The philosophy of the Bridge of Friendship

The media platform “Bridge of Friendship” goes beyond simply providing information about the political, economic, social, and cultural aspects of life in Bulgaria, Romania, and the region. It aspires to contribute to new experiences in these countries, in the relations between them and in the region (the “new” here is defined as transformation and renewal in contrast to the static identity of relationships and people – the all-too-familiar situation in which real life experiences do not lead to a renewal of thought and identity, and events pass as if they had never happened). This renewal becomes possible when the individual or community calls for the transformation of their “armor” of insularity and its gradual elimination. We call the path to this renewal the “friendship bridge”—non-hegemonic communication between people and social realities, within which they mutually enrich and transform one another, freeing themselves from the harmful initial socialization baggage. The goal is to transform static identity into a dynamic one, in which the world ceases to be an external threat and becomes a part of ourselves.

1. Static Identity vs. Dynamic Identity

The war in Ukraine has accelerated changes in Southeast Europe, fostering spaces that mirror the logic of the European core. The “bridge of friendship” aspires to be such a space, aiming to transform the static identities in the region and reshape their bilateral relations.

Static identity stems from national socialization rooted in trauma and “learned helplessness.” This confines individuals within national boundaries, rendering them unable to transform their society. Breaking out of this state requires introducing a dynamic element. Engaging with and understanding this element creates new experiences that shift the static mindset.

Dynamic identity develops when diverse elements—within a person, society, or region—communicate without hegemony or mutual stigmatization, focusing instead on mutual enrichment. The pathway to achieving this non-hegemonic communication and dynamic identity is “the bridge of friendship.”

2. The Bridge of Friendship in International and Interpersonal Relations

In international relations, deep chasms often separate countries. Jumping over the chasm into another territory without undergoing a personal transformation results in a condition, in which a person enters the other culture “domesticated”—just as incapable of transforming that new environment as they are their own.

Friendship bridge offer an alternative formula. Separated nations agree not to politically or existentially absorb one another, remaining anchored on their respective shores. Instead, they facilitate an infrastructure of trusted people and organizations. These entities revitalize ties and gradually transform the static nature of regional relations.

The defining trait of any person or organization acting as a “bridge of friendship” is friendliness, conviction in the good nature of the other party, built on mutual trust between the connected sides. This stands in sharp contrast to the traditional hostility and mistrust common among societies socialized through the trauma of peripheral experiences.

Ultimately, the bridge of friendship is universal. It is neither “pro” nor “anti” any geopolitical lobby; rather, it recognizes the basic human legitimacy of everyone within a region. By approaching all parties with openness, it systematically dismantles the accumulated hatred and mistrust left behind by the old logic of the periphery.

3. The center, the periphery, and maturation through shadow integration

In the Balkans, the peripheries often compete to draw the center to their side and use it in their blind rivalry with neighbors. Part of this dynamic is the “satellite syndrome” of countries like Bulgaria and Romania-their constant quest to find a “big brother” to serve as subcontractors for in the region.

The friendship bridge is an approach to transcending the role of the eternal “little brother.” It gives us the opportunity to expand our boundaries “not by conquering foreign territories” and imposing our hegemony upon them, but by integrating the experience of our neighbors and “illuminating our own shadow” in the Jungian sense of the term. 

Traditionally, the peoples of Southeast Europe often projected their own negative qualities onto their neighbors. Communication across the bridge allows us to integrate their experiences and contradictions, expanding our personal territory and strategic depth. In this way, we introduce the logic of the EU nucleus (dynamic identity) into a space dominated by the experience of the periphery. This synchronization marks the end of “the little brother” who is always looking for a patron, and empowers our societies to finally become adult and mature.

4. The four manifestations of the friendship bridge in Vladimir Mitev’s activity

These four pillars represent the concrete material and intellectual agency through which the vision of the friendship bridge materializes in space:

 1. The Bridge of Friendship Media Platform (The Media): 

A Bulgarian-Romanian publication founded in September 2015. With an archive of about 2,500 articles and active channels on Substack, Facebook, and Viber, it provides its audience with news, analysis, and commentary with context. When the media explains the context of “the other” as its own, the reader stops feeling isolated within their national stronghold.

