Historians have tended to view postwar labor migration, including the Turkish-German case, as a one-directional story whose consequences manifested within host country borders. This chapter complicates this narrative by arguing that Turkish migrants were mobile border crossers who traveled as tourists throughout Western Europe and took annual vacations to their homeland. These seasonal remigrations entailed a three-day car ride across Central Europe and the Balkans at the height of the Cold War. The drive traversed an international highway (Europastraße 5) extending from West Germany to Turkey through Austria, socialist Yugoslavia, and communist Bulgaria. Migrants’ unsavory travel experiences along the way underscored East/West divides, and they transmuted their disdain for the “East” onto their impoverished home villages. Moreover, the cars and “Western” consumer goods they transported reshaped their identities. Those in the homeland came to view the Almancı as superfluous spenders who were spending their money selfishly rather than for the good of their communities. Overall, the idea that a migrant could become German shows that those in the homeland could intervene from afar in debates about German identity amid rising racism: although many derided Turks as unable to integrate, they had integrated enough to face difficulties reintegrating into Turkey.

The Bulgarian National Bank (BNB) was restructured repeatedly between 1926 and 1935, but these restructurings were superficial and incoherent, producing contradictory outcomes. The liberal spirit of the initial 1926-8 reforms dissolved with the onset of the Great Depression. Subsequently, the BNB was endowed with new instruments and tasked with carrying out the interventionist policies adopted in the 1930s, thus paving the way for the bank’s eventual role in the communist planned economy. This chapter focuses on the significance of BNB’s state ownership and on the tight economic conditionality attached to 1926 and 1928 loans sponsored by the League of Nations. By contrasting policies followed in Bulgaria and Greece during the Depression, it challenges Eichengreen’s hypothesis that heavy defaulters and countries leaving the gold exchange standard performed better relative to those that sought to maintain their reputations as decent debtors.

Chapter 9 is the brief story of the lesser-known World War I reparations of Bulgaria and Russia. Both reparations were large in terms of each countrys output but were subsequently negotiated away in political treaties. In the Soviet Unions case, it is one of the examples of how you can repudiate debt completely but under the cost of exiting the global trading system.

This chapter draws a picture of ownership and control change of large Bulgarian companies after the collapse of communism in 1989. Post-communist privatization has fundamentally changed the ownership landscape. First, in 2018–2019 the state was the largest shareholder in only 9% of the top 100 companies (down from 42% in the mid-1990s). The state has virtually disappeared as a direct largest shareholder of listed companies. Nevertheless, the state still remained among the key ultimate owners among the top 20 companies. Second, foreign investors have become the largest shareholders in 46% of the top 100 companies (up from 31% in the mid-1990s) and in 11.7% of listed companies (up from 6.25% in the mid-1990s).Third, there was a remarkable increase in ownership concentration in listed companies and the percentage of listed companies with dispersed ownership has declined. The destruction of large Bulgarian firms, proxied by their exit rate, was not coupled with an entry of newly established private firms into the top 100 companies. There was no sustainable development of the domestic largest shareholders. The chapter discusses potential determinants explaining the observed ownership changes.

The chapter describes the main nature conservation challenges in Bulgaria, its main policy responses and actions, and their achievements and lessons, primarily over the last 40 years. This covers the country’s natural characteristics, habitats and species of particular importance; the status of nature and main pressures affecting it; nature conservation policies (including biodiversity strategies), legislation, governance and key actors; species measures; protected areas and networks; general conservation measures including habitat management and restoration; nature conservation costs, economic benefits and funding sources; and biodiversity monitoring. Likely future developments are also identified. Conclusions are drawn on what measures have been most effective and why, and what is needed to improve the implementation of existing measures and achieve future nature conservation goals.

Chapter 4 examines the relationship between Giovanni Amendola and Nelia Pavlova, born 1895. This complex love story has been all but entirely ignored by Italian scholarship on Giovanni and in the national memory. Apparently, the couple had a son who died of meningitis at the age of six in 1929. In Giovanni’s papers there is evidence of the love affair but no acknowledgement of the child. Since Nelia also claims on occasion to have been ‘married’ to Giovanni, some doubt must remain about the veracity of her account. She was a young woman who resembled Eva Kühn in quite a few ways: foreign, multilingual, independent, from her country’s leading political classes, intellectually able. Nelia was one the three people at Giovanni’s deathbed in Cannes (Giorgio was another). Over time, however, the Amendolas, as they put it, ‘lost contact’ with her. Yet she made for herself a distinguished career as a Paris journalist, an expert in Eastern Europe. While the Amendola sons became communists, she remained a liberal democrat, as well as a woman who always remembered Giovanni as her man. Her death probably occurred in 1940. She should not have been forgotten as easily as she has been.

