Ivaylo Ditchev
MOBILE IDENTITIES? MOBILE CITIZENSHIP?
The paper presents the results of a field research conducted with students in 2006, dealing with mass labour migration from Bulgaria towards countries in the EU. The trajectory of the migrants is reconstructed through life-stories from interviews with them and their relatives, as well as participant observations of the journey conducted in the buses taking them to Italy, Austria, and Germany. A special emphasis is put on the question of how the mobile persons perceive their citizenship and identity. The paradox, having led to this research, is that more freedom of movement produces more submission and the general lowering of citizenship standards. The result seems to be a defensive reaction on the level of the imaginary; a general hardening of identities.

Mila Mancheva
LABOUR MIGRATION OF BULGARIAN TURKS TO GERMANY: CO-ETHNIC MIGRANT NETWORKS AND CULTURES
Drawing upon ethnographic research on Bulgarian irregular labour migration in Berlin (2006) this article deals with the question of how notions of ethnicity, nationality and citizenship are negotiated and configured with respect to the social status of irregularity among a specific group of irregular labour migrants from Bulgaria in Germany, namely the ethnic Turks. Bulgarian Turks are particularly interesting for such a study because of their minority status in the home country framed by their Muslim religion, Turkish mother tongue and ethnicity and due to their general orientation towards the networks of co-ethnic German Turks in the host country of Germany. The article provides an outline of the main characteristics of the group of irregular Bulgarian Turk migrants in Germany (as of 2006) including main migration practices, key niches for illegal employment, organization of the irregular labour market as well as conditions of work and every day socialization practices of migrants. The article focuses on the role played by ethnicity on the one hand and irregularity on the other in the establishment and maintenance of migrant networks as the focal arteries of migration. To this aim of special interest is the study of the social network established between the "new" Bulgarian Turk migrants and the "old" diaspora of German Turks in Berlin that involves ongoing contestations over proper gender, religious and cultural practices. The article investigates the changing dynamics between being "Bulgarian", "Turk" and "European" that are central in the exploration of identity practices among irregular Bulgarian Turk migrants in Berlin. The article argues that although migrant networks play a strong role in migrants' insertion and accommodation into the country of destination they are not constituted and maintained in isolation from state powers and existing labour market hierarchies which exert strong force in shaping migrants' social reality and identity practices.

Marina Liakova
THE HYBRID LIFE-WORLD OF THE BULGARIAN STUDENTS IN GERMANY
The paper scrutinizes the way of life-world building by the Bulgarian students' community in Germany. Interpreting in-depth interviews the text analyses the motives for choosing Germany as a place to study, the problems faced by the students in question as well as the forms of constructing the relationships in the students' community.

Richard Wilk
HATE/LOVE FOR FOREIGN FOOD: NEOPHILIA AND NEOPHOBIA AND GLOBALIZATION
The attraction of foreign goods and fashions is often a volatile and controversial issue for countries as they become more firmly enmeshed in global media and trade systems. On one hand they offer excitement and the allure of difference, but they can also come to represent the weakness of local culture, the decay of indigenous traditions, and a loss of authenticity and identity. This paper works towards an understanding of why the foreign appears sometimes so alluring, and other times so threatening. Food and cuisine are used to illustrate the major points.

Milla Mineva
THE NATIONAL AS AN ADVERTISING REPERTOIRE
The paper analyzes advertisement as a cultural form through which we could interpret the popular common sense. On one hand, it situates the commercials in the research field of consumer culture. On the other, the text tries to focus the attention on one specific advertising repertoire in Bulgaria: the national images. The main problem is how to interpret the transformation of the national into commercial images. The paper argues that this de-dramatizes the national imaginary and transforms these images from national into local ones.

Dessislava Lilova
THE STORY OF VIKTOR KRUM: NATIONAL IDENTITY ON THE WEB
An analysis of the Bulgarian national image in Joanne Rawling's fantasy novel Harry Potter. The focus is set on the different actors which participate in the identity production: the novel, the film, the internet fan-communities and the Bulgarian state represented by the National agency of Tourism.

