The first book of History Professor Markus Wien was published in April this year and discusses the German-Bulgarian economic relations during World Wars I and II. It was written as a defence of his PhD thesis at the University of Florence.
“Even though this perspective is legitimate, it runs not only the risk of a too negative one-sided judgment, but also of an application of cliches. Even though these concepts are to some extend suitable for the study of certain aspects of the German-Bulgarian economic relations, they assign Bulgaria a too passive role and disregard its interests,” Wien says.
The debates among the Bulgarian economic elites as well as the foreign economic political decisions, taken by the government in 1931/32, make evident that Bulgaria performed as a sovereign state pursuing its own interests. This is true in spite of the “final result” of the development of the German-Bulgarian economic relations, which certainly ended up in a an almost ruinous dependence of Bulgaria on Germany.
A priori views on Bulgaria as part of an informal German empire are shortsighted at least in terms of the factors that drove the country into this relation to Germany. Concepts that view Germany as the advanced center and Bulgaria as the backward periphery are neither helpful for an analysis of Bulgaria’s foreign economic policy.
Even though the Bulgarian economic discourse sometimes reveals a subjective consciousness of being “backward”, a closer look, however, revealed the debates as the formulation of concrete interests, such as an increased agricultural productivity and a structural differentiation of this sector of the national economy.
In the early 1930s, Bulgaria laid substantial hopes on the trade agreements with Germany. The fact that these hopes were not completely unrealistic, became evident not only through the intensification of the country’s foreign trade and the initial success of the agricultural restructuring, but also through the concepts developed by the “Mitteleuropaischer Wirtschaftstag” (MWT, Central European Economic Conference) in order to modernize the Bulgarian economy.
The MWT principally assumed, that Bulgaria and the whole region could be economically profitable for Germany in the long run only if their national economies were “healthy”, i.e. worked efficiently, were differentiated and produced marketable surpluses and at the same time had a consumer potential, which would be high enough to create an attractive market for German export products. In order to approach these objectives, the MWT started initiatives in various fields.
Within this conceptual framework, the MWT helped establishing a number of academic institutes for Southeast European studies in Germany and promoted academic exchange programs.
In the second half of the 1930s the MWT extended its activities beyond the fields of agitation and academia by initiating projects which were supposed directly to support the modernization process of the Bulgarian economy. On top of the grants, awarded to Southeast European students in Germany, the MWT started practical instruction programs for the peasants in the region.
Prof. Wien has a Master’s degree in History of East and Southeast Europe from Ludwig-Maximilian-University Munich, Germany, where he defended a thesis on Anti-Semitism in Bulgaria. He was a visiting student at the Department of History of Sofia University where he studied in 1996 and 1997. He also studied at the German Giessen University and Pushkin Institute in Moscow, Russia.
