ABSTRACT
Since the fall of the state socialist regime in 1989, Bulgaria has experienced a turbulent ‘transition’ from a centrally planned towards a free market economy and from one-party rule towards parliamentary democracy. This transformation has been accompanied by a number of signifi cant social and cultural changes, but also by a number of continuities. The new order ostensibly undermined all kinds of boundaries – national, ideological, cultural. Travelling abroad became easier and people gained unprecedented access to previously scarce or explicitly forbidden cultural resources, a process that has been greatly enhanced by the internet since the mid-1990s. Nevertheless – or probably precisely as a reaction to such disorienting openness – negative attitudes towards difference along major socio-cultural axes like ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and disability have remained relatively stable. Public discussion on such issues was largely silenced during the state socialist period, when the problems of difference were expected to automatically wither away with the abolition of class exploitation. They did not disappear, 1 but neither did they dissolve with the development of the free market and parliamentary democracy after 1989. The results of recent sociological studies strongly suggest that ‘at the moment in Bulgaria (and to a different but approximating degree in all postsocialist countries) many real problems exist in relation to the perception and approach towards difference’ (Tomova 2009 : 120).
