Post-socialist Europe Research Articles

Gender Division of Domestic Labor in Post-Socialist Europe (1994–2012): Test of Class Gradients Hypothesis

This article analyzes changes in the gender division of domestic labor (GDDL) in post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), an under-researched region characterized by high levels of inequality in GDDL from 1994–2012. Drawing on the literature on class gradients<em> </em>in the contribution of the genders to domestic labor and their change over time, the article answers two questions: How has GDDL (operationalized as men’s relative involvement into routine housework) changed in CEE in the post-socialist period? What has been the role of class (operationalized as respondents’ education and household income) in shaping GDDL in CEE in the post-socialist period? Data for the article comes from the 1994, 2002, and 2012 waves of the International Social Survey Program on Family and Changing Gender Roles from six CEE countries, i.e., Bulgaria, Czechia, Hungary, Poland, Russia, and Slovenia. The findings suggest that net of individual and interactional-level factors, inequality in GDDL in the CEE region did not change substantially during the post-socialist period. The analysis also shows, however, that trends of inequality in GDDL among different classes were idiosyncratic, and this underlay the overall lack of movement towards greater equality.

Transition shocks during adulthood and health a few decades later in post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe

BackgroundHealth of the population of post-socialist Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries lags behind the European Union average. Our aim in this paper is to analyse the link between transition shocks and health two-three decades later.MethodsWe use retrospective data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe. We estimate the implications of stressful periods, financial hardships and job loss occurring around the transition (1987–1993) on subjective and objective measures of health in 2017. We compare these implications across groups of CEE countries and with the health implications of similar difficulties reported by individuals from Western Europe. We also compare the health implications of difficulties occurring around the transition to difficulties occurring before or after the transition.ResultsIn the CEE region there is a peak in the timing of difficulties around the transition. Stressful periods, financial difficulties and job loss around the period of transition are generally associated with worse subjective and objective health at older ages in all groups of CEE countries, even after netting out the effect of childhood health and demographic factors. However, the consequences of hardships due to the transition are not specific, health implications of these difficulties seem to be similar to the implications of other shocks possibly unrelated to the transition.ConclusionsThe high fraction of individuals experiencing stress, financial difficulties and job loss around the transition contributed to the current health disadvantage in the CEE region. As similar shocks in the West and before or after the transition had similar health implications, our results draw the attention to the long-lasting impacts of psychosocial stress and financial hardship during adulthood on later health over the life course.

Introduction: The Middle Class in Post-socialist Europe: Ethnographies of Its “Good Life”

In this special section, drawing from ethnographic research undertaken in Estonia, Russia, Romania, and Bulgaria between 2013 and 2017, we argue that in post-socialist Europe the notions of “middle class” and “good life” have become interchangeable. Related dialectically, each can be substituted for the other as a signifier of a field of aspirations and possibilities. In the current period of persistent economic crisis, deepening social inequality, and growing political turmoil, this interchangeability is a significant ideational conjunction, making it possible to declare middle-class aspirations inherently ethical and thus depoliticise them. Equally important, this interchangeability sustains the continuous idealisation of middle-classness in the face of accumulating frustrations, disappointments, and disillusionments among both the aspiring and the more established middle classes. Nevertheless, our interlocutors differ in their understanding of the kind of “good life” that middle-classness supports. Beyond individual horizons of expectations and socio-economic positions, these differences stem from their experience of recent economic and political crises and from their location at the more, and the less, prosperous local and global “margins.” These differences illustrate the fluidity of these signifiers, which unify an otherwise heterogeneous set of meanings, practices, and relationships.

Landed value grabbing in the terroir of post-socialist specialty wine

ABSTRACT This article adds nuance to contested land ownership and ‘land grabs’ in postsocialist Europe in the context of protected sites of production: terroir. It calls attention to conceptions of land and value in these spaces, particularly in protected territories of specialty production. Considering the enclosed vineyard as an archetypical site of monopoly rent, I present a case study from a historic Hungarian wine region. Tracing the history of land tenure in the region, the privatization of terroir in the 1990s, and more recent state interventions, this study illustrates the need for contextualizing ‘land’ and ‘value’ in land grab analyses. Following recent land grab scholarship of this region, I argue that availability does not necessarily equal access, nor is ‘land’ limited to material resources. Rather, I turn to lived experiences of privatization to explore the dual nature of land as economic resource and collective heritage in a region of Euroscepticism and growing nationalism.

