Post-communist East Central Europe Research Articles

Disillusionment and the Growth of Mass-Level Euroscepticism in Post-Communist East-Central Europe

This paper seeks to test if the disillusionment theory developed by Sokolov et al. (2018) to explain the rise of anti-Americanism in post-Soviet Russia, can also explain the recent growth of Euroscepticism in East-Central Europe (ECE). We provide anecdotal evidence of anti-EU disillusionment in the region and then test several empirical implications of the disillusionment theory using mass-level survey data from the European Social Survey (ESS). Our empirical findings are, however, contradictory. This suggests that the disillusionment model cannot be directly applied to the ECE case and should be modified to some extent. We propose two potential modifications. The first is based on David Laitin’s concept of “the most favored lords” and the second underscores the benefits that EU membership offers to the upper strata of Eastern European societies.

Resilient incumbents: Ethnic minority political parties and voter accountability

Are ethnic minority parties held accountable by voters for their participation in governing coalitions in the same way as parties drawing votes from the ethnic majority? Scholars have shown that incumbents in postcommunist East Central Europe are routinely punished in elections, particularly in the face of poor economic performance. However, it remains to be seen if ethnic minority political parties are similarly punished by voters when they join coalitions. I argue that ethnic minority parties are less likely to be punished than their fellow coalition members for poor economic performance, enjoying the benefits of a “captive” electorate. Using data sets of electoral and economic data at the national and subnational levels in Bulgaria, Romania, and Slovakia, I find that ethnic minority parties, on average, gain votes after serving in government, while mainstream parties almost always lose. This finding holds when controlling for economic factors. Additionally, I show that while mainstream incumbents are punished or rewarded accordingly for changes in gross domestic product growth, ethnic minority parties do not see their vote share being impacted. Understanding the unique role of ethnic minority parties in party systems enhances our understanding of the dynamics of political representation, party competition, and coalition building in ethnically heterogeneous states.

Encountering the victims of Romanian communism: young people and empathy in a memorial museum

ABSTRACTMany states in post-communist East-Central Europe have established memorial museums which aim to tell the story of suffering under the communist regime. They also seek to encourage visitors to develop empathy for the victims of communist repression. This paper explores the responses of a group of young people to a memorial museum in Romania (Sighet Memorial Museum), focusing on how these visitors experienced empathy for the victims of communist-era violence. Data were collected using focus groups. Most participants showed a degree of empathy for the victims of suffering but this was usually shallow in nature. However some visitors displayed more “active” empathy (characterized by deeper imaginative and cognitive engagement). The paper explores how both the design and environment of the museum and the background experiences of visitors influenced the development of empathy. It argues that empathy is not an automatic response to suffering and instead can be considered as an interaction between the design of the museum and the background knowledge of visitors. The paper argues that empathy is an important means for young people to participate in remembering the communist period, and is a means to make “prosthetic” memories of an authoritarian past which they have not experienced first-hand.

Problem oder Lösung? Akademische Internationalisierung in der Humangeographie der zeitgenössischen Periode in Ostmitteleuropa

Academic internationalisation has remarkably accelerated in the contemporary period, opening up a lot of opportunities but also presenting new challenges for scholars. This paper scrutinises the complex impact of this process on human geographies in post-Communist East Central Europe. It discusses the language gap, the differences between dominant approaches in various national contexts, and the role of path-dependence and inherited structures from the Communist past, along with their impact on scholarly practice. It also investigates the uneven consequences of internationalisation at various scales and for different generations in academia. Finally, it underlines that these consequences, although they are comparable with similar trends all around the world, show some peculiar features in East Central Europe. This results from a specific, and, in global comparison, much more radical kind of neoliberalisation in this region after 1989, and from the fact that these changes have taken place in a special post-Communist context, with the neoliberal project and remnants of the Communist heritage making up a peculiar hybrid.

The “Boomerang Effect” of Kin-state Activism: Cross-border Ties and the Securitization of Kin Minorities

ABSTRACTThe kin-state phenomenon is often understood as unifying and inclusive: states reach out beyond their borders to engage with co-ethnics living abroad, thus maintaining historic “national” ties, and fostering connections and contacts. But kin-state activism may also be dangerous and conflictual, when a kin-state's transborder projects anger neighboring governments, leading to the securitization of kin minorities and the destabilizing of inter-ethnic and regional relations. Moreover, certain types of kin-state behavior may divide the very communities that it seeks to unite. In post-communist East-Central Europe, Hungary and Russia have been pursuing kin-state activism since the early 1990s, using a range of tools and strategies. In recent years, the actions of both kin-states have had a “boomerang effect,” producing unexpected outcomes for kin minorities and for the kin-state itself. Drawing on evidence from the two cases, this paper explores how kin-state activism can backfire and trigger a securitization of cross-border relations.

