There have been some truly great duos throughout history and pop culture doing everything from
solving mysteries to judging baked goods to tracking down an emperor they've accidentally turned into a llama.
If we look closer at these pairs, we’ll often find that some of the best ones are a mix of opposites.
In fact, their success might even be because they’re so different.
We love to see a straightlaced fussbudget deal with an agent of chaos.
Or a...well now that I think about it, that one comes up a lot.
Take Holmes and Watson, or Ernie and Bert, or any character duo Tina Fey and Amy Poehler
bring to life, or even...Bulgaria and Germany!
Wait.
Ok, so maybe I let my geography nerd brain run a little wild there, but geopolitically,
Bulgaria and Germany have a long history!
In the early 2020s, they have a close relationship and pass things like cars and precious metals
back and forth with relative ease.
From a distance, they look like BFFs, but just like in many of our duos, it’s an uneven relationship.
Germany is more important to Bulgaria than Bulgaria is to Germany.
I’m Alizé Carrère, and this is Crash Course Geography.
INTRO
Over the last few episodes, we’ve talked about how power moves to form and maintain countries.
And we briefly mentioned how things like the strength of the economy is one aspect that
affects the coherence of the state.
Economics, or the study of scarcity, decision-making, and how people respond to incentives around
resources impacts everyone’s lives, whether we’re aware of it or not.
How we make a living and consume material goods is part of what shapes how we interact with the world.
So to understand what makes Bulgaria and Germany such a good pair, particularly at trading
goods back and forth, we can use the frameworks of economic geography, which is a branch of
human geography concerned with where and how people earn a living.
But, our economic activities are also tied with the power systems we live in.
So human geographers study both power and economics because understanding our relationship
with power and material wealth helps explain human patterns on the global scale -- from
how population size is related to economic opportunity, to resource use, to migration
trends, to the way our cities are laid out.
In geography looking at economics and politics together and studying how they interact is
called political economy.
Geographers trained in political economy argue that both political and economic power move
unevenly across the landscape, and that power shapes the way people work and live.
That means we study things like how trade policy impacts where goods are produced and
where they are sold, like we saw on the Silk Roads.
And as economic geographers, we’d want to understand how wealth was formed in spice-rich
places, who actually amassed that wealth and who didn’t in the region, and what political
structures, like empires or tribes, reinforced trade patterns and maintained those structures.
But there are a lot of people who study this with a lot of different definitions!
At its core, economic geography tries to describe the distribution of material wealth in the world.
And -- spoiler alert -- that wealth is usually distributed unevenly.
As geographers, we want to know why that unevenness exists and understand why people have different
economic opportunities.
Since the 1990s, Bulgaria’s economy has continued to strengthen, though in the 2020s
it’s still less wealthy than Germany and some of its other neighbors.
Like all geographers, economic geographers will think spatially about something like wealth.
We also think about economic work as being grouped into three main categories.
A truly healthy economy needs to have elements of all three economic activities, and they
often overlap and exist in the same spaces.
In the 2020s, a large chunk of Bulgaria’s economy is a primary economy based on extracting raw goods.
Their largest exports to Germany are primary goods, like raw copper ore and other precious metals.
Anything that comes from the land, like agriculture, mining, logging, or hunting are all primary activities.
And primary production is important because it’s how we get the basic materials we need
to live, like food, minerals, and cloth.
Every government system has some sort of primary production.
But, primary production tends to not generate very much wealth on its own.
Like let’s think about that classic geography example, the banana.
As we learned way back in episode 1 when we started this journey, the people who grew
those bananas didn’t make very much money.
But the companies who owned the plantations did.
A secondary economy is based on manufacturing or refining those primary goods, which adds
value to them and makes a profit for the owner.
So the plantation owners didn’t really change the bananas, but they did process and package
them and bring them to the US where they could be sold for a lot more money.
And in the 2020s, Germany has a booming industrial or secondary economy.
There’s a saying in geography: “It’s not enough to have the stuff.”
Places with resources often find their wealth is extracted away to other places that make
money by processing the raw goods to make tons of other products.
But ultimately, it’s the different routes that Germany and Bulgaria have each taken
on their economic paths that have helped create their modern day political, economic, and
even cultural landscapes.
Historically, as manufacturing became easier in North America and Europe during the late
18th and early 19th centuries, the people who owned the factories started to make a
lot of money off the labor of those doing the manufacturing work.
Around this time is when capitalism started to resemble the system you're probably familiar with today.
Capitalism is a political economic system that’s dominated by earning a profit with
private business ownership, and where both wages and production are guided by the free market.
Now a market isn’t necessarily a physical place.
It’s more like a relationship we enter into when buyers and sellers exchange goods and
services and negotiate those prices.
Like how much someone is willing to pay for Wiener schnitzel, or what the going rate is for a gadulka player.
And it’s called a “free” market, but there are allowances for economic regulation
from governments at national and international levels.
Though this form of capitalism, known as a mixed capitalist economy, wouldn't be recognized
by its most famous proponent, Adam Smith, who mostly talked about it in theory.
And there are so many other types, too.
For example, Democratic socialism still sells goods and services on the market, but creates
buffers and boundaries on how labor is treated.
The government is democratically elected, and the fiscal policies they enact are a result
of those elections.
But, instead of markets being where the cost of goods and services like healthcare or education
are determined, the state sets policies that prevent swings in costs or type of service
a person can access.
