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The Making of the Bulgarian Middle Class: Citizens Against the People in the 2013 Protests

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The Making of the Bulgarian Middle Class: Citizens Against the People in the 2013 Protests The Making of the Bulgarian Middle Class: Citizens Against the People in the 2013 Protests By Jana Tsoneva Submitted to Central European University Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Supervisor: Assistant Professor Alexandra Kowalski Reader: Associate Professor Dorit Geva Budapest, March 31, 2019 CEU eTD Collection Statement I hereby state that the thesis contains no material accepted for any other degrees in any other institutions. The thesis contains no material previously written and/or published by another person, except where appropriate acknowledgment is made in the form of bibliographical reference. Jana Tsoneva Budapest, 31st March 2019 CEU eTD Collection ii Abstract The Making of the Bulgarian Middle Class: Citizens Against the People in the 2013 Protests 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 ‘prosthetics’. 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 CEU eTD Collection 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. iii 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. CEU eTD Collection iv Acknowledgments Firstly, a heartfelt thanks is due my supervisors Alexandra Kowalski and Dorit Geva for the help, encouragement, guidance and the laughs throughout the write-up. My first supervisor Alexandra struggled heroically to rein in my verbosity and sharpen my ideas, forcing me to own my arguments and making me more confident about my writing. I have learned tremendously from her brilliant and witty mind, and from her breathtaking command of social theory. Dorit provided invaluable feedback and it is a privilege to count her among my readers. This thesis is the second baby I have given birth to in my PhD years, and the sessions with my supervisors would often imperceptibly morph into immensely enjoyable exchanges of parenting experience. I cannot imagine a better way of writing a PhD! I also thank Gáspár Miklós Tamás for the help during the first year of my PhD studies. Thesis writing is a solitary exercise, yet I have been by no means lonely. This thesis would not have been possible without our “Triumvirate”, comprising my closest collaborators Georgi Medarov and Madlen Nikolova. Georgi is my soulmate, and best friend with whom I have almost a telepathic intellectual relationship, and the person I have learned with the most. And Madlen Nikolova’s brilliant mind is an unquenchable source of ideas and inspiration. I also thank Veronika Stoyanova, Ognian Kassabov and Momchil Hristov with whom I have discussed extensively and generated a lot of the ideas that ended up in the final draft. I also feel lucky to have met and shared chunks of this journey with my CEU friends Rik Adriaans, Wiktor Marzec, Volodymyr Artiukh, Sergiu Novac, and Viktoria Fomina, as well as the entire 2016-2017 MA cohort who suffered quietly and patiently under my first teaching attempts. You are too many to list individually. I am also very grateful to Mary Taylor for hosting me at the immensely intellectually stimulating Center for Place, Culture and Politics at CUNY. I cannot fail to thank my dear friend Zhivka Valiavicharska for cushioning the worst attacks of the morning sickness and for the amazing conversations in NY. I am so honored to have you as a friend. Finally, family. Whatever I say will be inadequate to express the gratitude I feel for the love and support my mother showered me with throughout this journey. The threats and ultimatums she issued every time I had a PhD meltdown have also played a crucial role in bringing this thesis to an end. My aunt Raina has been extremely supportive, too. She CEU eTD Collection was my private research institute, providing shelter and a lifeline several winters in a row in Vienna so that I can read and write insulated from my turbulent political habitat in Sofia. I am also deeply grateful to Agnes, Georg and Antonia who opened their cozy home for me and took care of my daughter so that I could push through the last stages of writing. Last but not least, Markus, I thank you for the conversations, the support and the love. v Dedication To Kiki CEU eTD Collection vi Contents Abstract............................................................................................................................. iii Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................. v Dedication......................................................................................................................... vi List of figures .................................................................................................................... x List of tables ...................................................................................................................... x Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 1 Neoliberalism After Neoliberalism ................................................................................... 1 Fits and Starts of Neoliberalization After 1989 ............................................................. 2 Reform Fatigue Sets In .................................................................................................. 9 The 2013 Protests .......................................................................................................
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