Debt and Indebtedness: Redrawing Global Color Lines in a Postsocialist Capitalist Restoration

• In Event: Histories and Cultures of Debt in Eastern Europe

Abstract

The presentation illustrates the redrawing of global color lines in the early years of a post-socialist capitalist restoration. Around the 1950s, the building of the so-called “mutually beneficial” relations between Eastern Europe and the Global South presupposed a way to struggle in the global battle of ideas and political influence. Low-interest loans, debt forgiveness, people’s aid, state-funded educational stipends, and the guarantee of equal social and labor rights for foreign workers were among the key elements that were to sustain political imaginaries of socialist internationalism, antiracism, and mutual solidarity between the socialist East and the Global South. Once considered an internationalist duty, by the mid-1980s, ‘Third World debt’ had shifted from a shared moral obligation to a crushing financial burden, fundamentally transforming the nature of indebtedness itself. I examine the case of Bulgaria and demonstrate how “indebtedness” presupposed race making anew: shifting from paternalistic whiteness extended toward socialist friends to the constitution of postcolonial migrants as an undesirable communist contamination. Beginning in 1990, student and worker programs were violently dismantled. Racist street attacks, the suspension of state stipends, and the establishment of state commissions tasked with dealing with the “threat” posed by postcolonial nationals to the newly emerging liberal democracy and capitalist economy marked this transition. This shift in the “morality of indebtedness” laid conditions for the mass expulsion of thousands of postcolonial students and workers in the early 1990s, effectively redrawing global color lines.

Author

• Raia V. Apostolova, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (Bulgaria)