Bulgaria joined the EU on 1 January 2007, together with its northern neighbour, Romania. Both countries' roads to membership were far from easy. A plethora of political, socioeconomic and institutional problems prevented them from acceding to the Union in the first wave of eastern enlargement on 1 May 2004. Bulgaria's progress, in particular, was hampered by sluggish economic transformation in the 1990s as well as the weakness of state agencies in charge of implementing the EU entry criteria. Reforms in critical areas such as the judicial system and the fight against corruption, often produced limited results due to internal opposition, lack of political will or institutional inertia. The salience of these domestic constraints has induced analysts to question the extent to which the EU actually managed to mend the gap between the state and the citizenry marking Bulgarian transition. In addition, certain actors within the EU viewed sceptically the country's preparedness for membership, pointing at the shortcomings in the fight against organized crime and corruption.

At the same time, it is hard to deny that Bulgaria came a long way since the early 1990s. The EU accession perspective catalysed reforms, bringing about sustained economic growth and increasing the governance capacity of the state. While it will be inaccurate to give exclusive credit to Europe for steering the Bulgarian transition from communism, its influence was decisive in areas such as the liberalization of the economy, the modernization of state institutions and society, and, to a lesser extent, the consolidation of democracy.

The onset of the Cold War was a period critical for the formation of national identity in the latter twentieth century. As the country was faced with stark dilemmas regarding its overall political development, its position in and relations with Europe were tested to breaking point. With the European context being fundamentally redefined, Bulgaria's choices were overshadowed and, indeed, restricted by the attitudes of the great powers of the day. In addition, the latter's policies projected a particular perception of Bulgaria to the outside world.

The Historical Setting

Bulgaria can hardly be plausibly presented as something other than Balkan at core: after all, the eponymous mountain range runs through the middle of the country. Neither can Bulgaria be dissociated from the imperial legacy of Byzantium, the Ottomans and most recently, the Soviet Union, all of which gave the peninsula its distinctive attributes. In both geographic and historical terms, Bulgaria has indeed been at the heart of the tumultuous Balkans. It itself has contributed to the image of the Balkans as ridden with controversy and war.

The region's centrality for the outbreak of the First World War sealed the prevalent popular perception, which was more often than not upheld by diplomatic and other informed opinion. While the role of the Balkans in the Second World War was not as notorious, their eventual plunge in the conflict can be seen as due in equal measure to the aggressiveness of the Axis powers and the stir of long-unresolved indigenous issues.

Introduction

This chapter discusses some aspects of Bulgarian migrant economic performance in the host labour markets of Spain and Greece. The analysis is based on my empirical work in these countries. Migrant performance is defined by occupational attainment, namely, first and last or most recent job in the host country, competition in employment with native workers and migrant remitting/saving patterns. Two other definitions are adopted in the analysis. Foreigners are those who enter a country either illegally or legally and then take up employment there, but having neither a residence nor a work permit or being in violation of their entry visas. In contrast, legalized foreigners are those undocumented foreigners who manage to successfully complete a regularization programme of the host country government.

Migrants' economic performance and their degree of integration into the receiving labour market determine to a very large extent the overall assessment of the economic impact of immigration. In the case of Europe, empirical evidence on the economic impact of immigration, regardless of migrant country of origin, suggests that the derivation of robust qualitative results is a very difficult – even hopeless – task, because of the nature of the data and the inherent heterogeneity of the phenomenon. There is serious concern about the lack of access to additional, individual-based data, without which the task of estimating the effects of immigration would never be completed.2 This research contributes towards filling this knowledge gap.

Introduction

The collapse of the communist regimes in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe brought about sweeping changes in the economic and political institutions of the formerly centrally planned economies. With the critical influence of a number of supranational and international institutions, an unprecedented process of transition took off in these countries, encompassing both the political and economic spheres.