In the summer of 1914 it had been more than forty years since the last major European war. That period had witnessed unprecedented economic growth and the flourishing of culture. Lasting peace was conducive to prosperity, technological progress, and social change. Between the Franco-Prussian war of 1871 and the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 trams appeared on the streets of European cities, and the bigger capitals – London, Paris, Berlin, Budapest – acquired underground metro lines. New factories were built and the urban proletariat grew so rapidly that politicians began to vie for its support. Although the European powers pursued overseas campaigns, the latter’s impact on the daily life of Europeans was limited to articles in the morning press. Nor were peace and development the sole preserve of the West. In Central and Eastern Europe, too, war was not within living memory for the vast majority of citizens.

This chapter tracks how the measures on enemy aliens consolidated, evolved and transformed and how the number of enemy aliens grew and changed between 1915 and the beginning of 1917. In this period, policies against enemy aliens became more detailed and regulated new aspects of the enemy aliens’ lives. The chapter follows the processes of convergence and divergence among countries at war. It also deals with the policies adopted and implemented by countries such as Italy, Bulgaria, Romania and Portugal and its colonies that entered the war at a later stage. It also pays attention to the process that transformed enemy aliens into friendly aliens and vice versa. As the war ground on, while anti-alien feelings among the belligerent populations assumed an anti-Semitic and racial character, the warring governments put in place a two-way process that turned some enemy aliens into friendly aliens and citizens and subjects who belonged to specific national or religious minorities into aliens. This double process mainly concerned, directly and indirectly, the multi-ethnic empires at different stages of the war, and varied greatly from government to government.

Stuck between politics of ethnic nationalism and multiple responsibilities under international legal regimes, Bulgaria has introduced a laissez-passer integration model for refugees which is in stark contrast with integration policies in Western Europe, but ironically achieves similar results of 'othering' and exclusion. The reception of asylum-seekers and refugees has been similar in other Central and Eastern Europen countries, if not more problematic. This paper looks at the reasons for the preference for such an approach and claims that ethnic nationalism is still alive, albeit well disguised. Engaging with theories of 'othering' and 'otherness' from a historico-legal perspective, it aims to illustrate that, despite insurmountable differences between East and West, the increased mixed migratory flows of 2015 onwards have paradoxically contributed to more cohesion in response to migration and integration on a European level.

The war entered 1915 with Germany in possession of most of Belgium and firmly entrenched in northeastern France, Serbia holding its own in the Balkans, and Russia in occupation of Austrian Galicia and Turkish territory along the Caucasus front. On the Western front the British Empire provided much of the manpower in Flanders and the Artois sector, but the Germans successfully stood on the defensive against them, and against the French in the Champagne, making the first effective use of poison gas on the battlefield. In the east, Germany joined Austria-Hungary in liberating Galicia, then conquering Russian Poland, only to have Tsar Nicholas II refuse to consider a separate peace. The Western Allies anticipated the pressure on Russia and tried to force the Dardanelles, an ill-fated campaign that left British and Imperial forces focusing for much of the year on Gallipoli, where Mustafa Kemal became hero of the Turkish effort to repel them. In the spring Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary, opening up a front in the Alps and along the Isonzo River which soon became as stalemated as the Western front. On the Balkan front, Bulgaria entered the war in the autumn, joining the Central Powers in overrunning Serbia.

The Fourth Crusade (1199–1204), culminating in the sack of Constantinople and the conquest of most of the Byzantine empire, is a textbook example of a noble plan gone awry. The original intent was to attack the Ayyubids in Egypt, but along the way financial and other considerations diverted the French and Venetian crusaders to Constantinople where they restored the deposed emperor Isaac II Angelos (r.1185–95, 1203–4) to power. According to an earlier agreement, Isaac was to provide the crusaders with military and financial aid, but fiscal problems within the empire made this impossible. As time passed, anti-Latin sentiment within the city led to a palace coup which overthrew Isaac. The crusaders then seized the city and the empire itself. The Fourth Crusade and the subsequent Latin conquest intensified the anarchy that already existed within the provinces, providing the grace blow to an empire which had become increasingly fragmented to the point of disintegration.