Abstract
Now, over 20 years after the beginning of the postcommunist transition, there is a need for assessment of existing scholarship on the subject and, if warranted, a theoretical and methodological redirection. The Postcommunism from Within edited by Jan Kubik and Amy Linch offers both.
The book is divided into four parts: (1) general approaches to postcommunism, (2) gender, (3) poverty, and (4) corruption. While the first part is composed of two chapters that offer a strong and thoughtful critique of dominant approaches in postcommunist studies, parts 2, 3, and 4 deal with specific social problems that are both informative of the issues and illustrative of a more contextualized, holistic approach advocated in part 1.
Chapter 1 by Kubik and chapter 2 by Wolfe and Pickles offer an insightful critique of two decades of Western scholarship of postcommunism that to a large degree privileged the hegemonic neoliberal worldview and has used Western conceptual framework without due regard to its genealogy and a ‘particular histories and geographies of deployment’ (p. 96). Both chapters offer a more nuanced approach to postcommunism that pay due attention to the diverse local cultural and institutional context, purposive and reflexive social actors, and the different historical legacies of socialist period in each country. They point toward the need to investigate how these hegemonic Western concepts are themselves diffused by the local practices of innovation, resistance and selective adaptation (p. 98).
Chapter 3 by Regulska and Grabowska, chapter 4 by Lovin, and chapter 5 by Badashvili all address the gender issues across postcommunist landscape. All three chapters build their analyses of women’s mobilization to gender oppression in the respective countries they study as a complex interplay between the hegemony of Western conceptions of gender inequality, present in the discourses of European Union (EU) and various women’s non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the region, and local understanding and praxis of women writers and activists in the postcommunist world. These essays also suggest that, while the presence of NGO as well as the political pressures coming from the EU to institutionalize ‘gender equality’ has created opportunities for women’s mobilization across the region at the level of political parties and state institutions, they have also obscured other important forms of women’s empowerment, resistance, and mobilization. These essays also demonstrate how the cherished notion of deep cultural affinity with the West present in some countries of the communist block resulted, at least initially, in almost blind, uncritical embrace of neoliberalism by women activists at the expense of other discourses that connected the oppression of women with capitalism.
Chapter 6 by Szelenyi and Wilk and chapter 7 by Vamanu and Vamanu are grouped under part 3 (poverty), but they address different issues.
Szelenyi and Wilk posit a question why the first decade of postcommunism can be characterized as popular demobilization, with dramatically decreased strike activity despite high social costs of transition. Using quantitative data, the authors demonstrate overall increase in poverty in the region between 1988 and 2000, but they also show that this increase was uneven. The authors use historical analyses to demonstrate the embrace of the neoliberalism by the democratic opposition by 1989 as well as the ‘sudden meltdown of state socialism’ as contributing to the feeling on the part of the majority of communist societies that there was no alternative (p. 245). Szelenyi and Wilk also grapple with the second paradox of the region, namely, the uneven pattern of economic and social reforms across the region. Again, utilizing historical analysis and case studies of health-care reforms in Hungary and Poland, they conclude that timing of reforms, and the openness and plurality of the political system make a difference.
Chapter 7 by Vamanu and Vamanu describe the increased use of hate language directed at Roma minority in Romania focusing on online publication and discussion forums. The authors link this phenomenon to both, the lengthy exclusion of Romania from the EU that, in the view of some ethnic Romanians had to be blame on the Roma minority, as well as growing anti-immigrant (particularly anti-Romanian) sentiment in the EU countries after Romania’s accession to the Union. The authors explain that the attack against Roma by the ethnic Romanians was possible by the process of discursive inversion, whereby the dominant and privileged majority of ethnic Romanians was falsely depicted in the media and Internet discussion forums as a group being increasingly dominated, oppressed by Roma minority.
The significance of understanding the meaning and mechanism of corruption in postcommunist societies is examined by Ledeneva in chapter 8, Karklins in chapter 9, and Grodeland in chapter 10.
