EU Visa Ruling Means the World Is About to Get Bigger for Bulgarians

Despite the fall of the Iron Curtain more than a decade ago, Boris Asenov, a university student here who dreams of running his own tourism business, still feels trapped behind a wall of visa restrictions imposed by the West. But he sees a change coming.

Early this month, in what was celebrated here as a major triumph, almost all European Union countries agreed to grant Bulgarians the right to travel visa-free for tourism and business, setting aside fears that they might overstay to work illegally or seek social benefits. The new rules are expected to take effect this spring.

“I’m very happy,” Asenov said. “This is the day we can feel like real Europeans, like real men. We are not secondhand people now. I’ll be free to go out and see how things are.”

Until now, he added, “when you go to the embassy, they say, ‘Oh, you’re an economic immigrant; you want to go there and work.’ You feel like you’re not a man.”

The West won the Cold War in part with a slogan of “freedom of movement,” but then imposed “another curtain--on the other side,” by requiring visas and, in many cases, not easily granting them, said Vladimir Philipov, foreign affairs advisor to Bulgarian President Petar Stoyanov. “This was a major humiliation.”

The recent action by a council of EU interior ministers was widely seen as a reward to Bulgaria’s nearly 4-year-old center-right government for its willingness to meet specific requirements such as the introduction of hard-to-forge passports and tighter border controls. Some also saw it as recognition of the country’s painful efforts to push forward market-oriented economic reforms, its success in building a solidly democratic political system and its support for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s air campaign last year against Yugoslavia.

“For Bulgarian citizens, the Berlin Wall fell today,” Stoyanov told a jubilant parliament when the EU decision was announced.

Slow to get started with economic reforms in the 1990s, Bulgaria is now on a roll. It has turned in three consecutive years of economic growth and enjoyed major successes in its drive for closer ties with Western Europe.

“Last year, we got accepted by the European Union to start negotiations that will result in our accession to the EU,” noted Angel Naidenov, a 20-year-old student at Sofia University. “One year later, we joined this [visa-free] club.”

Assia Traytcheva, another 20-year-old at the university, said that if the EU decision had gone the other way, “we’d have felt [that] the West Europeans don’t want us, so why should we go on striving to join the European Union?”

Such sensitivities reflect a widespread longing to be fully accepted as the country makes a dramatic turn away from Russia and toward Western Europe and the United States.

“Most European countries do not feel Bulgaria is a pure European country,” complained Ilia Iliev, 30, a software developer and entrepreneur who was shivering in line outside the German Embassy on his fourth visit seeking a visa. “They think we are too different from them and our culture is too different . . . [and] they are afraid Bulgarians will travel and work there illegally.”

In Eastern Europe’s escape from Soviet domination and domestic dictatorship about a decade ago, Poland had its heroic Solidarity union movement, Czechoslovakia its peaceful “Velvet Revolution” and East Germany the fall of the Berlin Wall. Romania had bloody clashes and the quick 1989 Christmas Day execution of Communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu.

But events in Bulgaria were far less dramatic. The nation launched its changes Nov. 10, 1989, the day after the Berlin Wall fell, when an internal Communist Party coup ended the 35-year rule of Todor Zhivkov.

The group soon changed its name to the Bulgarian Socialist Party, then hung on to power in 1990 by winning a democratic election against a center-right coalition. For the next decade, Bulgaria gradually went about changing its politics, economy and society.

Disruptions from the often corrupt privatization of state enterprises helped trigger a severe contraction in economic output from 1990 to 1993 and a further decline in 1996 and 1997, bringing the size of the economy at that point to slightly less than three-quarters its level in 1989.

After a center-right government took office in early 1997, privatization was given a stronger legal basis, market-oriented changes accelerated, economic growth resumed and hyper-inflation was tamed. The economy grew 3.5% in 1998, 2.4% last year, about 4.5% this year, and it appears set for strong growth in 2001.

Unemployment, regarded by many as the country’s worst problem, is at 18%. About 75% of production is now in private hands, “which is quite an achievement,” said Ognyan Minchev, executive director of the Institute for Regional and International Studies in Sofia.

The travel issue was particularly galling for Bulgarians because the visa requirement was seen both as an insult and a barrier to the growth of private business, blocking entrepreneurs from making timely visits to customers and partners in Germany or other EU countries.

In recent years, most EU countries have permitted visa-free visits for tourism and business to citizens of 10 of the 12 countries now applying to enter the alliance, keeping out only Bulgarians and Romanians. A trip west for them often meant long waits in embassy lines and hours of bureaucratic hassles.

The new privilege applies to travel from Bulgaria to the 13 of the 15 EU member states--all but Britain and Ireland--that have joined the Schengen accord, which ended passport checks on common borders. The recent decision did not grant Romanians visa-free travel but offered conditions that they could meet to win that right.

In the post-communist transformation of Eastern Europe, relatively prosperous countries such as Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland have raced ahead. Those three joined NATO last year and hope for EU membership in just a few more years.

Bulgaria’s turn toward the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which now has strong support from the public and all major political parties, did not come easily.

“We were taught in school that Russia was the best country in the world--the best, biggest and most wonderful country on the planet,” said Solomon Passy, president of the Atlantic Club of Bulgaria, a group working in favor of NATO admission.

“We had to overcome this delusion, deception, this intellectual fog in which the Bulgarian people were living for almost half a century,” Passy said.

The new reality is reflected at a monument here honoring the Soviet soldiers who invaded Bulgaria near the end of World War II and declared it “liberated.” Every day, teenagers practice in-line skating and skateboarding on a huge curved ramp and obstacle course set up in front of the soaring statue.

Bulgaria “was a part of Europe before World War II, and now is the time for our re-integration,” said Deputy Foreign Minister Vladimir Kissiov. “Not integration, but re-integration.”