Smaranda Șchiopu
Transforming the Danube through infrastructure, Central European Studies
Stefan Dorondel (editor), Luminita Gatejel (editor)
Table of contents
Summary
This edited volume, “Flowing Progress: Transforming the Danube through Infrastructure” (2025), explores the intricate relationship between the Danube River and the states that attempt to govern it. Editors Stefan Dorondel and Luminița Gătejel argue that infrastructure projects—dams, levees, and canals—are not merely utilitarian tools for navigation or power; they are the very sites where state power is performed, legitimized, or eroded.
Smaranda Șchiopu (the book review author) explains how the book focuses on the “Lower Danube,” a region historically neglected in longitudinal studies due to its complex international borders. By examining “disturbances”—specifically floods—the contributors reveal how the intersection of the built environment and natural forces shapes political authority and citizenship.
1. Giurgiu (1840): The Birth of State Responsibility
In the mid-19th century, the port town of Giurgiu (Wallachia) was devastated by a flood. This event triggered a five-year campaign by citizens who petitioned Prince Alexandru II Ghica for protection.
- The Shift: This marked a transition where subjects began to view the state as a benevolent authority capable of taming nature.
- Infrastructure as State-Building: By building a dam with international expertise and local labor, the budding state solidified its central authority at the periphery.
- The Poetics of Infrastructure: As suggested by Brian Larkin, the dam became a “process” involving labor and politics, while simultaneously symbolizing progress and protection in the minds of the citizens.
2. Vidin (1942): The Affective State
A century later, a massive flood caused by an ice bridge hit Vidin, Bulgaria. Unlike the 19th-century example, the Bulgarian state was already a sophisticated bureaucratic machine.
- The Response: Despite being embroiled in WWII, the state intervened with military-like precision. Royalty and ministers visited the site, and public fundraisers were led by government officials.
- The “Affective State”: Stelu Șerban argues that this display of solidarity and paternal care turned the abstract bureaucracy into something “felt” by the people. The infrastructure of repair created a kinship-like bond between the citizens and the monarchy.
3. Dolj County (2006): The Performative State and Erosion
In the post-socialist era, the relationship between the Romanian state and the river fractured. During the 2006 floods, authorities breached a levee to save downstream industrial cities, inadvertently flooding two villages.
- The Failure: Decades of neglect following the privatization of socialist-era fisheries and farmland meant that the “environmental infrastructure” (canals and backwaters) no longer functioned as experts assumed.
- Infrastructure as Neglect: The weakened levees became symbols of state withdrawal.
- The Performative State: While officials arrived in helicopters with measuring tools, their scientific expertise was disconnected from the reality of the landscape. Here, the river re-emerged as an “intractable agent,” asserting its power over a state that had lost its capacity to manage it.
Conclusion: The Danube as a Socio-Natural System
The book concludes that the Danube is not a passive background for human history. Instead, it is a socio-natural system where ecological forces and human engineering constantly renegotiate power. Infrastructure acts as the medium for this negotiation:
- It makes states by providing a platform for protection and centralization.
- It breaks states when neglect and environmental agency expose the limits of human control.
By focusing on these moments of “disturbance,” the volume highlights how the environment itself is an active participant in the history of European state-making.
Book review
Published in the summer of 2025, the book ‘Flowing Progress, Transforming the Danube through infrastructure’ is a welcome addition to scholarly work about the Danube, “the most international river on the European continent”. The editors themselves note in the Introduction the lack of longitudinal engagement with the Danube from within the fields of history and social sciences, particularly concerning the river’s lower section, a shortcoming that can be attributed precisely to the international character of the river, making it difficult for transdisciplinary and cross-border teams to enrol in long-term research. This volume is all the more stimulating as it enters a contemporary debate existing within the fields of geography, history, anthropology (to name a few), that re-examines the ‘modernising’ role of infrastructure, by applying a magnifying lens on the intersection of the built and the natural environment. The volume evaluates the ways in which large infrastructural projects, aimed at altering natural landscapes for the benefit of humankind, create binding relations between states, riparian communities and the river itself.
