Editorial

A long and rich tradition of communication, culture and politics in CEE

There is nonetheless a long tradition of communication and media research in CEE, often conducted at very long-established institutions of higher education: Charles University in Prague, founded in 1348, was the first university in the CEE region; Jagellonian University was established in Cracow in 1364, the University of Vilnius in Lithuania in 1579 and the University of Tartu in Estonia in 1632. There are many more examples. The particular conditions of democratic transition in the 1980s and 1990s also gave rise to a particular mode of media and communications research in CEE. The public demand for free media was a key element of the transition years and many media and communication scholars across CEE became part of the transition process – as scholars, as policy advisors or policy makers, or, in some cases, even as politicians, taking on multifaceted roles as truly public intellectuals. In Poland, Karol Jakubowicz (1941–2013) defended his PhD thesis on how radio and TV had affected the evolution of societies in Western countries and went on to become an advisor to the National Council for Radio and Television and later President of the Supervisory Board of Polish Television, in addition to maintaining a career as an internationally active scholar of the media in general and of broadcasting policy in particular. In Estonia, Marju Lauristin, Professor of Social Communication at Tartu University, later became a cabinet minister. Her colleague at Tartu, Epp Lauk, had worked alongside others to keep the Journalism department at that university a centre of resistance against the Soviet regime and, after 1989, she became a noted media critic and founder of the Estonian Press Council. Many more names could be mentioned, for example, Slavko Splichal in Slovenia, Mihai Coman in Romania, Boguslawa Dobek-Ostrowska in Poland, Václav Štetka in the Czech Republic, Marsha Siefert and Péter Bajomi-Lázár in Hungary, Auksė Balčytienė in Lithuania – all have contributed to international scholarship and debates on media, democracy and culture in CEE, and to contemporary media debates in their respective countries and beyond. The public intellectual tradition is strong among CEE media and communication scholars, making it all the more striking that the region has largely been ignored by researchers from outside. However, a significant attempt at ‘de-West-Europeanising’ media research and creating the first collaborative network of media researchers from all CEE countries (and seven Western countries) was made by a COST Action called “East of the West: Setting a New Central and Eastern European Media Research Agenda” in 2005-2009 (funded by the European Science Foundation) (http://www.cost.eu/domains_actions/isch/Actions/European_Media_Research_Agenda/%28glossary%29/off). The public intellectual tradition is strong among CEE media and communication scholars, making it all the more striking that the region has largely been ignored by researchers from outside.

It is indeed unfortunate that CEE is considered ‘dead ground’ research-wise within mainstream media studies outside the region. In CEE, one could argue, many issues that are ‘buried’ in other societies are on the surface because of the tremendous changes these countries have gone through in the fairly recent past. Studying the media in CEE may enable us to see things we have not previously been able to see in countries that have not experienced such dramatic change. But we would also argue that studying media and communication in CEE is important not only for area specialists, but for media and communication studies as a whole. We argue that it would be a mistake to assume that we can understand how societies and their media are changing globally if we ignore the parts of the world we do not know about. The reluctance to explore what seems to be invisible may have serious implications for the ways in which we theorize, conceptualize, develop and use methodologies and in which we collect empirical materials.

The impact of CEE scholars beyond the region

Academics and intellectuals from CEE have traditionally played a significant role both within and outside the region. Many fled from Nazism and later from communism, and we do less than justice to those many by mentioning just a few. Perhaps the most famous were Karl W Deutsch (1912–1992) in political science, Ernest Gellner (1925–1995) and Julia Kristeva in philosophy, Eva Hoffmanin in literature studies, Zygmunt Bauman in sociology and George Gerbner (1919–2005) in communication. Deutsch left Prague in 1939 to study politics at Harvard and later became an eminent political scientist with a special interest in communication and comparative research. Likewise, Gellner escaped fascism in Prague at the age of 13 to move to the UK, and became a professor of philosophy and anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science and later at Cambridge. Like Deutsch, he was interested in understanding nationalism. Gerbner was forced to flee from fascist Hungary to the USA in 1939, and later became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the leading figures in international communication and in research on television and violence. The parents of Eva Hoffman (born in Cracow) survived the Holocaust by hiding in the Ukraine and emigrated to Vancouver in 1959. She received a PhD in English and American literature at Harvard and later wrote her most famous book, Lost in Translation: Life in a New Language (1989). Kristeva left Bulgaria in 1965 to study in France, where she became a leading semiotician, feminist and anthropologist. Bauman left Poland in 1971 as a result of an anti-semitic campaign. He later became a professor at the University of Leeds and an internationally famous academic who writes about modernity, post-modernity and globalization.

