СРПСКО-БУГАРСКИ ОДНОСИ – ПИТАЊА САРАДЊЕ И ПЕРСПЕКТИВA
Abstract
Serbs and Bulgarians are two brotherly peoples who, apart from having and have a common border, had (have) a common dream of a unified state. During the liberation from Turkish slavery and during the rule of Obrenović in Serbia and Bulgaria, that dream was dreamed, i.e. an attempt was made to realize it. A large percentage of Bulgarian youth was educated in Belgrade, and the first books of liberated Bulgaria were printed for free in Belgrade. The reader can find out about this in Jovo Bajić’s excellent article.
Then follows the intervention of the West, Great Britain, Austria-Hungary, Germany, France and Italy to stop the process of unification of Serbs and Bulgarians. Bulgaria gets a German king, later an emperor, and his advisers are British officers. The policies of the two countries take different courses, and this was excellently “inventorized” by Professor Nikola Avrejski. This new policy led to the fact that the Bulgarians were on the side of Austria-Hungary in the First World War and fought against the Serbs (everything was repeated in the Second World War). After the First World War, the dream of a joint state of Serbs and Bulgarians was carried by Aleksandar Stamboliski (Prime Minister of Bulgaria) and the Serbian, later Yugoslav heir to the throne, Aleksandar Karađorđević. Both of them died tragically, and the orderers and perpetrators of both murders were the same. This stopped work on the idea of a joint state for many summers.
At the geopolitical level, it is so. There is no support for getting to know the two peoples, their rapprochement, except through the people’s diplomats and the Orthodox Church. In other words, advocating for a beginner’s and, in our opinion, correct attitude, pays with your head. At the same time, propaganda works to alienate two brotherly peoples. Bulgarians are almost exclusively discussed in Serbia in the context of the crimes committed by the Bulgarian army, on the orders of the German emperor, in the south of Serbia. In Bulgaria, the Serbs present themselves as the kidnappers of Macedonia. Simply, propaganda works and distances two peoples, as if they never had anything in common, nor did they cooperate. Of course, it is not as the propaganda narratives make it out to be.
When one travels to Bulgaria, one cannot escape the impression that it is a very close people, where Serbian culture occupies a prominent place. The Bulgarian Orthodox Church preserves numerous shrines and relics, among other things, of King Milutin and, in general, fosters a positive attitude towards co-religionists from Serbia. Serbian popular music is heard in Bulgarian restaurants, the sports public follows events in Serbian football, Serbian tourists are happy to visit Bulgaria… However, when it comes to other forms of cooperation (science, politics, etc.) there is a huge discrepancy with the expectations of public opinion of both States. Instead of open borders, we have different geopolitical orientations of two countries. Bulgaria is a member of NATO and the European Union, and Serbia maintains neutrality, that is, it directly opposed the Alliance’s military aggression and Brussels’ blackmail, and nothing has yet been concluded. At the same time, if you look at the results of Bulgaria’s Euro-Atlantic integration, it is clear that it was a geopolitical failure. Bulgaria is the loser in all this. It has also lost qualified human resources and is on the way to a demographic collapse, without experiencing an economic boom. On the contrary, agriculture was destroyed, deindustrialization took place…
Serbia, on the other hand, is in the geopolitical environment of NATO, which has repeatedly manifested hostile attitudes and the desire to definitively prevent the gathering of Serbs into one state, that is, to further disintegrate the remnants of this state. Also, the Euro-Atlantic power centers prevent Serbia from cooperating with friendly countries, in this sense also with Russia, China, and Bulgaria, which is justified by the unique foreign policy of the EU members. Of course, this is not the first time that Western power centers have prevented Serbia from cooperating with countries close to it. Since the liberation of Serbia and Bulgaria from Ottoman slavery,
until today.
The international scientific conference on Serbian-Bulgarian relations is in a sense pioneering, especially after 2000, and aims to “open” this topic to the scientific public, because without mutual cooperation between the two countries, as it turns out, there is no perspective for any of them. The works that we publish are about the mentioned topic.
Colleagues from Russia, Belarus, Poland, Bulgaria, BiH and Serbia responded to the invitation to participate in the conference, and we sincerely thank them on this occasion, because the scientific community received a collection that should be an introduction to further dealing with the topic of Serbian-Bulgarian relations.
Whether that goal will be achieved remains to be seen, but it is certain that the scientific community and fans of such content have received important material for critical and other judgments.
