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Letter from the Editors
In this year of anniversaries, we turned to some of our contributors asking them to reflect not so much on what has happened in the past twenty years as on where we are today. [...]
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In this year of anniversaries, we turned to some of our contributors asking them to reflect not so much on what has happened in the past twenty years as on where we are today. [...]
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How Milošević’s empire-building completed the process of national homogenization in the successor states of Yugoslavia and brought this part of the Balkan region in conformity with the modernity’s prescription of national statehood.
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Nearly two decades after renewed independence, the population of Latvia is quite unhappy with the status quo. The number of inhabitants in the country continues to decline due to outmigration and a low fertility level; the international image of the country is believed by Latvians to be ambiguous at best, negative at worst; there is widespread disillusionment with the new political elite, which is thought to be incompetent as well as corrupt; the market economy has not produced straight-line economic progress but rather a growing subpopulation living at the minimal standard of living; continuing divisions of opinion over a wide range of subjects (such as the meaning of World War II and the question of the country’s official language) continue to suggest at least incomplete social integration; and the openness brought by the instruments of the information revolution appears to many to contribute to dissension and not cohesion. This was not the normality Latvians had aspired to during the heady years of unified opposition to Soviet power in the 1988–91 period, but the characteristics of this normality are shared in different combinations by many members of the European Union.
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Why is there nostalgia for real socialism? Is it but a logical response to sudden, dramatic transformation? Don’t people remember those days anymore—or do they remember them all too well? In popular opinion, nostalgia for socialism is something fabricated, invented, and then imposed by different groups of people to achieve some goals: to open a new commercial niche, to attain political credit, to win popular support, to get artistic inspiration, and so on. Thus, many academic studies have examined only this instrumental side of the phenomenon, limiting it to the “industry of nostalgia” only. But research shows that nostalgia is in fact a retrospective utopia, a wish and a hope for a safe world, a fair society, true friendships, mutual solidarity, and well-being in general, in short, for a perfect world. As such, it is less a subjective, arbitrary, ideological effort to recall the past as it is, an undetermined, undefined, amorphous wish to transcend the present. So nostalgia for socialism in fact does not relate exclusively and precisely to past times, regimes, values, relations, and so on as such, but it embodies a utopian hope that there must be a society that is better than the current one.
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What were the effects of constitution-making procedures on the acceptance of the new “rules of the political game” in postcommunist Central Europe? This article sets out to scrutinise the increasingly popular claim among politicians and scholars of democratisation that inclusiveness and popular involvement in constitution-making processes enhance a constitution’s legitimacy. The concept of constitutional conflict, referring to political contestation over the interpretation and application of constitutional relations among state institutions, is introduced as a way to assess constitutional acceptance among politicians. The investigation concentrates on constitutional conflict patterns during the five years following constitution-making in seven Central European countries: Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia. Constitutionmaking procedures varied substantially among the cases, as did the intensity and timing of constitutional conflict. The article finds that differences in constitution-making procedures do not necessarily determine the legitimacy of constitutions among political elites. Instead, ambiguity on the allocation of formal competencies among political actors and increasing political tensions between pro-reform and anti-reform parties during the early 1990s proved to be more important triggers of constitutional conflict. Accordingly, studies on constitution-making and democratisation should focus less on procedural aspects and take into account the fuzziness of important constitutional provisions and the extent to which constitutions can survive periods of intense political polarisation.
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This study describes and compares Czech and Slovak party politics after 1989. The concept of cleavages is used as a theoretical starting point. The authors point out that although the communist period overshadowed the traditional cleavages dating from the second half of the nineteenth century, it is possible to analyze some politically-based cleavages in the respective party arrangements of the two countries. The main conclusion of the article is as follows: that despite differing trajectories of political development during the 1990s, at the present time, both the Czech and Slovak party systems show great similarities in terms of the prevalence of the socioeconomic cleavage. Socioeconomic cleavage emerged quite early after 1989 in the Czech Republic; in Slovakia the socioeconomic cleavage has become dominant only in recent years. This has contributed to the stabilization of the classic left-right model of political competition and the consolidation of the two countries’ party systems.
