The Failure of Roma Inclusion in Bulgaria: A Case of Othering within Othering

The paper explores recent racist and violent attitudes towards Romani people in Bulgaria as a case of othering within othering. One should situate the plight of Romani people inside Bulgaria in the context of Western European representation and perception of the region; the imagining and invention of Eastern Europe and construction of the Balkans as an Other (Todorova, 2009, Wolff 1994, Bakic-Hayden, 1995, Goldsworthy, 1998). Slavoj Zizek and Renata Salecl’s Lacanian analysis of racism and xenophobia as “stealing your enjoyment” helps illustrate that the ongoing racist tensions and violence between Bulgarian ethnic majorities and Roma have their roots in the peculiar otherness that Roma represent. In order to understand the Roma as a signifier of otherness we need to look closely at the specificity of Bulgarian’s identification, tainted by what Todorova defines as the discourse of Balkanism - the ambiguous way the region is perceived as the specific Other of Europe. This paper argues that racism and violence in Bulgaria is prompted by a plethora of paranoid fantasies of stealing the Nation’s enjoyment, interrelated to historically formed perception and self-perception of being the Other in the EU, occurring in the socio-economic context of severe neoliberal regimes. In conclusion, Etienne Balibar’s (2004) critique of citizenship without the social, helps bring about the need to be suspicious of the approaches of integration and inclusion, which, in a country devastated by neoliberal austerity measures, feed on the fantasies of the attack of inside and outside enemies against the national body.