Month: August 2013

Within the framework of the summer school “Between (post)socialism and (neo)liberalism”, held in Sofia at the fridge & Xaspel, on July 21st Prof. Don Kalb (Central European University, Budapest) gave a talk on the topic “Socialism, Postsocialism, Neoliberalism – Interconnections in CEE”. The talk was held in a dialogue with Volodymyr Ischenko (Ukraine) and Florin Poenaru (Romania), both researchers influenced by and working in the context of Prof. Kalb’s research.

Don Kalb is a Dutch social anthropologist, currently teaching at CEU, Budapest.

Economic turbulence is an especially fruitful ground for racist sentiments; the rapid growth and electoral success of far-right parties and movements across Europe since 2008 testifies to this. With this article I want to address the problem from the perspective of the situation in a peripheral EU member: the island state of Malta. Its small geographic size should not blind us to the enormity of the issue of racism there which is all the more interesting in that the local politics still obeys the old two-party model and is spared the shockwaves of new xenophobic players that jolt the world of traditional party politics in other parts of Europe (i.e.

Maryia Radeva in response to some questions posed by Mary Taylor

Quite a few leftist intellectuals have recently discussed the discursive mobilization of the “middle class” in the last waves of protests in Bulgaria and worldwide (Ivancheva, Medarov, Seymour etc). It is not what I want to return to here. Instead, I’d like to bring up two different  contemporary tactics of political suppression of public discontent in Bulgaria, addressing your fifth  question to a certain extent. 

The several days spent in the atmosphere of the Sofia political protests predictably led me to compare them to the Russian experience of 2011-2012. Despite the significant contextual differences, these two movements could be seen as part of а single—but to an even greater degree—a potential East European protest wave. As such, its analysis and the strategy based on it become major questions for the radical left.

One of the characteristics of the protest movements in both Russia and Bulgaria is their sudden birth in the absence of a preceding tradition of mass street politics.

Perhaps one of the most common jokes that are circulating lately in Bulgaria is the one that depicts emigration as the most relevant escape from the politico-economic crisis. The joke goes something like this:

Question: “What are the possible exits out of the crisis?”

Answer: “Terminal 1 and Terminal 2”

Author: Christo Komarnitski. Source: (http://www.ideyazabulgaria.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=4264:-2013-&catid=55:karikaturi&Itemid=107). The caricature captures Terminal 2. In the line on the left is a protestor from the February events. On the right is a protestor from the June mobilization.