ETRECE
An Environmental History of Transboundary Rivers in Cold War East-Central Europe
Transboundary river basins shared by two or more East-Central European (ECE) countries experienced
increasing water stress under communism. Although there has been extensive interest from the
environmentally focused social sciences and humanities to study specific cases, “hot spots” such as the
Gabčíkovo–Nagymaros Barrage System, yet the scientific community knows little about how issues of
transboundary rivers - most notably pollution, regulation and utilization - were discussed and coordinated
in communist East-Central Europe. This project is centering transboundary river issues around
Czechoslovakia with a focus on the Oder River (shared with Poland), and the Danube (shared with
Hungary), and it focuses on the analysis of politico-scientific, as well as popular discourses.
The project hypothesizes that there is a specific ECE-specific ecological dichotomy under communism in which the “official” scientific and political discourses created strong parallel realities regardless of the actual ecological situations. Paradoxically, actors of the politico-scientific discussions in communism were
seeking intensively to incorporate conservationists’ theories, many of which were rejected by the
mainstream in the West. Hence, the gradual growth of “unofficial”, grassroots ecological movements
managed to facilitate the “official” dialogue, which in return sought such facilitation, and opened up to
incorporate new eco-agendas. These two-way dynamics, proposed to be specific in Czechoslovakia,
Poland, and Hungary, eventually closed the gap between the ideologically envisioned ecological reality
and the actual environmental situation.
Thus, it is anticipated that this project will find out novel insights how and why ECE transboundary river
issues, especially the ones between Czechoslovakia and Poland as well as Hungary, were formed by various
actor groups during the communist period, and this study will reveal new knowledge about the human-
nature relationships in ECE communist society, which were ECE region specific and different from relevant
counterparts in the West.
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