Post Communism

This essay focuses on a paradoxical transformation that happened within Soviet ideological discourse at the very end of perestroika, around 1990-91. The Party's attempts to revitalize Soviet ideology by returning to the original word of Lenin unexpectedly produced the opposite result. The unquestionable external Truth from which Soviet ideological discourse drew its legitimacy-and that had always been identical with Lenin's wordsuddenly could no longer be known. This shift launched a rapid unraveling of the Soviet communist project. At the center of this unexpected transformation was the search for the true Lenin-a kind of Lenin that Soviet party theorists, bureaucrats, historians, and scientists hoped was still hidden in the midst of his unpublished texts and unknown facts of his biology, life, and death.

This article concerns the extent to which corrupt behavior is dependent on the organizational power structure and the resources available for illegal exchange. This qualitative study is based on 42 in-depth interviews with organizational actors in different organizations in Hungary. Four core themes emerged from the analysis of the interviews: (a) isolated corruption at the bottom, (b) the middle level's own corruption, (c) "technicization" when middle-level professionals and expert groups are used to legalize the corruption of the dominant coalition, and (d) "turning-off controls" when organizational elites intentionally deactivate internal and external controls to avoid detection.

 Konturen der früheren Sowjetunion werden in der Forschung vielfach entlang der Bruchlinie von Repression und Widerstand aufgezeigt. Der Kulturanthropologe Alexei Yurchak hat in seinen Untersuchungen den Fokus verschoben. Er hat die offziellen Strukturen und Rituale des früheren Sowjetstaates in den Blick genommen – und das, was die Menschen in ihren Alltagspraktiken daraus gemacht haben. Sein Buch Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More (dt. Alles war für immer, bevor es verschwand) über die sowjetische Generation unter Breshnew ist inzwischen auf Russisch erschienen und Yurchak für seine Studie im vergangenen Jahr mit dem renommierten Buchpreis Proswetitel (dt. Aufklärer) in Russland geehrt worden. Das junge Medienprojekt Gorky traf ihn nun für ein Interview, sprach über Vererbtes ins Heute, Vergleiche mit den USA und verschobene Wahrnehmungen der Gesellschaft.

Aus einem Zirkel kritischer Marxisten, die für die Erneuerung des Sowjetsozialismus eintraten, ist an Instituten der Russländischen Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Moskauer Staatsuniversität die Schule des postsowjetischen Marxismus hervorgegangen. Ihre führenden Köpfe Aleksandr Buzgalin und Andrej Kolganov erklären das Scheitern des Sowjetsozialismus in der Tradition von Lev Trockij sehr verengt durch das Entstehen einer reformunwilligen Bürokratie. Sie versprechen sich vom Sieg weltweiter Bewegungen von Ökosozialisten und Globalisierungsgegnern den Übergang zu einer von allen Zwängen befreiten kommunistischen Zukunftsgesellschaft.

The changes since the breakup of the USSR have impacted African migrants' social composition, as well as their strategies and forms of adaptation and integration in the capital city of Moscow. In this study, we discuss the factors influencing the choices of African migrants, related to their background as Africans and to their perceptions of the receiving society. We distinguish between two social groups of African migrants and argue that while one group seeks integration into the Russian society, the other limits itself to mere adaptation to life in Moscow.

Scholars have raised concerns about the social costs of the transition from state socialism to capitalism in Central and Eastern Europe, and geographers are particularly interested in the spatial expressions and implications of these costs, including apparently increasing residential segregation. Applying a range of segregation measures to 1992 and 2002 census data, this contribution studies socio-occupational residential segregation in Bucharest. The conclusion is that Bucharest was relatively socio-spatially mixed at both times; in fact, a modest, yet fully legible, decreasing overall trend is observable. This is at odds with many popular assumptions of the past 20 years.

This article examines the "morally correct" narrative on the communist past which became dominant in early post-communist Romania, and which focused on the former secret police, the Securitate, as a key actor under the former regime. This narrative framed the epoch 1945-89 as a period of confrontation between innocent victims and the secret police, and trivialized as morally incorrect any attempt at redefining the much more complex relation between rulers and ruled under communist rule..

