This book by Svetla Baloutzova on the history of pronatalism and some demographic aspects of social policy in Bulgaria between the two world wars is an extremely valuable piece, which should be read by scholars and students working on the global history of demographic thinking and/or on East European history. It is a proper, well-researched historical analysis of several important legislative acts and their political and discursive contexts in Bulgaria, including the 1923 Bill for Public Health, the 1934 Decree-Law for Public Assistance, the gradual development of family allowance, legislation on children born outside marriage and, very importantly, the history of the 1943 law on child-rich families. This nuanced local analysis, with excellent notes on comparative issues, sheds light on many aspects of East European management of population development. If carefully read, the work of Baloutzova, together with the current works of Marius Turda on the interrelationship between nation and eugenics or some of the new pieces on Romania, Hungary and the Balkans,Footnote ¹ can be excellent starting points in understanding the early twentieth-century East European story of demographic thinking as related to the much-researched Italian, German, French or even North American developments in the first half of the twentieth century. These ‘Western’ and East European policies should be compared with other non-European policies and discourses also. Although there are some excellent pieces of postcolonial criticism, we lack real comparative works. There is a great need to develop a proper comparative framework to understand the often horrifying story of demographic thinking and demographic extremism globally.Footnote ² This book on demography and nation in Bulgaria is a new opportunity to continue the work.

Regardless of the local focus of the work Baloutzova indeed recognises the need for a comparative study of population management which does take into account the role played by global hierarchies and global competition when differential fertility was the focus of population management. She aptly writes that:

In other words, demographic policy was framed and organised by various considerations of how the nation could be ‘revitalised’, made ‘healthy’ and ‘normal’ or could be advanced with regard to greater powers and/or ‘civilised’ nations. Baloutzova constantly cites such statements, which, together with the title of the book, draw attention to the globally framed links between demography and national positioning. This can be seen clearly in the reasoning put forward by Prime Minister Aleksandŭr Stamboliiski and his radical reformist Bulgarian Agrarian National Union (BANU) when introducing the Bulgarian law of People's Health in 1923:

Concerning the early parliamentary debates on the law helping child-rich families we learn that birth rate is the most important part of national capital (p. 163). Even more interestingly, in 1938, the pronatalist Professor Stefan Konsulov argued that ‘as the nation was supposed to be the creator of its own history, [to be] numerous was a prerequisite for its successful historical mission’.

These and the related arguments of pronatalism were no different from pronatalist conservative or fascist approaches in Italy, Hungary or other East European countries. ‘Number means force,’ shouted Benito Mussolini in 1928 and this frustrated nationalist attitude spread throughout the region (and even outside Europe), when writers, thinkers, scientists and politicians wanted to challenge a global hierarchy which put their countries into unsatisfactory positions. Bulgaria also illustrates nicely a geopolitical (or, better, geo-biopolitical) panic concerning the relation between ethnic groups, their differential fertility and, of course, territories. Here Baloutzova nicely demonstrates that demographic nationalism was constantly worried about losing territory due to ethnic imbalances in population. Here various Bulgarian Turkish groups were an obvious prime target of legislators and public intellectuals who wanted to change the declining fertility of ‘proper’ ethnic Bulgarians (two generations upward as we learn). For a Hungarian reviewer there is nothing shocking in this, as even today these demographically contextualised national controversies are key issues in public discourses.

In this respect the crucial contribution of Baloutzova's work is: first, that she is aware of the global positioning game (although this mechanism is not adequately elaborated); second, she dares to show the Janus face of East European demographic nationalisms; and, third, she shows some of the key elements in this complexity. She herself is puzzled by the amorphous character of demographic nationalism, and wants to show that this local variant was not as racist or exclusivist as in Italy or in Germany. Several times she comes back to this point and makes rather personal statements in an otherwise neutral language of analysis, as in the concluding paragraphs:

The point here is not whether Baloutzova is correct or not concerning a scale of racism or whether she is trying to distance the local national story from the most ‘evil’ ones in Europe (this is a common game in East European public discourses). Such questions are outside scholarly interest. The point is that these demographic nationalisms were a mixture of social consideration and Foucaudian biopolitical concerns of separating the ‘unworthy’ from the social groups to be supported. Most importantly, these discourses promoted the welfare of certain groups at the relative or absolute expense of other groups. It is to be noted that this latter approach was functionally racist regardless of the language used.

