Post-socialist Europe Research Articles

Economic marginalization of ethnic minorities in Eastern Europe: A cross-national assessment of self-reported experiences

How has identification and differentiation based on ethnicity shaped the economic experience in postsocialist Europe? We propose that creation of neoliberal capitalism in the context of ethnic conflict led to a sense of economic marginalization of East European ethnic minorities. Findings from Life in Transition Survey analysis show greater economic discontent by ethnic minorities in 2006 than in 1989 and persistent discontent in 2016, controlling for social class standing and other relevant demographics. Economic marginalization may also lead ethnic minorities to support more involvement of state in guaranteeing employment and low prices and to dislike markets as a way to organize the economy, both supported in our data. We conclude by suggesting how our findings about marginalization of ethnic minorities help put into perspective contemporary receptivity of East Europeans (and others) to nationalist and populist leaders.

Recognition at the corporate celebration of Christmas: Freezing the postsocialist gender regime

This article critically examines the perpetuation of gender regimes within postsocialist Europe by analyzing how organizational recognition is performed as part of the corporate celebration of Christmas. A critical ethnography was conducted at a male-dominated company in postsocialist Hungary. The article’s findings align with three corporate Christmas scenes: the company owner’s speech, an award ceremony for families, and an award ceremony for the best employee. This study contributes to critical organization studies by advancing an understanding of the postsocialist gender regime and those ideological forms of recognition that invisibly reproduce it through the seemingly innocent practices of Christmas celebrations. Furthermore, by providing a critical reconceptualization of workplace familism as an ideology, it is argued that it is a central and distinctive element of the gendered subtext of this particular postsocialist gender regime. Ultimately, three different and ritualized forms of pathological recognition (misrecognition, overidentification and reification) are identified, claiming to be constitutive of individual gender identity regulation and extending socioideological control beyond the boundaries of the organization.

Who Cares for Families? Narrative(s) of Return in Postsocialist Europe

This introduction to the thematic cluster “Who Cares for Families? Narrative(s) of Return in Postsocialist Europe” identifies and analyzes its core concept—the narrative of return. Families of today are talked about differently, and how they are narrativized matters. The narrative that stresses that family is under threat and in need of defense or a special form of care, figuring care as restitution of the natural, traditional, or proper family, is termed the narrative of return. The trope of return is strongly normative and non-descriptive, as it relies on mythical temporalities that ought to be restored in our present. The article first defines the choice of concepts—narrative, return, care, and threat. Second, it applies this conceptual frame in the transnational context, particularly within the transnational anti-gender campaigns in the populist moment. Third, it focuses on the postsocialist part of Europe, where, as the entire thematic cluster aims to demonstrate, the narrative of return has gained particular currency. In eastern Europe, these narratives are integral to larger projects of restoration of national agendas and serve as a tool of double emancipation: from the Soviet past and from the present European Union. Political actors using narratives of return advocate and successfully push through fundamental changes in the political frameworks and value systems of the postsocialist countries. In sum, the introduction aims to demonstrate the conceptual background of a political tool.

Performances of Memory

The public space of post-socialist Europe has been marked by contested collective memories in the aftermath of violent invasions and national wars following the collapse of state socialism. This becomes even more evident in the Balkans. What forms of collective resistance can be activated in the aftermath of past atrocities? More crucially, what is the role of actions within communities that have witnessed and survived past atrocities? Examining the relationship between live art and the activist potentials of memory politics, this article explores two contemporary participatory art performances that were created in the aftermath of the Bosnian War (1992–5): Što te nema (Why are you not here?) (2006–20) by artist Aida Šehović and Our Family Garden (2021) by artist and activist Smirna Kulenović. By analysing the distinct ways in which Šehović and Kulenović employ participatory practices of remembering and collective care in their performances, the article also engages with activist interventions such as that by Women in Black (Žene u Crnom), who employ in their protests practices of public mourning. The article argues that such participatory performances that enable collective remembering in the public space function both as acts of affective resistance in the aftermath of violence as practices of care in securing a possible present.

