Individual projects

Project Outline

Albeit each in a different end, the post-Communist societies have many aspects in common. In particular, they need to reconcile the alleged need for academic (research) freedom and the independence of the judiciary with the ‘must' of internal reforms.

The proposed research project examines a series of questions related to the transformations of the professions, including self-administration versus external administration issues, funding and resource control, the renewal of the profession, entry and exit conditions, foreclosure, questions of hierarchy (elites and oligarchy) within each profession, as well as the ways, in which authority is generated.

The project adopts a comparative and interdisciplinary approach. It draws on a comparative analysis of the situation in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, and hopefully, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania. It subscribes to the assumption voiced by the Shaken Order Project that ‘the common totalitarian past does not predetermine a common present'. Hence, it hopes to build a working hypothesis in the course of research on trust in the process of transformation of self-regulated (self-contained) professions, thus avoiding overreaching conclusions.

Project Outline

The process of modernisation, acculturation and secularisation of the Jewish communities in Europe has been traditionally described in analogous terms, regardless of the community or country analysed. Nevertheless, recent studies have prompted that this generic process might have varied for each country or case-study, according to the specificity of each Jewish community involved, and the corresponding cultural, religious, political, and socio-economic peculiarities of the particular Gentile society in question. The topic of the proposed research places the historicity frame represented by the generational debate and its perception as a concept at the crossroad of modernisation, identity debate and its representation.

Comparisons between the Central European and Romanian modernisation and Jewish identity pattern in generational terms suggests a permanent tension between he cultural, political and social conditions set by the specificity of the Jewish, but also Gentile communities in both cases. Hence, by focusing on the generational identity changes representedpublicly and debated intellectually, the proposed research work analyses the connection between modernity and historicity to be found at the core of the identity discourses among the Jewish intellectuals of Romanian languages during the interwar period. It aims to connect debates on modernity, historicity, and identity in a larger equation relevant for both the Jewish Romanian intellectual life, and Romanian history in the interwar historiography. By building on the cultural instrumentalisation of the concept of generation, the proposed research hopes to reach roader conclusions in terms of the social, cultural and political life during the interwar period.

Project Outline

The question of social trust in the legitimacy of law-producing and lawimplementing institutions is closely related with individuals' experiences especially in countries with state-sponsored regimes of repression and violence. In Bulgaria and Greece, memories of past repressions, contributed to endemic distrust in public authority and its legal institutions until today. The current research project focuses on the present schisms and heritage from experiences of radical changes, political instabilities and discontinuities. It intends to enlarge the problematic of the hidden order and social distrust by studying the instrumentalised dichotomy between ‘people from the Left' and ‘people from the Right' in the light of the labelling process of individuals and groups as belonging to ‘ours' or ‘others'.

The concrete questions to be explored focus on:

• How do social actors describe the political other in the context of their everyday interactions?
• How does genealogy link to political belongings and to the process of construction, maintenance, invention or re-invention of a coherent account of one's ‘pure' Rightist/Leftist identity?
• How does the mechanism of exclusion and/or inclusion work in the interactions between individuals and when do socially-attached etiquettes assume a stigmatising or, inversely, prestigious social role?
• How do Right or Left belongings shape an intimate ‘internal order', especially with regard to the micro-universe of family relationships?
• What is at stake in Left/Right competing historiographies?
• Within this almost ethnic fracture, how do individuals experience the extreme politicisation of legal, social and political institutions and find ways to transcend their ‘embeddedness'?

The project hopes to shed light on sentiments of distrust and lack of confidence on law and legal institutions by extracting from social relations those fundamental divisions that lead to the extreme politicisation of social life and create endemic affiliations to the rightist or leftist space in society.

Project Outline

The proposed research project aims at studying the particular reasons for the inefficiency of the constitutional and legal system in the Central and Eastern European countries. Its analytical framework encompasses the political and institutional experience driven from the process of social change in Bulgaria after 1989. It focuses on the challenges - social, political and legal - to the designed constitutional model in Bulgaria, on types of threats to that model and present safeguards for the constitutional supremacy. The degree of citizens' attention and attitude to the constitution is analysed as a litmus test for the level of democratic development and potential in the civil society.

The project examines the social preconditions for an effective constitutional and legal regulator in the post-communist societies, the latter having undertaken radical institutional reforms to meet the political and economic standards of the developed Western democracies. The study also critically investigates the connections of the present political elite in Bulgaria to the former communist party and the secret services and attempts to explore the ways these links might influence the process of institutional decisionmaking behind the institutionalised forms and means of the legislative process.

Project Outline

Despite several decades of intensive research, the study of fascism as a major political phenomenon of the twentieth century is still far from reaching its endpoint. While the literature on paradigmatic cases such as the Italian or the German one is abundant, ‘peripheral', yet salient cases, such as Romanian fascism remain ess researched. The current research focuses on the nature and manifestations of Romanian fascism, by positioning it in the history of regenerative, evolutionary projects that matured in the interwar period as an alternative to what was considered the decaying system of fin-de-siècle liberalism, while xamining how they were rooted in the intellectual milieu around 1900.