Nowadays, people like Epp Lauk, who now works at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland, leave their countries not only for political reasons, and it is not only colleagues from CEE who are leaving to work outside their countries of origin - there is also a two-way flow. Professor Marsha Siefert, a former Editor of the Journal of Communication and Gerbner’s co-author, has been working for years at the Central European University in Budapest. Peter Gross, who emigrated from Romania in 1963, works as a professor of journalism at the University of Tennessee and was instrumental in establishing a new journalism program in 1992 at the University of Timisoara, Romania. We also have the second-generation CEE academics. For example, Professor Philip Schlesinger of Austrian and Hungarian descent works at the University of Glasgow, is a widely known expert on the European public sphere and one of the founders of the field of media studies in the UK.

CEE is not a homogenous block

So it is not always easy, or even necessary, to separate research on media and communications carried out in Central and Eastern Europe from that carried out elsewhere. Academics, no matter what their nationality or location, are nowadays also carrying out research on countries that are neither their country of origin nor the country they are living in. Academic research should be not only interdisciplinary, but also intercultural. We still need local knowledge and knowledge of local languages, but these qualifications are not necessarily tied to the nationality of the researcher. CEE is a prime example of a region whose borders have kept changing, and issues around identities have thus remained contested. At the same time, there is also a deep sense of diversity and belonging-ness across borders, a desire to be ‘in the middle’ where ‘East’ and ‘West’ meet, if not in the ‘West’.

Interestingly, also, even when the media in CEE countries are seen to matter for academic research outside the region, they often seem to be bundled together in the context of CEE as a supra-national political block, an absolute space, rather than, to use Harvey’s (1973) concepts, a relational or a relative space. It is a great injustice to define CEE with reference only to the communist period or to the second-wave EU accession countries or to transitional countries, and thus to ignore the rich history that precedes the 20th and 21st centuries. However, for practical reasons, we do use the blanket term in this issue. There are 18 countries in CEE and they do, of course, share, to an extent, common histories, politics and culture, but they also differ from one another. By using the term CEE, we do not want to imply that the region is a homogenous unit, and we are fully aware of the many political and other issues that are subsumed by placing all these countries under the blanket of CEE.

Articles in this issue

We hope that the articles in this issue will contribute to addressing the neglect of the CEE region and to highlighting the wider issues at stake when studying the region. As previously mentioned, many issues that remain ‘buried’ in the West have tended to come to the fore in CEE due to the rapid societal upheavals before, during and often following transition. Studying the CEE can help us to understand processes elsewhere, and many phenomena that at first may seem country- or region-specific turn out to have general relevance.

For example, Nikola Belakova’s article on the Slovak Press Act of 2008 highlights the important role of various elite networks of actors – informal as well as formal – in determining the practical effects of the said law. Her results may well also function as a comment on media laws in Western countries, where the ‘law on the books’ (Belakova’s term) may indicate a high level of media freedom and autonomy, but conditions on the ground (for example, the relationship between media owners and other elite actors) place clear limits on this freedom and autonomy.

Péter Bajomi-Lázár and Dorka Horváth argue in their article for the continued relevance of an ‘old-style’ propaganda model in the analysis of political communication in contemporary Hungary. Analysing a set of political campaigns launched by the Orban government, they convincingly make the case that these campaigns are dictated by ritualistic propaganda principles, rather than by political marketing, and that this can be explained by the fact that Fidesz – Orban’s party – is a proto-hegemonic rather than a pluralist political party. Given the fact that many European countries now have proto-hegemonic parties represented in parliament (for example, the far-right Sweden Democrats in Sweden), Bajomi-Lázár and Horváth’s analysis is clearly also relevant to the analysis of contemporary political communication outside Hungary.

Florian Toepfl’s comparative article, analysing the emergence and non-emergence of pluralist media systems in the Czech Republic and Russia, respectively, explicitly aims for general relevance when presenting an analytical framework consisting of six factors that help to explain why pluralist media systems emerge or do not emerge. His analytical framework, stringently applied to the two chosen cases, could theoretically be used to analyse the emergence of the media system of any country and, as such, is not limited to the CEE region.

Terhi Rantanen’s final article explicitly addresses the shortcomings of general systems approaches in comparative media research, using the CEE region as a counterpoint to the ‘Western-centric’ assumptions guiding many such system-level comparisons. For example, assumptions of a close relationship between media systems and political systems are confounded in the CEE case, where media systems have been subjected to much more arbitrary and haphazard policy changes than have the political systems. Furthermore, many system-level comparative approaches assume an unproblematic relationship between nation and state, an assumption that cannot be made in most CEE cases, where state-building – with or without a ‘national’ basis – was in fact a key part of the political agenda during transitions.

This issue also features an interview with Epp Lauk on issues of journalism, democracy and culture and a memoriam for Karol Jakubowicz (1941–2013).

Our aim is that, taken together, these texts will demonstrate that CEE cannot and should not be considered ‘dead ground’ and, in fact, that the study of media, democracy and culture in this region carries important lessons for the rest of Europe and for the world.