The Ukraine crisis and European memory politics of the Second World War

ABSTRACTIn Europe, commemorations of the seventieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War have reiterated the existence of different national narratives of the historical event. These narratives can be grouped into four distinct memory discourses. Each discourse is dominant in a particular European country or region: Russia, post-communist East-Central Europe, Germany and the Western European countries that fought against the Third Reich. On 8–9 May 2015, the four narratives found expression in distinct European commemorative locations: Moscow, Gdansk, Berlin and London/Paris. The paper argues that, while the four narratives have existed for several decades, the Russian narrative has recently been reformulated with a more nationalistic rhetoric and used as a conceptual framework to explain and interpret the crisis in Ukraine. Simultaneously, East-Central European narratives have been radicalised too, while nationalist discourses and highly controversial historical figures have been subsumed in a new post-Maidan official narrative in Ukraine. This further politicised the memory of the Second World War, leading to dissonance between the Russian and the German and Western European narratives and, most notably, to a radical discursive clash between the Russian and the East-Central European memory discourses.

Thy Will Be Done?

Levels of both religiosity and of religious influence on public policy vary enormously across the countries of post-communist East Central Europe. This variation poses a challenge to existing explanations, which have focused on religious competition and alliances with political parties to explain religious participation and policy influence, respectively. The legacy of religious nationalism instead helps to explain both the vibrancy of religious participation and the influence of churches on democratic public policy. This variation also calls for greater scrutiny of “historical legacies”: while some patterns are durable and reach back centuries, others are recent innovations.

Lustration (administrative justice) and closure in post-communist East Central Europe

This article discusses the various dimensions of East Central Europe’s closure with the communist past, and then assesses the impact of transitional justice measures in the closure with communism. Special attention is paid to the so called ‘lustration’, which in the view of the author performs important functions in transitions to democratic regimes, related to the reconstruction of a moral and rational community, and to the closure with the communist past. The article shows that the failures and controversies surrounding ‘lustration’ were due to its radical potential of reconstruction of a moral-rational democratic community, and also to specific socio-political factors of the post-communist ECE. What specific features of ECE post-communist transitions and of lustration conducted to the recurrence of debates related to the communist past is a question that has not been addressed heretofore, despite a fairly well-developed literature on post-communist administrative justice.

Correlates of National-level Homicide Variation in Post-Communist East-Central Europe

This article examines whether correlates of cross-national homicide variation tested with data from highly developed, predominantly Western nations could also explain homicide rates in East-Central Europe. Using pooled time-series analyses of data from nine countries from 1990 through 2003, this study found that homicide rates were negatively related to GDP/ capita and positively related to ethnic diversity and population density. They were also negatively related to the percentage of young people and not significantly related to income inequality or divorce rates. This article also investigates whether conditions specific to the post-communist transformations contributed to homicide variation. Findings indicate that progressive reforms toward democratization and marketization decreased homicide rates. The discussion uses the socio-historical context of the nations to explain these results.

Reconceptualizing the Social: East Central Europe and the New Sociocultural History

This introductory essay reviews recent debates on social history, with a focus on the revival of this field of studies in post-communist East Central Europe and its potential impact on rejuvenating approaches to the social history of Europe. The first part of the essay provides a brief overview of the emergence of social history as a reaction to the dominant political history of the nineteenth century and its crystallization in different national schools, and highlights recent responses to the poststructuralist and postmodern critiques of “the social.” The second part focuses on traditions of social history research in East Central Europe, taking Poland and Romania as main examples. The third part summarizes the main claims of the articles included in this issue and evaluates their implications for future research. It is argued that, at first glance, post-communist historiography in East Central Europe provides the picture of a discipline in transformation, still struggling to break up with the past and to rebuild its institutional framework, catching up with recent trends and redefining its role in continental and global historiography. The recent attempts to invigorate research in traditional fields of social history might seem largely obsolete, not only out of tune with international developments but also futile reiterations of vistas that have been for long experimented with and superseded in Western Europe. At closer scrutiny, however, historiography in East Central Europe appears—unequal and variegated as it is—as a laboratory for historical innovation and a field of experimentation, and interaction of scholars from various disciplines and scholarly traditions, in which old and new trends amalgamate in peculiar ways. It is suggested that the tendency to reconceptualize the “social” that we currently witness in humanities and social sciences worldwide could be not only reinforced but also cross-fertilized by the “social turn” in East Central Europe, potentially leading to novel approaches.