 2. A fund for financing Bulgarian-Romanian events (The Fund): 

A personal portfolio of shares on the Bulgarian Stock Exchange, whose dividends are used for endowment funding of bilateral initiatives: lectures, debates, exchange of experience, film screenings, theater tours, journalistic trips, and book translations. This model ensures economic sovereignty and demonstrates that independent thought has its own financial foundation.

 3. The Romanian speakers’ club in Ruse (The Speakers’ Club): 

An informal, vibrant, and politically independent community, which is to gather for the first time in the summer of 2026 at the Austrian Library in Ruse. The club keeps intellectual interest in Romanian topics alive and builds horizontal connections in the cross-border region.

 4. The Bulgarian-Romanian library (The Library): 

A personal collection of hundreds of books in Bulgarian, Romanian, and other languages. Given the right conditions, these collections could form the conceptual core of a future shared library for cultural and scientific exchange.

5. Ten examples of transformation (the horizon for other actors)

These ten areas define how the state elites, civil society, cultural elites, the NGO sector, and the business community can apply the approach of non-hegemonic communication on the ground:

• Historical memory and education: Overcoming disputes over whether shared historical figures (such as the Asen dynasty or Anton Pann) are Bulgarian or Romanian. Replacing nationalist fears of territorial revisionism in Dobruja with the principle of mutual cultural enrichment.
• The cross-border city of Ruse-Giurgiu: An example of how connectivity is possible at the level of administrations, cultural institutions, and producers thanks to organizations that enjoy the trust of both countries (such as the “Euro-Region Danubius” Association).
• Investments on the Bulgarian Stock Exchange (BSE) and Bucharest Stock Exchange (BVB): Breaking down the isolation of national stock exchanges. Overcoming technical and bureaucratic barriers for individual investors to create mixed portfolios and ensure the free flow of local capital.
• Media and the information space: Breaking out of national media “bubbles” that only cover the neighbor in the event of disasters, scandals, or traffic jams on the Danube Bridge. Need for shared airtime following the example of the Franco-German channel Arte.
• Literary translations: Balancing translation efforts. While there is an increased translation of Romanian novels in Bulgaria, in Romania, primarily Western-recognized and Romanian-speaking Bulgarian authors are being translated. A dynamic identity requires the translation of non-commercial texts by philosophers, thinkers, anarchists, and feminists.
• Ecology: Civic solidarity in the face of shared threats, illustrated by the joint protests of residents of Ruse and Giurgiu against the construction of a waste incinerator.
• Festivals and sports: Utilizing cross-border marathons (Via Pontica, Ruse-Giurgiu), the “Danube Ultra” cycling route, and authentic folk festivals (Kukeri in Brănești, Horse Easter in Targovishte, etc.) as shared spaces for shared experiences.
• International relations and geopolitics: The understanding that the strength of nations lies in connectivity, not isolation. Since diplomats are constrained by state dogmas and business by pure profit, this model is most accessible to ordinary citizens who do not impose their will through hegemony.
• Social innovation and the NGO sector: Honest exchange of expertise between good governance experts (such as Codru Vrabie) and local civil society organizations for strategic survival in a challenging environment.
• Personal development and psychology: Transforming the “Balkan curse” – the feeling that nothing depends on the individual and that one can only endure social life, not change it – into building personal confidence in one’s own strengths thanks to experience across the border.

6. Bulgarian-Romanian relations through the lens of the friendship bridge philosophy 

Security and defense relations between Sofia and Bucharest are growing under the auspices of Western partners, but on an interpersonal level they suffer from the inertia of the previous era. The same applies to the economy: although trade is substantial, the momentum is driven primarily by foreign corporations. Local capital remains weaker and more timid. Politicians and businesspeople fail to change negative perceptions and often reinforce them. In this context, change can come only from the participation of ordinary citizens, the NGO sector, and cultural elites, who are less burdened by strict procedures and ideologies. There must be a Bulgarian and Romanian autochthonous dynamism in the bilateral relations, which advance mostly in domains where Western partners guarantee that there wouldn’t be surprises. Bulgarian-Romanian relations will be transformed indeed, when they are driven by the internal drive of Bulgarians and Romanians and if this happens, they will become all-weather relations. 