Whether in principle​ or on the level of institutional praxis, the rule of law proscribes mafia-like ways of functioning. Effective barriers in the framework provided by the rule of law deter mafia-style operations from coming to influence decision-making, dictating norms, or affecting the formation of political will. It follows from the above that the institutionalization of a mafia-like power structure requires a systematic dismantling of the liberal constitution and constitutional establishment.

In the recent decades protest participation has become most widely accepted and practiced form of citizen engagement in western democracies. Many researchers believe protest participation is crucial for democracy to be consolidated and effective, and previous studies have shown that protest participation is one of the main characteristics of a democratic public. Though protest is on the increase in western democracies, it declined in postcommunist democracies from 1990 to 2000. The bulk of participation research still comes from western countries and less is known about participation patterns of postcommunist and especially post-Yugoslav citizens. More importantly, previous cross-national studies have mostly not dealt with the motivations behind protest participation in post-Yugoslav countries. The aim of our research was twofold: firstly, we compared levels of protest participation (signing petitions, joining in boycotts, and attending lawful/peaceful demonstrations) in three regions: seven post-Yugoslav countries (BiH, Croatia, Kosovo, FYR Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia), seventeen established EU democracies, and nine East-Central European EU member states. Secondly, we analyzed the relationship between protest participation and prodemocratic political culture (i.e. democracy index consisting of items indicating acceptance of democracy and rejecting authoritarian rule) in all three regions. We employed the newest (2008) wave of European Values Study, which consists of representative national surveys. The results indicated that post-Yugoslav population is almost as protest oriented (Mprotest = 1.89) as citizens in western countries (M = 1.93), and significantly more than ECE EU member states (M = 1.55). Interestingly, within post-Yugoslav countries, citizens of Kosovo and Macedonia report the highest levels of protest potential. The results also showed that protest participation is positively and statistically significantly associated with prodemocratic orientations in all three regions, as well as within all seven post-Yugoslav national samples. If Europeanization of West Balkan countries is understood in terms of their populations taking part in elite-challenging behaviour (e.g. protest participation) motivated by pro-democratic orientations, The WBP Review website: http://www.kppcenter.org/wbpreview.html Subscriptions/Submissions/Reprint Permissions/Distribution: [email protected] This electronic version of the WBP Review article is intended for personal, individual use. Distribution in any way, including online posting, without prior permission by the publisher is prohibited. The Western Balkans Policy Review Volume 2, Issue 2 (2012) 96

This article broadens understanding of the role that East European intellectuals have played in building foundations for democratic institutions and practices over the past two decades. Drawing on Habermas' writings on the public sphere, we use interviews conducted with founders of women's and gender studies centers, professional women's NGOs and Internet forums to examine the establishment of new micro-contexts for civic engagement and critical debate in Ukraine. Three main types of indigenous feminist micro-public are identified: academic, professional and virtual. Through an analysis of these micro-publics as well as the works of writer Oksana Zabuzhko, we explore the articulation and legitimation of a ''national feminist'' standpoint that draws upon feminism to criticize populist understandings of national history and civic belonging. We contribute to studies of democratization and transition by suggesting how small groups of critical intellectuals (locally called ''tusovky'') acted as microfoundations of civil society. By supporting local engagement with Western critical theory, these small groups helped to create a new infrastructure for engaging intellectuals in the pluralization and diversification of public life.

This paper seeks to explain the continuing lack of economic convergence and the persistence of market dysfunctionality, or wild capitalism, in postcommunist transformation. An overview of key statistics on economic convergence and market failure are presented. The paper then analyses the causes of malaise through the lens of institutionalist and radical perspectives.
In doing so key data are assembled and presented from documents of the international financial institutions and other agencies monitoring crime and corruption. The paper concludes that, rather than encourage offspring of labour market reform have created the conditions for continuing economic divergence and for wild capitalism to survive and thrive.

This collective monograph analyzes post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe through the paradigm of postcoloniality. Based on the assumption that both Western and Soviet imperialism emerged from European modernity, the book is a contribution to the development of a global postcolonial discourse based on a more extensive and nuanced geohistorical comparativism. It suggests that the inclusion of East-Central Europe in European identity might help resolve postcolonialism’s difficulties in coming to terms with both postcolonial and neo-colonial dimensions of contemporary Europe. Analyzing post-communist identity reconstructions under the impact of transformative political, economic and cultural experiences such as changes in perception of time and space (landscapes, cityscapes), migration and displacement, collective memory and trauma, objectifying gaze, cultural self-colonization, and language as a form of power, the book facilitates a mutually productive dialogue between postcolonialism a...

