Balázs Venkovits, editor. Stalwart Peasants, Undesirables, Refugees: Central and Eastern European Immigration to Canada

Voice of the Silenced Peoples in the Global Cold War: The Assembly of Captive European Nations, 1954–1972

The form of racism the book calls Eastern Europeanism assumes that anything that happens in ‘Eastern Europe’ also happens in all other parts of it, and that most developments there have causes different from the West. This exaggerated East–West distinction incorporates as a matter of course Central Europe in ‘Eastern Europe’. Doing so serves the interests of Western business, seeking to exploit Central European labour within the framework of the EU free market, while also delegitimizing potential competition from local businesspeople. At the same time, the rhetoric of East–West difference helps to turn Western European labour against perceived competition from Central European migrants. Against this background, the chapter explores scholarship in ‘Central and Eastern European Studies’ that claims, incorrectly, that the East–West difference seen during the Cold War actually goes back, in much the same form, to the Enlightenment period. Like Orientalism, sometimes Central and Eastern European Studies produces its own object, and so justifies a distinction embedded in global inequalities.

Despite mortality improvements across Europe, premature mortality notably persists in Central and East European countries. This study is aimed to assess premature mortality variations across Central and East European countries from 1970 to 2019, employing both classical premature mortality indicators and the more nuanced lifespan disparity indicators. Specifically, the analysis utilised the proportion of deaths up to the age of 65, lifespan disparity, and an age threshold derived from lifespan disparity to explore mortality trends. The findings reveal a stable reduction in premature mortality within Central European and Baltic countries, contrasting with the pronounced fluctuations experienced by East European countries. Remarkably, Czechia, Slovakia, and Estonia demonstrating the most significant progress in mitigating premature deaths. The trajectory of premature mortality in Central and Eastern European nations underscores the influence of socioeconomic crises and distinct alcohol consumption patterns on mortality trends. The study highlights the limitations of employing a static age threshold of 65 years in analysis of premature mortality, which fails to capture the full scope of premature mortality realities, particularly among females. However, the traditional metric of deaths before age 65 provides a broadly understandable measure, the nuanced insights offered by lifespan disparity and its derived age threshold enhance our understanding of premature mortality dynamics. Recognising the strengths and limitations of each indicator is essential for advancing our grasp of premature mortality and for refining the development and execution of targeted public health interventions throughout Europe.

The paper deals with the possibilities of closer integration and deeper cooperation of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe - Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria and Austria. The paper will address the alternative of integration in the form of regional cooperation, independent of the patronage of Western Europe and major powers such as the US, Russia and Germany, which could act as a balancer in international relations and as an element of European security and lead to the creation of new security structures as well as a new European security architecture based on a strong Central European peacekeeping force. It is based on the idea of Milan Hodža, who in his work on the Danube Federation proposed the creation of a federation of Central and Eastern European countries in the Danube basin with common institutions and common policies. However, Hodža extended the project of this cooperation in Central Europe to the area from Gdańsk to Thessaloniki, even in Ankara. His proposal can be considered partially fulfilled in the current European Union. The beginnings of this federation can be considered Little Entente from the years 1921 - 1939, in which Hodža participated. The paper will work with the hypothesis based on the Hodža’s opinion, that “… the Central European Federation must be a bastion of the national and social security of its peoples" and that "European security cannot build on Western democracy alone. Its construction requires further reliable support. It is Central Europe. The same is in the interests of European democracy: in addition to the West, it must have strong support in Central Europe, and therefore the unity, if not the identity, of the democratic ideals and institutions of Western and Central European democracy provides satisfactory prospects ... Every nation, big or small, must survive and will only survive if it contributes an appropriate share to the common moral and material values of humanity. A capable nation excels only in international competition, but in order to excel, it must have moral support ...“