7. Guidelines for the Development of Media Promoting a Dynamic Identity

7.1. General Observations on Bulgarian Society

Bulgaria is part of the world, but to what extent is the world part of it? Unlike Romania, the Bulgarian economy is often described by external analysts as a closed battleground between local (Bulgarian and Russian) structures and German business – a system that reproduces itself primarily within its own ranks. This turns the country into a society with high levels of insularity, where widespread public discontent is directed at the political representatives of the corporate and IT sectors, who claim to have the ambition to replace the oligarchic elites of the transition, but in reality can’t or don’t want to do it.

Bulgaria’s transition was more destructive and traumatic, leading to a deficit of social capital. Contemporary Bulgaria is a society of groups and closed cliques (in-groups), within which people dissolve and through which they interact with the world. These groups generally compete with one another, and solidarity is lacking. Due to the absence of a unified social center the impression remains that blows can come from any direction. In Bulgaria, authority is not seen as distant and is not respected. Anyone can easily be labeled as ridiculous or dubious, as there is a constant struggle in the region over who is the “fool” in a given relationship. Many believe that if they cannot identify the naive one in a relationship, then they themselves are the naive ones-a fact their egos cannot accept-and that is an obstacle to non-hegemonic and mutually beneficial relations.

At the political level, fragmentation leads to periodic deadlocks. Each group tries to attract an external power to its side, but when that power chooses a camp, its energy gets bogged down in the local dead end. This gives rise to a sense of exceptionalism—a society in which raw power and the ability to impose one’s interests by force often determine what will happen, while dialogue, empathy, or rational arguments rarely lead to change. It is clear that the generic Bulgarian, the in-between Bulgarian, the unaligned Bulgarian – who is to be identified at a philosophical and sociological level and exists in society in a diluted form, needs to be empowered so that the vicious cycle and blockage of the in-groups be transformed and weakened.

7.2. The role of the Bridge of Friendship Media

In such an environment, it is not enough simply to inform. The content must have a transformative effect-enriching perceptions, widening horizons, combating clichés, and taking people beyond the confines of their national exceptionalism. To withstand the powerful nihilism and the Bulgarians’ conviction that no journalist has a conscience of their own and writes only under the dictates of parties, oligarchs, foundations or geopolitical forces, the media outlet must be funded from the personal resources of its founder or team. Donations should be limited to a circle of trusted friends.

The strength of cross-border media lies in the fact that it stands with one foot outside the national context. This allows it to remain independent of internal polarization and offer a different perspective. It practices intellectual openness: it treats all political currents with respect, interest, and goodwill, including the Romanian and Bulgarian sovereignists. Regardless of their radical narratives, they are part of the legitimate democratic process and reflect the attitudes of real people. To transform them in a non-hegemonic way, we must first recognize them as legitimate interlocutors.

The movement for social change should not stigmatize public figures, even when they are mediocre. Efforts should be directed toward helping them recognize their own limitations, rather than “flogging” and “cancelling” them. Ultimately, a part of the new experience, including the new media experience, might paradoxically be the power of talking softly and letting hegemony demonstrate its degrees of ability and failure and then become aware of its own need for renewal and unlearning the wrong lessons of socialization in the periphery.

8. The realism of “impossible desires”: citizens’ agency

By “citizens,” we mean here people who have the time, information, and means of subsistence necessary to do more than what is required of them by their employment contracts or family ties—people with their own social project, hobby, or cause. They seem to possess the capacity for action—the individual’s ability to act independently in the face of hegemonic forces (Anthony Giddens’s definition of deliberate action).

These citizens are the backbone of a future decentralized, people-led foreign policy, independent of the official state center in Sofia. Instead of pinning empty hopes on yet another political “savior” against corruption and subsequently becoming disappointed, people may see the oligarchy weakened much more effectively if it is de-hegemonized. As the social, financial, and educational capital of authentic non-oligarchic forces grows, the oligarchy’s power weakens on its own. Building something of our own at the social level gives us experience and resources that we would never have if we limited ourselves to merely voting and then cursing yet another savior.

