Sunday, March 16, 2014
Embassy (Omni Shoreham)
In 2010 a scandal erupted in Bulgaria concerning two young people of Armenian descent, who met on the Internet and decided to marry only to realize they were short on claiming legal residence in the country. The eerie battle to validate their lives as refugees invited an unprecedented public attention to the plight of refugees: a phenomenon that is still novel and limited in Bulgaria. Yet, the fact that the refugee issue has an audible presence in larger Europe is no small factor for the perception of immigrants in Bulgaria. The augmentation of the refugee issue in this case into an urgent national concern has been emblematic of the hegemonic presence that the Euro-centred agenda holds for this new member-state. I am interested to highlight the logics of public deliberation and the other purposes to which this first public episode concerning refugees in Bulgaria has been employed by an array of political actors – NGOs, citizens and the state – to press the public address the shifting geopolitics of Bulgaria as a new border zone of Europe and the complex apparatus that constitutes the new citizenship regime in the EU. It is on that background that now the country faces its first real refugee crisis with migrants from Syria. The politics of membership that underlie attitudes to migration are particularly conducive to the complex vagaries of the interaction of global and local agendas, argues Seyla Benhabib, highlighting the disjunction between universalist commitments and the paradoxes of a democratic culture.
