Winner of the 2019 CEU Award for Outstanding Research This book documents the making of Romanian citizenship from 1750 to 1918 as a series of acts of national self-determination by the Romanians, as well as the emancipation of subordinated gender, social, and ethno-religious groups. It focuses on the progression of a sum of transnational “questions” that were at the heart of North-Atlantic, European, and local politics during the long nineteenth century, concerning the status of peasants, women, Greeks, Jews, Roma, Armenians, Muslims, and Dobrudjans. The analysis emphasizes the fusion between nationalism and liberalism, and the emancipatory impact national-liberalism had on the transition from the Old Regime to the modern order of the nation-state. While emphasizing liberalism's many achievements, the study critically scrutinizes the liberal doctrine of legal-political “capacity” and the dark side of nationalism, marked by tendencies toward exclusion. It highlights the challenges nascent liberal democracies face in the process of consolidation and the enduring appeal of illiberalism in periods of upheaval, represented mainly by nativism. The book's innovative interdisciplinary approach to citizenship in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman Balkans and the richness of the sources employed, appeal to a diverse readership.

In mid-1989, the Bulgarian communist regime seeking to prop up its legitimacy played the ethnonational card by expelling 360,000 Turks and Muslims across the Iron Curtain to neighboring Turkey. It was the single largest ethnic cleansing during the Cold War in Europe after the wrapping up of the postwar expulsions (‘population transfers’) of ethnic Germans from Central Europe in the latter half of the 1940s. Furthermore, this expulsion of Turks and Muslims from Bulgaria was the sole unilateral act of ethnic cleansing that breached the Iron Curtain. The 1989 ethnic cleansing was followed by an unprecedented return of almost half of the expellees, after the collapse of the Bulgarian communist regime. The return, which partially reversed the effects of this ethnic cleansing, was the first-ever of its kind in history. Despite the unprecedented character of this 1989 expulsion and the subsequent return, not a single research article, let alone a monograph, has been devoted to these momentous developments yet. However, the tragic events shape today’s Bulgaria, while the persisting attempts to suppress the remembrance of the 1989 expulsion continue sharply dividing the country’s inhabitants. Without remembering about this ethnic cleansing it is impossible to explain the fall of the communist system in Bulgaria and the origins of ethnic cleansing during the Yugoslav wars. Faltering Yugoslavia’s future ethnic cleansers took a good note that neither Moscow nor Washington intervened in neighboring Bulgaria to stop the 1989 expulsion, which in light of international law was then still the legal instrument of ‘population transfer.’ The as yet unhealed wound of the 1989 ethnic cleansing negatively affects the Bulgaria’s relations with Turkey and the European Union. It seems that the only way out of this debilitating conundrum is establishing a truth and reconciliation commission that at long last would ensure transitional justice for all Bulgarians irrespective of language, religion or ethnicity.

"The plight of the Turkish people living in Bulgaria since it ceased to be part of the Ottoman Empire deserves to be better understood by the world at large than it has been up to now. It is a painful story of the progressive violations of the human rights of a people who constituted about a third of the whole population. The author is an authority on Turkish and Ottoman history and in the present book he recounts with a wealth of documentary material the oppression of the Turks under Bulgarian rule starting with the Monarchy and ending with the People's Republic. It is an indictment of the persistent Bulgarianization of the Turks, often by force, in the fields of language, education, culture, freedom of speech, sport, local administration, and the right of emigration." --Dust jacket.

In Managing Invisibility, Hande Sözer examines complicated invisibilities of Alevi Bulgarian Turks, a double-minority which faces structural discrimination in Bulgaria and Turkey. While the literature portrays minorities’ visibility as a requirement for their empowerment or a source of their surveillance, the book argues that for such minorities what matters is their control over their own visibility. To make this point, it focuses on the concept protective dissimulation, a strategy of self-imposed invisibility. It discusses cases indicating Alevi Bulgarian Turks’ strategies of dealing with historically changing majorities in their larger societies and argues that dissimulation actually reinforces the intergroup distinctions for the minority’s members. The data for the book was gathered during 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Bulgaria and Turkey.

Building on the work of a new generation of historians, this volume presents twelve papers from all parts of the former Ottoman space, from the Middle East to the Balkans, showing new approaches to Ottoman provincial history.