Buying Bulgarian

I have complained about my consumer habits elsewhere, but nontheless I today had the pleasure to go shopping for a suitcase. For years I was pleased with my black back pack. Maybe it was a mid-life crisis, maybe something else - I had decided that now was the right time to buy one. In the end I settled for a suitcase that seemed reliable, was fashionable green and was made in Bulgaria.

By Frizabela [Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons

People in Bulgaria have often advised me to buy Bulgarian products, absolutely not Turkish or Chinese. I have often followed their advice to show my good manners, but I regarded their opinion as just another national prejudice on the balkans. Of course Bulgarians will think that Bulgarian T-shirts or suitcases are better than Turkish ones, just like Serbs will think that their goods are the best. So will Romanians and Turks.

There is no denial that people in the Balkans host strong and largely irrelevant prejudices agaist each other. But when I talk to Bulgarians about this issue, most people have a list of personal examples where Bulgarian goods were in deed much better produced than Turkish or Chinese ones.

So I have I. I have bought a number of clothes, bags and similar things produced in Bulgaria, often at a much better quality than the price first indicated. As a rule of thumb it is actually a good advice to buy Bulgarian stuff in Bulgaria. You know what you get, and it is usually a good product at a good price. This can not be said about everything that is sold in Bulgaria.

But how can this be? If one compares China and Bulgaria, one could easily get away with cultural differences, but I do not believe in that. But what cultural differences could explain the differences in quality between Turkish and Bulgarian goods, sold in Bulgaria?

After all, Bulgaria was part of the Ottoman Empire almost 500 years. After the world wars, when Bulgaria was directing its production to Soviet tastes and needs, and profoundly ignored the quality of its industry output, Turkey struggled vehemently to adapt European culture and values.

Mayde the simple truth is that the best Turkish goods are unlikely to end up in stores in Bulgaria. Those that go for export probably go to markets with wealthier customers. The same goes for China. A lot of high quality products are manufactured in China, but what is sold on Bulgarian markets is generally crap.

Bulgarian manufacturers probably have some difficulties to reach out to markets abroad. And with the die hard competition from very cheap chinese and turkish products, they have a chance to nice themselves as high quality providers. Which is why much of the best Bulgaria has to offer is sold here. Tashev, for example, is a great market for bags and outdoor gear, but I have never seen the brand abroad.

Still, that hardly explains half the question. How can Bulgarian producers meet a higher standard than (some) Turkish ones? Turkey is currently one of the world's most dynamic countries, and it's economic statistics look every bit as good as the Bulgarian one's. Shouldn't he country produce better stuff?

Maybe Turkish industry can, but simpy won't, because it doesn't pay off. Whereas Bulgaria is just another East European country, Turkey and China have become the sweatshops of the West. Go into any clothes store in Sweden and you will find hundreds of garments made in Turkey, plenty made in China, but hardly any made in Bulgaria.

What Turkey and China have that Bulgaria is not is a globalized industry with big producing units. Which generates cheap products and economic development at the expense of quality.

What Bulgarian producers do have at the moment is small producing units with reputations - any Bulgarian into mountaneering knows what Tashev is and where its factory is located, just like the vendor who sold my suitcase knew which factory it was made in. Only if the consumers know this, can a free market reward high quality producers.

There are probably many people in Bulgaria who would like to see its industry move towards larger profits and larger producing units. That would be risky. It is so much easier to make things right on a small scale. And the fact that the producers are more or less known by the consumers is probably the only reason that many, like me, feel a confidence in Bulgarian products

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P.s. Small is beautiful, not only when it comes to the garment industry. We live in a time were food production is taken over by agribusinesses, with horrible consequenses for everyone involved. That the landscape gets dominated by west european agribusinesses is probably an imminent danger in Bulgaria, with so fertile lands, innefficient agriculture and economically weak landholders.

A pleasant crisis

Everywhere you go these days in Bulgaria you hear about the crisis. People avoid celebrating the holidays in restaurants and they make jokes about how santa claus is coping with the crisis. In the weekly Kapital writers take a glance at 2011. An optimist argues that the bottom is reached, while a pessimist argue that the crisis will continue throughout an unknown future.

