Sometimes the best way to get lost in a town is to try to find one’s way using a map. Maps have few details and the streets are drawn in thin lines that have nothing to do with the houses around you. Failing to cope with the abstraction of the map, you may feel the urge to throw it into the closest dust bin. A few hours latter, though, you might find yourself staring at the same dust bin again, feeling even more lost after trying to “feel” the city following its details: facades, shop windows, people, cafes…

The new book by Roumen Avramov, Communal Capitalism. Reflections on Bulgarian Economic Past is out. The book is a journey through the economic culture of the first Bulgarian capitalism, which took shape between the Liberation and the beginning of the 1940s. Marked by the communism and the following opening towards the world, this culture continues to be reborn in today’s economic forms. The whimsical links between yesterday and today, revealed throughout the text, lead to long-standing, resilient roots of the communal (etatist, clan, or collectivistic) principles, which has never stopped undermining the full-blooded competition in the economy.

362 European citizens participated over the weekend in Tomorrow’s Europe, the first EU-wide Deliberative Poll. With experts and politicians, they discussed challenges and opportunities facing the European Union in the medium term. Aged between 18 and 80, coming from the 27 member states, they carefully exchanged opinions and arguments and put questions to balanced panels of experts and politicians.

A national Deliberative Poll® of Bulgaria on policies toward the Roma produced many strong and statistically significant changes in the direction of an integrationist perspective. The scientific sample of 255 residents drawn from around the country by Alpha Research spent the weekend of April 14-15, 2007 deliberating about three issues affecting the Roma: Housing, Crime and Education.