Very soon after the fall of the communism, Romania was confronted with an economic crisis that went on for almost ten years. With the objective of entering NATO and EU accomplished, and GDP rising to unprecedented levels, subjective well-being levels of Romanians returned to those from 1990. However, the critics looked with skepticism to this recovery, observing that the unfinished or wrongly directed reforms, together with undesirable outcomes that the capitalism brought such as increase in social inequality and anomie, conduced to a fragile economic and social system. Their apprehensions seem to be confirmed when Romania fully resented the new global economic crisis which started in 2008. In this paper I will analyze the response of Romanians to the menaces of economic crisis and government corrective measures between 2009 and 2012. I will examine variations in the structure and the inequality of subjective well-being, trying to explain how changes in the social situation of the socially excluded groups provoked a response from their part. I will show that the happiness of the Romanians decreased along these years. Partly, this had as effect the large scale protests which started at the end of 2011, which culminated with the demise of the Government. I conclude that potential for upheaval was not consumed entirely by this political change, and strong political dissatisfaction predicted further mass protest movements.

In the recent decades protest participation has become most widely accepted and practiced form of citizen engagement in western democracies. Many researchers believe protest participation is crucial for democracy to be consolidated and effective, and previous studies have shown that protest participation is one of the main characteristics of a democratic public. Though protest is on the increase in western democracies, it declined in postcommunist democracies from 1990 to 2000. The bulk of participation research still comes from western countries and less is known about participation patterns of postcommunist and especially post-Yugoslav citizens. More importantly, previous cross-national studies have mostly not dealt with the motivations behind protest participation in post-Yugoslav countries. The aim of our research was twofold: firstly, we compared levels of protest participation (signing petitions, joining in boycotts, and attending lawful/peaceful demonstrations) in three regions: seven post-Yugoslav countries (BiH, Croatia, Kosovo, FYR Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia), seventeen established EU democracies, and nine East-Central European EU member states. Secondly, we analyzed the relationship between protest participation and prodemocratic political culture (i.e. democracy index consisting of items indicating acceptance of democracy and rejecting authoritarian rule) in all three regions. We employed the newest (2008) wave of European Values Study, which consists of representative national surveys. The results indicated that post-Yugoslav population is almost as protest oriented (Mprotest = 1.89) as citizens in western countries (M = 1.93), and significantly more than ECE EU member states (M = 1.55). Interestingly, within post-Yugoslav countries, citizens of Kosovo and Macedonia report the highest levels of protest potential. The results also showed that protest participation is positively and statistically significantly associated with prodemocratic orientations in all three regions, as well as within all seven post-Yugoslav national samples. If Europeanization of West Balkan countries is understood in terms of their populations taking part in elite-challenging behaviour (e.g. protest participation) motivated by pro-democratic orientations, The WBP Review website: http://www.kppcenter.org/wbpreview.html Subscriptions/Submissions/Reprint Permissions/Distribution: [email protected] This electronic version of the WBP Review article is intended for personal, individual use. Distribution in any way, including online posting, without prior permission by the publisher is prohibited. The Western Balkans Policy Review Volume 2, Issue 2 (2012) 96

In the recent decades protest participation has become most widely accepted and practiced form of citizen engagement in western democracies. Many researchers believe protest participation is crucial for democracy to be consolidated and effective, and previous studies have shown that protest participation is one of the main characteristics of a democratic public. Though protest is on the increase in western democracies, it declined in postcommunist democracies from 1990 to 2000. The bulk of participation research still comes from western countries and less is known about participation patterns of postcommunist and especially post-Yugoslav citizens. More importantly, previous cross-national studies have mostly not dealt with the motivations behind protest participation in post-Yugoslav countries. The aim of our research was twofold: firstly, we compared levels of protest participation (signing petitions, joining in boycotts, and attending lawful/peaceful demonstrations) in three regio...

