Alliance News, Autum 1999
An Oasis in the Balkans
By Robert L. Woodbury
Madeline Albright cancelled her speech at the
American University in Bulgaria this week. Few were
surprised in light of recent events, but she would
have found a startling alternative to most stories
out of the Balkans.
Only 80 miles from Kosovo, beneath the beautiful
snow-capped Rila mountains, the AUBG
commencement honored 125 graduates from all
over Southeastern Europe: Bulgaria and Romania,
Albania and Macedonia, Hungary and Kazakhstan,
and yes, Serbia and Kosovo. Secretary Albright
would have met the newly elected student
government president, the first non-Bulgarian, a
Kosovar Albanian, and the new student
representative to the Board of Directors, a
Hungarian.
As she sat on the platform only a few minutes drive
from the famous 10th Century Rila Monastery,
where she and her sister once jumped into the
fountain, she would have marveled at the prospects
of graduates, not unlike herself a long time ago. The
valedictorian, a Romanian, will be attending
Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton in the fall; the
salutatorian, also Romanian, is trying to decide
between offers from the London School of
Economics and Georgetown; The Presidential Medal
Winner, a “townie” from Blagoevgrad, AUBG’s
hometown, will be moving on to graduate study in
political science and international relations at the
University of California, Berkeley. The student
speaker, in her remarks, admitted that the defining
characteristic of her classmates was that they were,
undeniably, “nerds.”
It has not been easy to be a student at AUBG over
the past few months. The Yugoslavian students,
Serbs and Kosovars alike, worry desperately about
their families; the Macedonian and Albanian students
wonder if their fragile countries can survive; all the
students worry about each other as they move
from classroom to library, and dining hall to
dormitory.
The “Kosovo Forum,” a flexible vehicle for student
and faculty discussions about the war, has helped.
When the U.S. Ambassador to Bulgaria and a
representative of NATO joined a panel on campus,
most of the student body of 650 came and spent
three hours debating and questioning. Across all the
boundaries of ethnicity and history, students live and
study and debate and play together. No one there
found it noteworthy that the team that left Sofia for
a tournament in the Netherlands was made up of a
Serb and a Kosovar Albanian.
AUBG is no ordinary place. Founded eight years ago
by some visionary people from unlikely places—staff
and faculty at the University of Maine, local leaders
in Blagoevgrad, a few U.S. state department
officials, Bulgarian ex-patriates—it offers an
American style liberal arts education on a residential
campus to some of the most able and ambitious
young people from 20 neighboring countries across
Southeastern Europe. The average SAT scores, in
English, are over 1300; the typical student is fluent
in three or four languages; almost all think of
themselves as future leaders—in journalism,
business, government, and non-profits—for a
troubled region.
Zhelyu Zhelev, the first democratic president of
Bulgaria after the collapse of communism,
envisioned an institution that would offer a window
to the West, an incubator for a now generation of
democratic leader, and a convening point across the
boundaries of nation and ethnicity. The vision and
the reality seem alive at AUBG in stark contrast to
bombs dropping and ethnic cleansing only a few
mines away.
President Clinton recently proposed the idea of a
Marshall Plan for the Balkans. The cost of one night
of NATO bombing in Yugoslavia would endow a place
like AUBG forever. It is that kind of investment—in
democratic institutions, in a new generation of
leaders for Southeastern Europe, in education and
economic infrastructure—that could undergird a new
future not only for the region but for all of us.
Editor’s note: AUBG is a long-standing member of
AUDEM, and AUBG President Julia Watkins, a
member of our board of directors, will deliver a
plenary-session talk on this subject at the
conference. Robert Woodbury is director of the
McCormack Institute of Public Affairs at the
University of Massachusetts, Boston, and a board
member of AUBG. This article is reprinted by
permission.