Negotiating Welfare in Postcommunist States

Welfare states everywhere have been under pressure to retrench and restructure, to reduce public expenditures, and to adopt market-conforming welfare models. Such pressures have been especially intense in postcommunist East Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. As these countries moved into market transition and recession dur ing the early 1990s, their inherited systems of broad, basic social provision became financially unsustainable and ineffective. In response, most governments initiated reform projects based on a liberal paradigm of reduced subsidies and entitlements and social sector privatization, projects that would move the balance in welfare provision away from the state and far toward the market. Yet the patterns of retrenchment and lib eralization in postcommunist states diverged in puzzling ways. In Russia the government's liberalizing welfare reform project was blocked for most of the 1990s. Inherited statist welfare programs and structures were kept in place amidst ongoing economic decline. Liberal restructuring proceeded only at the end of the 1990s, when it coincided with economic recovery. The transitional democracy in Poland increased welfare expenditures as its economy declined and liberalized welfare struc tures gradually over the decade. The authoritarian post-Soviet regime in Kazakhstan implemented deep expenditure cuts and radical liberalization. By the end of the 1990s these three states had institutionalized distinct welfare models that differed in expendi ture patterns, public-private mixes, and measures of exclusion and state withdrawal. Why did postcommunist welfare states produce such divergent trajectories of change and outcomes from similar beginnings? Part of the answer lies in the differing intensity of downward economic pressures. While all postcommunist states experienced transitional recessions, East Central European states had much shallower downturns than the former Soviet states and recov ered sooner, allowing them to better maintain welfare provision. But economic explana tions are limited in accounting for patterns of change. Postcommunist states behaved differently with regard to welfare expenditures even in the depths of recession: Poland increased overall welfare effort (that is, social expenditures as percent of GDP); Russia sustained previous levels; and Kazakhstan cut. Nor did the extent and timing of their movement toward liberalization correlate with economic and fiscal pressures. Poland introduced liberalizing structural reforms sooner than Russia despite better economic and fiscal conditions. Kazakhstan liberalized more rapidly and deeply than Russia while following a similar economic trajectory. Moreover, all three had substantially recovered

Héritages, concurrence entre les partis et gouvernance de la fonction publique dans la Hongrie postcommuniste

Legacies, Party Competition and Civil Service Governance in Post-Communist Hungary This paper examines the impact of the legacy of the past on administrative reform trajectories in post-communist East Central Europe. It argues that East Central Europe has numerous different legacies that have the potential to matter for post-communist reforms, that any legacy explanation of administrative reform in East Central Europe is required to spell out the causal mechanisms that link the legacy of the past and the outcomes of the post-communist present, and that the interaction effects between the legacy of the past and other important drivers of administrative reforms need to be considered, for instance, European integration and the structure of party political competition. The investigation of the politicisation of the civil service in Hungary shows that the main influence of the legacy is exercised through the impact of the late communist legacy on the structure of party competition. The legacy of the past has contributed to the polarisation between an ex-communist and an anticommunist political camp in Hungary. The legacy also continues to shape the identities and interaction orientations of key political and administrative actors vis-a-vis civil service governance. The legacy of the past does therefore exercise an important, if indirect, influence on present day civil service governance.

The historical foundations of party politics in post-communist East Central Europe

This article gauges how plausible deep historical explanations are in accounting for the emergence of particular types of parties in post-communist Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. Generating and testing hypotheses from the centuries-long historical logic of Lipset and Rokkan's model of cleavage and party development, it finds that the historical foundations of post-communist parties may be deeper than most analyses assume and that the influence of the communist era may be less than is often believed. While a full understanding of the emergence of post-communist party types requires both historical and non-historical explanations, historical ones should not be underestimated.