This collective monograph analyzes post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe through the paradigm of postcoloniality. Based on the assumption that both Western and Soviet imperialism emerged from European modernity, the book is a contribution to the development of a global postcolonial discourse based on a more extensive and nuanced geohistorical comparativism. It suggests that the inclusion of East-Central Europe in European identity might help resolve postcolonialism’s difficulties in coming to terms with both postcolonial and neo-colonial dimensions of contemporary Europe. Analyzing post-communist identity reconstructions under the impact of transformative political, economic and cultural experiences such as changes in perception of time and space (landscapes, cityscapes), migration and displacement, collective memory and trauma, objectifying gaze, cultural self-colonization, and language as a form of power, the book facilitates a mutually productive dialogue between postcolonialism a...

This special issue brings together reflections that mark the thirtieth anniversary of the Revolutions of 1989 and their consequences for understanding European and global society. What seemed for some at least the surprising and rapid collapse of Eastern European state socialism prompted rethinking in social theory about the potential for emancipatory politics and new modes of social and political organization. At the same time there was increased reflection on the nature of varieties of capitalism and the meaning of socialism beyond the failure of at least its etatist and autarkic mode. The five articles here and the editors’ introduction address themes such as utopian hopes, civil society, the transformation of Europe, the world beyond 1989, and new configurations of power and conflict.

In this introduction to our special issue on the politics of memory in the post-Soviet space, we present a four-part analytical framework through which to evaluate recent developments in the region. Specifically, we focus on: 1) the circulation of memories across space and time; 2) the factors that condition the recall of the past; 3) the actors involved in these processes; and 4) the logics that guide how the past is represented and interpreted. This framework provides a means through which to conceptually order and discuss the individual contributions to this issue, as well as to evaluate the wider relevance of Russia's 2020 Victory Day commemoration, which marked the 75th anniversary of World War II's end. A central claim advanced in this article is that researchers need to distinguish not just between the nationalized remembering we increasingly see being manifest across the former communist states of East-Central Europe and the more universalistic appeals of the cosmopolitan memory regime that predominates in Western Europe, but also contemporary Russia's attempts to promulgate an "empire memory" that represents a competing set of generalizable norms for how the past should be depicted. The latter is significant because it directly challenges the specificity and contextual embeddedness of national recall as well as key mnemonic precepts of the post-national-meaning largely spatially and temporally unbounded-attention that has been accorded to victimhood and suffering in recent decades. The past is never dead. It's not even past. -William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun CONTACT George Soroka

The present special issue has the ambition of contributing to the further development of critical legal theory of a specific, Central and Eastern European strand, paying attention to the characteristic features of the legal life of our region. The nine papers in this volume can be divided into four distinct groups, addressing issues of our current predicament and its methodological implications (papers by Cercel, Tacik and Mercescu); questions of Central and Eastern European legal identity (paper by myself and by Nazmutdinov); theoretical and philosophical issues particularly in the contemporary Central and Eastern European context (papers by Fusco and Reid); and finally, questions of law and ideology in Central and Eastern Europe analysed through the lens of case studies from various areas of positive law (papers by Kuźmicka-Sulikowska and Rudt).The main question that we want to address is the methodology of critical legal theory as applied to the specific context of Central and Ea...

Central Asia consists of five culturally and ethnically diverse countries that have followed different paths to political and economic transformation in the past 25 years since achieving independence from the Soviet Union. Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan have in relative terms made strides in market reforms, while Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan have not yet completed their transitions to market economies. Tajikistan represents an intermediate case. After experiencing more than a decade of growth based on hydrocarbon booms, Central Asian countries are faced with increasing challenges resulting from falling commodity prices, declining trade and lower migrant remittances. The main policy challenge is to move away from commodity-based growth strategies to market-oriented diversification and adoption of a broad spectrum of economic, institutional and political reforms. The major obstacles to political reform and structural diversification in the five Central Asian economies are internal and external geopolitical factors and deeply embedded institutional weaknesses within each country, particularly in areas where economic management interacts with authoritarian political systems and imperfect legal institutions.