Culture-Led Regeneration of Industrial Brownfield Hosting Temporary Uses: A Post-Socialist Context–Case Study from Novi Sad, Serbia

Utilizing culture as a tool for the regeneration of industrial brownfields represents a fairly new trend in post-socialist Europe. This topic has garnered some academic attention; however, studies primarily originate from EU member states, whereas the examples from non-EU cities remains largely unexplored. In addition, the literature dealing with the temporary creative use of derelict industrial sites in post-socialist cities is scarce. The case study-based paper contributes to filling these voids by investigating the creativity-driven informal activation of the Kineska Quarter in Novi Sad, the second largest city in Serbia and the European Capital of Culture for 2022, and its planned transformation into a creative district. The research aims are to examine the capacity of temporary uses to act as a hard infrastructure of the culture-led regeneration, identify the policy framework that shaped the project and highlight its shortcomings, detect potential sustainability issues, and examine how soft factors affect the use of hard infrastructure. The findings suggest that the redevelopment of a creative brownfield based on the simulation of bottom-up decision-making and hastily developed and blurry regeneration policies lead to uncertainty about its sustainability. They also suggest that post-socialist cities lacking experience in this field necessitate a context-perceptive, socially responsible, and locale-conscious approach to the (then sustainable) culture-led regeneration of spontaneously activated brownfields sites, which requires meaningful and not just pro forma involvement of non-institutional actors in the policy- and decision-making process.

Creating the post-socialist middle-class mother: Global hierarchies and local distinctions

This paper discusses the ways class distinctions are upheld through the performance of culturally valued childcare practices in a post-socialist capital: Sofia. It is based on 19 in-depth interviews, concerned with the mundane everyday lives of first-time middle-class mothers on maternity leave. I use feminist critical discourse analysis to trace the ways classed power shapes the meaning my interviewees attach to their experiences of motherhood. Feminist academic literature on motherhood, generally originating in the global west, has long demonstrated how the labour-intensive, financially demanding and time-consuming practices of middle-class mothers historically inform the very idea of ‘good’ motherhood. Seeing the child as a project in need of managing, via an amalgam of diligent provision of organic home-cooked food options, skilful manoeuvring around pre-school selection and an endless supply of extracurricular activities, has been exposed as middle-class privilege and thoroughly critiqued. These practices are implicitly opposed to the more intuitive parenting styles of the working classes. However, automatically linking specific childcare rituals with a certain class standing is also a symptom of the global inequalities in knowledge production, which tend to naturalise western realities as universal truths. My research shows that class distinction, rather than being produced by the exact practices parents engage in, is the outcome of processes of symbolic and material exclusion through which one imagines oneself as superior. The mothering styles of the socially privileged correlate with the norms enforced by childcare experts and state institutions around the world, but these styles are essentially ‘glocal’ designs. ‘Good’ middle-class mothers in post-socialist Europe anxiously manage their classed performance of motherhood with an awareness of their inferior position in the global class ladder. As such, Bulgarian ‘glocally-appropriate’ parenting merges two symbolic strategies in order to secure a relative and fragile economic privilege: mothers’ preferred childcare styles deploy an array of technologies of exclusion of the socially marginalised poor as well as those perceived as nouveau riche; and they represent an attempt at imagining oneself and her children as ‘civilised’ and valuable Europeans, with a focus on rejecting the country’s socialist past.

Class, Conflict, and Power between Hegemony and Critical Knowledge

This article opens by situating the Yugoslav academic perspectives on class and politics within the framework of recent studies dealing with class in post-socialist Europe. It then presents the ways in which the first Yugoslav dissidents understood the “new class” (the embourgeoisement of the party elite), followed by a review of a large number of studies on the disintegration of workers’ self-management project, students’ protests, and workers’ strikes. The diverse scope of research conducted between the 1960s and 1980s provided a corrective to the League of Communists’ hegemonic perceptions of the growing social inequalities, the causes of the economic crisis, and the stalemates of political decision-making, showing the deepening, while “invisible,” sense of powerlessness among workers and the opaqueness of the polycentric, increasingly fragmenting and clashing centers of political power. In the conclusions, changes in the perceptions of class in post-Yugoslav states are discussed.

