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Simeon Mitropolitski is a Canadian analyst, of Bulgarian origin, and a former syndicated columnist with the Bulgarian News Agency (BTA). He is the author of several hundred articles dealing with hot political and economic topics, both national and international.

He was part of the first group of Bulgarian intellectuals and students that began the opposition movement that finally put an end to the communist regime in this country in 1989, and in 1996-1997 participated in international observation teams during the elections in several Balkan countries - Romania, Albania and Bulgaria.

In 2002 Simeon and his family moved from Bulgaria to Canada where they live now in Montreal, province of Quebec. Simeon is a Master of Political Science from McGill University and a B.A. of Political Science and History.

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The years of writing about economic, political and some more specific aspects of the international relocation led me to a conclusion that not only the countries differ, their self-perception differs too. Facing unpleasant facts about their present and especially about their past as nations, facts that could be relevant to anyone's relocation plans, some of them prefer to concentrate on the ways of fixing the problems, some simply deny their existence, some even would go as far as to blame the author for manipulating the world public opinion. Doing so they just put an additional touch to the picture of their own countries.

In our days when hundreds of millions cross the national borders for business purposes it's especially difficult to manipulate anyone on any topic related to the life abroad, no matter how exotic a country under observation is. The time when few European adventurers described the human beings in the far away territories as having three legs, or one eye, or other incredible stories are gone. It seems there is no country on the face of earth without its Internet fan club, without several independent from one another sources where we can get information and decide whether or not to visit it. If today someone decides to manipulate the "innocent" and "unaware" foreigners about any of them, that one won't find much audience. Looking at many sources for information, these manipulating stories will sharply contradict the others and will be discarded as irrelevant to the topic.

By the same token, denying existence of facts about history and about current events in any country based on the assumption that such strategy pays is also myopic. Countries that are visited by millions can't claim they are not what they look like in the eyes of these same millions. If many complain about the quality of the services offered, that's more than a product of imagination of one observer, situated far away. The psychological mechanism of denial has at least two negative consequences for those who use it. First, denying a problem reduces the chances of fixing it. A society that denies having higher than average criminal rates won't invest in law enforcement activities. Second, the usual targets of denying are observers without state protection. Those who send to the independent observer hate e-mails using bad language won't dare to send such e-mails to the CIA, the State department or to any other government agency around the world making similar travel warnings. By doing so the hate e-mails authors just show their complex of inferiority.

Two regions show up high above all the others in this struggle against any revelation about them on international level. These are the Balkans and Latin America. Perhaps more than 90% of all hate e-mails in the author's mailbox come from these two corners of the globe, although they together represent no more than 15% of all articles at IRED. They could be many reasons why people react so aggressively toward anyone trying to reveal or just to collect unorthodox information about their societies. Comparing these two regions the Balkans look as a clear winner; much less people from fewer countries produce more hate than the whole regions between Mexico and Patagonia.

Being a living product of the Balkans, for me it isn't difficult to trace the roots of the problems, although I'm not quite sure that this is the main or the only relevant reason for its cultural backwardness. I insist on the word backwardness because the fact that the European civilization took roots in the Balkans some 3,000+ years ago couldn't as such influence the current societies. The claim that they are enough culturally developed because of the ancient Greece is just one of many nationalist myths, created and maintained in order to keep the things where they are. When you're around the bottom but are constantly told you're around the top that sounds nice and above all it doesn't require additional efforts to move up. The political and national myths in the Balkans are really strong and they can cover anything from the history throughout the current state of economy, the political life and above all the culture. For those living in the Alice's wonderland it isn't wonderland; it's the only possible land.

Thus I understand why those who have escaped out from this modern mythology are blamed for treason. The national myths can live only as long as people keep faith in them. Not sharing a myth means that you're either an ignorant foreigner or a national traitor. For this way of reasoning nobody is allowed to be outside the myth, to be just an observer and to tell the others what s/he sees.

I can't make clear prediction about the future of the Balkan myths. Will they outlive the present generations or will be destroyed sooner by the European integration? Looking at the Greek example I'm rather pessimist about incoming death of these nationalist cultural phenomena. So I suggest to anyone moving to the Balkans to be prepared to share some myths. At least to share one myth, that there are no myths and the Alice's wonderland is just an ordinary land.