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The article provides a detailed and informative account of the transitional justice process in Albania and examines the logic behind the initiation of lustration process. Describing the accurate historical context of the country’s communist past, the authors explain the factors that prevented the successful implementation of the post-communist transitional justice in Albania, such as its political culture, the impact of the communist regime, and most importantly, the lack of political will from Albanian political leadership to break away from its communist past. A pioneer in initiating transitional justice laws in the Balkans in the early nineties, Albania failed to successfully implement them, as the leadership saw the lustration process as a political means to crush the opposition and consolidate its power. The article explains that transitional justice process in Albania became highly politicized and was used by politicians for political gains, which ultimately led to loss of trust from general public failing to detach the Albanian political scene from its communist past.
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The review of: Baltic Postcolonialism edited by Violeta Kelertas. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. pp. 464.
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An important source of the post-Communist divide between a relatively democratic Central and Southeastern Europe on one side and a highly autocratic former Soviet Union on the other is the different character of the international environments in the two regions. Post-Communist countries differ along two key dimensions of the post–cold war international environment: Western leverage, or governments’ vulnerability to external pressure; and linkage to the West, or the density of a country’s economic, political, organizational, social, and communication ties to the European Union and the United States. High linkage and leverage in Central and Southeastern Europe generated intense international democratizing pressures, contributing to democratization even under unfavorable domestic conditions. By contrast, weaker linkage and leverage in the former Soviet Union has produced a much more permissive international environment. As a result, democratization has failed in the absence of a strong domestic push.
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Robert M. Hayden has written a very strange book review. In my book, Thinking about Yugoslavia, I discuss 131 books, among other things noting differences in factual accounts, interpretations, and moral and empirical frameworks. In his review of my book, Professor Hayden refers to only 7 of the books I discuss and relies on outright falsifications of my views to advance his argument. In fact, nowhere in his review does he demonstrate that any of the works I praise in my book do in fact “violate the principles of social science inquiry,” as he alleges. [...]
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I would only point out that while Sabrina P. Ramet devotes much of her response to an attack on one of my books, I purposefully avoided dealing in my review with her comments on my own work, on the principle that a review should not be so personalized. I felt very qualified, however, to assess her reviews of others in a field of research to which I have been contributing for more than fifteen years. [...]
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This article draws several conclusions. First, that elections provide critical information for shaping behavior, since in the second and third rounds, party elites and voters behaved in ways that were rational considering the outcome of the previous election. Second, on the whole, states have adopted a variety of systems and rarely changed them in major ways after the second round of elections, indicating that electoral systems quickly become constraining institutions. Where they have been changed, movement has been away from the extremes of either high disproportionality or proportionality. Third, results from the first three rounds of elections indicate declines in party system fragmentation, disproportionality, volatility, and wasted votes, indicating a growth in strategic voting. Finally, except in the very important case of party volatility, and Russia, the view that there is a generalized gap between the post-Soviet cases and the East European cases is not supported by the evidence.
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The review of: 1) Prilozi za političku biografiju dr. Franje Tuđmana, predsjednika Republike Hrvatske by Davor Butković and Dubravko Grakalić. Zagreb, Croatia: Azur Journal, 1991. pp. 95. 2) Tuđman: Biografija by Darko Hudelist. Zagreb, Croatia: Profil International, 2004. pp. 739. ISBN 953–12–0038–6. 3) Predsjednice, što je ostalo? by Nenad Ivanković. Zagreb, Croatia: Naklada P.I.P. Pavicić, 2000. pp. 150. ISBN 953–6308–24–X. 4) Franjo Tuđman. Biografija by Željko Krušelj. Zagreb, Croatia: Globus, 1991. General editor, Tomislav Pušek. Photographs, Tomislav Jakić et al. pp. 263. ISBN 863–4306–46–1. 5) Tuđman izbliza by Ivica Radoš. Zagreb, Croatia: Profil International, 2005. pp. 248. ISBN 953–12–0141–2. 6) Predsjednik. Protiv krivotvorina i zaborava by Zdravko Tomac. Zagreb, Croatia: Slovo M, 2004. pp. 302. ISBN 953–6514–10–9.
