ISSN 1062-7421
Vol. 9 No. 12 (December 1999) pp. 581-584.

CREATING PARLIAMENTARY GOVERNMENT: THE TRANSITION TO DEMOCRACY IN BULGARIA by Albert P. Melone. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998. 323 pp. Cloth $20.95. ISBN 0-8142-0769-3. Paper $12.95. ISBN 0-8142-0770-7.

Reviewed by Daniel C. Kramer, Politics-Economics-Philosophy Department, College of Staten Island CUNY.

Bulgaria is one of the Balkan countries that Americans know very little about. With a population of only nine million and not in recent years the scene of large-scale civil wars, stories about it generally do not make the front page of the NEW YORK TIMES. Some American scholars actually sneer at colleagues who do research on this Balkan nation, saying that they should concentrate their efforts on "something important". This snobbishness is repulsive on many grounds, not the least of which is that the study of Bulgarian history and politics can teach us some important lessons. Lesson #1 is one in bravery and comes from World War II, when Bulgaria, though allied with Nazi Germany, refused to hand over to Hitler its 50,000 Jews. Lesson #2 comes from the end of 1989 through 1997, when the country
made a largely peaceful transition from Communist dictatorship to working democracy. It is this transition that Professor Melone, a member of the faculty of
Southern Illinois University, chronicles in the fine book under review.

As Chapter 1 notes, Melone's interest in Bulgaria was stimulated by visits by Bulgarian scholars to Southern Illinois during the 1980s. This led to his participation in a Bulgarian-American Law Conference there in 1991 and to a sabbatical semester there in 1993. Chapter 2 starts with several pages providing a thumbnail sketch of Bulgarian history between 1878, when the Russians liberated the country from the Turks, to the end of 1989. A monarchy until the end of World War II, it came under full Communist control by the end of 1947. Between the mid-1950s and the end of 1989 the Communist dictator was Todor Zhivkov, a Stalinist who built concentration camps and forced ethnic Turks to adopt Bulgarian names. At the same time presided over improvements in the educational system and health care. By 1989 Communist regimes were collapsing in Poland and Hungary and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev made it clear that he would not use military force to prop up these governments. Zhivkov was no fan of Gorbachev, but many younger members of the Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP) were. Inn November 1989 they ousted the BCP head in a bloodless coup.

The second part of Chapter 2 begins with describing the mass anti-Communist demonstration in Sofia, the capital, on December 14, 1989. Various individuals prominent in opposing the BCP convinced the rioters to peacefully disband. The Communists and their major opponents, the then-loose and extremely disparate coalition called the Union of Democratic Forces (UDF), agreed in early January 1990 to hold discussions later that month on the future of the country. The rest of this Chapter and Chapters 3, 4, and some of 5 describe these

Page 582 begins here

colloquies (called the "National Roundtable Talks" or simply "The Roundtable") and the deals they produced by the time they ended in mid-May, 1990. A considerable portion of these chapters consists of excerpts from more than 15 interviews that Melone conducted with various participants in the Roundtable and with other figures influential in Bulgarian politics. His first transcript is of an interview with an entomologist active in an environmentalist group associated with the UDF. Another is with a sociologist who had quit the Communist Party at the end of 1989 but who had even earlier helped found a "pro-glasnost" club that later joined the
UDF alliance. Melone then inserts comments by a Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) professor of constitutional law, who claims that much of the impetus for the
end of the dictatorship came from reformers within the BCP itself. (The BCP changed its name to BSP in 1990.) One of these reformers was one Andrey
Lukanov, and excerpts from the interview with him are provided at the end of Chapter 3. He tells of the violent small-scale vendettas that had plagued Bulgarian politics since the end of the First World War and of his epiphany that these had to cease and that political opposition had to be tolerated.

Chapter 4 concentrates on events surrounding the start of The Roundtable. Comments are provided from a UDF sociologist about why the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF), the party representing the country's Turkish minority, was not present at the discussions. His explanations are unconvincing though, as Melone points out, the MRF has played an important role in Bulgarian political contests beginning as early as the June, 1990 elections, the first ones after the collapse of the Communist dictatorship. The next interview is with a former BSP Minister of the Interior, a General who describes how he freed this secret police agency from Communist control.

Chapter 5 notes that as a result of negotiations in the Roundtable, the BSP and UDF sides decided that elections for what was to be called the Grand National Assembly should take place in June 1990 rather than later. The UDF really wanted them to be held at the end of the year because by then it would have had more time to organize, but it gave into the BSP demands for an early ballot because American Secretary of State James Baker told the UDF that his country wanted this. Both sides agreed that the Grand National Assembly should not only be a parliament enacting ordinary laws but should also have the authority to draft a new Constitution. To the surprise of many the supposedly despised BSP won a majority of Assembly seats in the June 1990 contest. Pieces from the Lukanov interview are inserted in which he explains why the BSP emerged victorious. The Chapter ends with Melone defending the early elections on the sensible ground that they signaled those who would have liked to restore totalitarianism that democracy had widespread support in the nation.

