I’ve just come back to New York from Sofia, Bulgaria, where there have been daily protests gatherings and marches, punctuated by chants of “step down” and, less frequently, yet consistently, “red garbage” and “mafia out of parliament”, accompanied by the sound of a three whistle march step. A general assembly has met fairly regularly, and small tent city in front of Parliament makes the protest appear to resemble Occupy Wall Street and others in the wave of protests around the world.
Month: July 2013
Since mid-June, public spaces of downtown Sofia have been constantly in use by protesters against the current Bulgarian government. In this short paper, I offer a critical geographical reading of how these daily demonstrations have been orchestrated in the urban milieu, and how these performances strengthen, or in some cases weaken political and economic claims of the protesters (although the demands become quite elucidative if we look at them from the global context of post-socialist neoliberalism).
JULY 20-24, 2013
8 Madrid rd. (house in the inner courtyard)
20th of July, Saturday
08:45 – 09:10
Mary Taylor
Opening
Panel: The rise of the Entrepreneurial City in the East After 1989: Neoliberalization, Gentrification and Resistances
Chair: Mary Taylor
10:00 – 10:20
Daniel Saric
The Right to the City Movement and its Contestation of Urban Transformation Policies in Post-socialist Zagreb
10:20 – 10:30
Discussion
10:30 – 10:50
Márton Czirfusz
Mobilising the creative city: the case of Budapest
10:50 – 11:00
Discussion
11:00 – 11:10
Coffee Break
11:10 – 11:30
Themis Pellas
Contemporary urban social movements in Greece and possible cross-national autonomous movement building in eastern Europe.
China 2012
The debates concerning the present and future of China—an “emerging” power—always leave me unconvinced. Some argue that China has chosen, once and for all, the “capitalist road” and intends even to accelerate its integration into contemporary capitalist globalization. They are quite pleased with this and hope only that this “return to normality” (capitalism being the “end of history”) is accompanied by development towards Western-style democracy (multiple parties, elections, human rights). They believe—or need to believe—in the possibility that China shall by this means “catch up” (in terms of per capita income) to the opulent societies of the West, even if gradually, which I do not believe is possible.
Since 2010, Orbán Viktor’s government symbolically announced an anticolonial war against Western capital. At the same time, it carried out major transformations in the 1989 system of political democracy, and started a campaign of economic centralization. Due to these, Hungary came under the spotlight of international discussions, as a model impersonating the fate of democracy in the context of the present crisis and controversial EU crisis management.
In the new Hungary-talk, Western liberals speak of nationalism, antidemocratic rule and, in the case of Jobbik, fascism.
Bulgarian ‘Children of the Transition’
A text by Mariya Petkova about the current protests in Bulgaria:
It did not take much for the Bulgarian public to take to the streets demanding the fall of its new government after the disaster of an election it witnessed in May. Bulgarian voters had already punished political parties with a largely fragmented vote which forced the previous ruling party (GERB), which “won”, to give up its mandate and hand it over to the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP).
Thursday, June 13, Ankara
I am waiting through an intense thunderstorm outside, periodically reading facebook posts from my students gathered in Ankara’s Kuğulu (Swan) Park, which has been the capital’s version of Istanbul’s Gezi Park, and from some at Gezi Park itself. Erdoğan has announced that “this will be over within 24 hours” and has reportedly organized separate rallies in Istanbul and Ankara with the “fifty percent” that he has said “he will not be able to keep at home,” and some are worried that he is going to let these people loose on the demonstrators as he has done in Izmir where men in civilian clothes have been beating people with sticks, alongside the official police violence.
Here’s a declaration of solidarity with the people of Croatia from the part of the Fourth Republic, Hungary.
“The 4K! is in solidarity with Croatian workers. Croatian workers, small and middle entrepreneurs will face similar problems we have seen in the last nine years of EU membership. (…) We, the people of East European countries in similar positions of dependency within the EU need to work together to challenge the present European politics. Presently, the EU takes market policies to the Union level, while social policies are left at the level of the member states.
Interviewers: Raia Apostolova and Mathias Fiedler
On June 22 a group of migrants declared a hunger strike in Munich, Germany. The strike struck at the heart of the European Empire which in the last decades has been the source of the migration policies responsible for the production and further reinforcement of the European Apartheid and flexibilization of labor and class hierarchies. Stripped of all political rights, migrants throughout Europe often resort to hunger striking as their only weapon against the imposition of violence through practices such as deportations and detentions.