Open Archives to Close the Past: Bulgarian Archival Disclosure on the Road to European Union Accession

Abstract

The Bulgarian archival law was adopted a few weeks before Bulgaria entered the European Union (EU) on the first of January 2007. The chapter investigates the dynamics between the domestic political debate on disclosure of the former communist state security files and EU accession. Paying attention to the EU’s normative status and discourse, it is argued that the prospect of a future in the European Union created a momentum that was actively used by individual actors within the European Union and Bulgaria. On the basis of political party and parliamentary accounts as well as EU documents, this chapter analyzes how this international context interacted with long-existing domestic political strategies pro and con archival disclosure.

The author is thankful to the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) for financing the doctoral research of which this case study is part. The insightful comments and feedback of participants and moderators (special thanks to Nico Wouters and Berber Bevernage) during the conference on State-Sponsored History, November 2015 in Ghent were very helpful in writing this chapter. Most important, I thank my interviewees.