Borderlands in European Gender Studies: Feminisms of Postsocialist Europe

Borderlands in European Gender Studies: Feminisms of Postsocialist Europe

Host-Region: Safe Folklore and the Negotiation of Difference In Post-Socialist Diasporas in Newfoundland

Many studies of diasporas focus on (large) locales where sizable diasporic populations provide room for group formation based on a single ethnicity. Scholars often treat such regions as representative of larger units, defining hostland in broad geopolitical categories of countries and even continents. Based on ethnographic research devoted to immigrants from postSocialist Europe and Asia to the Canadian island of Newfoundland, I propose the concept of host-region to emphasize a regional perspective in diaspora studies. The overall small newcomer population and the unique socio-cultural context of the island result in regionally-specific diasporic group-building dynamics, stimulating new Newfoundlanders to expand the notion of their people beyond likeminded co-ethnics. Safe home-region folklore, namely, select cultural expressions that reinforce a sense of unity and do not cause tensions within a group, offers points of connection. However, contrary to many studies that emphasize the notion of commonality within groups, I show that difference, reinforced by continuous turbulence in the home-region, can be equally important in group-building endeavors.

Urban shrinkage in post-socialist countries

The article has two main tasks. On the one hand, it attempts to perform a comparative analysis of the shrinkage process of post-socialist cities in an international perspective and to formulate generalisations and recommendations. On the other hand, it presents the specificity of this process in various national, regional and local contexts. The analysis covers selected countries located in post-socialist Europe (with emphasis on East-Central and Southeast Europe), Russia and China and is focused on three issues: 1) geography of the shrinkage process of post-socialist cities; 2) common and country-specific factors responsible for urban shrinkage; 3) comparative analysis and conclusions in the context of managing urban shrinkage. The article points to the fact that urban shrinkage (especially in terms of demography) is one of the world challenges (with its scale being particularly large in post-socialist Europe), and the COVID-19 pandemic has started to affect its course and spatial distribution. The following key problems associated with the shrinkage of post-socialist cities are identified: 1) overcoming the demographic crisis; 2) demographic compensation for the migration outflow of the population; 3) overcoming the negative consequences of deindustrialization; 4) the problem of “wild” uncontrolled suburbanization, etc.

Romani snapshot photography and a black sense of place: appraising infrastructure through movement, memory, and metabolism

The concept of a black sense of place focuses on racialised infrastructural violence and black struggle in the production of space in the Americas. Addressing how this resonates with the histories of dispossession of Roma in postsocialist Europe, this article examines how a black sense of place is constituted, which it explores through Czech Romani women’s encounters with/in a postmilitary landscape. Former military areas are underexamined refuges of biocultural diversity and infrastructural de- and re-composition. Reworking participatory photography as a compositional process of snapshot photography that draws together ‘snaps’ of images, thought, and affect that do not congeal into a narrative, the analysis focuses on the modalities of movement, memory, and metabolism for collectively sensing and (re)imagining an infrastructural landscape. The concept of geocorporeality helps to specify how infrastructure bodies and knowledges co-compose with the geos, where a black sense of place materialises as metabolic ingestion, a refusal to forget or to stay in one’s place in ways that inspire the infrastructural imagination in an ostensible wasteland.

Urban Shrinkage and Socio-Economic Segregation in Medium-Sized Cities: The Case of Schwerin (Germany)

AbstractAlthough past studies have found that processes of urban shrinkage may act as a catalyst for socio-economic segregation, these relationships remain underexplored outside the context of large cities and capitals. Moreover, cities at lower-tiers of the urban hierarchy in post-socialist Europe have been doubly excluded from the critical discourse on the socio-spatial effects of shrinkage. Hence, this article examines how shrinkage affects socio-economic segregation in the medium-sized post-socialist city of Schwerin, employing segregation indices to assess levels of spatial unevenness and location quotients to map intra-urban patterns of vulnerable population groups over time. Results indicate processes of shrinkage may exacerbate socio-economic segregation in medium-sized cities and that the spatial heterogeneity of shrinkage intersects with uneven distributions of affluence and poverty. However, suggesting that legacies of state socialism shape contemporary socio-spatial change, segregation in Schwerin is strongly conditioned by its socialist-era housing estates, which are generally characterised by the highest rates of population decline, vacancy, and vulnerable groups.