True enough, Bulgaria has been affected by the international financial turmoil. Unemployment have risen, and remains uncomfortably high even after the country returned to GDP growth earlier this year. Bulgarian companies are cautious about investing, and many Bulgarians are forced to cut down expenses. But I am still a little curious about the strong feeling of crisis.



Data from Eurostat

There are hardly any Bulgarian now who does not remember times that were rougher than this. Much rougher. After all, the current unemplyment levels are hardly higher than they were in 2006, when the country was booming. The crisis in Bulgaria is nothing compared to its neighbours Romania and Greece, or even in the Irish tiger economy. Wouldn't the correct emotional response be "thanks god we live in Bulgaria and not in Greece or Ireland"?

Such a response would probably demand a massive mental change in a country that by and large sees itself as a poor corner of Europe. But the sense of crisis probably is probably well founded. One reason is that unemployment in Bulgaria is still a very diferent reality in than what it is in the west.Another is the massive mistrust against politicians. When the world is shaking, Bulgarians wisely enough do not trust their own politicians to do what not even Obama has been able to do - turn the economy around. The statistics might look promising now, but they can be replaced with bad surprises any day. In the Kapital article mentioned above, the pessimist first of all mentioned the risk that misdirected populism causes havoc in the Bulgarian economy with increased spenditure, taxes and borrowing. Few will object against that.

Maybe more striking than fear of the future in this article was the pride with wich Kapitals economical writers discussed this subject. They have always loved to discuss fundamental economical issues rather than business news (which makes the paper readable), and it is as if they enjoy having found a topic both worthy of discussion and relevant for Bulgarian everyday life.

This crisis is not the kind of crisis that empty people's stomachs, but it is historical news. For the first time in a very long time, Bulgaria is so integrated in the western hemisphere, that her economical development is more dependent on what happens in Brussels and New York, than on decicions by maverick Balkan politicians. The fact that Bulgaria is in a moderate state of crisis like all other European countries hint at something that many Bulgarians have been waiting for: she is finally becoming just a normal country.

(Which by the way, The Economist realized before me... )

The rift

The day before christmas I watched a news clip about a charity, where Bulgarian kids collected money for other Bulgarian kids. Completely normal and laudable of course, but there is still someething significant about it - not so long ago Swedish kids collected money for Bulgarian kids, and the thought that Bulgarian kids had money over for charity was utopian.

By Edal Anton Lefterov (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons.These Bulgarian children have nothing to do with this post

Still, the number of ragged roma children who approach you for stotinki* in the train stations is not visibly lower than any time since 2007 when I started to regularly visit Bulgaria. This charity campaign, and numerous other good initiatives indicate that there are still thousand of Bulgarian children in need of help from somewhere. What has changed is that there are now Bulgarians rich enough, and good hearted enough, to give them a hand.

More people have money for consumer vanity as the incredible number of shopping malls show. The metro in Sofia is slowly growing, and roads are rebuilt. In a small city like Pleven, there are new park benches to sit on and brand new second hand city buses. Sitting on these benches an buses you can see the same poor retired workers as always. To them, development must seem like a joke.

Where development feels real is not on these benches or buses, but in the cafés of Sofia. My personal favourites are Onda and Pop Art in Sofia. What is most heartening is how cheap the coffee still is. The pricing shows that the target group is neither an impoverished intelligentia, filhty rich mafioti and their girlfriends or west european businessmen. These cafés, that are the best places in Sofia, take aim at the group of people that are said to be absolutely crucial for a positive development in any country: the local middle class.

A such class clearly exists today, and most Bulgarians I know belong to it. It is a highly educated class that can thank Foreign Direct Investments for their relative wealth. Without western multinational companies in Bulgaria most of my friends would have much lower wages, and they would not be able to support the blooming varitey of cafés and artistic shops that is the true pearl of Bulgaria.

For these Bulgarians, and many, life gets a little better every day. But next to them, or rather below them, there is a huge mass of people who are not part of this development. The rift betweens those whose life develop those whose life does not growns bigger each year. Which it is normal. Every development has its winners and losers. But ther is still a tragedy in it, and social inequalities raise a host of new problems that do not exist in a country where everyone is poor. (Was there ever a country where everyone was rich) Schools must try to diffuse the differences beween individuals. City planners must try to avoid ethnical and ecomical segregation. All public instituions must redefine their work, from simply existing to become the fabric that binds society together.