State and organized interests in post-communist Hungarian politics

The paper reviews different approaches to the study of both the state and civil society in post-communist East Central Europe and questions the predominant view in the literature that civil society in the region is weak. Existing research has focused on the one hand, on the elitist character of the state and the growing strength of the central executive within government, and on the other hand, on the low levels of grassroots involvement in interest groups and civic associations. Drawing on data from two different research projects on Hungary, one on the state, the other on interest group politics, the paper suggests there is evidence of more effective interest representation and more dynamic inter-relations between state and society than is usually assumed.

State-labour relations in East Central Europe: explaining variations in union effectiveness

The article offers an explanation for variations in the effectiveness of trade unions to obtain legislative and policy concessions in peak-level tripartite negotiations in post-communist East Central Europe. It shows that standard interpretations for such variationsfocused on structural legacies, modes of transition, political cycles and institutional differencescannot account for the problem at hand. Instead, I argue that the sources of these variations are to be attributed to distinct paths of statelabour relations, which are the product of continuous strategic interactions that crucially depend on power dynamics between the main actors. To present a mechanism through which these paths evolve, the article sketches a model of governmentunion interactions that combines institutional and behavioural variables. I propose a set of hypotheses regarding the conditions that determine initial choice of strategies and factors that influence continuation or modification of these strategies later on. By analysing the cases of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, the article further illustrates how these interactions shape tripartite institutions in such a way that they start reflecting accentuated power disparities between the contending actors, thereby limiting future choice sets for weaker actors.

State-labour relations in East Central Europe: explaining variations in union effectiveness

The article offers an explanation for variations in the effectiveness of trade unions to obtain legislative and policy concessions in peak-level tripartite negotiations in post-communist East Central Europe. It shows that standard interpretations for such variations-focused on structural legacies, modes of transition, political cycles and institutional differences-cannot account for the problem at hand. Instead, I argue that the sources of these variations are to be attributed to distinct paths of state-labour relations, which are the product of continuous strategic interactions that crucially depend on power dynamics between the main actors. To present a mechanism through which these paths evolve, the article sketches a model of government-union interactions that combines institutional and behavioural variables. I propose a set of hypotheses regarding the conditions that determine initial choice of strategies and factors that influence continuation or modification of these strategies later on. By analysing the cases of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, the article further illustrates how these interactions shape tripartite institutions in such a way that they start reflecting accentuated power disparities between the contending actors, thereby limiting future choice sets for weaker actors.

Western influences in the print media of post-communist East Central Europe

Western influences in the print media of post-communist East Central Europe

Inter-Party Mobility among Parliamentary Candidates in Post-Communist East Central Europe

The development of stable partisan commitments among political elites is crucial for party-system institutionalization in the new democracies of post-communist Europe. Little is known, however, about the partisan behavior of those who compete for national office. This study begins to fill this gap through an analysis of inter-party mobility among all candidates who ran for the lower house of parliament in two pairs of consecutive elections in Poland (1991–3 and 1993–7) and in three pairs of consecutive elections in the Czech Republic (1990–2, 1992–6 and 1996–8). We consider the overall extent of inter-party mobility, structural versus voluntary components of mobility, patterns of movement between types of parties and electoral payoffs of stable and shifting partisan affiliations. Although the overall rate of party-switching has declined substantially in the Czech Republic but not in Poland, changes in other characteristics of inter-party mobility indicate that party-system institutionalization is taking place in both countries.

Michael Shafir, Between Denial and “Comparative Trivialization”: Holocaust Negationism in Post-Communist East Central Europe. Jerusalem: Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, ACTA, No. 19, 2002, 84 pp.

Michael Shafir, Between Denial and “Comparative Trivialization”: Holocaust Negationism in Post-Communist East Central Europe. Jerusalem: Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, ACTA, No. 19, 2002, 84 pp.

Political parties after communism: developments in East-Central Europe

Contents: List of Tables and Figures Preface Acknowledgments Abbreviations for Post-Communist Political Parties, by Country Introduction 1 An Overview of Party Development (1850-1989) 2 A New Day: Parties in the Post-Communist Period (1990 to the Present) 3 The Party System: A Product of a Country's History and Culture? 4 The Party System: A Reflection of Social Cleavages? 5 The Party System: A Product of the Rules of the Game? 6 Political Party Development in Post-Communist East-Central Europe: In Search of General Patterns Notes Works Cited Index