Remigration to Post-Socialist Europe. Hopes and Realities of Return

Remigration to Post-Socialist Europe. Hopes and Realities of Return

Home‐grown food and the benefits of sharing: The “intergenerational pact” in postsocialist Moldova

AbstractThe policy literature on postsocialist Europe tends to frame smallholders' practices of food self‐provisioning and sharing as driven by necessity and proposes land consolidation to increase productivity and efficiency. However, these practices generate nonfinancial benefits, which need to be accounted for. In this paper, I test the socio‐economic relevance of these practices in the Republic of Moldova, the country with the highest density of farming households in Europe and whose government has embraced the rural modernization agenda to integrate into the EU economic space. I carry out quantitative estimates using the household budget survey and complement the results with qualitative insights from an original smallholder survey. I find that food self‐provisioning and sharing are positively related to subjective well‐being and that there is an “intergenerational pact,” with home‐grown food flowing from late‐adulthood smallholders to urban‐based young families and the vulnerable elderly. A counterfactual analysis shows that poverty and inequality would be higher in the absence of donated food, especially in urban areas. The preservation of smallholder farming through widespread access to land could thus help fight poverty and provide social benefits vis‐à‐vis land consolidation.

Strange bedfellows? Consumer culture and the moral order in the post-socialist world – An afterword

Critiques of consumption frequently assume moral undertones, with the effect of obscuring the moral foundations underlying consumer practices themselves. The articles in this collection offer compelling and ethnographically rich evidence of the moral tensions that inform consumer preferences in post-socialist Europe. Consumer behaviors and discourses have historically played an important role in the region, determining grounds for social inclusion under socialism as much as under capitalism. This makes post-socialist settings particularly rich sites for ethnographic studies of the intersection between consumer culture and the moral order, as it allows us to trace how the criteria for full social membership – a chance to be seen, heard, and treated with respect – relate to consumption under different economic and political regimes.

Hungarian authoritarian populism: a neo-Gramscian perspective

ABSTRACTThis article analyses post-2010 Hungarian populism from a neo-Gramscian perspective. Stuart Hall’s authoritarian populism is discussed because the critical role of (transnational) capital in maintaining and stabilising populist regimes. The result is a unique approach that partially captures how the Fidesz-KDNP government has instigated changes to the external dimensions of the political economy. This analysis has the potential to be applied to similar regimes in post-socialist Europe, graduating from accounts of populism that often underplay (a) factors that maintain regimes, (b) regimes’ relationship with (transnational) capital and, (c) the role of capital relations in achieving regime consolidation.

Is community energy really non-existent in post-socialist Europe? Examining recent trends in 16 countries

Community energy (CE) initiatives are developing in many regions of the world through a great diversity of typologies. Europe has a leading role with thousands of ongoing projects of small and medium size, which are however unevenly distributed over the continent. The density of CE projects is highest in North-Western and parts of Central Europe; on the contrary, their spread in post-socialist European countries (PSECs) has been reported to be much more limited. However, the (under)development of CE in PSECs remains an understudied topic in the literature. In this paper, we present an exploratory overview of the situation and briefly discuss its potential explanatory factors for 16 PSECs. We find differing development levels of progress, with Croatia outstanding with a diversity of projects and a certain maturation of the field, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia with a reduced number of rather small-scale projects, while in the remaining countries no operational relevant projects have been found to date. We present our methods, overviews by country and some tentative explanations. We suggest further research to be directed towards in-depth analysis of single countries and relevant project cases in PSECs.

Staging the Lived Experience and Socialist Everyday Life in Post-Yugoslav Theater

Authoritative models of remembering Yugoslavia tend to exclude experiences of living people while often reproducing the memory trope of “totalitarian legacy.” Several theater performances that appeared in 2010 and 2011 challenged these memory models, as they centered on performers’ personal experiences and recollections as legitimate sources of understanding, imagining, and discussing the past. This article investigates how lived experience is (re)constructed in the theater and whether these performances differ from dominant narratives. Reception analysis of selected performances has shown that public and media appear to find affective memories of socialism more acceptable if told from the position of victims and “authentic” witnesses. Performances widened and diversified the cultural memory of socialism and directed attention to positively evaluated experiences of socialist culture and everyday life, such as multicultural and supranational interactions in Yugoslavia. Nevertheless, the dominant representation of Yugoslav state as totalitarian was not challenged, but rather sidestepped. The focus on popular and everyday culture thus remains the predominant memory model for remembering Yugoslavia in theater, which can be seen as a part of wider processes of gradual reevaluation of socialist life in post-socialist Europe.

