Divide and Pacify: Strategic Social Policy and Political Protests in Post-Communist Democracies by Pieter Vanhuysse (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 179 The book develops recent scepticism about dvoeverie. Although many peasant traditionswere derived and developed from the pagan past, itwasn't that peasants remained quasi-pagan; their world outlook was essentially Christian. In fact, itwas often precisely because it centred on God and 'the Mount ofOlives, Rome, orJerusalem' (p. 190), rather thanKyiv orMoscow, that peasant 'superstition' was opposed by modern secular nationalisms. Chris tine Worobec stresses that peasants' elaborate death rituals were entirely in keeping with Christian teaching on immortality. Peasant beliefs also made sense in terms of their everyday lives. The idea that one should not over-grieve the loss of children under the age of seven, as they would serve as angels in Heaven, was some solace in societies where infant deaths were all too common. Readers looking for embryonic 'Ukrainian' and 'Russian' popular religions will find some limited evidence. Ukraine popular religion was to an extent distinct from a 'Russian' institutional Church, but so was everyday practice inRussia often enough (p. 14).But most 'popular' practices ignored putative national boundaries, or were specific to particular regions. Certainly, there were no general packages that could be labelled 'popular Ukrainian' and 'popular Russian'. However, peasant society often provided services that the institutional Church could not. Chernichky(devout spinsters) oversaw funeral preparations and ritual; literate peasants read the psalter, although the clergy disapproved of wailers, who were on the wane by the late nineteenth century. Much of what was 'popular' was the common culture of 'Holy Rus", which by the nineteenth century, as Yaroslav Hrytsak has recently pointed out, was a concept that was only vaguely rooted in any specific sense of territory (Hrytsak,Prorok u svoi vitchyzni: Franko tayoho spil'nota,Kiev, 2006, p. 137). This is a fascinating book, filledwith rich ethnographic detail and cultural observation. The contributions maintain a uniformly high academic standard. I could have done with an index, but this is a minor quibble. UCL SSEES Andrew Wilson Vanhuysse, Pieter. Divide and Pacify: Strategic Social Policy and Political Protests in Post-Communist Democracies. Central European University Press, Budapest and New York, 2006. xiii + 170 pp. Notes. Index. ?21.95: 32.95: $41.95. Pieter Vanhuysse's thought-provoking study takes as its starting point the question firstposed by Bela Greskovits in his seminal work The Political Economy ofProtest and Patience (Budapest and New York, 1998): why did widespread early predictions that post-Communist democracies would be convulsed by Latin American-style waves of social protest prove so wrong? Greskovits concluded that the answer laywith Communism's demobilization of Eastern European societies; a lack of credible populist ideologies in the region; and a more elderly demographic profile. l80 SEER, 87, I, JANUARY 200g However, Vanhuysse suggests, the remarkable social quiescence of post Communist 'losers' cannot credibly be attributed either to such structural factors or to competing notions of ideologically-induced compliance. The huge social costs of transition were concentrated among older workers in industrial regions and rural communities with well established and cohesive social networks, creating a viable basis fordisruptive anti-reformmobilization. Moreover, extensive Communist-era trade union organization represented a powerful potential vehicle for social resistance. Instead, he argues, the answer is to be found in CEE governments' strategic use of social and economic policies after 1989 to pre-empt disruptive protest. Although initially generous unemployment benefit seems to have been common across the region, the overall mix of strategic social policies varied significandy between states. Poland and Hungary combined high early levels of unemployment with 'great abnormal pensioner booms', which were driven by attractive packages for early retirement or transfer to disability status. In the Czech Republic, by contrast, mass unemployment was staved off with active labour policies and delays in enterprise restructuring linked to incomplete bankruptcy legislation and the effects of voucher privatization. The common element was, however, that cohesive 'loser' groups were neutralized by being dividing into three subgroups with lower mobilization capacities and divergent interests: the unemployed, stillemployed and prema turely retired. Policies which at firstsight appeared fiscally and economically irrational or naive thus had an important political rationale in securing political breathing space for reform policies. Indeed, arguably, the book sug gests, theymade a key contribution to the subsequent...