CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2022
| Author | Dimitrov, Bogoya |
|---|---|
| Title | Human Rights Diplomacy And Bulgarian-Turkish Tensions During The Cold War: Internationalization Of The Muslim Minority Issue In Southeastern Europe, 1984-1989 |
| Summary | More than thirty years after the events, scholarships have been concerned with the end of the Cold. While global politics and the relations between Washington and Moscow have been widely studied by historians, interstate relations in the periphery remain understudied in English-speaking literature. This is the case in the Bulgarian-Turkish conflict regarding Muslim minorities in Bulgaria in the 1980s. This work reexamined this largely forgotten story of the end of the Cold War. The relations between Sofia and Ankara are traditionally seen as deeply influenced by the international military and ideological affiliation of both countries. In 1984, the Bulgarian communist government initiated a name-changing campaign known as the ‘Revival Process’ (‘Vazroditelen protzes’), which forced the country’s Muslim populations to change their Turkish names to Bulgarian names. The ‘Revival Process’ in Bulgaria in the 1980s and the 1989 migration of the Bulgarian Muslim populations to Turkey questions the level of autonomy of Sofia vis-à-vis the Kremlin in terms of foreign policy. It examines Bulgarian-Turkish relations from 1950 to 1991 with a strong focus on the period from 1984 to 1989. After 1975, the defense of human rights became a powerful tool for exercising pressure on Eastern bloc countries. Using unexplored archival materials from several diplomatic archives in Europe, this work argues that the ‘Revival Process’ took a predominant place in the Bulgarian-Turkish diplomatic bilateral relations as well as in the multilateral diplomatic relations between Bulgaria and Turkey. Even if the Turkish government received relative support from Western countries which were part of NATO, Ankara was not able to impose the use of its strategic language while other states and international organizations were describing the Muslim minority in Bulgaria. Ankara was not perceived as a legitimate promoter of moral lessons mainly because of the human rights situation in Turkey at that time. The main contribution of the thesis is the reexamination of the multiple aspects of the end of the Cold War in the periphery. The case study regarding Bulgarian-Turkish relations in the 1980s attempts to clarify the level of autonomy of Sofia vis-à-vis the Kremlin in terms of foreign policy. |
| Supervisor | Iordachi, Constantin |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2022/dimitrov_bogoya.pdf |
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