Through archival and ethnographic research, the authors track, across different periods, modernising projects along the Danube in Austria, Bulgaria, Hungary, the late Ottoman Empire, Romania, and Serbia. For the past two centuries, these efforts to ‘modernise’ the Danube have reflected the changing ambitions of the Austrian, Ottoman or Russian empires, and later of the socialist and post-socialist states that replaced them. These technological interventions had utilitarian motives: to enhance navigability on the Lower Danube, to generate electricity or to develop agriculture; concurrently they achieved undeclared objectives, i.e. establishing and legitimising state power, by showcasing its power to govern over nature as well as over humans.
I will briefly survey three chapters (though all deserve lengthy discussions) that show precisely the evolution of state building (and even state erosion) as seen along the banks of the Lower Danube. Each of these chapters begins with a flood, a perfect example of the kind of ‘disturbance’ the editors set out to examine. A flood is a disturbance for human life, whereas for the river, it is a normal, expected process, it is part of its natural rhythm. For humans, it is an interruption of order, a crisis demanding reparations and control. For the river, a flood carrying fresh water and fresh sediments nurtures its floodplain, which, like its riverbed, form part of the river’s eco-system. The river, with its floods and floodplains, thus becomes a site where nature, citizens and the state meet to renegotiate anew their relationships. Nicely said.
In the chapter ‘A young state empowered by technology?’ Luminița Gătejel discusses how a flood in the 19th century port-town of Giurgiu pushed a budding state to become aware of its goal of capacity-building, centralisation and modernisation.
In 1840, Giurgiu, a small port on the Danube, had recently been incorporated in the principality of Wallachia after centuries of Ottoman direct control. When the Danube flooded the town, causing extensive damage to households, the townspeople (most of whom were recent transplants into the region to help populate the newly acquired territory and who had never lived near a large river before) wrote repeatedly to their prince, Alexandru II Ghica, pleading with him to “order” budget and expertise to prevent any future flooding. What these petitions reveal is a new expectation that the state could, and perhaps, should, prevent disaster; that a benevolent authority had the resources and the power to tame nature, in the name of its subjects’ welfare. Furthermore, the flood occasioned a new and radical position vis-à-vis the river: it must be tamed if we are to live near it. Following a five year long epistolary campaign, the state took on the responsibility for disaster management and a dam was built. By deploying state budget, enlisting international technical expertise and local manpower to build the dam, the principality was beginning to define its modernising role, while also strengthening its periphery and border region, a prime occasion to learn about bolstering central authority at local level. Meanwhile, residents in Giurgiu laid claim to what we may envisage as incipient ‘riparian rights’, winning privileges and officially reshaping politics and communal life. According to anthropologist Brian Larkin, what we see on display here are the political and the poetical dimensions of infrastructure. Think of a dam for example: we imagine it as a sturdy structure that holds back a river’s force, a human triumph over natural (and destructive) rhythms. Larkin invites us to deconstruct such material items and conceive them instead as multi-level processes where knowledge, labour, money, and political power inevitably meet. In fact, political power sits at the centre of any infrastructural enterprise, manifested through the state that acts most of the times as at least co-financier, and always as the beneficiary. What starts as a site-specific, concrete need, moves into officials’ offices, becomes paperwork, and is subject to financial transactions, long before the first stone is laid. The poetics, on the other hand, expose the affective and emotional ties that arise, perhaps unexpectedly: the hopes and frustrations that citizens attach to these objects, the ways in which infrastructure becomes a symbol of progress or evidence of neglect.