The main political (democratization, civil society, institution building) and economic (market liberalization, privatization and restructuring, macroeconomic stabilization) priorities under this process were meant to address the key problems that the transition countries were facing in the advent of the 1990s: very centralized and inefficient state bureaucracies; inefficient organization of production (both within firms and across sectors or space); lack of private and, importantly, financial capital; and a disparity between use values, market prices and production costs. More importantly, however, they aimed at two much more immediate and crucial deficits: on the one hand, the democratic deficit and problems in the rule of law; on the other, the problems of indebtedness and hyperinflation that the fast monetization of the economy and the liberalization of market mechanisms brought about. In this context, attention to issues of regional and cohesion policy was at best limited.

This deficiency of regional policy is, of course, important on theoretical grounds, given the fact that persistent regional imbalances raise issues not only of economic cohesion and social justice, but also of economic efficiency.

The core argument was first presented in a keynote address to the Puerto Rican Association of Economists in San Juan, Puerto Rico, 26 August 2005. The manuscript was subsequently revised and appeared as “Una propuesta basada en ‘La tragedia de los comunes’: Un museo de bioprospección, de los derechos de propiedad intelectual y del conocimiento público,” Revista de Ciencias Sociales, núm. 16, invierno 2007, 118–135. The English translation first appeared in The Nexus of Law and Biology: New Ethical Challenges by Barbara A. Hocking, ed. (London: Ashgate, 2009). Support has been provided by The Institutional Research Fund (FIPI) of The Office of the Dean of Graduate Studies and Research (DEGI) of The University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras.

Introduction

“The Tragedy of the Commons” by Garrett Hardin (1968) is one of the most cited articles in all of science. Having taught the tragedy in its distilled version for many years, I have only recently re-read the original article. I am startled to find that the text holds important and overlooked lessons for access to genetic resources and fair and equitable benefi t-sharing (ABS). I will take a few quotes, shamelessly out of context, and apply them to ABS. What emerges is a proposal for a “Museum of Bioprospecting, Intellectual Property Rights and the Public Domain” that is wholly consistent with both the letter and spirit in which Hardin penned his oeuvre.

E. O. Wilson emphasizes the importance of classification in a number of his writings. “The first step to wisdom, as the Chinese say, is getting things by their right names.” Such wisdom is not confined to Harvard entomologists and leaf-cutting ants. It can also be applied to civil society and education. In 1956, Benjamin Bloom conceptualized education as divisible into three domains: the cognitive, the affective, and the psychomotor. Each domain could be further broken down. The cognitive was a hierarchy of six distinct classes or levels. At the bottom is “knowledge,” associated with “remembering, either by recognition or recall, of ideas, material or phenomena” (62); at the top, “evaluation,” “the making of judgments about the value, for some purpose, of ideas, works, solutions, methods, material, etc” (185). From bottom to top, the mental levels are more challenging and the hierarchy can be conceived as a pyramid (Fig. I.1.). The seven contributors to this volume share the conviction that a “Museum of Bioprospecting, Intellectual Property, and the Public Domain” will enable the public to scale the cognitive pyramid while also delving into the domains of the affective and the psychomotor. Given the ignorance and misconceptions about bioprospecting, intellectual property, and the public domain, the ascent for most museum visitors will begin at the very bottom, viz., knowledge.

The application of the philosophical theories of right and wrong in the moral rhetoric that surrounds many a burning issue today has become a raging fashion, at least in the West. Unfortunately this fact clouds the very real and significant contribution that a rigorous and systematic training in philosophical analysis can make towards a balanced and even-handed approach to questions such as abortion, euthanasia, cloning, animal rights, suicide and human rights. Philosophy needs not only to lend techniques of reasoning to a moral debate. It actually helps us to take sides while appreciating the strengths of opposing arguments.

There is much moral rhetoric that one finds in magazine articles and lobbyist pamphlets on the issue of human rights. But strangely not much public debate goes into the question of punishment and what is befitting treatment for a transgressor who has sinned against society. What, if any, consideration is given to the protection of human rights of the sinner, the criminal. One aspect of the whole subject of punishment, however, has received a sizeable amount of attention and that is the question of capital punishment. Anyone and everyone has something to say about it but the interesting questions are raised by the philosophers. There is the question of whether the capital punishment is another form of killing that lobbyists or philosophers have to justify. There are utilitarian arguments for and against it.

