Five Causes to Change Bulgaria

It's time for daily pursuit of good and making useful compromises, believes Maxim Behar

To be honest, I'm tired of "patriotic" slogans—Bulgaria above all, Bulgaria on three seas, let's fight for our Bulgaria, and whatnot—spewed from the mouths of people who have not earned a single lev in their lives with labor that pays salaries or adds value.

And at the outset, I want to say—I love Bulgaria a lot, but not as it is now. More than ever, I want it changed, better, and more successful. But I know that everything takes time, which too often cannot be skipped.

In the early '90s, then still an ambitious journalist full of freedom from the recently arrived liberty, I was invited by a large American bank—Meryl Lynch—to the then iconic Mexican restaurant in the center of Sofia to discuss economics and free markets.

The bankers were researching when and if our economy would approach European standards and our prospects for full membership in the European Union. A topic that sounded too distant and unclear at the time; but during those years, everything seemed achievable, and if possible, I wanted it to happen tomorrow.

We were five or six leading journalists from different newspapers, and when they approached me and asked for my opinion, I returned the same question; after all, they were the experts, not us. An American woman with short hair and very thin-framed glasses immediately replied, "Well, according to us, it will take you between 15 and 17 years to reach the minimum European standards…"

I didn't even wait for her to finish and jumped up heatedly...

"How come,15 years? We'll be ready in one year - we have free media, a free market, and competition, full of ambitious and intelligent people in Bulgaria; why would we wait so long?"

The banker looked at me coldly and, without a twitch of her facial muscles, replied in a metallic voice, "There are rules that require time that neither in the economy nor in social relations can be skipped. You can have your media and market, but I'm telling you, there are processes that need time, and nothing else."

She was right. Since then, not 15, but exactly twice as many years have passed. The media has become less free, but on the other hand, social media have made our lives more informed and have made us make decisions much faster. The market, however, has become even more free and much more competitive.

But after 2007, a huge gap appeared in Bulgaria, which we are still trying to overcome.

Until then, it was clear, easy, and simple—the banker was painfully right: We needed about fifteen years to fix our legislation, get the market working, open our borders, travel without restrictions, and, most importantly, be accepted into the endless European market. Until January 1, 2007, we really had a unifying goal and a great, unique cause, and it was clearly, precisely, and very understandably contained in just three letters—EU!

Just a few months later, it became clear that "rivers of prosperity" would not flow unconditionally, that we needed to work more, much more, to overcome not only the Bulgarian but also the European competition, to generate ideas, to be innovative, and to be much more dedicated to business—and not only to it.

But most importantly—we lost the goal and the causes as if we lost the motivation to move forward. And now, when there are wars near our border, when the world is in crisis, more than ever, we need causes that unite us and make us proud that we can overcome any difficulty.

I offer you five of them, which—I assure you—are worth reading.

Naturally, the first of them is to live better. We can't even compare with those first years of a free market and media; now, naturally, in Bulgaria, life is much better, more meaningful, and freer, but in the end, this cause is just like riding a bicycle—if you stop pedaling, you simply fall. I've always said that compared to those first "free market" years, Bulgaria is now not a different country but outright another planet, but the last few months show that this now applies to the whole world. Naturally, living better is such a general and incomprehensible cause that if about six million people live here now, it will surely have at least as many interpretations. But if we have to think in strictly pragmatic terms, only innovation and creativity, both in business, the office, the enterprise, and personal life, can make this goal possible. Stagnation, mechanically going to work, mechanically returning home, and wasting precious time on trivial disputes and things will only permanently detach us from the goal.

Immediately after that, at least for me—is the cause to regain a quality we have lost over the years, but now more than ever, it is necessary for us—in politics, business, family, and even our friends. And this is the art of compromise: always at any time and in all cases to look positively at each case, to seek what unites us, not what separates us. Excluding the huge necessity to work hard and innovatively to change our lives for the better, I am convinced that a pragmatic, positive attitude to the environment in which we live and create, seeking—even if it is only one percent—understanding controversial issues, and not confrontation, now can change all of us, our country, our daily lives. It is obvious how important this is for politics, watching the constant disputes among the "players" on this muddy field, but surely the ability to compromise has now become vital in business and our personal relationships as well. It's simply necessary to turn our backs on the tension, the daily "sparks" around us, the misunderstandings, and miscommunications, and to have one goal—to seek the common intersections.

And since our lives really are changing at the speed of light, quite often, we seem to forget the foundations on which our future successes are built, and they are in good and modern education. And since this is an extremely important cause, we need to take the best from the best, bring it to Bulgaria, break the molds, and give wings and motivation to everyone who wants to learn interesting things. My observations from the current schools, especially the state ones, are that everything is changing slowly, uncertainly, and very standard and bureaucratic. There are certainly thousands of cases where students know more than their teachers simply because they spend much more time online than them, read more, watch more, and there are no boundaries that many middle-aged people carry over the years. Here, we need to boldly break the stereotypes and do everything possible for the teachers and the students to be satisfied and highly motivated.

A very strong cause, and a very national cause, is to remove dishonest and bought elections as soon as possible so that every vote is real and all of us know that democracy, good or bad in this form, still works. It is unthinkable in the future to live in a country where someone can sell their vote and distort their preferences for money. I'm not sure that this will happen only with (non-working) laws or with empty calls and slogans, and it will certainly be a long and complicated process related to a lot of communication work, as well as with the changing of generations. But it needs to start now, immediately, and not a day later, so that our state, our institutions, our people... can work and live with an understanding of democracy, of majorities, and most importantly—the honest way these mechanisms determine our future. If this does not happen, we cannot fail to understand that everything else we do will completely lose its meaning, and our country will plummet downward—it will be a state of lies, of deceit, of people dishonestly in important positions, and this will inevitably demotivate the entire system.

The causes, naturally, could be dozens, for some even hundreds, but there is one more to which we need to pay special attention—always to dream and to live to fulfill our dreams. It might seem strange to you for this to be a national cause, especially since everyone has different dreams, probably some of them not so decent and honest, but the very message to have dreams and to fulfill them is indeed a cause that will contribute to the whole nation thinking at least for a few years, even if it's only for a few days, still something, forward. I've always said that if your dreams don't scare you, they're not big enough. In the end, sometimes, we all have big dreams, but often, they turn out to be small and insignificant. But they are dreams we achieve, and that is no small feat.

Some of these causes will probably seem to you like they are not causes but just wishes or things that we should do anyway. But I firmly believe that if we want to and live better every day, if we learn to compromise and seek the good things in every person, if we constantly think about how to become accomplices in modern and timely education, if we fight for honest and uncompromised elections, and fulfill dreams... if we do all this together, we will be close to making our only and most important cause a reality. And this cause is called Bulgaria.