We encounter more of these poetics in the chapter ‘Floods and the Affective State on the Bulgarian Lower Danube’, where Stelu Șerban discusses the reaction of an established state to a similar event. In the winter of 1942, an ice bridge had formed on the Danube, interrupting the river’s flow and eventually flooding the right bank at Vidin. The state’s response could not have been more different from what we saw a century earlier at Giurgiu. The Bulgarian monarchy, fully involved in WW2 at the time, was nonetheless equipped with a strong bureaucratic apparatus and technical expertise, enabling it to intervene swiftly. Committees were formed, funds were raised and distributed and plans for future consolidation and expansion of Danube infrastructure were drawn up. Officials and, it is rumoured, even royalty, the king himself, visited the site. State ministers launched public fundraisers to supplement the reparation funds and ministers themselves led the charge in donations, a genuine display of solidarity. The state thus quickly became visible in the eyes of the affected populations and remained a stable partner for a few years as it distributed the reparation funds and continued to build embankments on the river to prevent future destruction. The flood occasioned circumstances for the state to appear protective, caring, paternal even, qualities that turned the administrative apparatus into something felt and remembered. Through presence and performance, the bureaucratic state became what the author calls, the affective state. We have seen in the case of Giurgiu how the state establishes its legitimacy across its territory through building local infrastructure. In Vidin’s case we see how the authorities’ expeditious intervention, as well as the drawing up of plans to mitigate against future disasters go beyond self-legitimation or power consolidation, engendering a kinship-like relation between authority and townsfolk. Therein lie the poetics of infrastructure.
By 2006, the relationships between state, citizen and river had changed again. Ștefan Dorondel, in the chapter ‘The Ethnography of a Flood and the Failure of Infrastructure’ considers the 2006 flood in Dolj County, in Southern Romania. Two villages were accidentally flooded when authorities deliberately decided to breach a levee, the intention being to reduce pressure downstream and spare the industrialised cities like Giurgiu, Brăila, Galați. The authorities hoped that once the levee was breached, water would flow naturally through the man-made canals that criss-cross Southern Romania, built during communism. Their thinking backfired largely due to their own ignorance and neglect. Starting with the 1950s, the Romanian socialist state had implemented its own state building exercise through large scale infrastructural development, by draining the Danube plain to make way for state-managed farmland and fisheries, all protected by levees. In the post-socialist transition years, the state owned land was privatised or leased, the state fisheries sold, and the levees neglected and consequently weakened. As the authorities decided on the levee breach, they failed to consider the hidden layer of the river’s environmental infrastructure, which consisted of canals, lakes, ponds (human or nature made) and backwater, ultimately the conduits for the flood to reach the villages. When the flood came, the state reappeared – “a hoard of experts with measuring tools, who took pictures and travelled in helicopters over the area” and yet its scientific expertise looked weakened, no longer attuned to the lived realities of the landscape. What emerged instead was a performative state – one that, by deploying state funds, enacted the rituals of control without the capacity to sustain them. Casting our eyes back to the weakened and broken levee, we see it as a symbol of the gradual removal of the state from regional infrastructure maintenance. On the other hand, the river re-emerges as an intractable agent of change, ready to reshape communities and politics, through its own natural infrastructure, by transforming what was considered passive landscape into an embodied environmental actor. Whether unruly, disrupted or (mis)managed, the environment constantly asserts itself as a contributing factor to cultural and ecological contexts.
Across these three moments, from the appeals of the 19th century townspeople to the bureaucratic mobilisation of the 20th century and the fragmented governance of the 21st, we witness how both the environment and the infrastructure built to manage it have contributed to the state formation process in the Lower Danube basin. Neither the river, nor the infrastructure built to contain it are thus mere background; rather, they emerge as agents that repeatedly disturb local communities and compel political actors to intervene where protection is needed. By foregrounding moments of disturbance, the volume makes visible how the environment itself intervenes in state-making and state erosion, transforming infrastructure into a site where power, care, neglect, and ecological forces intersect. The authors invite us to imagine thus the Danube as a socio-natural system, a living site of intersecting, and potentially conflicting, interests, a system that has the power to make and break states.
Further reading by Smaranda Șchiopu
Photo: The cover of the book Flowing Progress (source: screenshot)
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