Ten years of transition processes in the former communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEEC) have changed the ownership structure as well as the structures and legal forms of enterprises in agriculture considerably. The farm structures in Eastern Europe developed under the influence of various collectivisation models. These influenced the course of the transformation process and therefore the development of new entrepreneurial and farm structures to a great extent. In addition also the effects of other political, social and economic factors with different weights can be noticed in the individual countries. Considering labour organisation and relation to markets, four different types of farm enterprises have evolved in the Central European and East European states during the transformation process: (a) Family farms for a mere self-sufficiency (Subsistence farms) (b) Family farms with a predominant orientation towards the market (c) Market-oriented joined family farms (d) Market-oriented farms with hired labour In the future farms and agricultural enterprises of all different types can have good prospects and therefore also the different sizes connected with them. For this reason the same should be valid for all types of farms and in the long term competition should decide, which types are going to compete. The preference or discrimination of a certain type by the agrarian policy needs to be avoided. The state also needs to develop the infrastructure in rural areas, to improve the prospects of farms that are deprived in this respect.

The aim of the present paper is to contribute to promoting a discourse of Central and Eastern European legal identity, underscoring the legal-cultural bonds of legal cutlure in the region, based on a common past, a common juridico-political mentality and a common present predicament. To this end, the paper posits regarding Central Europe as being a legal family in its own right, distinct both from other legal families in Europe. The paper contends that legal taxonomy is a matter of social construction of reality and has a disciplining function. Considering the ‘death and burial’ of the Socialist Legal Family as the founding myth of Central European regional juridical identity, the paper posits the succession of the former by two coexisting legal families: the Central European and the Eastern European/Eurasian ones. However, the paper does not intend to give definitive answers to the questions of legal taxonomy of the post-Soviet/post-socialist juridical space; its ambition is more moderate – to put forward a number of arguments in favour of a Central European legal family with the intent of destabilising the hegemonic ‘return to Europe’ approach and fostering a discussion of comparatists, legal theorists and socio-legal scientists focused on the problem of legal identity of our region. Keywords: comparative law, legal taxonomy, Central Europe, Central European Legal Family, Socialist Legal Family, legal identity, legal culture, legal tradition

SEER, 97, 4, OCTOBER 2019 778 Janevski, Ana and Marcoci, Roxana, with Ksenia Nouril (eds). Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe: A Critical Anthology. Primary Documents. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2018. 408 pp. Illustrations. Figures. Notes. Index. $40.00: £31.00 (paperback). The difficulty of defining Central and Eastern European art after the region’s transition from socialism to neoliberal capitalism hangs over the introduction to Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe, edited by Ana Janevski and Roxana Marcoci with Ksenia Nouril. Keen to avoid reifying the East/West binary, the editors of this ambitious follow-up to MoMA’s Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s (New York, 2002) turn to Jelena Vesić, an independent curator and member of the Belgrade-based Prelom collective. Vesić claims that ‘Eastern European art’ can refer to everything from all art made in conditions marked by socialism to only art that engages with the socialist legacy — or even only those practices that were supported by the Soros Centers for Contemporary Art (SCCAs), a network of twenty institutions established around the region to grease the wheels of post-socialist transition in the 1990s (p. 13). Wisely, the volume avoids any clear consensus on the meaning of Central and Eastern Europe and its art as it divides its seventy-five contributions into seven themed chapters rather than organizing them into geographical or chronological schema. Certain themes, particularly the focus on activism and collectivity in the second chapter, reflect the collaborative structure of the book itself, which is a product of multiple research trips and seminars organized by the Central and Eastern Europe group of MoMA’s Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) project between 2015 and 2017 (these exchanges are listed at the end of the book). Each section comprises a mix of re-publications from English and other languages and newly commissioned texts. Each chapter begins with three new texts: the first is a theoretical introduction by an outside adviser and expert in the field, the second a chapter summary by a C-MAP member and the third an interview with an artist or collective. The first chapter, titled ‘Reckoning with History’, delves into the legacy of the socialist era. In an email conversation with compatriot Jonas Valatkevičius from 2000, Deimantas Narkevičius emerges as the rare Lithuanian artist ready to violate a major taboo on the country’s art scene by engaging with history through the prism of personal experience. Exploring the extra-legal codes that guide interpersonal conduct in post-Soviet society, Narkevičius frames them as a kind of popular truth that protects against both the obligatory rule of law and the trauma of processing past events (pp. 37–38). Socialist baggage remains a topic of interest in the second chapter, ‘Exhibiting the “East” since 1989’. In one highlight, Polish art historian Piotr Piotrowski argues that REVIEWS 779 the unstable nature of borders after the fall of socialism compelled Central European artists to submit their work for Western inspection, and that the thematics of transition and EU integration of the early 1990s and early 2000s, respectively, were informed by geopolitical lines that ‘exist and at the same time do not exist’ (p. 85). As the post-Communist context began to retreat from view, interest shifted from centre/periphery relations to relations between various peripheries (p. 85). Through all this, the concept of Central Europe only maintained coherence from the perspective of actually existing socialism. Once its memory began to wane, the concept was kept alive by nostalgia for the Hapsburg Empire in countries like Hungary and Czechoslovakia (p. 84). Chapter three expands this look at the ideological value of exhibitions to consider the value of archives. Slovenian curator Zdenka Badovinac leads the charge with a look at the strategy of self-historicization adopted by artists at a time when state institutions either ignored or condemned the neo-avant-garde (p. 145). Key projects include Romanian Lia Perjovschi’s Contemporary Art Archive (begun in 1985) and East Art Map (begun in 2001) by the Slovenian retro-avant-garde group IRWIN. The Romanian collective...