Angel Angelov
UNCERTAINTY AND CHOICE
The paper analyzes the transition from art history to visual culture from 1960-s onwards and suggests to historicise the very understanding of the "end of art history". Reflecting upon the end is an element of modernity; as an anxiety about the decline it can be found in the gradual comprehension of the development of art in Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. Special attention is paid to interplay and merging different disciplinary fields into which the understanding of visual culture has taken shape. The developments in Bulgaria around the same time are also tracked. The paper suggests a particular notion about the proper way to study the visual and about the actuality as intense both in future-ness and in historical presences. Categories such as novelty, difference, gaze, are submitted to an analysis and a particular stance as to what kind of art histories are actual is upheld.

Albena Hranova
THE APRIL UPRISING ON THE ROAD OF CULTURES
About the battles among, and the interactions of the statements coming out of different disciplinary fields – literature, historiography, and sociology – in the course of interpreting the April uprising (1876) against the Ottoman rule in Bulgaria. The analysis shows that the April uprising happened to be a case to actively and deliberately emancipate the fields in late nineteenth century – early twentieth century in Bulgaria. Yet this emancipation did not occur in a profound way as both disciplinary statements and separate discourses of historiography and sociology happened to be deeply infected by the statements of late nineteen-century Bulgarian literature.

Todor Hristov, Ivelina Ivanova
LEGITIMATING INEQUALITY
Presenting the findings of a 2006 study on the legitimization of social inequality in Bulgaria. The study conceived legitimization as a language game, and staged legitimization games with 57 respondents from different classes, communities, professional, educational and social backgrounds, adhering to the conceptual and methodological framework of grounded theory, ethno-methodology and discourse analysis. The data obtained enabled us to put together 7 grounded theories of social inequality, and to examine the ways those theories functioned in different types of common sense circumstances. The general conclusion our analysis pointed towards was that the Bulgarian political sphere invented a powerful strategy for legitimating inequality, a sort of metaphysical inequality language able to make the public say yes to inequality even when is was trying to say no.

Dessislava Gavrilova
THE OTHER SIDE OF EU INTEGRATION OR ABOUT THE POLICY TRANSFER AS AN OBSTACLE FOR DEVELOPMENT
The author identifies a relation between the intensive EU rules, regulations and acquis-transfer that takes place in certain policy areas during the EU accession preparation, and the non-reforms in other policy areas. The starting hypothesis is that many accession countries' governments' failure to seriously deal with the problems in the non-EU regulated policy areas is a reverse effect of the accession process itself. Based on the single case of Bulgaria, we trace the effects of the accession process and the procedures it involves on the way policy priorities are being articulated. The study establishes an EU-invoked twist in the way Bulgarian politicians define what the key problems that they need to address are. It shows that the fact that EU regulates certain policy areas and leaves others on the discretion of the national governments has an unintended negative effect on the attention paid to non-EU regulated areas, and on quality of democratic governance and policy making. This effect is labelled here "a benevolent state capture".

Although this study is based on the case of Bulgaria, the universe of its supposed validity is the formerly communist countries that are already part of or expected to become members of the European Union.

Dimitar Vatsov
NIETZSCHE AND THE POLITICAL TODAY
A brief manifesto for an affirmative democracy On how to reassemble the agonistic character of the political today as a field of struggle of decisions based on strong evaluations (of friend – enemy type). Instead of critical rethinking of Carl Schmidt's legacy, made by Chantal Mouffe and others, Nietzsche is taken as a resource for solving this problem. The key point here is the Nietzschean concept of power: the immediate force of evaluation, immanent to every interpretive (performative) act. Obviously in this perspective power and knowledge coincide; there is no purely neutral interpretation. But not because of some external anonymous conditions on which the power relations in our discourse are dependent (Foucault). Primarily power and interpretation coincide immanently on a performative level and therefore we are committed to take the responsibility for the power in our acts of speaking. On this base we could develop a theory of affirmative political identity (citizenship), as well as a notion of affirmative democracy.

Published 2008-04-23