Democratisation, environmental management and the production of new political geographies in Bulgaria: A case study of the 1994-1995 Sofia water crisis

This dissertation examines interconnected problems of political change and environmental management in post state-socialist Bulgaria through a critical unpacking of the drinking water supply crisis that affected the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, between November 1994 and June 1995. Working within a theoretical tradition informed by historico-geographical materialism and certain strands of poststructuralism, the thesis of the dissertation is that the democratisation process is fundamentally characterised by both change and continuity in the political relations of geographical scale; between the citizen and the state, between the local and central, and between and amongst new regionalisms. Detailed attention to the transformation and conservation of political relations of scale, the development of new institutions and mechanisms for local-central interaction and new attitudes towards natural resource management provides a cogent and empirically grounded vantage point for determining the realities of the "democratic transition" in Bulgaria.;A parallel objective of the dissertation is the interrogation of existing models of political and social change, especially as they have been applied to the post state-socialist realm. I argue that the mainstream liberal model of "democratisation" and "transition" has misunderstood the past realities of state-socialism and is currently being imposed as the new political orthodoxy in Central and Eastern Europe with many unforeseen, and perhaps even anti-democratic, results. Careful and detailed examination of the 1994-95 Sofia Water Crisis, its causes and proposed solutions, and especially the protest actions against one such solution, the construction of a water diversion near the Southwestern Bulgarian town of Sapareva-Bania, reveals a number of factors that are conditioning the Bulgarian democratisation experience. Pre-1944 underdevelopment of the Bulgarian periphery, including the Southwestern region, the strong urban bias of the state-socialist mode of development, the callous (and characteristically modernist) attitude towards nature, and the long-standing constitution of a peculiarly conflicted political subject all condition the realities of the political transition. Mainstream neoliberal attempts to describe these processes collectively in terms of the liberal model of democratisation therefore mark a twofold elision. First they obscure the multiple and complex realities of political contestation at different spatial scales in Bulgaria, and Central and Eastern Europe. Second, by attempting to characterise them in terms of this neoliberal model they contribute to the hegemonic project of the capitalist West. Revealing these multiple elisions is therefore a necessary first step in constructing a critique of Western liberalism's pretensions to global hegemony under the guise of economic and political freedom. It is also a first step in preparing the way for political alternatives to this revitalised hegemony.