Chapters 6 and 7 turn to the work of the Grand National Assembly, with most of the latter Chapter being devoted to extracts from interviews with supporters and opponents of the Constitution the Assembly produced in mid-1991. This charter was backed by all the BSP deputies and by some of those allied with the UDF. The document makes Bulgaria a republic: a few of the Assembly members had wanted to restore the monarchy. The government it designed is a parliamentary democracy with a

Page 583 begins here

unicameral legislature known as the National Assembly. The National Assembly can oust the Prime Minister and his/her cabinet by a vote of no confidence. The President is directly elected but has little power. The judiciary is structured more like the French than the Anglo-American, featuring a separate administrative court system. There is a Constitutional Court with the power to declare laws unconstitutional. The Constitution declares private property inviolable while permitting its regulation by the government. Many of its clauses protect human rights, including one declaring that all citizens must be afforded equal protection under the law.
This sends the message to the Turkish minority that the persecutions of the Zhivkov years are a thing of the past.

Chapter 8, which includes transcripts of more interviews, updates the political situation in the country as of 1997. It notes that the UDF won a plurality of seats in the October 1991 parliamentary elections with the MRF holding the balance of power and opting to support a UDF government; mentions the return of the BSP to power in the 1994 elections; and depicts the UDF's winning an absolute majority of seats in the National Assembly in the 1997 races. (As of the writing of this review, it retains this majority. It is now a center-right party along the lines of Germany's Christian Democrats.) Chapter 9 concentrates on the structure of the judiciary and how that branch has struggled for independence of political control. In one spectacular case the Constitutional Court invalidated a statute rammed through by the BSP-controlled National Assembly in 1994 providing that top judges had to have had at least five years of judicial experience. This law would have
forced some UDF sympathizers to resign from the bench, as they would not have been there in 1989, five years before 1994 and an era when the BCP still ruled the
roost. A couple of other decisions also showed the Court independent of the BSP. One invalidated legislation requiring landowners to first offer to sell their property to cities and the state before making it available to private parties. (After Melone's book appeared, the Court overturned a law barring ex-communists from working in the civil service, which shows it is not a tool of the ruling UDF, either.)

Chapter 10 contains Melone's conclusions. One of his most important points is that the standard thesis of political scientists that democracy can survive only in a prosperous country with a large middle class is disproved by the transition from dictatorship to democracy in Bulgaria, a relatively poor land. He believes (p. 242) that if the political elites "will" the creation of a democratic system it can thrive despite the absence of the so-called sociological-economic correlates of democracy. He successfully backs up this thesis with post-Communist Bulgarian examples. These include the very willingness of the BSP to allow free elections; their voluntarily
agreeing to new parliamentary elections in 1997 under pressure from street demonstrations and strikes even though they controlled the National Assembly and even though elections were not required until 1998; and the requests of both BSP and UDF leaders to the people to avoid violence after the assassination of BSP adherent Lukanov in 1996. He also predicts that Bulgaria's "Democratic institutions and processes will survive"(p. 253). I think he is right, despite the fact that the country is significantly worse off economically now than in 1989 under Todor Zhivkov. One crucial reason democracy is safe there is one Melone glosses over: the desperate desire of

Page 584 begins here

Bulgarian leaders of all factions to have their country join the European Union and NATO. Unless it behaves itself in the sense of remaining democratic, these prestigious "clubs" will reject its application for membership.

Melone's volume appears in a series on Parliaments and Legislatures. Thus it would be unfair to criticize him for not spending more time on the rights provisions in the Bulgarian Constitution. However, his discussion of these articles would have been more helpful had it all appeared in the same spot: as it is, bits of it are placed outside the main paragraphs on the topic. This somewhat disorganized approach is also seen in his putting elsewhere than in his concluding Chapter a couple of episodes that back up the thesis for which he marshals evidence there, i.e., that human will can create democracies in the most unlikely spots. One of these happenings is the support for the BSP-dominated Grand National Assembly's Constitution given by then-President Zhelyu Zhelyev even though this popular member
of the UDF had been a staunch anti-Communist for many years. Zhelyev's urging the opponents of the document to avoid disruptive behavior might well have
averted large scale fighting between BSP and UDF supporters. There is too much repetition. For example, the idea that democracies can be created in the absence of the socio-economic correlates IS a very significant one, but there is no reason why he should have spent several pages explicating it in Chapter 8 as well as in his Introduction and Conclusion. His long excerpts from interviews interrupt his description of the events of late 1989 and afterward, and thus make the chronology harder to grasp. However, on balance one has to be glad that he provided us with these transcripts; for they allow the reader to understand the philosophies, the fears and the likes and dislikes of the main actors in Bulgaria's metamorphosis and are thus more memorable than a mere recitation of dates. In sum, Melone's work is a significant addition to the literature on how a democratic regime can be birthed and nurtured and thus can be read with profit by every political scientist and legal scholar regardless of subfield.

*****************************************************************
Copyright 1999 by the author.