The Organic Crisis of a Colonised State: Bulgaria in the Eye of the Pandemic, 2020–2022

Abstract

Bulgaria’s particularly tragic experience with covid-19, with one of the largest death tolls per 100,000 in Europe, can be analysed in terms of purely natural factors (more lethal variants), the foibles and missteps of leaders, and unpredictable vaccine supplies. From a Gramscian critical materialist perspective, the pattern is better understood in terms of four interlocking structures: Bulgaria’s subaltern status as a downtrodden colony of Europe, its mode of insertion into globalised capitalism, the Orthodox Church’s strenuous effort to maintain its hegemonic position within Bulgarian nationalism, and the crisis of hegemony that engulfed a government already reliant on corruption more than persuasion, with an inchoate and ideologically variegated ‘Great National Revolt’ against it coinciding with the pandemic. The upshot of these structures was a rate of vaccination that was unusually low by European standards, leaving many Bulgarians, especially the elderly, lethally exposed to the disease and harmed by a widely distrusted corrupt neoliberal state.