CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020
| Author | Tsoneva, Jana Mariyanova |
|---|---|
| Title | The Making of the Bulgarian Middle Class: Citizens Against the People in the 2013 Protests |
| Summary | This thesis provides an empirically-driven theory of the formation of the ‘middle class’ in a peripheral country: Bulgaria between 2002-2013. Based on low wages and low taxes, the country’s political economy mitigates against the emergence of а ‘broad middle’ habitually associated with the developed welfare states of the West. 80% of the working population ekes out less than 500 EUR monthly, making Bulgaria the poorest EU-member state. After three decades of neoliberal reforms, the country’s class structure resembles that of a Third world country: a tiny opulent minority sits atop a vast ocean of poverty. The unpopularity of this mode of economic development prompted the liberal ideologues of the Transition to create a social base for the liberal reforms in the early 2000s, a project that culminated with the 2013 anti-corruption protests. Therefore, I analyze the insurgent “middle class” as a political, rather than economic formation. More specifically, I explore the formation of the Bulgarian middle class from the vantage point of the 2013 summer protests. That year saw feverish protest mobilizations in two phases in winter and summer. Even though these protests occupy determinate temporal frames, their significance reverberates to this day because commentators continue to make sense of current events through the prism of the “long 2013.” Time and again pundits and participants stated that the summer protests portended the birth of the middle class. I follow these discussions in the public sphere and tease out the vectors of inclusion into the self-identified middle class. The first part of the thesis focuses on class formation and class consciousness where class is understood in materialist yet non-economistic terms. I offer a way of thinking about the problem of the ‘middle class’ that breaks with the double objectivism of structural and mechanical theories extrapolating its existence from the laws of capital in Orthodox Marxism, on the one hand, and from liberal stratification theories which rely on arbitrary income brackets to discern its existence, on the other. Because of the strong emphasis on class polarization, inherited from the Manifesto, the ‘middle class’ has traditionally posed a challenge Marxists have tended to overcome via a recourse to Weberian ‘prosthe tics’.In contrast, I treat class as a political becoming, every class is always-already a “class against”. Thus, a ‘subjectivist’ approach to social class is well suited to understand this formation. To this end, I fashion a theoretical apparatus out of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology and the Essex School’s Discourse Theory to account for the discursive and polemical constitution of the middle class of the 2013 summer protests. This theoretical amalgam offers a polemical slant to theorizing class formation, resonating with some early remarks on the political nature of social class by Karl Marx. I do so against the backdrop of the thorny path of the neoliberal reform in Bulgaria. I argue that the middle class is the crystallization of a long search on part of policy elites, civil society practitioners and democratization experts to find the “social base” for the neoliberal reform, perceived as increasingly beleaguered by populism, left and right. One such challenge to the reform consensus came in the wake of the winter protest of 2013. It rebelled against austerity, poverty and the political establishment, yet it did so by poaching the liberal semantic field and appropriating the language of “civil society”. The summer protests re-appropriated the appropriation and, in the process, subjectivized itself as “middle class” against the winter protests and the corrupt oligarchic elite. The second part of the thesis traces the effects the 2013 class imaginaries exert on the formal and universalistic political equality under liberalism. The discourse of “the middle class” organized the protesters’ normative visions about citizenship and national identity along increasingly inegalitarian, demophobic and elitist lines. This dissertation thus follows an instance of ‘class struggle’ unfolding on the terrains of civil society, citizenship and nationhood. I show how the radicalization of imaginaries about class difference are projected onto the political field resulting in a tendency to question formal equality under liberalism. |
| Supervisor | Kowalski, Alexandra; Geva, Dorit |
| Department | Sociology PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2020/tsoneva_jana.pdf |
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