This article reviews the implications of the collapse of Communism in Europe for some themes in recent social theory. It was often assumed that 1989 was part of a global process of normalization and routinization of social life that had been left behind earlier utopian hopes. Nothing that utopia is open to various interpretations, including utopias of the everyday, this article suggests, first that there were utopian dimensions to 1989, and, second, that these hopes continue to influence contemporary social and political developments. The continuing role of substantive utopian expectations is illustrated with reference to the politics of lustration in Poland and the rise of nationalist parties in Hungary. This analysis is placed in the context of the already apparent impact of the global economic crisis in post-communist countries. It concludes that the unevenness and diversity of the post-1989 world elude overly generalized attempts at theorization and demand more nuanced analyses.

This article examines attitudes to membership of the EU and Nato amongst countries in central and eastern Europe. Sample survey data are obtained from the Eurobarometer surveys of transition and EU candidate countries. The empirical results suggest that support for membership increases with socio-economic variables such as in come and education, reflecting self-interest. But attitudinal variables are also important and, in particular, confidence in the free market economy impacts positively on support for membership. Support for EU membership is not a mirror image of that for Nato, with the differences appearing to revolve around self-interest.

In the recent decades protest participation has become most widely accepted and practiced form of citizen engagement in western democracies. Many researchers believe protest participation is crucial for democracy to be consolidated and effective, and previous studies have shown that protest participation is one of the main characteristics of a democratic public. Though protest is on the increase in western democracies, it declined in postcommunist democracies from 1990 to 2000. The bulk of participation research still comes from western countries and less is known about participation patterns of postcommunist and especially post-Yugoslav citizens. More importantly, previous cross-national studies have mostly not dealt with the motivations behind protest participation in post-Yugoslav countries. The aim of our research was twofold: firstly, we compared levels of protest participation (signing petitions, joining in boycotts, and attending lawful/peaceful demonstrations) in three regions: seven post-Yugoslav countries (BiH, Croatia, Kosovo, FYR Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia), seventeen established EU democracies, and nine East-Central European EU member states. Secondly, we analyzed the relationship between protest participation and prodemocratic political culture (i.e. democracy index consisting of items indicating acceptance of democracy and rejecting authoritarian rule) in all three regions. We employed the newest (2008) wave of European Values Study, which consists of representative national surveys. The results indicated that post-Yugoslav population is almost as protest oriented (Mprotest = 1.89) as citizens in western countries (M = 1.93), and significantly more than ECE EU member states (M = 1.55). Interestingly, within post-Yugoslav countries, citizens of Kosovo and Macedonia report the highest levels of protest potential. The results also showed that protest participation is positively and statistically significantly associated with prodemocratic orientations in all three regions, as well as within all seven post-Yugoslav national samples. If Europeanization of West Balkan countries is understood in terms of their populations taking part in elite-challenging behaviour (e.g. protest participation) motivated by pro-democratic orientations, The WBP Review website: http://www.kppcenter.org/wbpreview.html Subscriptions/Submissions/Reprint Permissions/Distribution: [email protected] This electronic version of the WBP Review article is intended for personal, individual use. Distribution in any way, including online posting, without prior permission by the publisher is prohibited. The Western Balkans Policy Review Volume 2, Issue 2 (2012) 96

This collective monograph analyzes post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe through the paradigm of postcoloniality. Based on the assumption that both Western and Soviet imperialism emerged from European modernity, the book is a contribution to the development of a global postcolonial discourse based on a more extensive and nuanced geohistorical comparativism. It suggests that the inclusion of East-Central Europe in European identity might help resolve postcolonialism’s difficulties in coming to terms with both postcolonial and neo-colonial dimensions of contemporary Europe. Analyzing post-communist identity reconstructions under the impact of transformative political, economic and cultural experiences such as changes in perception of time and space (landscapes, cityscapes), migration and displacement, collective memory and trauma, objectifying gaze, cultural self-colonization, and language as a form of power, the book facilitates a mutually productive dialogue between postcolonialism a...