The key issue is identifying those mechanisms that put these population considerations within different frameworks or discursive trajectories. One moves into the direction of social change, while the other moves toward racist rivalries. Reading Baloutzova we find strikingly different texts, from the BANU bill in the early 1920s, those concerning illegitimacy or even the various arguments for supporting child-rich families in the 1930s and 1940s. Some of them were clearly aimed at welfare support alone, while others combined support with various ethnic–racial competitive exclusions. From Baloutzova's analysis, we may point out the real dividing line between real demographic–racist extremism and demographically minded social support, which was accepted by even the leftists in Eastern Europe (thus not breaking the pronatalist consensus).

Reading the Bulgarian case story (compared with others in and outside Europe) it seems that, although there was a shared concern about the advancement of the nation through demographic revival, there was an important difference between those who saw welfare support and related social changes as the real aims of helping demographic development, and those who only wanted to use social support as a means for improving the status of the nation and, very importantly, to discipline the behaviour of local social groups.

This difference can be illustrated by the contrast between Stamboliiski, the prime minister of BANU in the early 1920s, and Bogdan Filov, the prime minister of the early 1940s and a minister of his, Petŭr Gabrovski, responsible for the 1943 law supporting child-rich families. As cited above, Stamboliiski argued for the reorganisation of healthcare in order to achieve social and national advancement, not for national rivalry itself. Indeed, he was the prime minister who was driven from office (and even executed) due to having accepted the loss of Bulgarian territories. This is how he finished his remarks on the public health law in 1923:

By contrast, Filov argued in 1941 for:

Gabrovski argued exactly in the same way, for:

The key point is that Bulgaria is to be strengthened (made mighty) through the discipline, hierarchy and sense of duty among ethnic Bulgarians (via for instance, the creation of ‘racially valuable marriages’, p. 220). The dividing line between the populist approach of Stamboliiski and the conservative–fascist one is rather thin (certainly in Hungary representatives could cross this line easily),Footnote ³ but very important. Both approaches operated in a globally competitive sphere and worked for the advancement of the nation. But while the first looked for social progress itself, the other – as Baloutzova rightly argues – saw pronatalist or social intervention only as a means to discipline others and to achieve a higher position relative to others inside and outside the nation.

Thus the shared pronatalist consensus can be broken down according to the different dynamics at the interface of local and global hierarchies. This also means that the key issue is not the measurement on some kind of a scale of racism, but the acceptance that Janus-faced demographic nationalisms could work in different ways according to whether ‘backwardness’ and agrarian problems (as nicely introduced also in the analysis of Baloutzova) were compensated by social and population policy aiming at changing or reforming some social relationships or whether such policy aimed at freezing social structures or increasing the level of exclusion for disciplining purposes.

Beyond this contribution to global debates on population policy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Baloutzova also demonstrates an interesting comparative point. While in most of Europe at that time, including not only Western and Southern European countries but also Hungary, most of the policy makers and public intellectuals were concerned about fertility levels, in Romania and Bulgaria (till the late 1930s) the key concern was mortality, most importantly infant mortality and the hygienic conditions in the rural population. The Gusti group in Romania and also the BANU party and the related activists focused on village communities and rural land structures, but paid little attention to fertility.Footnote ⁴ This difference was mainly due to the fact that marital fertility declined somewhat later than in Hungary and central Europe. As soon as this did happen such issues did emerge as important public concerns, more so in Bulgaria than in Romania, where concern emerged only in the 1960s in the form of the tragic population policy of Nicolae Ceauşescu.Footnote ⁵ This difference was also largely due to the fact that in Bulgaria, as in Hungary, there were public movements (described in detail by Baloutzova) that did concentrate on these issues, while in Romania these were missing. Thus there were issues of activism and actual personal influences that should be of prime interest in future research.

Bachelor tax, gender imbalances and, very importantly, the role of the Orthodox Church are also of primary interest in the comparative analysis of the Bulgarian case. It is important to see that the semi-fascist, and fascist Bulgarian governments had huge clashes with the Orthodox Church, which fought very hard against the modernising state that wanted to take over the regulation and, very importantly, the administration of marriage life and fertility. Thus once again it is clearly shown that East and South European fascism was not an anti-modernist approach, but one that wanted to modernise, revitalise the state and society through a particular mix of ultramodern, conservative values, social reforms and direct interventions.Footnote ⁶ Baloutzova nicely illustrates this struggle even before the 1940s with the constant fight over illegitimate children around securing the mother's role, the right to find the father or to seek the support of the state.

Overall, Baloutzova has written a very important book that sheds light on the local story of population policy and social reform in Bulgaria between the two world wars. The analysis is grounded in a respectable level of careful documentation, proper historical contextualisation and finds a place for the Bulgarian case in European historiography on population management. As a result, we can now relocate Eastern Europe in the global history of population control in the early twentieth century. It is time to move further towards a global story.