Search Results

This chapter begins with descriptions of the life and accomplishments of Archie Brown, Britain’s foremost expert on Russian politics. In the last 40 years, Brown has gained international recognition for his scholarly work on leadership and political change in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. Brown’s insights into the sources of within-system reform, the role of Gorbachev in transforming Soviet Communism, and leadership and democratisation in post-Communist Russia are discussed.

This chapter argues that any incorporation of the CEE economies into the VoC framework must take into account two fundamental features of these economic systems: an almost complete lack of working-class political mobilization and a completely outdated technological structure. As a result, there is great reliance on foreign investors and foreign purchasers for providing technology transfer and the training of manpower. The chapter conceptualizes this VoC as ‘liberal dependent post-communist capitalism’ to highlight the liberal nature of the state and the dependent nature of the economy. In most the rest of the post-communist world, foreign direct investment, or FDI, and foreign manufacturers play a much smaller role. Instead, patron-client relationships ensnare major enterprises, leading to a decomposition of the bureaucratic (in the Weberian sense of the term) nature of the state. This produces a different variety of post-communist capitalism.

This introductory chapter explains the objectives of this book, mainly to explore the recent work of Western liberal theorists on the issues of pluralism and minority rights in post-Communist countries of Eastern and Central Europe. It seeks to answer the question of whether Western models of liberal pluralism can contribute to the democratisation and stabilization of post-Communist Europe. An overview of the papers included in this volume is presented.

Political leaders in post-Communist Eastern European states have rejected ethnic minority leaders’ calls for territorial autonomy (TA). Two reasons are given for this rejection: TA is viewed as a stepping stone to secession, and that the putative minority homeland is no more culturally homogeneous than is the state as a whole. The validity of these two objections to TA is discussed within the context of the history of TA in the Soviet Union, and actual experiences of TA in successor states.

It is not so long ago that Niklas Luhmann (1988) wrote that the study of trust has never been a topic in mainstream sociology, and others have echoed this claim with reference to other social sciences. Curiously, deep insights of Georg Simmel (1858–1918) on trust have been largely ignored or have been remembered only in minor references. Since the 1980s and 1990s, the subject of trust has become, quite suddenly, a theme of the day. Social and political scientists have embarked on this topic, posing theoretical and empirical questions. This book is concerned with trust/distrust in post-Communist Europe after the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989. It raises questions about trust and democracy, and how history, culture, and social psychology shape the nature and development of political phenomena. In this introduction, trust and different forms of rationality are discussed, along with trust/risk and trust/fear, mutual distrust and public security, socialization into fear, arbitrariness of decisions in a totalitarian regime, trust and legitimacy, and abuse of common sense.

Political theorists claim that political trust is located on the continuum that runs from blind faith to enforceable contract. Trust ‘as passion’ borders on blind faith, while trust ‘as calculation’ comes close to enforceable contract. More often located between these extremes, political trust is usually a mix of faith and calculation, varying from largely irrational responses to the charisma of political leaders to largely calculated ‘bets on the actions of others’. This chapter discusses political distrust in post-Communist Europe and looks at four broad categories of potential influences (all negative) on political trust: distrustful citizens, untrustworthy institutions, discordance between citizens and government, and hard times. It also examines incompetence, scandal, dishonesty, and corruption; responsiveness and fairness; the untrustworthiness of elected and unelected officials; and the unfairness that citizens perceive or actually experience.

Research on the transition of countries in post-Communist Europe towards democracy mostly indicates that there is more political and institutional trust in Western democratic countries than in the post-Communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Questions about citizens' trust and distrust in the newly formed institutions and about the trustworthiness of these institutions seem to be just as compelling today as they were in the early 1990s. In the context of the rapid socio-political and economic changes that influence citizens' daily lives, political trust and distrust appear to fluctuate alongside the rise and fall of optimism and pessimism. Among the unquestioned consequences of totalitarianism, the profound demoralization of citizens, learned helplessness, undemocratic thinking, and distrust of institutions have been generally diagnosed as being the most significant. Research on trust and democratic transition in post-Communist Europe has involved, over a number of years, into the exploration of both public opinions and social representations. This chapter examines trust and distrust in old and new democracies as well as the link between political revolutions and human psychology.