The research method applied was analysis and synthesis of materials from the Archives of the President of the Republic of Poland in Warsaw. This approach is located in research in the field of economics, with appropriate references to social issues, and thus is related to the subject matter of security studies. Findings: The empirical results show that the main principles underlying the economic transformation in Poland after 1989 included: the consistency of political and economic reforms, rapid privatisation and reprivatisation, internationalisation of trade, establishment of state institutions to support economic transformation, promotion and protection of the national character of the economy, protective measures for the economically weakest groups. In the process of systemic transformation, little reference was made to the power of national memory. Practical Implications: With the fall of communism in Poland and the political transformation in 1989, an economic transformation was neededa transition from a centrally controlled economy to a market economy. In the course of political and economic reforms, one of the greatest obstacles in the process of transformation turned out to be the mentality of a society oscillating around a totalitarian system, the inefficacy of legislative processes and the application of foreign, not Polish solutions. Originality/value: Selected unique and unpublished sources were used for this study. These are texts summarising the activities of the President and the circles surrounding the Chancellery of the President of the Republic of Poland and the Presidentʼs Political Services Office.

The contours of markets and entrepreneurship are shaped by historical and politico-institutional factors. In the case of Central and Eastern Europe, the development of new entrepreneurial classes is a function of communist legacies and post-1989 political processes. Employing survey data from 2000, this article examines how political and institutional conditions influence patterns of recruitment into self-employment and income returns to small entrepreneurship in Hungary, Poland, and Romania. The results of this analysis show that human capital (captured by education) has positive significant effects on becoming a self-employed individual with employees in Hungary and Romania. As compared to other individuals, former socialist "petit bourgeois" (i.e., individuals who were business owners in 1988) are more likely to be small business operators in post-communism. Individuals who held managerial authority positions before 1989 have higher chances to become small business operators in Romania but not in Hungary or Poland. Unemployment seems to function as a push-factor for becoming a small business operator in Hungary and Poland but not in Romania. In Romania, most small entrepreneurs earn significantly more than employees in the state or private sector. Gender, age, and education have significant positive effects on income returns in all of the three countries under scrutiny.

This thesis investigates famous Balkan films that explore the post-communist narrative while reflecting on certain issues, such as violence and war in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the emigration and identity crisis in Bulgaria, and the overall consequences of dismantling the oppressive communist regimes in the Balkans.

A large body of research supports the procedural justice hypothesis that quality of treatment matters more than outcomes for institutional legitimacy. How fairness matters across legal institutions and geographic settings remains an open question, however. This article uses a survey of criminal defendants to test the factors associated with perceived legitimacy of courts in Poland, a country whose judiciary is currently subject to intense political contestation. The findings confirm the primacy of procedural justice, while also illustrating the influence of instrumental performance factors such as time and court organization. This suggests that in contexts of political transition with disputed legal institutions, citizens' contact with procedurally fair, operationally efficient institutions can support the legitimacy of authorities and strengthen the rule of law. After the sentence, someone always loses and is unhappy. Sometimes, indeed, both parties are unhappy, because even those who won did not win as much as they wanted. Małgorzata Gersdorf, Polish Supreme Court President, and Roman Hauser, former President of the National Council of the Judiciary (Gersdorf and Hauser 2014) Few areas of socio-legal scholarship have been as influential on both the practice and study of law as procedural justice. Procedural justice-the idea that how people are treated by legal authorities is often more meaningful to their subsequent conduct and perceptions of authority than whatever punishment they

A large body of research supports the procedural justice hypothesis that quality of treatment matters more than outcomes for institutional legitimacy. How fairness matters across legal institutions and geographic settings remains an open question, however. This article uses a survey of criminal defendants to test the factors associated with perceived legitimacy of courts in Poland, a country whose judiciary is currently subject to intense political contestation. The findings confirm the primacy of procedural justice, while also illustrating the influence of instrumental performance factors such as time and court organization. This suggests that in contexts of political transition with disputed legal institutions, citizens' contact with procedurally fair, operationally efficient institutions can support the legitimacy of authorities and strengthen the rule of law. After the sentence, someone always loses and is unhappy. Sometimes, indeed, both parties are unhappy, because even those who won did not win as much as they wanted.

This article illustrates a relatively less charted form of exilic dislocation which I have dubbed paraexile. Unlike Claudio Guillén, who claims that exiled writers can triumph over their native attachments and create a literature of "counter-exile," I propose, alongside critics like Lamming, Rushdie, or Said, that the trauma of displacement can never be entirely left behind and is constantly part of exilic writing. In addition, I make the claim that paraexilic literature is a peculiar form of internalizing exile by means of irony and contradiction. I am illustrating this attitude with the work of Constantin Noica, one of the most popular and respected philosophers in postwar Romania, who rejected emigration and, instead, adopted the paradoxical solution of triumphing over internal and internalized exile by embracing it as a form of liberation. I am proposing the rhetorical category of contra-discourse-a dialogic structure of argument and narrative in which the homely and the foreign are spoken of in the ironically mingled voices of the oppressor and of the victim. I am concluding with the suggestion that, while the work of Noica is in many ways idiosyncratic, it may also be viewed as a typical form of coping with exilic traumas in Central and East European cultures during communism.