Slavenka Drakulic writes in Café Europa (I think!) about Bulgarians and the notion of social equality. After the fall of communism they where keen to enjoy the freedoms of capitalism, but abhorred by its injustices, according to Drakulic. 20 years later, I think many have accepted certain injustices as necessities and moved on. Charity campaigns where Bulgarian children help other Bulgarian childrens show both an acceptance of economical differences between Bulgarians, and a wish to deal with this new social reality.

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As most often, the thoughts in this post originally came from my girlfriend.

*Stotinki is the smalles Bulgarian coins, like cents, ören or kopeks.
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A hundred years of solitude

21.00 18/12 2010

I am at a gathering with the Bulgarian diaspora in Lund, Sweden. During the next week must of us will be travelling to Bulgaria to celebrate christmas and new years eve, so this is a kind of good bye meeting. Since the community in Lund is mainly made up of students, the participants in our gathering change form semester to semester. I couldn't claim that I know everyone present very well,some people I have met only a few times, but none the less it is a cordial meeting. All speakers refer to "we" and "us" in a way that makes it sound that we have always been together.

10.24 19/12 2010

The plane to Sofia is delayed, like most other planes on European airports this day. But we need not shead tears - Cimber Sterling offers us a free lunch, and I again find myself in the midst of a cordial group of Bulgarians. One of them was present the previous day, the other I haven't seen in half a year. But nontheless , we entertain ourself so vividly that I do not once manage to pick up the book from my backpack. And just like yesterday, the language and discussion invokes the image of us as people who have known each other forever. We don't belive so, but the illusion makes us feel comfortable for the moment.

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The wait at the airport was prolonged, and at one point I did manage to skim through the Sydsvenskan of the day. As so often on christmas, the editor's column remembered those who are alone at this holiday that most people spend with their near and dear one's. The column stated that involuntary solitude is a problem, but it also noted that there is a very high correlation between the number of single house holds and a high GDP. So is solitude the price we pay for being rich? Not necessarily, Sydsvenskan wrote. The fact that many people live alone does not prove that they are lonely. Some people like being alone, and an individualistic society lets the individual choose for him or herself which group to belong to. The column supported its opinions with research that shows that people are not more lonely in Sweden today than they were in the 80's.

I don't think the issue can be dealt with so easily. As a matter of fact, what most foreigners I know says about Sweden, and what frustrates many visitors, is the strong individualism that creates a certain alienation between people. I remember a Polish friend that had seen the film Lilja forever. What terrified her the most was not so much the criminals who forced Lilja into prostitution - such people and problems exist everywhere . but the indifferent attitude from the neighbours. No one sees what is happening, because noone feel olliged, or alowed, to know anyhting about their neighbours.

Swedish people do have friends, of course, and between friends we are probably not more individualistic than any other people. But with people we don't know at all, or with people that we don't know very well, we adopt a polite but strict 'mind your own business' attitude. For good and for bad. In many situations a person does better without the opinions of curious neighbours'. But we also overlook many wrongdoings, like neighbours who beat their children or bus passengers who threathen other passengers, simply because we don't feel that this is our problem.

Within Europe, Bulgaria is probably as far from Sweden as you get when it comes to individualism and group responsibility. With more than one Bulgarian around, a strong group feeling tends to materialize almost immediately. You might have to listen to more life stories than you ever wanted, but you will never feel alone. It is also hard to think a story like Lilja forever set in a Bulgarian city, where neighbours tend to be highly aware about who lives in each flat. It is less than 24 hours since I and my girlfriend arrived in our friend's flat in Sofia - but I think most of the house already know that we are here. Which doesn't prevent a hundred and one other problems that Bulgarians face every day. And I can not for my life imagine a Bulgarian op/ed. like Sydsvenskan saying that solitude can be a good thing and that it is a sign of a developed economy. After all, there is a difference between lonely and alone, but the noun to both adjectives is loneliness.