“Paradoxical” Dissatisfaction among Post-Socialist Farmers with the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy: A Study of Farmers’ Subjectivities in Rural Poland

Farmers in post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe are the major beneficiaries of the European Union’s (EU) Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), at least in monetary terms. Why, then, are they dissatisfied with the CAP? This study aims to understand farmers’ subjectivities (i.e., judgments shaped by personal opinions and feelings) regarding CAP and compares these subjectivities to the actual impact of CAP in rural areas. It is based on empirical research in the Błaszki commune in central Poland, where the farmers’ movement Agrounia originated. The study has found that in addition to its benefits, CAP created a number of new problems, such as socio-economic differentiation and related tensions in rural communities, misuse of the CAP’s direct payments, disappearance of rural (peasant) lifestyle, and environmental degradation. The empirical material has also revealed the fragile position of Polish farmers in the domestic market, which affects their dignity and self-esteem. Agrounia seeks to address the latter issue, yet it faces the problems of farmer mobilization and negative representation in the media. This article contributes to the discussions about the applicability of CAP in the post-socialist context, the impact of farmers’ subjectivities on their practices, and the farmers’ mobilization and social movements in post-socialist countries.

Flat-rate personal income tax in Lithuania, Romania and Hungary: A revolutionary policy idea without revolutionary outcomes

A decade of writing on the politics of flat-rate tax adoption and diffusion across post-socialist Europe and Asia has presented these reforms as revolutionary, but at least bold. However, in what ways they might have proven so and for whom has not been investigated. Based on a micro-level study of actual personal income tax rates for the 1991–2018 period, the article engages critically with the scope of the flat tax ‘revolution’ in three different flat tax nations, early adopter Lithuania, later-adopter Romania and recent-adopter Hungary. The analysis shows that the introduction of flat-rate tax in no way revolutionised actual tax burdens for the majority of earners, not even for high-income earners, whose tax burdens had been declining for at least a decade before the arrival of flat tax in both Romania and Hungary. The article also reveals the crucial role played by standard tax credits in shaping tax regime progressivity not only in flat tax regimes, but also progressive ones. The article suggests that the novelty of policy ideas cannot be assumed, but needs to rest on comparisons of outcomes.

Resisting the Great Recession: Social movement unionism in Croatia and Serbia

Addressing the debate regarding the impact of the Great Recession on changing union strategies in post-socialist Europe, our analysis shows that in Croatia and Serbia the crisis, while depressing strike numbers, was nevertheless met with substantial union resistance. Developing a paired comparison and relying on protest event data for the period 2000–2017, we argue that the differences among the two countries’ respective varieties of capitalism drive divergent union strategies described as social movement unionism. In Serbia, the role of unions in protests articulating workers’ demands remained more central and unions were overall more present in the protest arena, while in Croatia, unions have exhibited stronger propensity to forge alliances and adopt innovative policy strategies. While taking on board scholarship that portrays social movement unionism as signalling union weakness, we argue that strategies which increase union mobilization capacity may also be understood as increasing union resilience in changing social circumstances.

Cultural Tourism in Nitra, Slovakia: Overview of Current and Future Trends

Cultural tourism has undergone fundamental changes in several countries of post-socialist Europe. In Slovakia, this fact concerns, for example, localities with a strong connection to the church and its cultural heritage. These monuments belong to the foundations of cultural tourism, yet the state intentionally did not prefer them as tourist destinations until 1989. Only after political and social changes were such localities exploited by tourism with a qualitative and quantitative increase in cultural tourism. The aim of this paper is to investigate the recent changes in cultural tourism in urban areas and to address alternative cultural tourism products to diversify the offerings. To do so, Nitra (Slovakia) was used as a case study area. The main used methods were comparative analysis of information sources and questionnaire surveys, aimed at residents, entrepreneurs, and tourists. The main result is that Nitra has the potential to become an important center of cultural tourism/stage destination of various cultural routes. The presented results will increase awareness of the present and future of cultural tourism; they can be beneficial for organizations dealing with tourism management in the city (city office) and its marketing (Nitra Tourism Organization) for the academic and public sphere.