This article analyses and compares the treatment of history in two dramatic re-enactments: the English Canadian 1837: The Farmers' Revolt, a collective creation of Theatre Passe Muraille with Rick Salutin as dramaturge, and the Romanian A Cold, by Marin Sorescu. Both plays re-enact past events as a form of anti-colonial and respectively anti-communist resistance and as a way to enable imagined exile, but their dramaturgical strategies and substance are necessarily different as each deals with a specific order of history. History as a Tool and an Artefact Echoing the old saying, 'History is written by the victors', several twentiethcentury studies dismantle the myth of history as an objective record of the past. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, among others, note that the rise of history as a scientific discipline in the nineteenth century was in fact simultaneous with, if not determined by, the beginning of modern colonialism, responding to the empires' need to assert difference and enforce a subaltern identity project on the colonised subjects: '[W]hat it means to have a history is the same as what it means to have a legitimate existence. .. [H]istory legitimates "us" and not "others" ' (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 1989:317). A similar official attitude towards the past can be found in former communist countries, supporting the idea that 'communisation' was a form of colonisation. 1 The Soviet Union employed general and specific imperialistic strategies of asserting control over the nations within its borders and/or under its influence (Thompson 2000:2-40). Among them, manipulating history provided the ideological rationalisation of communisation and of the

Agnieszka Mrozik: Przyczynkiem do naszej rozmowy są badania nad komunizmem i PRL-em, które każda z nas prowadzi, wykorzystując kategorię "pokolenie". Nie jesteśmy oczywiście jedyne. W ostatnich latach przybywa prac operujących tą kategorią w obszarze studiów nad pamięcią, przemianami postaw społecznych, polityką historyczną. Sięgają po nią socjolodzy, historycy, literaturoznawcy. Na własny użytek przepracowują i wypracowują oni/one deinicje "pokolenia". Myślę, że to dobry punkt wyjścia do naszej rozmowy. Jak we współczesnej humanistyce rozumiana jest kategoria "pokolenie"? Gdzie-w jakich obszarach badawczych/przy okazji jakich zagadnień-widać jej potencjał? Anna Artwińska: Można zaryzykować stwierdzenie, że kategoria pokolenia przeżywa dziś swój renesans. Jest obecna w dyskursach biologicznych, politycznych, pedagogicznych, historiograicznych i literackich. Mimo że w badaniach naukowych (nie tylko humanistycznych) Pożytki z "pokolenia". Dyskusja o "pokoleniu" jako kategorii analitycznej

This communication is based on a dissertation project in progress concerning the political changes in the post-communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe after 1989, and more particularly, concerning the role of the European integration in the post-communist democratization. A certain controversy dominates the literature regarding the role of the European integration in this democratization. This debate comes mainly from putting accent on institutional and strategic approaches. They use quantitative methods, even if it isn’t always necessary from methodological standpoint. Thus, the literature on the role of the European integration in the democratization of the post-communist countries defends the idea for harmonious spreading of the democratic institutions (Vachudova 2005), or for spreading that takes as a basis certain preexisting economical rationality within the national actors (Tomescu-Hatto 2008), or for spreading that bumps itself on the harmful effects of the former ...

This paper examines the relationship between the post-communist political regime and the communist past, analysing how the communist past, after a period of time when the state agents resorted to eschewing strategies, was eventually confronted frontally in 2006 when the Romanian President commissioned what came to be known as the “Tismaneanu Report” in order to officially condemn the communist regime. The Tismaneanu Report is seen here as a state-sponsored attempt to impose an official memory of communism as the sole “scientifically” based narrative of the communist past. The trial of communism, ended with the sentencing of the communist regime as illegitimate and murderous based on the conclusions of the Tismaneanu Report, is seen as expressing a political strategy of legitimating the new democratic order by breaking off with the past. The paper then examines the latent conflict subsisting between the official memory of communism codified in the narrative delivered by the Tismanean...