The starting research hypothesis assesses fascism as a ‘coherent body of thought', a ‘form of political modernism in its own right', which presented itself as a revolutionary deology, that put forward the necessity to reshape the ‘national self' and regenerate ‘the decay' of the national body by bringing about a ‘new man' and  ‘new temporal order'. Analysing fascism from within, and considering it as a solid ideological construct, the project expects to better understand the diverse intellectual and social support it garnered, and the mass appeal that assured its political success in various contexts.

The primary focus of the research is an indepth look at what I have termed ‘the other green intellectuals', who sympathised with, and in some cases even joined, the Iron Guard (the most important fascist movement in interwar Romania) and had a genuine impact on its development. The project looks at their radical response to he temporal crisis that interwar Romania had to face, how that time horizon shaped their political views, and their ideas for an alternative extreme right-wing revolutionary ay towards modernity.

The path that the study intends to pursue is an analysis of the public stands these intellectuals took in relation to Romania's past, present and future, and how they envisaged the interplay between modernity and historicity. The kind of stand may be tracked down in some underexplored primary sources, such as the legionary and pro-legionary press and pamphlets from late 1920s to early 1940s.

The project also looks into the external intellectual influences that marked the discourse of this cohort, given the fact that, with few exceptions, most of them
were trained by, or were in close contact with academic institutions based especially in Germany, Italy, and France. By adding the analysis of their interaction in certain groups such as the ‘Axa' group, the ‘Criterion group, or the ‘Rânduiala' group, the research hopes to develop their comprehensive intellectual biographies while mapping their common views of the role of historicity in the debate focused on modernity and nation building.

Project Outline

My research investigates two ideologies of modern national citizenship which emerged in early twentieth century Bulgaria (ca. 1900-1939) as alternatives to the official ideology of liberal, individual citizenship. These framed citizenship as the contractual agreement among the main socio-economic sectors in the nation-state, on the one hand, and as negotiated cultural autonomy for the two main ethno-religious groups (Bulgarian Christians and Turkish Muslims) respectively.

The research addresses three major issues, namely:

• It explores how the prominent critiques of the official Bulgarian national project of modernity - Agrarianism and Muslim reformism - shaped national citizenship and ethno-religious relations in the post-Romantic period;
• It contextualises Agrarianism and Muslim reformism in the general framework of the European crisis of modernity, and seeks to illuminate the links between imperial past and national present, between tradition and progress which Agrarians and Muslim reformers forged in search of a viable future and empowered collective identity;
• By illuminating alternative visions of modernity in Bulgaria, it hopes to provide ground for qualified comparisons between the crises of modernity in other post-imperial, national societies in Southeastern and East-Central Europe.

By analysing the conception of property adopted by Bulgarian Agrarians and the Turkish-speaking minority in Bulgaria, and their respective efforts to change the underpinnings of modernity from liberal individual to ‘corporatist’, the project inquires whether this was a specific Bulgarian problem or whether such efforts could be interpreted as signaling of a wider crisis within European liberal modernity, in general.

Project Outline

In the period after 1918, a public debates on eugenic ideas was initiated in Bulgaria, falling in the framework of what was perceived as an interwar cultural crisis. It encompassed a large number of ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ eugenic measures with regard to healthcare, marital and sex hygiene, criminal justice, professional legislation and education. Though the most radical projects for ‘hygienisation’ of the nation were never put into practice, the Bulgarian eugenics discourse nevertheless carried a considerable rhetorical burden, and certain eugenic initiatives were partly institutionalised after the First World War.

The study aims at examining the cultural relevance of the eugenic argumentative strategies and practices in Bulgaria, in the way they were developed by adopting and emancipating Western bio-political models from the beginning of the 20th century until the 1940s. It explores the Bulgarian eugenic projects as versions of a multiform hygienic utopia, which, in turn, implied a more general project for national identity.

The research focuses on the temporal modes of a medicalised crisis of modernity and identity, transcribed as ‘degeneration’, i.e. an ‘illness’ of the ‘national organism’. It addresses the culture which the Bulgarian eugenics discourse reflected, the past historical times which it (d)evaluated, and the utopian national future which it projected. In lines with it, the analysis attempts to clarify the system of strategies and techniques for ‘naturalising’ the culture-historical continuities, applied by the eugenics discourse. It hopes to ‘map’ the symbolic register of the so-called ‘degeneration stigmata’, and question the cultural reasoning behind the selective readings of the ‘morbid’ national past, which tended to ascribe different historical periods to the decay of the ‘national organism’.

Finally, the project examines how the ‘regeneration’ of the ‘degenerated’ people was conceptualised as a target result from the synthesis of ideological visions and expert practices, i.e. of national integration theory and the instruments of state bio-politics.