Knowing more and more about less and less is the hazard of advanced research. The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) is no exception. Since its ratification in 1993, a cottage industry has sprung up around the Conferences of the Parties (COP) to the CBD. Case studies, anthologies, and books have gushed forth to address the varied problems of bioprospecting, intellectual property, and the public domain. Nevertheless, the problems persist and even compound despite ever more case studies, anthologies, and books. Faith remains strong that technical solutions are still waiting to be found. Besides, the specialists will rationalize, non-technical solutions are not our bailiwick. Civil society must weigh in on the ethics and let us do our thing: flesh out the technical solutions.

What exactly are those ethics? How is civil society supposed to “weigh in?” Such unwelcome questions are not unique to bioprospecting, intellectual property, and the public domain. The French philosopher Jacques Ellul commented, “Everywhere we find men who pronounce as highly personal truths what they have read in the papers only an hour before, and whose beliefs are merely the result of a powerful propaganda“ (21). Any hope that civil society can express its values through the political process, Ellul felt, was equally unfounded:

In this paper I propose to examine two texts by Rabindranath Tagore, The Home and the World, (hitherto abbreviated HW), a novel, and an essay, or more precisely, a set of four lectures published under the rubric Nationalism. HW was published serially in a journal called Sabuj Patra (The Green Leaves), edited by Pramatha Choudhury, in 1915–16 and translated into English by Surendranath Tagore in 1919. The four lectures on Nationalism were delivered around the same time. Rabindranath's critique of the nationalist ideology in these two texts, one a non-fictional narrative and the other a fictional narrative, hinges upon his conviction that nationalism ignores the claims of both individuals and communities who supposedly go into the forging of a nation-state.

In HW, Rabindranath foregrounds the question of women's identity to interrogate the discourse of nationalism. In his recent book, P. K. Datta (2003) has pointed out that the Sabuj Patra ‘phase’ in Rabindranath's literary/intellectual trajectory raises the gender question. Between 1914 and 1917, at least three stories in Sabuj Patra, viz. The Wife's Letter (Strir Patra), Women Unknown (Aparichita) and House Number one (Poila Number) center around women who seek self fulfillment by moving out of Procrustean roles which subordinate them. I believe HW shares more than an incidental literary/intellectual affiliation with these stories.

Bimala in the novel emerges as an indispensable factor to the contrary reformist agendas formulated by her husband Nikhil and his friend Sandip.

Mr. & Mrs. Iyer

A bus full of passengers makes its way through the hilly tracts of the southern part of India. As the bus makes its way through the hills, a riot breaks out somewhere on the route the bus is to follow. The bus is invaded by a group of Hindu fanatics. They are in search of Muslims. They undress one by one the male passengers of the bus to find out who among them are Muslims. As they go about doing this, one passenger, presumably in a bid to save all the passengers of the bus, cries out: ‘Hum sab Hindu hain.’ (‘We are all Hindus.’) It is at this moment that a male passenger (named Cohen), seated at the rear end of the bus, interjects: ‘No, not all are Hindus – they are not Hindus.’ And he points at an old couple seated in the left hand corner of the bus: ‘They are Muslims – they are not Hindus.’ The old couple is dragged out of the bus, never to be seen again. When asked later why he did such a thing, the visibly dejected and crestfallen Cohen answers: ‘They would have caught me. I am a Jew. I do not have a foreskin.’

The Vaiśeṣika philosophy of Kaņāda is usually held to be a metaphysical theory. But on closer analysis it becomes clear that this stream of Indian philosophy is very rich in other aspects as well. For instance, the sixth chapter of Kanāda's Vaiśeṣikasūtras deals mainly with moral problems. This chapter is divided into two sections – the first section focuses on morality from social angle while the second is concerned chiefly with the individual ethics. The aim of the present paper is to highlight some socially important moral issues emerging from the first section of the sixth chapter in Vaiśeṣikasūtras. But it must be admitted that the scope of this presentation is very limited in the sense that it does not discuss the Vaiśeṣika in its total perspective and focuses only upon the relevant portion of sutra text from a very specific point of view.