Chapter 2 traces the origins of the Central Asian states’ patrimonial political systems and the “local rules” that structure their interactions with outside powers. It explores the Soviet origins of Central Asia’s patrimonial political arrangements and their restructured role during the independence era, and surveys the varieties of authoritarianism across the region. Central Asia’s local rules lead governments to conflate external and internal threats in the name of preserving their regimes; use state resources for private gain; and act as brokers between external actors and local constituents. In the 1990s these practices were masked by the external assumption that the Central Asian states were in transition, while in the 2000 rulers became more brazen about their patrimonial imperatives.

Transition economies have lower rates of entrepreneurship than most developed and developing market economies. The difference is even more marked in the countries of the former Soviet Union than those of Central and Eastern Europe. The chapter links these differences partly to the legacy of communist planning, and the need to replace it with formal market-supporting institutions. Many of these changes, however, have now taken place. To analyze this longer term issue, the chapter highlights the necessarily slow pace of development of new informal institutions and the need to rebuild generalized trust. The chapter argues that changes are slower in the former Soviet Union than Central and Eastern Europe because communist rule was much longer, leading to a generational lack of institutional memory.

This chapter focuses on Romanian films which emerged after the collapse of Communism in 1989. The political events in Romania at that time were almost entirely and sometimes excessively filmed by professional film and television crews and by numerous amateur film makers, which had long-term effects on the future history of Romanian cinema. These effects were felt in the early documentaries, domestic and foreign docu-fictions, shorts, and feature-length films of the early 1990s. The chapter begins with a brief discussion of events leading up to revolution in 1989. It then describes the four categories of art-house films by less familiar or totally unknown directors, with corresponding examples: those still indebted to a metaphoric encoded cinematic language; those choosing to put it bluntly and reveal the realities of the immediate post-Communist Romania; those eager to retrace unknown and long-forbidden periods and facts from recent Romanian history, such as the terrible ordeals of Communist prisons or the forced collectivization replacing private property; and those depicting in a style closer to documentary and television the complex facts of the December revolution and of its immediate consequences.

This chapter examines the retrospective recounting of life in the collective years by women in reform-era China. It looks at an ongoing interdisciplinary and cross-geographical discussion about revolution, repudiation and post-Communist nostalgia and traces the connections between pre-Liberation, socialist construction, and market socialism eras. It suggests that the women in this study have fashioned a narrative of progress, featuring themselves as paragons of womanly virtue, telling their stories in an era when the histories, memories, and institutions of the collective era are disappearing and devalued.

In Eastern and Central Europe's post-Communist transition, property restitution played no small part in expanding the privatizing and re-privatizing of the economies of the countries involved in the transition. Since World War II ended, the notion of rectifying arbitrary injustices has been the subject of numerous debates especially since Communist hegemony was put to an end in 1989. Also, certain statutes in formerly socialist countries can be associated with various policies that advocated the implementation of property restitution measures. This chapter attempts to discuss how the principle of restitution does not only reflect forms of legitimacy, but also directs attention to issues of temporal and spatial responsibilities of the state particularly in Germany's New Bundesländer. The chapter also discusses how the Federal German State was also able to establish administrative procedures and structures to push through with the practice of property restitution.

Analyses of party manifestos, of expert judgements on party positions, and of parties’ actual behaviour when voting on military missions all show that party-political contestation is structured along the left/right dimension. Support for the military and its interventions is systematically related to the left/right dimension in a skewed inverted U-curve: support is weakest at the far left and increases as one moves along the left/right axis to the centre right where it reaches its peak. The far right is less supportive then the centre right but less opposed than the far left. The relation to the ‘new politics’ dimension is shaped very similarly but is generally weaker. Party-political contestation of military missions in the post-Communist party systems in Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe follows a different pattern than elsewhere. In the post-Communist party systems, the relationship between left/right and support of military interventions is weaker, and the relationship with the ‘new politics’ dimension is either weak or even points in the opposite direction as in Western Europe. It is important to note, however, that the influence of the left/right dimension is not limited to Western Europe. As the manifestos of various non-European countries show, the correlation can also be found in Asia, Oceania, Africa, and Latin America.