Quantity vs Quality Сitizens and anti-citizens in the Bulgarian protests of 2013

Abstract

Protests are often waged against governments but can end up fighting the constituencies that rush to the defence of embattled governments. The enmity between the protest and the authorities thus bifurcates into an antagonism not only against the government, but also against another protest. This paper focuses on instances of such triangulation of social antagonism, and the effect they have on the discursive constitution of civic identities. More specifically, it traces the delineation of the boundaries of legitimate belonging to civil society and the community of citizens during anti-governmental and so-called counter-protests (or pro-government protests) in Bulgaria in the summer of 2013. Those boundaries were drawn along class, aesthetic, epistemic and ethnic lines. I treat “civil society” as a contested terrain of competing discourses and show how protesters refocus it – contra Hegel's understanding of civil society as a “system of needs” – into the cultured domain of the greatest distance from material necessity and need. According to the protesters, what made 2013 stand out in the history of protests after 1989 is that people rallied behind immaterial things such as “European values”. However, this strong anti-materialist view does not make the protesters independent from the materiality of class. Rather, one of the main points of these protest discourses was that the protests are the expression of the “new middle class”, embodying civil society, and this was articulated with ruminations on what makes one an authentic citizen. This self-designated “new middle class” which spoke on behalf of civil society came to imagine itself as the legitimate arbiter of what constitutes the public interest and belongs to the community of citizens, and denied the claims of other “interest groups” to be able to define the common interest. In this paper, I consider the protests and counter-protests as a class conflict unfolding on the terrains of civil society and citizenship, a conflict mediated by new articulations of (middle) class and civic consciousness. I draw on Ernesto Laclau's theory of populism which thematizes the antagonistic constitution of identities. I supplement it with a term of my own – the anti-citizen – against which a vision of the model citizen was discursively articulated by the protesters. The anti-citizen captures the ambivalent position of people who are formally citizens, yet symbolically excluded by the (self-appointed) legitimate representatives of civil society due to their alleged lack of knowledge and misguided political positions. Keywords: citizenship, civil society, protests and counter-protests, aesthetics, class, anti-citizens.