Reforming the Bulgarian State of Knowledge: Legal Expertise as a Resource in Modelling States

Abstract:

The transformation of the Eastern European countries from communist states to EU members was supported by massive investments in Western discourses and social science knowledge and export programmes for these from the West to the East. In the West, and specifically in the US, a market for discourses and knowledge production professionalized and intertwined with institutions that exported specific forms of policy visions of US modes of the State. In the East, the importation of discourses and knowledge became pivotal in the struggles for power of modelling the state and its institutions, and thus as knowledge tools to guide and legitimize the path towards democracy and later towards membership of the EU. Based on the notion of co-production, this study focuses on how leading American and European lawyers, think tanks and different agencies were involved in the reorganisation of the Bulgarian field of power.