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While recent surveys do not find that poverty is feminized in post-communist Hungary, this project explores gender differences in the experience of destitution. Drawing on a content analysis of in-depth interviews in twentyseven very low-income households, the author exposes the particularly gendered daily practice of poverty in Hungarian families. The author argues that one of the major gender differences in the experience of poverty is that men often find themselves in a gender role crisis when they are too poor to function as successful breadwinners. Women, on the other hand, tend to feel their roles as caretakers intensified and thus avoid a conflict with (newly) hegemonic ideals of femininity. As a response, poor marriedcouple families devise ways in which they try to alleviate men’s gender shame. The goal of the article is to identify four such strategies, which are used by poor couples to devise livable alternatives to hegemonic gender roles.
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Drawing on research conducted in Ukraine and Washington, D.C., the author illustrates how U.S. programs to develop nongovernmental organizations in the former Soviet Union have led to the creation in Ukraine of a nonprofit sector that is dominated by “hybrid organizations.” These organizations cannot be easily categorized using the conventional dualistic labels that social scientists and policy makers adopt. They are neither strictly state-run nor based in civil society, neither free market nor state enterprise, neither elite nor grassroots. The author examines the main types of “hybrid feminist” organizations that have been established in Ukraine in response to foreign programs devoted to raising awareness of women’s rights.
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This article explores how ideas and beliefs shaped the development of programs of retrospective justice. By focusing on lustration, property restitution, and the declassification of secret service files in four central European countries, this article investigates the role of formalized anti-communist programs in the founding of the new political and economic order. After reviewing the development of anti-communist programs in East Germany, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary, the article examines the motivation behind these programs and the variation in approaches across countries. It then analyzes the implications of anti-communist programs for the creation of a post-communist national identity, and concludes with a discussion of the weak anti-communist programs in post-Soviet Russia.
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Many in the West and the USSR (but not in Eastern Europe) were surprised that communism as an idea fell along with the regimes that it had buttressed. Perhaps because of this exhaustion, the kind of fervent ideas-centered debates that had characterized previous revolutionary periods are largely absent in Russia. Yet communist ideas and ways of life have become the subject of nostalgic memory and reinterpretation, entering the postcommunist present partially as legacy but also as novel adaptation, both as new ideas and new practice. In Russia where the democratic design is clearly ailing, if not failing, it is more important than ever to consider the views and the agency of those beyond the elite either to embrace or defeat conflicting visions of Russia’s future. And once again, people are dreaming, not of democracy and capitalism, but of order and a strong hand.
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This article tests four theses regarding the origins of Romanian post-socialist entrepreneurs: (1) “political capitalism,” (2) “post-socialist managerialism,” (3) “capitalism from below,” and (4) “refuge from poverty.” The results of the analyses show that the former cadres are at an advantage in being employers due to their organizational experience and network resources. Nevertheless, in line with arguments advanced by the second thesis mentioned above, education, as the most basic form of human capital, plays an important role in this story of entrepreneurship. Consistent with the predictions of the third thesis, the experience in the second economy under state socialism, as a form of cultural capital, represents an asset for being an employer and a small business operator in 2000. Private farming is an avenue taken by former socialist farmers and by some of those who have lost their jobs after 1990, especially the former peasant-workers of state socialism.
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The review of: The Baltic Transformed by Walter C. Clemens Jr. Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001. pp. 281.
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