In this paper I problematize the transformation of the field of mass cultural production as a producer of specific mass cultural goods/media products. The aim of this paper is to set the situational and theoretical background against whic h the specificity of the field of mass cultural production in Romania is to be understood. The main co ceptual tools that I use are: field, press freedom and market, as they appear in the academic literature, and as they have been used in Romania after the fall of communism. The transforma tion of the locus of valuation of mass cultural goods and the consequences it entails has not enjoy ed enough attention. The lack of clarification of these aspects has concrete consequences at the leve l of th lack of coherence between the legislative institutional structures that continue to define an d treat the mass cultural products as symbolic good s, and the market reality that defines them as merchan dise whose value is provided by the price obtained on th...

Most European post-communist societies after 1989-1991 appeared to be on the road to liberal democratic capitalism. However, a quarter of century after the change of the system, at least some of the countries-Russia and Hungary in particular (arguably setting a trend for many other nations)-began to drift sharply away from liberal democracy. We treat liberalism and democracy as two distinct dimensions of "good governance". We interpret liberalism as separation of powers and security of private property rights. We interpret democracy as majoritarian rule. As the regimes shift to illiberalism, secure private property tends to be converted into "fief" (neo-patrimonialism-like during the rule of Yeltsin), or eventually into "benefice" (neo-prebendalism, this turn happened with the rise of Putin to power). While the principle of majoritarian rule is retained, it is also "managed". But as long as democratic institutions operate, as long as leaders are elected to office the ruling elites of illiberal democracies need a legitimating ideology which can appeal to a broader electorate. We call this post-communist traditionalist/neoconservative ideology. Post-communist traditionalism/neoconservatism emphasizes the value of patriotism, religion and traditional family values much like some of the socially conservative republicans in the USA do. Keywords: post-communist capitalism, managed and illiberal democracy, transition from communism to capitalism, neo-patrimonial and neo-prebendal forms of ownership, traditionalism/neo-conservatism.

This article highlights the disjunction between, on the one hand, the Romanian civic and environmental local movements and the transnational NGOs actively working to implement “democracy” and “civil society” programs in Romania. The 2012-2013 environmental and social mobilizations against the whole Romanian political class brought to the surface this compartmentalization, hitherto latent. These social realities cannot be understood without a discussion of the history of NGOs in post-communist Romania. I argue that the big NGO democratization programs have been oriented towards an imagined normalization of Romania, based on an anti-communist and neoliberal ideology. This explains why they cannot be representative of a larger social spectrum. Next, I discuss the new social movements that emerged in 2012, built around gold-mining issues in the Roșia Montană region. An analysis of the mobilizations and debate around the gold-mines reveals a gap between two civil societies with divergent...

This paper elaborates on the context of social policy reform in East European countries. The research question addressed by this paper is through which path of development the Romanian welfare state is facing post-communist challenges, particularly the accession to EU. What are the implications of adopting the acquis communautaire for the configuration of Romanian social policy? The research hypothesis is that the negotiation process in the social field is shaping the development of Romanian social policy, particularly as regards the institutional design. The first part of the paper outlines Romanian social policy during the communist period and the social achievements during the transition period. The second part takes a closer look at social Europe and the impact of the negotiation process on Romanian social policy. The paper concludes that the EU has played an important role in shaping Romanian social policy during the postcommunist period.

This article highlights the disjunction between, on the one hand, the Romanian civic and environmental local movements and the transnational NGOs actively working to implement “democracy” and “civil society” programs in Romania. The 2012-2013 environmental and social mobilizations against the whole Romanian political class brought to the surface this compartmentalization, hitherto latent. These social realities cannot be understood without a discussion of the history of NGOs in post-communist Romania. I argue that the big NGO democratization programs have been oriented towards an imagined normalization of Romania, based on an anti-communist and neoliberal ideology. This explains why they cannot be representative of a larger social spectrum. Next, I discuss the new social movements that emerged in 2012, built around gold-mining issues in the Roșia Montană region. An analysis of the mobilizations and debate around the gold-mines reveals a gap between two civil societies with divergent...