Paper short abstract:

This paper 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 in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Paper long abstract:

Transboundary river basins shared by two or more East-Central European (ECE) countries experienced increasing water stress in late communism and during the early 1990s . Although there has been extensive interest from the environmentally focused social sciences to study specific “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 East-Central Europe in the 1980s-1990s.

This paper 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 paper hypothesizes that there is a specific ECE-based ecological dichotomy in late 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 late communism were seeking intensively to incorporate conservationists’ theories, many of which were rejected by the mainstream in the West. Hence, 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-agenda.

These two-way dynamics, proposed to be specific in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary, are analyzed in the last years of communism and in the early 1990s in this paper.