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1993 U. Chi. L. Sch. Roundtable 23 (1993)
Tacit Agreements in the Bulgarian Transition to Democracy: Minority Rights and Constitutionalism

handle is hein.journals/ucroun1993 and id is 31 raw text is: Tacit Agreements in the Bulgarian Transition to Democracy: Minority Rights and Constitutionalism Rumyana Kolarova' Until 1990, social scientists widely accepted that the only form of constitutional arrangements which socialist states have taken seriously since 1917, are formulas for national federation and autonomy.' The dramatic changes in Eastern Europe give indisputable evidence that during post-totalitarian transitions, the federative forms of constitutional arrangements are the most vulnerable to challenges. The devolution of the socialist feder- ative state could be described as a replacement of the dismantled prisonhouses of nations by provincial or county goals of mi- norities.2 In former federations such as Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and Czechoslovakia, the issue of minority rights was provoked by the changes in the constitutional provisions that regulated the governmental system/structure, sovereignty and territory of the state. That was not the case in Bulgaria. Introducing a national federation, or any other kind of autonomy, was never regarded by the communist regime as a possible solution to the problems of the Turkish ethnic minority. On the contrary, the Bulgarian communist regime targeted the Turkish minority for its most recent and violent acts of repression, an approach that was quite unusual in the context of Eastern Europe with one noticeable exception, Romania. In both Bulgaria and Romania, the commu- nist regimes tried to assure wider public support by promoting a nationalistic policy and a campaign for ethnic assimilation. In Bulgaria, post-totalitarian changes in the constitutional provi- Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Sofia University, Bulgaria. Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 172 (Cambridge, 1992). 2 This is a metaphor used by Ernst Gellner when analyzing the dismantling of em- pires and the establishment of nation states within their boundaries. Ernst A. Gellner, L'avvento del nazionalismo, e la sua interpretazione. I miti della nazione e della classe, in Perry Anderson, ed, Storia d'Europa 24 (Einaudi, forthcoming 1994) (all citations are to Gellner's English manuscript on file with the U Chi L Sch Roundtable).

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