The state redistributes wealth from things like taxes to ensure a minimum access to things
like health care, education, food and water resources.
Many European countries follow some variation on this idea, and a lot of experts would say
21st century Germany is one of them.
One contribution geographers have made to political economy, is noting just how variable capitalism is.
Capitalism looks different in different places because how markets work depends on how governments
facilitate them and regulate them, which tends to shift with different democratic structures.
And as a discipline that wants to understand why we see some features in one place but
not another, studying capitalism has been a key part of economic geography.
So the politics of a place can make a difference in how markets are regulated.
Most places have access to at least some natural resources, capable people to do good work,
and some way to get their goods and services to the people who want to buy them.
But which countries have access to markets is definitely uneven!
And how goods can move is a political decision.
For instance, how goods have moved through the area that we now call Bulgaria has changed
over the years.
Throughout the 20th century, Bulgaria followed Germany’s alliances and by the end of World
War II found itself behind the Iron Curtain with East Germany.
This meant it also became an ally of the Soviet Union, and less directly, a communist state
from the mid-1940s until 1990.
Communism is an idea that was proposed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles to address
the inequalities they saw that grew from capitalist economic practices.
Marx wrote about the masses of people doing the work eventually rising up and demanding
that wealth be distributed more fairly.
In theory, communism is a type of political economy that strives to replace private property
and a profit-based economy with public ownership and communal control of all resources.
And much like how the capitalism that Adam Smith wrote about doesn’t look like what
capitalism has become, the communism that Marx developed doesn't look like what communism turned into either.
So yes, there actually was a revolt and civil war in Russia, but it wasn’t what Marx had in mind.
It wasn’t led by the working people, and in the end power and wealth didn’t transfer
to the laborers.
Instead, it went to the leaders of the revolution.
There was then a wave of communism that spread out from the Soviet Union in the form of dictatorships,
or political systems where one leader has the power and that power is distributed at their discretion.
So...pretty much the opposite of what Marx was writing about.
One of the places communism spread to at the end of World War II was Bulgaria.
Bulgaria became part of the Eastern Bloc and like other communist countries, had what was
called a planned economy, meaning that the government planned everything like how much
of a good needed to be produced and where it would be produced, along with the prices
for goods and wages.
They could also prioritize social goals over economic ones.
So that means they could decide how many nurses would work in a clinic just based on how many
they wanted to have work there, not necessarily because of demand.
Bulgaria’s economy during their communist days also relied heavily on primary activities.
And even with detailed government planning and control, there was still uneven access
to wealth because the decisions were being made in a central place without the will or
desires of the people, or signals of supply and demand to guide them.
But not all formerly communist states had the same types of economic activity.
East Germany, while also communist, had more secondary production.
This created a space for more economic productivity.
West Germany was even more economically productive than East Germany thanks to international
investment and support to create a highly productive capitalist economy to help form
a buffer against communism.
When both parts of Germany were unified in 1990, the strength of the western economy
helped smooth the transition for East Germany.
And so, when in 1989 the Soviet Union and its control in the region began to unravel
and the Berlin Wall came down, countries like Bulgaria stopped being communist and adopted
other political economic systems, in this case, capitalism.
In 1990, Bulgaria held democratic elections, meaning that the next leaders were voted in
by the people and went through a years long process of transitioning from a “closed”
market, controlled by the state, to an “open” market participating in free trade.
Which means goods could be bought and sold between any countries with goods to sell,
not just the countries the state pre approved.
But whether it’s capitalism, socialism, or communism, these economic practices are rarely uniform.
Wherever they’re in practice, there are other economies also in practice.
In fact, the majority of employed people in the world actually work in what's known as
the informal economy, which is the diverse kinds of jobs, businesses, and other economic
activities that aren't regulated or protected by the state or market.
And this isn’t necessarily bad or secretive.
Anything that isn’t part of the market, like the neighborhood babysitter, the community
garden co-op, or the friend that comes over to cut your hair, can be part of an informal economy.
But because informal economies aren’t regulated or taxed by governments, they can also include
activities that try to not be seen, like human trafficking or drug trade.
Tertiary economies are also woven throughout every economic type.
This is anything that counts as a service, and is the largest growing sector world wide.
It includes activities like health care, education, and government -- all jobs that have existed
everywhere for a long time.
Whether it’s Bulgaria, Germany, or somewhere else, wherever we live there’s usually a
combination of economic activities that connect us to the things we buy, the jobs we do, or the money we save.
And on a larger scale, states experience that too.
They form relationships that can be uneven -- whether that’s a friendship with a long
history, or something more painful like a colonial relationship, which we’ll discuss more next time.
Until then, as another famous duo once said, “Be excellent to each other.”
Many maps and borders represent modern geopolitical divisions that have often been decided without
the consultation, permission, or recognition of the land's original inhabitants.
Many geographical place names also don't reflect the Indigenous or Aboriginal peoples languages.
So we at Crash Course want to acknowledge these peoples’ traditional and ongoing relationship
with that land and all the physical and human geographical elements of it.
We encourage you to learn about the history of the place you call home through resources
like native-land.ca and by engaging with your local Indigenous and Aboriginal nations through
the websites and resources they provide.
Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course Geography which is filmed at the Team
Sandoval Pierce Studio and was made with the help of all these nice people.
If you want to help keep all Crash Course free for everyone, forever, you can join our
community on Patreon.