The word ‘Moral’ can etymologically be traced to the word ‘Mores’ (Morals) which means ‘Custom’ and ‘Custom is some regularity of behaviour not of an individual but of a group of individuals in a society’.(Barlingay 1998:35) Therefore when we deal with morality, we have to take into account the individual conduct as in relation to others in group. In other words, morality is fundamentally concerned with social norms since moral acts generally have a bearing upon others.

Is morality (our sense of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’) at core relative or absolute? Few questions have engaged the attention of philosophers, anthropologists and other intellectuals so deeply and for so long as this one. The debate between Moral Relativism and Moral Absolutism (each claiming to be the true theory about morality) has thrived because of the experience of moral diversity of a multicultural society in which one sees the confrontation of diverse moral values and practices. It is true that cultural diversity expressed in diversity of lifestyles (including attire and diet), beliefs, practices, language, etc., among different ethnic groups, may not, in many cases, be moral diversity, for there could be differences of dress and diet without any moral differences. But often, cultural diversity is accompanied by moral diversity. Moral diversity simply means that there are moral beliefs held by one group of people that are not held by another, and this is obviously true. But, it is quite possible that both these groups believe in the same basic moral principles which when applied to their individual contexts yield different and sometimes opposing moral beliefs. E.g., the Inuits think it is right to kill their parents after the parents have reached a certain age – and the parents expect this – rather than have them bear the hardships of their hazardous life. This would be considered to be a totally wrong practice in most other communities where parents are venerated.

One of the major problems of distributive justice is about the State providing equal opportunity to its citizens to acquire equal resources and, subsequently, attain equal welfare. Though I have used the terms and their relationships little too loosely, their theoretical and praxiological implications are problematic to a large extent. Not only are there difficulties in talking about an ‘objective’ conception of welfare but also in dealing between resources and welfare or between resources and opportunity. Government, providing opportunity to its citizens to enter public sectors in addition to demanding services from its citizens, aims at enabling realisation of welfare for the citizens. On the other side, the nature of welfare's definition may differ from, say, the mental states (qualitative) of the persons concerned to the measure of material wealth people could acquire. Again, measuring welfare in terms of material goods may mean bringing the equality of welfare close to the equality of resources. The problems are indeed wide beyond the purview of this particular paper. I have only tried to glean over a few problems out of the many introduced here.

In this paper I have attempted to highlight only a few problems that crop up with the State's propagation of distributive justice based on economic and social enhancement of a group depending upon certain social criteria. That is, on State's attempt to enhance opportunity to acquire ‘equal’ resources to some of its citizens who are socially and economically backward.

While the awareness of the value of justice is quite widespread in western thought, its understanding or content has been changing with times. Plato's famous conception of justice as harmonious functioning of various parts of the individual and the society does not seem to have any place for the idea of equal dignity and rights of all human beings. This latter idea is present in Aristotle's conception of justice as lawfulness and fairness or equitability. But neither for Aristotle, nor for later medieval Christian thinkers, did the notion of justice imply the rejection of the institution of slavery.

Justice was conceived throughout the medieval period according to Greek thinker Ulpian's definition as ‘giving to each what is his own (or due)’. This, as pointed out by Hans Kelsen (1957: 13) and others, leaves enough scope for any amount of social disparities and inequalities, as our understanding of what is due to someone is determined by the sociopolitical order. For example, the slaves in the ancient Greek society and the shudras in the Vedic-dharmasastric social order could claim little as their due.

It is in modern thought alone that the idea of basic equality of all human beings, especially before the law, is made central to the conception of justice. The humanism of Renaissance; the rationalism of Enlightenment and the liberalism of nineteenth century – all led to the emphasis on the dignity of the individual per se and the equality of all human beings.

Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden warned before the opening of the Geneva Conference of 1954 that while there was the first objective ‘on the Western side’ to press for Korean unification and free elections, one had to be prepared for what he called the ‘fall back’ stance.