9. The attitude toward stigmatized and stigmatizing spaces on the periphery

In every society, stigmatized and stigmatizing forces (they are always both – I can name here a number of doctrines and ideologies that end in -isms and whose manifestation often violates international law, kills, harms or traumatizes large groups of people and which recruit supporters in any country of Southeastern Europe and the world) often represent an attempt, sometimes very successful, by the periphery to influence the social center. These groups are not homogeneous, there might be both progressive and reactionary tendencies within, but they are dominated and haunted by maniacal desire for power and step on exceptionalism. The authentic friendship bridge does not clash head-on with them. It appears to operate within a specific “force field” that maintains a distance but remains open to all. The very act of approaching and crossing the bridge de-hegemonizes and transforms; the bearers of exclusionary ideologies lose their destructive power upon contact with it.

10. The intermediate nature of the bridge as the antithesis of exclusion

The bridge is an intermediate space between two or more realities. In the case of Bulgaria, social stagnation stems both from the mutual deadlock of various forces and from the fact that the experience of a large part of society remained emotionally stuck in the decades of transition, perceiving the country as the center of the world rather than as part of broader spaces. The intermediary nature of the bridge, which enjoys the trust of its shores, allows external experience and the logic of the EU nucleus of countries (who have a higher degree of dynamic identity, mutuality and interconnectedness) to be accepted in societies that, in principle, experience resistance to change.

11. The genesis of the bridge: stubbornness as a preservation of authenticity

How did the Bridge of Friendship come into being—through social engineering, a coincidence of circumstances, or sheer stubbornness? My personal answer leans most toward stubbornness. The media outlet was created with the clear and conscious intention of not being a tool of Bulgarians against Romanians or vice versa. Its refusal to be co-opted by political forces in both countries, its desire “to be connected to everyone but belong to no one”, transformed the project into an authentic approach to human relations.

In a region obsessed with suspicions about “who is paying,” the bridge proves its value through its practical diversity of voices and valences. Its construction is a movement from the inside out; it is not the product of conspiracies, but of tenacity in the face of suspicion, arrogance and supremacy. This tenacity preserves the authenticity of the endeavor until the factions that see their enemy in it, realize their powerlessness or ignorance and withdraw.

12. Expansion beyond Southeastern Europe: Central Europe and the Middle East

The principle of the bridge, bridging the chasms in experience, remains valid for more distant contexts, such as those I explore in my projects Cross-Border Talks (based in Poland, curious about Central Europe) and The Persian Bridge of Friendship (toward Iran and the Middle East). However, various limitations make the bridge building in these cases advancing at a slower pace or stagnating. Just like the Bridge of Friendship, these bridges are built as one walks on them, as we walk across them. They are not prefabricated structures, which are sent down from the above, but an invitation to engage with the unknown and an expression of confidence that the dialogue will be productive.

Every new environment requires specific conceptual keys to approach the specific experience . For Iran, the key may lie in patience, stoicism, and the mythological idea of “the unjustly taken innocent life” (the legend of Siyavush). For Poland, the path involves dealing with strong national-centrism, competitiveness, and mercantilism. In both societies, however, the contours of exceptionalism are visible, making the need for bridges valid, while also creating the need for greater efforts..

Final cause: The space called Life

Many of us living in the modern world are obsessed with the idea of having their smaller or larger hegemony-with the desire to possess a space in which we are the boss and we make our thing great again. For me, what is truly interesting is the space between entrenched and hardened interests. I believe that this intermediate space is called life – life being the territory of vulnerability, in which also renewal takes place, instead of the death-like accumulation of power over the static experience (trauma), an experience, which the friendship bridge tries to dehegemonize.

The bridge of friendship is not built to seize power, to twist arms, or to pit people against one another. Its role is entirely different—to affirm life and change in a world obsessed with the struggle for domination. It is a persistent and long-term effort to preserve a human, free, and authentic space amid the clash of hegemonies, to do our part, and to make an impact in a region that fiercely resists new endeavors.

Photo: (source: The Bridge of Friendship, created by Gemini)