European brown hare, Lepus europaeus, from Central and Eastern European countries (Hungary, Poland, Serbia, Lithuania, Romania, Georgia and Italy) were sampled, and phylogenetic analyses were carried out on two datasets: 1.) 137 sequences (358 bp) of control region mtDNA; and 2.) 105 sequences of a concatenated fragment (916 bp), including the cytochrome b, tRNA-Thr, tRNA-Pro and control region mitochondrial DNA. Our sequences were aligned with additional brown hare sequences from GenBank. A total of 52 and 51 haplotypes were detected within the two datasets, respectively, and assigned to two previously described major lineages: Anatolian/Middle Eastern (AME) and European (EUR). Furthermore, the European lineage was divided into two subclades including South Eastern European (SEE) and Central European (CE). Sympatric distribution of the lineages of the brown hare in South-Eastern and Eastern Europe revealed contact zones there. BAPS analysis assigned sequences from L. europaeus to five genetic clusters, whereas CE individuals were assigned to only one cluster, and AME and SEE sequences were each assigned to two clusters. Our findings uncover numerous novel haplotypes of Anatolian/Middle Eastern brown hare outside their main range, as evidence for the combined influence of Late Pleistocene climatic fluctuations and anthropogenic activities in shaping the phylogeographic structure of the species. Our results support the hypothesis of a postglacial brown hare expansion from Anatolia and the Balkan Peninsula to Central and Eastern Europe, and suggest some slight introgression of individual haplotypes from L. timidus to L. europaeus.

Chapter 5.2 - Czech Republic and other Central European and Eastern European countries

The relevance of the paper is predetermined by the fact that nearly 75% of the population in the European Union live in cities, so the European Union is committed to making cities more sustainable. Thus, recent years have seen an increasing need for studies on urban indexes measuring European cities as well as those on the evaluation of the indexes. The purpose of this paper is to prove that Central and Eastern European medium-sized cities as regional centers are an under-researched area in social science research. While one typical trend of this research is ranking based on various aspects as well as the determination of leading cities, the regional centers of Central and Eastern European countries are only tangentially included in this research. The research objectives: The analysis examines 94 regional centers in ten Central and Eastern European countries (Austria, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Croatia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, and Slovenia) with regional functions at NUTS2 level based on a total of 41 different economic indexes and rankings. The research was based on the Eurostat Urban Audit database and the keyword search engine of scientific search engines such as Web of Science, Science direct, and Google Scholar. The research question: Which Central and Eastern European regional centers are examined by the different city rankings and indexes? The research results and conclusions are the following: 1) As a result of the research, it was found that out of the 94 regional centers, the most examined cities are Krakow, Wroclaw and Brno. A randomly selected city is included in only 11% of the studied rankings and indexes. 2) However, half of the Central and Eastern European capitals are considered areas for city rankings and indexes. The most studied capitals are, ranked in order of focus; Budapest and Prague, Vienna, Ljubljana, Bratislava, Sofia, Warsaw and Zagreb. 3) Based on the correlation analysis, we found a strong relationship between two indicators (Cultural Creative Cities Index and Smart Cities Index) which suggests that it would make sense to explore further relationships for which it is indispensable to have the right quality and quantity of data. All in all, it would be worthwhile creating an economic index measuring the performance of Central and Eastern European regional centers which could help regional and city governments as well as potential investors get an up-to-date and comprehensive picture of regional centers in the region.