Food self-provisioning as an answer to the metabolic rift: The case of ‘Dacha Resilience’ in Estonia

Agriculture is not only an essential nexus between society and nature but in its current industrial form also a possible threat to ecological stability. This article explores how a supplement to the conventional agrifood system alleviates the negative consequences of the industrial food production system that manifest through the metabolic rift (Marx, 1981). During fieldwork in Estonia ten semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted to analyze the practice of Food Self-Provisioning (FSP) in (peri-)urban dachas – a Russian term for a plot of land with a seasonal allotment house, mostly used for food production.Using McClintock's (2010) three-dimensional framework of metabolic rift that consists of ecological, social and individual dimensions, we demonstrate how FSP not only contributes to mending all these rifts but also increases resilience on various levels. As a region-specific practice of “quiet sustainability” (Smith and Jehlička, 2013) it displays an environmentally friendly alternative to the conventional agrifood system and serves as a strong example of sufficiency and moral economy. Furthermore, by its practice it not only challenges the continuous commodification process of ‘fictitious commodities’, such as land, labor and food (Polanyi, 2001; McClintock, 2010), but it defies market logic in general. Therefore, this article proposes FSP as a viable, but largely underestimated and even stigmatized, model of alternative sustainability, already widely practiced in post-socialist Europe.

Cross-country evidence on the social determinants of the post-socialist mortality crisis in Europe: a review and performance-based hierarchy of variables.

An unprecedented mortality crisis befell the former socialist countries between 1989 and 1995, representing one of the greatest demographic shocks of the period after the Second World War. While it is likely that country-level variation in the post-socialist mortality crisis in Eastern Europe can be explained by a constellation of political and socio-economic factors, no comprehensive review of the existing scholarly attempts at explaining these factors exists. We review 39 cross-national multi-variable peer reviewed studies of social determinants of mortality in post-socialist Europe in order to assess the social factors behind the post-socialist mortality crisis, determine the gaps in the existing literature and to make suggestions for future research. We propose a novel methodology to determine the relative importance of variables based on the ratio of significant to insignificant findings for each variable. The literature identifies inequality, welfare payments, religious composition, democracy, economic performance and unemployment as the leading factors that have a significant influence on mortality outcomes. Existing cross-country studies fail to establish a definitive connection between mortality and diets, drinking patterns, liberalisation, trust, health expenditure and war. We also point out that the level of analysis is not a neutral methodological choice but might influence the results themselves.

Articulations of race and genealogies of encounter among former Yugoslav migrants in Britain

ABSTRACT While the question of race has been largely underexplored in the study of postsocialist Europe, the logic of coloniality remains at the heart of Europeanness, complicating the assumption that migrants from the region only encounter racial difference once they arrive in a “multicultural” society. The article contributes to recent debates on racializing Central and East European studies as well as the literature on migrant encounters with difference by examining the articulations of “race” and coloniality among migrants from former Yugoslavia in Britain. On the one hand, interactions with fellow migrants are frequently imbued with racialized hierarchies that equate Europeanness with whiteness and modernity. On the other hand, the history of Yugoslav solidarity with decolonizing nations provides an alternative archive that refutes claims of British “openness” and recognizes unexpected forms of intimacy, highlighting a genealogy of encounter that extends the spatiotemporal scope of debates about migrants’ responses to racialized difference.

