language variant of a pop-folk musical genre that is popular throughout the Balkans. The genre is characterized by Turkish and Roma/gypsy musical influences and banal lyrics, usually about love.

There appears to be no sound reason for excluding non-ethnic identifications from the “prompted” survey and interview components of a study. For example, some preliminary research on the Balkans has already shown that rural and urban cultural identifications can be statistically demonstrated to correspond with given political allegiances in much the same way that ethnicity is known to (Cveticanin and Popescu).