The magnificent past to which nations supposedly need to return - "to make America/Europe/Bulgaria great again" - is illusory, because a more peaceful and prosperous time simply did not exist. By Daniel Smilov.
The "Conservative turn" in world politics, which is expressed in events such as Brexit and the re-election of Donald Trump as US president, has two essential characteristics.
Interests instead of values
The first is the turn to interests instead of values and the imposition of the idea of a world in which the stronger "has the right" of a sphere of influence and even the right to territory and resources over the weaker one. Formulated in this way, the thesis may sound scandalous, but after the claims made by the USA to Canada, Greenland and Panama, it seems analytically correct.
At a minimum, the conservative turn implies a turn towards "realism" in international relations, which places national egoism as a supreme value and delegitimizes forms of lasting and institutionalized interaction between sovereign countries - such as the European Union. Popularly speaking, the formula is "America first", and the hope is that it is universal and can be reduced to "America first, Germany first and… Bulgaria first". Although there are obvious logical contradictions between these statements.
Return to the past
The second characteristic of the conservative turn is its idea of the future as the restoration of some grand past. Brexit, which is now five years old, took place under the slogan of "taking back control", suggesting a happy past in which Britain had some control that it subsequently lost when it joined the EU.
Trump has simply revived slogans from the 1930s: "Make America Great Again". In both cases, the curious thing is that the glorious past to which nations are supposed to return is largely illusory for at least two reasons:
First, the US, Britain and the West as a whole have been experiencing an unprecedented period of lasting peace and economic and social prosperity in recent decades. Second, during this period other great powers have also emerged - such as China - which make it impossible for the West to return to the state of hegemony of earlier periods. That is, Neither can the West return to a more peaceful and prosperous time, because such simply did not exist, nor can it return to a time when it was a world hegemon, simply because other societies have also developed in the meantime and acquired enormous resources.
The West is being treated with the idea of a fabricated past
In terms of GDP, China is slightly overtaking the EU and chasing the USA. If GDP is measured by purchasing power parity, China has long been the world's largest economy, and India is close to the EU. These are huge changes that rule out the possibility of restoring Western world hegemony.
From this perspective, the "conservative turn" is a therapy for Western societies that tries rhetorically and purely verbally to create in them a sense of returning to past greatness. The words that charismatic leaders use are important - words that create at least media realities and silence the objective facts about the global balances of power and resources.
"The conservative turn" has a strong resonance in Eastern Europe and in Bulgaria. As Georgi Gospodinov quite prophetically revealed in "Time Refuge", politics in our region is also beginning to revolve around the search for this great and happy past, which is better and more attractive than the present.
The problem for Bulgaria, however, is the same as that of the West as a whole: it is difficult and impossible to find a past in which there was more prosperity and we were hegemon. The lack of such times can lead to absurd ideas, such as presenting the Bulgarian Middle Ages (the time of Tsar Simeon the Great, for example) as a normative standard. But even the biggest supporters of the "conservative turn" they will probably admit that this is political chatter without any particular consequences.
And to which exactly "great time" do we want to return?
More realistic candidates for the "great time" that some believe we should return to are socialism or the Bulgarian Renaissance. But both options suffer from very serious defects. Socialism is an era in which Bulgaria practically has no sovereignty, and compared to the current state, it is a relatively poor and underdeveloped country (despite the party's bombast on the subject). The Renaissance is an even more inconvenient option, because during its time Bulgaria as a state did not exist at all.
Due to the lack of an obviously attractive past to reconstruct, the "conservative turn" in Bulgaria has two options. One is "fantasy", which can be reduced to building "theme parks" - real or rhetorical - in which to produce an idyllic past. The second option, however, which is more realistic, is to attack the present. To present the present itself as a diversion of Bulgaria from the right path, as failure and corruption.
In the last week, for example, we witnessed two events that well illustrate the effects of the second strategy. The tenth anniversary of the death of Dr. Zhelyu Zhelev - the first democratically elected president of Bulgaria - was marked with a memorial service and was honored by President Radev and other politicians. The event as a whole was modest, dignified, but it exuded uncertainty about the value of what the country had achieved in the period after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Bulgaria is lucky to have a figure like Zhelev, who defended the values of freedom and democracy during a repressive regime. And he made a very serious contribution to the creation of a modern, free and European Bulgaria. History will be much more generous to Zhelev than we, his contemporaries, have been. And the "conservative turn" - with the search for the great past beyond the real achievements of the present - postpones and obscures the process of a real assessment of the weight of political figures in Bulgarian history.
The desire for a great past does not change history for the better
The second "event" was the proposal to "investigate" the activities of Soros and the individuals and organizations associated with him in Bulgaria. The politics in this move is obvious, but leaving it aside, we come back to the idea that Bulgaria's transition to democracy is a "failure" and those who supported, defended, and contributed to its realization must bear responsibility for it.
The fact that something like this "conservative turn" is based on illusory ideas about a great past does not make it any less real as a political trend. It is still good to distinguish between people's perceptions and motivations, on the one hand, and objective realities, on the other. Just because someone really wants something, does not make it a reality. But desires are real and they must be taken into account, especially when they determine policy in a given period. However, the anchor of reality should neither "leak" nor break.
Because just as the desire for hegemony is not enough to make someone a hegemon, the desire for a great past has not changed history. At least not for the better.
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This comment expresses the personal opinion of the author and may not coincide with the positions of the Bulgarian editorial office and the State News Agency as a whole.