Architectural Scale Models within Contemporary Art: Practices in Post-Socialist Europe

Architectural Scale Models within Contemporary Art: Practices in Post-Socialist Europe

Human capital investment or academic marginalism? Understanding the influence of political economy on higher education in post-socialist Europe

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this study is to examine whether the human capital theory tenets hold in Central and Eastern European countries (CEEC) that transitioned from socialist regimes to a market-based economy. The modeling approach relied on 18 years (1994–2012) of country level data collected from the World Bank, in order to explore whether the increase in labor force with tertiary education (i.e. human capital) was associated with better economic outcomes in post-socialist European countries, measured by GDP per capita. Findings from the panel data estimations indicated that, despite of the rise of GDP, the increases in the proportion of labor force with post-secondary education were not associated with this economic growth in post-socialist countries, and that the opposite was true for other European countries. Given that these findings problematize the applicability of the human capital theory in CEEC region, the recently developed theory of academic marginalism is utilized to help further explore this issue.

In the Bear’s Shadow? Russia’s International Image and Its Influence on Investments of Russian Companies in Post-Socialist Europe

ABSTRACTThe paper examines Russia’s international image and its influence on investment by Russian companies in post-socialist Europe. Findings are based on the cases of Gazprom’s South Stream Pipeline project, and Sberbank’s acquisition of Volksbank’s Central and Eastern European assets in Hungary and Serbia. The paper demonstrates that international positions and economic interests of two countries determinate decisions regarding investments of Russian companies, while Russia’s image to some extent accelerates these decisions in Serbia. The paper is based on the results of interviews with representatives of business communities conducted in Hungary and Serbia in 2012–2017, professional reports, and official documents.

Masculinity, Care and Stay-Behind Fathers: A Postsocialist Perspective

Over the last two decades many studies have focused on female migrants’ transnational care practices, while those of stay-behind fathers have hardly been investigated. This chapter deals with masculinity, childcare and fatherhood of stay-behind male partners of female migrants from former socialist countries in Europe. A discussion of the particularities of gender regimes in socialist and postsocialist Europe will be followed by a presentation of three case studies on fatherhood and lone parenting. The article concludes with a discussion of “mothering fathers’” predicaments in a postsocialist situation.

Social Movements Seen as Radical Political Actors: The Case of the Polish Tenants\u2019 Movement

This article casts new light on the processes of collective claims and identity formation in social movements, with the help of the radical political framework of Laclau and Mouffe (Hegemony and socialist strategy: towards a radical democratic politics, Verso, London, 2001). Polish tenants, classified as “losers” of transition and marginalized in the mainstream discourse, nevertheless act collectively, mobilizing alliances with other democratic struggles and thus challenge the hegemony of neoliberal dogmas in the country. The very fact of mobilization of a socially and economically deprived group demanding the right to the city is provocative in the studied context. The empirical foundations of our study are 20 in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted with Polish tenants’ activists cross-referenced with media material produced by and about the movement, and previous studies on the topic. The contribution of this article is twofold: it combines social movement theory with radical political framework and fills the empirical gap in the body of literature on social movements in post-socialist Europe.

Tourism and Europe's Shifting Periphery: Post-Franco Spain and Post-Socialist Bulgaria

This article examines how Spain's tourism industry was developed using European Union (EU) grants in the 1980s and 1990s, and how this strategy was later deployed to post-socialist Europe (illustrated using the case of Bulgaria). The article shows that peripheral modernisation was an important mission in the evolution of the EU and urban development for tourism played a major role in two successive post-dictatorial societies. Tourism was considered a key economic sector that addressed the reality of deindustrialisation and also served as a useful metaphor for intra-European mobility and the symbolic power of the leisure economy.

Green Flash in the Croatian Pan: Green Party Survival in Post-socialist Europe

This article explores the subject matter of new political parties’ survival by analysing the recent trajectory of the Green party ORaH in Croatia. ORaH emerged in October 2013; it won 9.4 percent of the vote at the 2014 European Parliament election and subsequently rose to 18.5 percent of public support in October 2014, only to collapse to 1.7 percent of the vote at the parliamentary election held in November 2015. In order to explain ORaH’s initial meteoric rise and its later equally rapid demise, we will employ studies on new and niche parties while we further elaborate our analysis of ORaH’s programme by profiling ORaH’s voter base. We also address a recurrent weakness in political party research by analysing the role of the European level of competition in increasing the chances of a new party’s survival by developing a framework that better integrates domestic and international dynamics of political party development. Our main finding is that despite its success in the 2014 European Parliament elections, and even though its electorate shares important features of the European Green voter, ORaH failed to secure parliamentary representation because of the inability of the party’s leadership to steer the party away from its initial contender status and define OraH’s policy niche.