ABSTRACT

By the end of the Second World War, 80 per cent of Bulgaria’s workforce was still employed in subsistence agriculture. By the 1960s, the economy had been transformed into an agro-industrial export economy dependent on inputs, credits, and orders from the Soviet Union and other Comecon countries. Like other economies throughout the region, national economic development in mining, industry and agriculture was achieved by the rapid adoption of large-scale technologies and organizational practices in which environmental and health concerns were minimized; what Green has called ‘the hubris of giganticism’ (Green 1989, p.1). In many ways it was this very hubris that brought the environmental and health consequences of rapid industrialization, urbanization and environmental degradation to the forefront of public concerns in the 1980s, eventually erupting as a mass mobilization of political forces for ‘ecological defence’ (EcoGlasnost n.d.; Pickles 1992; Pavlinek and Pickles 2000). The commitment to national development through forced industrialization prompted new environmental legislation in the 1980s (Table 14.1), and resulted in little political room for manoeuvre for the Zhivkov regime when opposition forces organized around environmental and health rights, particularly in the context of parallel opposition to state violence against the country’s Muslim minorities (see Pickles and Begg 2000).