Critique & Humanism | 33 | 2010 | Politics in the layers of time and space
Issue editors: Dimitar Vatsov, Boyan Znepolski
Issue: 3, 2010, p.280, ISSN:0861-1718
Anchialo, 1906: The political economy of an ethnic clash
Roumen Avramov
Centre for Liberal Strategies, Sofia
The paper examines the microeconomic aspects of ethnic conflicts. The particular case in focus is the immediate historical context and the outcomes of the anti-Greek pogrom in the Bulgarian town of Anchialo (since 1934 Pomorie) in July 1906. The events had significant repercussions and unleashed long-term and large-scale processes whose implications reach far beyond their local significance. What happened there and then conveys typical characteristics of the intimate economic mechanics of ethnic clashes. It reveals the political economy of competing groups, e.g. the assets and institutions used in the struggle for achieving positions of power and economic domination. The events of 1906 in Anchialo provide an insight into the market disruptions which conflicts, and in particular outbursts of violence, engender. They reveal the motivation and the driving forces behind mass phenomena such as emigration of large groups of national minorities (in this case the Greek minority), which in the end resulted in the ‘Bulgarisation’ of an important geographical area. Many of the consequences of the Anchialo’s pogrom spread after the end of the World War I. They accelerated the policies aiming to achieve as fully as possible ‘ethnic cleansing’ and homogenization of the nation-state. The paper sketches some impacts of those policies on the Greek community in Anchialo and more generally on the economic activity of the ethnic Greeks in Bulgaria. The purpose is to capture the reality of what it meant to make business being Greek in Bulgaria during the inter-war period. The research is based on the archives of various Bulgarian institutions which provide sufficient details of the events; data collected by the National Statistical Office and the local branches of key financial institutions; the complete archive of Krai newspaper which was the only printed periodical of the Bulgarian community in Anchialo from 1904 until 1911.
Identity and societal security: The art of governing poverty in Bulgaria (1934-1944)
Ina Dimitrova
Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia
The present study is focused on poverty as a security concern through which certain populations are governed and certain identities or social agencies are produced. Or, in other words, the focus is on poverty as a threat to society and its ‘good order.’ The general theoretical background of the study is the conceptual corpus dealing with the organized practices – mentalities, rationalities, and techniques – through which subjects are governed and subjectivities produced, i.e. the governmentality studies. These organized practices are investigated predominantly in the context of contemporary liberaland neoliberal regimes of government and their functioning in drawing lines of inclusions and exclusions in the social body and as a form of disciplinary and biopolitical regulation of social groups. The particular case which is investigated is the poverty administration and its transformations in Bulgaria in the period ca. 1934-1944.
Historical space and scale (Examples from Balkan studies)
Diana Mishkova
Center for Advanced Study, Sofia
The contention of this article is above all epistemological in that it proposes a theoretical perspective to transnational and regionalist scholarship involving rigorous engagement with the scales of observation, and scale shifts, in the interpretation of history. The hypothesis it seeks to test maintains that the national and the (meso)regional perspectives to history chart differentiated ‘spaces of experience’ – i.e. the same occurrences are reported and judged in a different manner on the different scales – by way of displacing the valency of past processes, events, actors, and institutions and creating divergent temporalities – different national and regional historical times. Different objects (i.e. spaces) of enquiry are asserted to be coextensive with different temporal layers, each of which demands a different methodological approach. Drawing on texts of regional scholars, in which the historical reality of the Balkans/Southeastern Europe had been articulated explicitly or implicitly, the article discusses also the relationship between different spaces and scales against the backdrop of the Braudelian and the microhistorical perspectives. In doing so, it brings to light a preexistent but largely suppressed and un-refl ected tradition of regionalist scholarship, the awareness of whichmight help us fi ne-tune the way we conceptualize, contemplate and evaluate regionalism as politics and transnationalism as a scholarly project.
The pragmatist turn of Bulgarian positivism: Undoing middle ages
Albena Hranova
Plovdiv University Paisii Hilendarski, Plovdiv
The paper deals with a set of problems emerging from the way Bulgarian philology and Bulgarian historiography justify their choices of a modern vocabulary while translating the mediaeval texts. To follow this, the text traces the tendency via examples from the 9th and the 18th centuries thought as boundaries of the medieval era in Bulgarian culture. It focuses on the old polysemy of the concept of ‘tongues’ which in the old Slavic and especially in Biblical uses could mean equally ‘anatomic organs,’ ‘tribes,’ ‘nations,’ ‘other nations,’ and ‘pagans.’ Since the 1930s this old polysemy is consecutively conceived as a ‘synonymy’ (which is a simple theoretical mistake), so all translations and references replace ‘tongues’ with the modern term ‘nation’ (narod), justifying this with the notion of ‘narod’ as an ‘equal substitute’ of all possible meanings. Thus, quite paradoxically, scientifi c procedures methodologically claimed as ‘positivistic’ in fact overlap with the later theory of the ‘pragmatist turn’ (in the works of Davidson, Rorty and others) which, in itself, is an ante-positivist undertaking. The paper also focuses on the political agenda of these ‘pragmatist’ undertakings of Bulgarian positivism – this replacement occurred in the same way in the 1930s and their political right and in the communist period and its political left, as well as in the postcommunist period; so, it proves the strongest political consensus (based on a non-refl ected nationalism) in Bulgarian culture.
