Suchergebnisse

This paper attempts to contribute to an understanding of power struggles in the post-socialist context of Bulgaria by way of examining the language of protests, which took place in 2013 in Bulgaria. It offers a critical discourse analysis and draws on the theoretical work of Antonio Gramsci and Ernst Bloch to suggest that these protests represented a counter-hegemonic attempt on the part of subaltern classes to challenge the liberal-capitalist discourse of the post-1989 transition by articulating a radical popular-national political identity.

In 2013, Bulgaria was shaken by two waves of mass protests, which seemed to mobilise distinct social groups and put different, and often conflicting, demands on the table. In the midst of the turbulence of the protests, new political formations emerged which aimed to capitalise on the mobilisations. The mushrooming of new political projects in the wake of the mass protests seems to mark an apparent re-politicisation following the post-political turn after 1989. Yet the language and identities of these new civic and party formations point to a more complicated dynamic between civic movements, political parties and the state. Drawing on Gramsci's theory of hegemony, this article scrutinises the links between the newly emerged political projects and the civic mobilisations of 2013 to unravel the new social cleavages underpinning them and consider how these are played out in a context of a changed relationship between civil society and party politics 25 years after the fall of the socialist regime in Bulgaria.

1. Introduction : studying popular mobilisation in the post-socialist context -- 2. Anti-populism and its critics : the battle over the "liberal consensus" -- 3. Classificatory struggles and civil society through the lens of Gramsci's theory of hegemony and Bloch's theory of ideology and utopia -- 4. The concept of civil society during the "transition" : its road to hegemony and its utopian surplus -- 5. Against the liberal consensus : a civil society of the people -- 6. In defence of the liberal consensus : civil society of the middle class -- 7. Hegemonic class struggles over the liberal consensus in the post-socialist context