COVID -19 pandemic, surveys on elderly about vaccination. National and European perspectives

The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA), the socialist bloc's economic organisation, was dissolved in June 1991. After the revolutions of 1989, which brought down the socialist regimes in Eastern Europe, the CMEA member states negotiated for the establishment of a successor organisation, the Organisation for International Economic Cooperation (OIEC). Its function would have been to act as a temporary coordination forum to ease the members’ transition to a market economy. The OIEC was never established because the three Central European members, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland, decided in early 1991 to withdraw from all regional integration plans led by the USSR. They wanted to protect their newly gained sovereignty and thus sought to dissolve all socialist-era tools of Soviet control, including the CMEA and its potential successor. Membership of the European Communities – the Central Europeans’ main foreign policy goal – remained out of their reach in the immediate post-1989 era. Therefore, the Visegrád Three, as they became to be called, tightened their sub-regional collaboration and created the Central European Free Trade Agreement at the end of 1992.

Central and Eastern Europe in the Process of Globalization and Europeanization: Comparing the Czech Republic and Poland☆

Prologue: The Westernisation of the East and the Easternisation of the West Hans-W Micklitz 1. Introduction: Revisiting the Transformative Power of Europe Michal Bobek Part I: Judicial Reasoning 2. Formalism in Judicial Reasoning: Is Central and Eastern Europe a Special Case? Peter Cserne 3. EU Law and Central European Judges: Administrative Judiciaries in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland Ten Years after Accession Marcin Matczak, Matyas Bencze and Zdenek Kuhn 4. The Impact of EU Membership on Private Law Adjudication in Poland: A Case Study of the Polish Supreme Court's Case Law on Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Rafal Manko 5. The Aversion to Judicial Discretion in Civil Procedure in Post-Communist Countries: Can the Influence of EU Law Change it? Ales Galic 6. The Remains of the Authoritarian Mentality within the Slovene Judiciary Jan Zobec and Jernej Letnar Cernic 7. From a Discourse on 'Communist Legacy' Towards Capacity Building to Better Manage the Rule of Law Bostjan Zalar Part II: Institutions and Procedures 8. 'Euro-products' and Institutional Reform in Central and Eastern Europe: A Critical Study in Judicial Councils Michal Bobek and David Kosar 9. The Impossibility of Being a National and a European Judge at the Same Time: Doctrinal Rifts Between Hungarian and EU Administrative Law Marton Varju and Andras Gyorgy Kovacs 10. Changes in the Level of the National Judicial Protection Under the EU Influence on the Example of the Polish Legal System Nina Poltorak 11. When David Teaches EU Law to Goliath: A Generational Upheaval in the Making Alexander Kornezov 12. Who are the Actors Mobilising Discourse among Courts? Erhard Blankenburg 13. Transformation in the Eye of the Beholder Matej Avbelj Part III: Constitutional Courts 14. Invalidity of EU Law before the Polish Constitutional Tribunal: Court of Old Closure(s) or New Opening(s)? Tomasz Tadeusz Koncewicz 15. Constitutional Sovereignty in Post-Sovereign Jurisprudence of the Czech Constitutional Court: From the Lisbon Judgments to the Landtova Ultra Vires Controversy Jiri Priban 16. 'Keeping the Faith' : The Trials and Tribulations of the Hungarian Constitutional Court in Following its European Vocation Allan F Tatham 17. Central and Eastern European Constitutional Courts Facing New Challenges: Ten Years of Experience Marek Safjan 18. Conclusions: Of Form and Substance in Central European Judicial Transitions Michal Bobek

The pattern of agricultural price distortions in Central and Eastern Europe