Български външнополитически акции пред Европа през XIX век до 1877 година 3-76
Bulgarian Foreign Policy Actions before Europe in the 19th Century (Up to 1877)

Summary/Abstract: The foreign policy activity of the Bulgarians during the National Revival Period occupied considerable space both as regard numbers and importance in the Bulgarian liberation movement. Closely connected and often directly conditioned by the development, difficulties and progress of its principal forms – the struggle for national education, church independence and political liberation – the actions of the Bulgarians before the external world, the European governments, the democratic public and the related national movements – had also a physiognomy of their own. As a whole formed a differentiated fourth aspect or form of the liberation movement. In the historical literature they are treated among other things also invariably subjected to the church struggle, to the political and educational movement. Considered in their inner entirety, constant presence in the life of the Bulgarians and in the conditions of spiritual and national-political emancipation, they assumed the significance of an unswerving and developing pre-state foreign policy activity which in its peak moments turned into a deliberate and purposeful activity of the Bulgarian people quite before the Liberation, i.e. into Bulgarian pre-state diplomacy. This paper is an attempt in a brief survey to give meaning to the foreign policy initiatives of the Bulgarians in the 19th c. as a differentiated trend in the liberation movement and as a vigorous and permanent activity in defence of the right of the people of independent existence and development, of integration with the values of European civilization in all spheres of life and of drawing the attention of the European cabinets and public to Bulgaria’s fate. Chronologically the foreign policy manifestations of the Bulgarians concentrated in all the crisis moments in international relations on the Eastern Question and at the times of the highest intensity of the struggles of the Bulgarian and the other Balkan peoples for liberation, when the interested Great Powers most closely followed up the events in the Balkans or directly intervened in them: the Russo-Turkish wars at the beginning of the 19th c., the Serbian and Greek Uprising, the Near East crisis in the late 30ies and early 40ies, provoked by the powerful wave of revolts, chiefly in Northwestern Bulgaria, the prehistory of the Crimean War, the war itself and the subsequent events, the revolutionary upsurge among the Bulgarians in 1867–1868 and, of course, the Great Eastern Crisis in 1875–1878. The study consists of two principal parts. The first is a review of the foreign policy initiatives of the Bulgarians during the early 19th c. and the first delegation to Russia, sent by the Bucharest political centre round Sophronius of Vratsa, the diplomatic demarches of Alexander Exarch before the governments of all the Great Powers in the 40ies, the foreign policy activity of the figures of the Church Struggle, especially after the Crimean War and the particularly extensive and representative activity of all groupings before Europe in the 60ies and of the Bulgarian Revolutionary Central Committee in the early 70ies, the contacts with kindred national and revolutionary movements and groupings in Serbia, Italy, Russia, Poland and other countries. The second part is dedicated to the movement for the protection of the Bulgarian people and for supporting its demands for autonomy and an independent state organization after the April Uprising, the climax of which was the sending of a Bulgarian delegation (Dr. Tsankov and M.D. Balabanov) to Europe with the mission of making all the governments of the Great Powers familiar with the intolerable position of the Bulgarians, the atrocities and crimes of the Turkish authorities during the uprising and their wish for an autonomous government of Bulgaria. The meetings and talks in the European capitals of the two Bulgarian representatives with the foreign ministers, senior officials and eminent public figures, as well as the initiatives of the Bulgarian Charity Society in Bucharest in 1876 and the early 1877 bore most definite features of pre-state diplomatic activity. The qualities and political maturity of the Bulgarian intelligentsia that defended the national cause of its motherland before Europe proved in an incontrovertible way that the Bulgarians had at their disposal sufficiently well-prepared forces capable of independently governing their own independent state.

• Details
• Contents