A Society Transformed. Hungary in Time-Space Perspective by Rudolf s> Andorka Tamás Kolosi , Richard Rose , György Vukovich (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 789 One of the doyens of American Russian studies, Robert Daniels, then brings the work together in a conclusion reflecting on the prospects of successful federalization in Russia and the impact this is likely to have for furtherdemocratizationof the country. How successfulthen is this compilation?As a corrective to the Moscow/St Petersburgfocus of so much of the literatureon Russia it is useful. It reminds us clearly that there is a another world out there beyond the Moscow ringroad with a differentfocus from that of the metropolitanintelligentsiaand its concern with cutting-edge reforms -indeed that there are many different concerns among the other eighty-sevenconstituentpartsof the federationand that they are in differingrelationshipswith the centre.With the reassertionof Russian ethnic dominance in the post- I99Iterritory,the threatof fragmentation may well be much less than it was in the Soviet Union (with the possible exception of Chechnya), but suchlack of cohesion can presentotherproblems in the field of forginga strongunited countryto face the outsideworld and the threats it poses. The problems of the regions will have to be addressed if Russia is not to lurch from one crisisto another, such as that witnessed of late in the FarEasternPrimoryeprovince. Undoubtedly the situation has moved on since the book was completed, and Putin is having some impact in reigningin the provinces. Some partsof it are increasingly period pieces of interest more in looking back at the development of the presentsituationand would now have to be supplemented by more recentjournal literature.Neverthelessthis representsa wide-ranging and thought-provokingguide to the currentvariantof the long-standingclash between centralismand localism in Russia. Department ofPolitics JULIAN BIRCH University ofSheffield Andorka,Rudolf; Kolosi, Tam.as;Rose, Richard and Vukovich,Gyorgy(eds). A SocietyTransformed. Hungary in Time-Space Perspective. Central European University Press, Budapest, I 999. XiV + 206 pp. Tables. Figures. Bibliographicalreferences .Index. 1i6.95. FORmost of the decade following Hungary's system change (rendszervaltas) most academic interest focused on the challenges posed by the country's marketization and democratization. Some commentators, using theoretical models that relied on notions of 'path dependence', drew attention to the way in which social phenomena that first manifested themselves in the years of Janos K.adar's gualyssocialisminfluencedthe social changes broughtabout by the globalization of the Hungarian economy. As analysesof 'path dependent' transitionalertedthe scholarlycommunity to the importance of historyto the understanding of the Hungarian transformation, it became clear that the social history of the country under socialism has been markedly underresearched . With the exception of contemporary sociologies of social groups such as industrial labour, the agrarian population or the intelligentsia produced from the mid-I960s onwards therewas little that offeredthose who focused on the present clues as to how society had developed in the four 790 SEER, 79, 4, 2001 decades thatpreceded Hungary'sfirstfreeelections. Huge quantitativestudies of social mobility conducted from the early I96os, however, did offer some information on the composition of society and changes in patterns of social mobility. It is a tremendous merit of this book that the most eminent practitioners of this kind of quantitative sociology, including one of its pioneers the late Rudolf Andorka, have sought to analyse the impact of social change under socialism on Hungarian society under emergent capitalism. This book takes the form of an edited collection ratherthat a monograph. It contains a range of studies. These begin with the general in which the late Rudolf Andorka and IstvAnHarcsa examine what they see as the distorted modernization of Hungarian society that occurred during the socialistyears. The examination of long-term social change per se occupies a disappointingly small part of the book. Aside from Richard Rose's and Tamas Kolosi's introduction, the first chapter by Andorka and Harcsa, as well as Gyorgy Vukinovich'sanalysisof demographictrends,most of the chaptersfocusfirmly on post-i 989 developments. In so doing most of the book acts as a kind of shop window for some of the most significant sociological research on contemporary Hungary. Of particular note is Gyorgy Lengyel's chapter dealing with the post-Communist economic elite which summarizesa decade of considerable and, in Hungary at least, influential research into the beneficiaries of economic transformation. Gabor T6ka provides us with an importantanalysisof the socialbasesof partysupportduringthe I990S raising important questions...