Ledeneva, based on her empirical investigation of the phenomena of public corruption in Russia and China, shows the mismatch between the global paradigm of corruption as constructed by global financial institutions and the postcommunist experience. She traces the historical origins of the concept of public corruption and juxtaposes it with the alternative meaning the term acquired in the postcommunist context, a product of the legacy of communist era. Ledeneva argues that measuring corruption in postcommunist societies using Western legal definitions and standards creates a danger of omitting and misunderstanding of a range of practices that represent various ‘strategies of coping’ or ‘forms of everyday resistance’ with the malfunctions of the larger political and administrative systems (pp. 319–320). While Ledeneva argues that corruption can be seen as a strategy by an average citizen to the inadequacies of the governance inherited from the communist era, Karklins shows that corruption in health care in postcommunist countries has also a very negative impact on society by exacerbating inequality in access to health care as well as increasing income inequality since it becomes a lucrative practice for doctors. Chapter 10 by Grodeland is a large study of corruption in procurement practices in four postcommunist countries (Czech Republic, Slovenia, Bulgaria, and Romania) that utilizes quantitative as well as qualitative survey methods. This study sheds an important light on the role that informal practices by foreign and domestic firms play in public procurement. It also illustrates limitations to transplanting legal Western standards into postcommunist context.
The importance of this volume is that it adds to the theory and practice of comparative research in general and postcommunist studies in particular by bringing attention to the need for a type of social analysis that is much more sociological, historical, and anthropological in orientation. Societies are more than forms of political and economic institutions; they are dynamic, contested terrains in which purposive and reflexive social actors both build on existing discourses and practices of resistance and create their own discourses and practices that are rooted in local knowledge, cultural traditions, and historical memory. Because of this, one must recognize both the power and the limits of Western hegemonic discourses and policy prescriptions in the postcommunist context.
In the aftermath of the major economic downturn and deepening social inequality in the West, this book is also a timely critique of neoliberal philosophy that dominated not just the economic policy circles in both East and West but has shaped the academia as well. As number of authors in this volume observe, neoliberalism in the postcommunist context was more of an instrument used by the democratic opposition to undermine state socialism than a coherent economic and normative system to replace it. If anything, it obscured the multidimensional, differentiated process of actually occurring, postsocialist transformations, and, as several essays in this volume demonstrate, the social problems caused by economic reforms along the neoliberal lines have muted these populations’ desires for this experiment to continue.
As for limitations, portions of this volume do not rise to the high theoretical and methodological challenge called for by Kubik, Wolfe, and Pickles in the first two chapters. I am particularly disappointed by the lack of the ethnographic sensibility advocated by Kubik (pp. 63–66). For a work that argues for more sensitivity to the meanings and discourses that are locally constructed, it is ironic that the closest it comes to this approach is in the picture on the book’s jacket of women and men taking part in a demonstration. One of the women, dressed in a black coat and black hat, her face shows both concern and determination, is holding a sign that reads in Polish ‘Kobiety Wkurzcie sie!’ (Women, Get Pissed!). We would like to know more about her (and the thousands of women like her across the postcommunist landscape), about her life and her troubles, and her motivations to march in the street, through her own story, told in her own language, using her own explanations. This level of authenticity and intimacy of local languages, understandings, and practices that inform, guide, and motivate the actors of social mobilizations across the region is largely missing in this book.
I believe that Western social sciences recognize to a varying degree, and this volume is no exception, the validity of other systems of knowledge (at least to the extent of being meaningful and significant to the actors who use and practice them) but continue to struggle with incorporating these insights into their own descriptive narratives due to their own entrapments of habit and institutionalization. I agree with Kubik that more rather than less ethnographic sensibility is needed in an attempt to disentangle the various historical trajectories and contradictions that continue to unfold throughout the region as the people search for a meaningful solutions to problems in their own lives and as they continue to shape the institutional edifices of their young democracies (or in their fight toward that end). This book represents a good step in this direction.