Localities, Natural Resources and Transition in Eastern Europe
Journal article by Caedmon Staddon; The Geographical Journal, Vol. 165, 1999
Journal Article Excerpt
Localities, natural resources and transition in Eastern Europe. by Caedmon Staddon Nearly a decade of scholarly research in the transition countries' of the former Soviet bloc has produced, virtually ex nihilo, an enormous and complex literature on the many different aspects of transition. First wave treatments of post-communist transition were perhaps necessarily preoccupied with events at the geographical scale of the nation-state (e.g. Kemme, 1991; Blanchard et al., 1994). Though the national scale fixation remains entrenched in some disciplinary traditions, other disciplines, notably human geography and social anthropology, have more recently highlighted the complex sub-national, regional and local scales of the transition. Studies such as Smith's (1996; 1997) analyses of uneven regional development in Slovakia, Andrusz, Harloe and Szelenyi's (1996) compilation of essays on urban restructuring and Bridger and Pine's (1998) collection of studies of local responses to transition introduce a vibrant new second wave of transition research. Even so it remains arguable that the macro-scale fixation of the first wave literature is reproduced in second wave literature insofar as it is inherent in the spatial ontologies, what Barnes (1996) calls the 'metaphysics of presence', implicit within the neoliberal models hegemonic within transition studies generally. Because the actual effects of transition are being visited upon individuals and their families in the innumerable villages, towns and peripheral areas that house the majority of Eastern Europeans it is important for critical scholarship to subject scale fixations to ontological as well as empirical critique. Several factors, including the importance of path dependence in actually existing transitions, the significance of local institutional negotiations, and also local adaptations to fluid political-economic contexts require close attention. Otherwise, scholarly research will be unable to contribute to the development of empirically-informed and theoretically-pragmatic 'alternative development futures', as opposed to either purely idiographic case studies or nomothetic high theory (cf. Bebbington, 1996). In this paper some of the problems posed by this deeply rooted spatial ontology for the study of post-communist transition in Eastern Europe are introduced through the close examination of the experience of the municipality of Sapareva Bania [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED], a rural locality situated in Bulgaria's mountainous south-west. It is argued that an emerging 'transition model of development' characterized by rampant speculation, economic crime and a strong orientation towards core regions, poses difficult challenges for local actors seeking to establish foundations for local political autonomy and autarkic economic development. In particular, the transition process has actually reinscribed and strengthened many long-standing core-periphery, urban-rural, class, and regional inequalities which formed the foundation of the rampant exploitation of the countryside by the urban core under central planning. Environmental issues will be of prime significance here as the natural environment is one of the two primary sources (the other being labour power) of economic surplus immediately available to fuel capital accumulation (Altvater, 1993). While the post-communist transition has thus far obviated some of communism's grosser environmental legacies (Carter and Turnock, 1996; Peterson, 1993), other problems, particular those experienced at the scale of the locality, have actually become much more acute. As in nineteenth-century Western Europe, and the contemporary developing world, the current period of primitive accumulation of capital is effectively looting the countryside in favour of the urban metropolis (cf. Harvey, 1985; 1996; Pred and Watts, 1993; Peet and Watts, 1996). In the following sections some of the main ways in which an emergent transition model of development is being grafted onto a new politics of peripheralization for Sapareva Bania are investigated. The next section introduces the major contours of economic change at the national and local scales in Bulgaria and Sapareva Bania respectively. There the emphasis is upon developing a new way of understanding the socio-economic dimensions of transition as a function of myriad local transitions. Key to this new development model is a renegotiation of the relations between different geographical scales, and between localities and their natural environments, topics treated in greater detail in a later section. Strong contrasts are drawn in that section between local management of the environment for meeting primarily non-commodity needs and national regulatory structures orientated towards macroeconomic stability and continued primitive accumulation of capital through natural resource liquidation. The concluding section reinterprets the lack of sub-national studies with which the paper began as a more general problem pertaining to the lack of attention to the critical political economy of scale relations in post-communist transition. As long as this lacuna remains unaddressed, scholarly understanding of the transition process will be at best incomplete, and at worst politically irrelevant.Underdevelopment and primitive ... |
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