The politics of the generation (in Narodnost and Dunavska Zora newspapers)
Galina Goncharova
Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Sofia
Tracing the generational discourse of Bulgarian emigrant press from the 1850s and 1860s, the article explores how the models of social and national solidarity represented in metaphorical uses of age reflected the interests of different strata as well as the cultural and political attitudes of particular emigrant circles. It discusses the images of youth and filiation in the works of prominent writers and public figures which constructed the broad semantic field of the emancipation from the traditional authorities of the Ottoman Empire. The opposition between ‘the young’ and ‘the old’ that was promoted by the periodicals Narodnost and Dunavska Zora is emphasized as a signifier of the conflict between Bulgarian ‘democrats’/revolutionaries and the upholders of the local community’s social activity and care. The analysis attempts to ‘derive’ important visions of society and social bonds embedded in the rhetorics of ‘generation,’ in order to provide cogent illustrations of the complex dynamic of Bulgarian transition to modernity.
Education in democratic societies: Challenge and decisions
Vanya Serafimova
University of Mining and Geology St. Ivan Rilski, Sofia
In the center of the current paper I place the way John Dewey talks about the connection education-democracy with the only aim and hope to elucidate the Bulgarian educational context today. I will analyze two of the articles from his latest works where Dewey explicates this connection pointing out the challenge to democracy as it confronts education. Through the basic categories that Dewey uses – information, knowledge and intelligence – the analysis reveals how education could meet the challenge of democracy, mainly in the specific context of education.
Democracy live
Ivaylo Ditchev
Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Sofia
In the age of new technologies today the political scene is ever more dominated by the imperative of live and immediate feedback by the citizens. The dangers of such a radical democracy of opinion have been known since the times of Aristotle: the principle one is the incapacity of power to assume responsibility, if not, by and large, to rule.
Consumption, this political object of desire
Milla Mineva
Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Sofia
The text is focused on the construction of a consumer culture as a political project. It aims at interpreting the uses of ‘consumption’ as a ‘soft’ weapon during the Cold War. The text analyzes one particular case of constructing a consumer citizen in the socialist Bulgaria, aiming to present the consumption as a fi eld of civil rights and most importantly as a battlefi eld to negotiate public defi nitions of ‘common good.’
Politics as a game according to Plato’s Laws
Nevena Panova
Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Sofia
The paper deals with the ‘play’ as a key concept in Plato’s political philosophy, mainly according to the Laws but also to some passages from Theaetetus, Statesman, Republic. In the frames of the interpretation, the fundamental aim of philosopher politician-lawgivers’ action is the construction of a homogeneous community in order to guide all citizens (and the city as a whole) towards virtues bearing in mind, however, their individual interests and abilities. Therefore, it was found that the organization of proper education is a primary task for the legislator. Precisely in the educative perspective the role of the games gets its explicit importance: through playing, the children are trained and involved in their future activities as adults. But there are also games for adults: for example, the relations between men and gods are regulated through the games during festivals. And most importantly, the philosophical reflection, also on political topics, represented by Plato in the specific dialogue form (by itself a playful genre somewhere in the middle between literature and philosophy) is also a kind of a game: less serious than the real politics but sufficiently useful and instructive as a model with the rules imposed on the players in each strategic game (even the creator of the universe turned out to be a participant in such a game).
The figure of the king: Asymmetry of justice and transcendence of power
Sergey Stefanov
New Bulgarian University, Sofia
Just as it can be derived from its context and can be defined, the kingly figure – whether fi ctional or real – can also be described as a center of two organizational perspectives in the medieval society. The first perspective is the asymmetry of justice, caused by the concept of the human world as hierarchically constructed, having one (and in some cases it is the only one) source of its order. The second perspective is the transcendence of power, caused by the understanding that the axis of this hierarchy could only pass through divinely supported center. Abstracted in such a way, the two perspectives look causatively bound by the transcendence, which as their cause, synthesizes them in the figure of the king, whose power is a source of justice. To show that the case of causal commitment is not a necessity, but a coincidental combination of ideas and dispositions, examples shall be taken from the early and high Middle Ages. In either case the kingly figure and the significations that establish it are bound in a genealogical network of various mental dispositions, which the historical sciences and the mediaeval ideology are trying to homogenize.