Word: balkanizing
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Shield on the Underbelly. The highway project reflects Bulgaria's growing interest in cultivating its once-hated Balkan neighbors. Foreign Minister Ivan Bashev visited Ankara last year, recently approved an agreement with Greece to increase trade and tourism. Exulted one Bulgarian in Sofia last week: "The Balkan powder keg is a thing of the past." Nothing dies harder in the Balkans than ancient history, however, and the Bulgarians are still effusive each year in their thanks to Russia for freeing them from Turkish bondage 88 years ago. What's more, the Kremlin is pleased to see Bulgaria...
Partly overregulated (railroads), partly underregulated (waterways), and partly free from all rate and route controls (contract truckers), transportation today is a Balkan thicket. Each uncoordinated segment has been encouraged to grab as much of the total market for itself as possible. The predictable result: too much capacity in some places (parallel rail lines), too little elsewhere (a shipping shortage for Viet Nam). On top of that, lawmakers, bureaucrats and private executives alike have virtually ignored the obvious matter of synchronizing transportation by auto, bus, rail or plane. Not a single railroad, for example, connects directly with a major airport...
...warming atmosphere that has drawn Eastern and Western Europe closer, one frigid holdout has been Bulgaria. Now, the tiny Balkan nation is also thawing a bit. Last week Todor Zhivkov, 55, Premier of Bulgaria and the brisk, burly first secretary of its Communist Party, made his first official trip to Western Europe, spending three days on the French Riviera and three more in Paris with President Charles de Gaulle...
Pursuing fresh Balkan ties, Rumanian Party Boss Nicolae Ceausescu made a point of taking his vacation in Bulgaria in July, bringing to six the number of top-level visits between the two nations this year. Long-independent Red Yugoslavia, not to be left out, has sent Premier Peter Stambolic on a working holiday to Bulgaria, and has docketed him for Greece in October. The Bulgarian Foreign Minister meanwhile has gone to Turkey, which Rumanian Premier Ion Gheorghe Maurer visited last month. And last week, in the first visit to the Aegean kingdom ever made by a Communist Premier, Maurer flew...
Except for some rather obvious police shadowing that had to be put up with in Rumania, our people suffered no pressures, were allowed to work freely for the most part. Perhaps the worst experience they encountered was that old Balkan bugaboo of night driving with the lights now off, now on. The trick is to switch the lights off and use those of the approaching car. Trouble is that the approaching car is playing the same game and, as Rademaekers recalls, "cars roll blindly at each other for sickening seconds before flicking their lights on again...