Uneven transformations: Space, economy and society 20 years after the collapse of state socialism

Abstract

Writing about the social and political revolts of 1968, Umberto Eco argued that one of the dominant narratives used in interpreting the impact of these events suggests that ‘[e]ven though all visible traces are gone ... it profoundly changed all of us’ (Newsweek, 22 December 1986: 49; quoted in Watts, 2001). Twenty years after the equally, if not more, profound collapse of state socialism in Eastern and Central Europe (ECE), the visible traces of the events of 1989 and the preceding era of state socialist collectivism remain very apparent in the geographies of ‘post-socialism’. But, just like the events of 1968, the effective collapse of the state-centrist, collectivist and planned model of development across one of the largest parts of the world not only led to a profound, highly uneven and contested set of transformations within the region, but has also meant that, in the words of Stenning (2010), ‘we are all postsocialist now’. The collapse of the collectivist and central planning systems, for example, has been one of the many forces that have been used for legitimizing the ascendancy of neoliberal capitalist relations around the world (not just in the ‘post-socialist’ world) – notwithstanding the dramatic global economic crisis that this particular model of development led to in 2008/9. As Pickles points out in this issue, however, ‘1989’ was not simply an unproblematic ‘ending’, even in Eastern and Central Europe and the former Soviet Union (FSU), as the examples of Moldova and Russia attest (Pickles, 2010). ‘1989’ did, however, dramatically change all of us. The events of 1989, then, have their parallels with those of 1968, as Antonio Negri has recently argued: ‘To my mind, 1989 corresponds to 1968. While 1968 had broken down the walls that closed our society, 1989 broke down the wall that defended “real socialism”, from the world market’ (Negri, 2006: 1). However, what Negri fails to account for in this passage is that other events of 1968 – other than the student and popular revolts in ‘the West’ – also consolidated, albeit temporarily, the regimes that came struggling to an end in 1989. Indeed, certainly in the case of the former Czechoslovakia following the Warsaw Pact military invasion, if not elsewhere as well, 1968 also led to the firm re-establishment of