On the West–East methodological bias in measuring international migration

ABSTRACT This article examines the complex relations between two social processes – standardisation and quantification in measuring migration. We explore how international migrant populations in the European territories of the former USSR, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia have been defined, counted and presented in European population statistics. Our analysis led us to conclude that the category of international migrant, defined as a person born abroad according to the present-time borders, has low contextual validity in postsocialist European contexts. Perceived as universally applicable, however, the category is persistently used in enumerating migration in postsocialist Europe. We argue that the unchallenged transferability of the category of international migrant across contexts is based on the West–East methodological bias – a preconception embedded in the standardisation and quantification of migration. The West–East methodological bias plays a dual role. It fuels the initial perception of the category, forged in Western geopolitical contexts, as standardised and applicable across different settings. Then, in combination with the perceived power of the quantified representation of reality, the West–East methodological bias contributes to the further objectification of the standardised category.

Titkok, megfigyelés és töredékek: a kortárs dokumentumfilmek a posztszocialista Európa regionális brandjére vonatkozó kihívásai

A shared characteristic of the new generation of contemporary documentary filmmakers from post-socialist Europe is their strategic appropriation of recognizable narrative tropes broadly associated with Eastern Europe. Appropriating these tropes allows filmmakers to brand their works as authentic representations of the region and increases the probability of securing international funding, distribution, and viewership. However, many filmmakers remain cognizant and critical of these stereotypes, and find ways to destabilize them over the course of their films. Directors such as Bojina Panayotova, Mila Turajlić, and Lisbeth Kovacic have mobilized common themes such as surveillance and spying, secrets, and divided spaces and identities within their self-reflexive, first person and polyvocal films in order to propel their narratives forward while also deconstructing rigid conceptualizations of post-socialist European identities. They offer promising examples of how post-socialist European documentary filmmakers can address the specific historical, political, and cultural aspects of the region while refusing immutable articulations of national or regional identities.

Cleavages and Government in Slovenia and Montenegro

Abstract In this article we identify the factors that contribute to the formation and especially the durability/stability of governments in both Slovenia and Montenegro after they formally introduced multiparty systems and following their democratic transition, with a focus on the effect of cleavages and party system characteristics generally. Although these two polities share several important similarities (small size, common institutional setting during Yugoslav era, aspirations for membership in international organisations etc.), the nature of governments’ durability/stability in the democratic era entails distinct differences. While Montenegro stands out in post-socialist Europe as the only case where the ruling party has not been overthrown, Slovenia has been led by many governments composed of different political parties. While it seems that in neither country are the ideological characteristics of the governments able to explain their duration/stability to any important extent, it is obvious that the cleavage structure in the two countries has varied, as has the importance of particular cleavages.

Spatializing authoritarian neoliberalism by way of cultural politics: City, nation and the European Union in Gdańsk’s politics of cultural policy formation

This paper develops perspectives which seek to spatialize authoritarian neoliberalism through arguing for greater engagement with the politics of urban cultural policy formation in the neglected context of post-socialist East and Central Europe. Through analyzing the politics of urban cultural policy-making in Gdańsk, Poland, the paper spatializes authoritarian neoliberalism by exploring how relations between the urban and the national, and between the urban and the supranational, shape urban cultural policy, drawing upon literatures on political economy, policy mobilities, cultural policy research, and the concepts of authoritarian neoliberalism and the relational-territorial nexus. Gdańsk is a liberally run city, strongly aligned with the European Union (EU), opposed to the authoritarian neoliberal national level politics in Poland. The paper analyses urban-national tensions and relationships between Gdańsk and the EU to unpack the contested spatial nature of authoritarian neoliberalism.