Eastern European Culture Research Paper

The notion of ‘Eastern European Studies’ should be understood as a regional theme in the more general enterprise called ‘area studies,’ that interdisciplinary study of a region’s languages, cultures, histories, and institutions. This particular form of scholarship achieved great prominence in the USA during the Cold War, during which a new linkage between Western geopolitics and scholarship was cultivated. The American government sought expertise about other parts of the world in order to aid its struggle against communism’s spread. Consequently, it subsidized research and training in area studies across the world’s regions.

Combining Western geopolitical aims with scholarly work was relatively more compatible in studies of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union than of other world regions. During and after World War II, the Soviet Union expanded its borders to include Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Western Ukraine, and Belarus, while communists took power in other parts of Eastern Europe—East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Albania. Many political emigres from these countries could be found among the West’s experts in Eastern European Studies. Despite the political associations of exile and state sponsorship, Eastern European Studies enjoyed relative autonomy and scholarly growth through its location within various disciplines. After communism’s collapse throughout the region, Eastern European Studies no longer faces such a direct and obvious political implication. It does, however, face a challenge of coherence and other problems associated with culture’s place in disciplinary practices.

1. Eastern Europe As Cultural Category

Eastern European Studies has its antecedents in various forms of civilizational study, most notably ‘Orientalism.’ Like Orientalism, area studies expertise tends to be organized through networks of knowledge production grounded outside the region. While the Cold War inspired American area studies projects, an East European focus could build on an earlier West European invention. During the Enlightenment, West Europeans understood this region, then including Russia, as neither Orient nor Western, a place filled with contradictions whose coherence a ‘European’ gaze could not recognize ( Wolff 1994, Gal 1991).

This combination of Western proximity and ‘backwardness’ has shaped much of Eastern European Studies. One enduring debate asks whether Eastern Europe’s indigenous social relations or its trade relations explain its economic underdevelopment over the last 400 years (Chirot 1989). Despite its economic trajectory, East European art, music, architecture, and literature have thrived, leading some to identify modernity’s disarticulation as a regional distinction ( Wandycz 1984). These accomplishments lead others to argue that Europe itself should be understood as much from its east and especially its center as from its west (Sayer 1998).

Eastern European Studies has not only been cultivated in the West. For instance, the Soviet Union had its own complement of area studies. Eastern Europe was particularly important in this array given the role post-World War II Eastern Europe played, until perestroika, asa cordon sanitaire. Within Eastern Europe, however, the region’s area study is not well developed; the region is rarely articulated as a category of cultural imagination. East European diversity has invited much finer breakdowns.

Most significantly, the region’s imperial heritage is diverse—with the Ottoman, Habsburg, Russian, and Prussian empires shaping the region’s long nineteenth century, with enduring effect. The ‘Balkans,’ territories of the former Ottoman Empire in Southeastern Europe, have remained an important regional category throughout the twentieth century; with war in the 1990s, the term gained new cultural power (Todorova 1997). Those from the Western-most parts of the region also took the area’s diverse imperial legacy as a starting point for their contemporary critique of Soviet domination, arguing that communism ill-suited East Central Europe, with its more developed civil societies (Szucs 1988). Some resist Cold War categories altogether and argue that East Central Europe’s boundaries should move into Soviet space, to include the lands of the fifteenth and sixteenth-century Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth (Magosci 1993).

There is no simple cumulation of scholarly competencies in Eastern European Studies. There has been no regionally hegemonic language, like Russian was in the Soviet Union. Depending on the boundaries one invokes, and the time one imagines, different languages have been more and less dominant and numerous. For example, in 1900, Germans, Poles, and Ukrainians were the largest ethno-linguistic groups in Magosci’s (1993, pp. 97–8) East Central Europe, but Romanians, Hungarians, Czechs, Belorussians, Serbs, Greeks, Bulgarians, Croats, Slovaks, Lithuanians, Slovenes, Albanians, Macedonians, Bosnian Muslims, and Montenegrins were all dominant in particular places across the region. Beyond these groups who then had, or who would eventually have, East European states in their name, there were significant numbers of Jews, Turks, Gypsies Rom, Italians, Carpatho-Rusyns, Szekelys, Friulians, Armenians, and other ethno-linguistic groups.

There also is no principal religious tradition in Eastern Europe, whose status Islam occupies in the definition of Middle Eastern and North African studies. Islamic and Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant Christian religions dominate various parts of the regional landscape. Judaism was demographically and culturally significant before the Holocaust, and even after genocide, Judaism remains critical to understanding the region’s cultural politics. Thus, while Eastern Europe is itself a profoundly important cultural category, it is not based on the region’s cultural homogeneity. Eastern European Studies is, however, profoundly shaped by the culture of nations and nationalism.

2. The Significance Of The Nation

Cultural analysis in Eastern European Studies draws upon an indigenous scholarship, but one organized through national fields rather than across the region. For instance, Polish sociologies of the intelligentsia, both before and after World War II, had the nation as their field of reference (Chałasinski 1997). Hungarian ethnographies of the countryside, while foundational for Western anthropology’s study of Transylvania and elsewhere, were focused on the making of the Hungarian nation (Hofer 1968). Musicology or literary criticism also has been organized within national fields, around leading figures like Bela Bartok or Witold Gombrowicz, whose complicated expressions of their nation through music and literature form leitmotifs of their cultural interpretation. Consequently, the nation is one of the region’s most important cultural formations. It shapes other cultural studies and is an object of study itself.

Studies of the nation are themselves framed within larger cultural formations. Many studies of the nation in Eastern Europe are set up within a narrative of civilizational distinctions. For instance, national historiographies tend to depict the Ottoman Empire’s expansion through the 1600s and its retreat from the Balkans during the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century in terms of the contest between Islam and Christianity, on which more recent stories of civilizational clash draw. Romanian national historiographies identify their civilizational alternatives with Western and more autochthonous (indigenous, native) traditions (Verdery 1991). Estonian social science around ethnicity portrays a ‘civilizational’ difference between the West and Russia (Kirch 1997).

In contrast to those who demonstrate enduring cultural oppositions, others have emphasized the process of establishing national identity and difference, asking, for example, how intellectuals articulate nations (Suny and Kennedy 1999). Those who focus on ‘historic’ nations ( Walicki 1982) and nations that had to ‘(re) awaken’ (Rudnycky 1987) have different emphases. The latter tend to ask how peoples come to recognize themselves as nations and how they mobilize to realize political ambitions including the formation of nation-states out of imperial states (Hroch 1985). Those who focus on historical nations are more influenced by narratives of loss, whether of sovereignty, territory, or tolerance. For instance, how should one theorize the condition of Jews in a nation-state rather than an empire (Hertz 1988)? How did nationalism learn to hate (Porter 2000)? How do diasporas beyond the homeland’s state boundaries figure in the nation’s membership (Brubaker 1996)?

Nationalism and its study are not limited to Eastern Europe, but its significance in Eastern European Studies has been elevated by the region’s distinctive experience with communist rule, which in turn has come to define the region as a whole, and to organize most of its cultural social science.

3. Culture In The Social Sciences

Czesław Miłosz’s The Capti e Mind (1951) is one of the best-known works detailing how communist rule shaped high culture. His portraits were based on particular Polish writers’ responses to Stalinism, but they also could be understood as ideal typical portraits of authorial responses to communist rule. Jeffery Goldfarb (1981) developed this concern for cultural freedom, identifying communism’s constraining and enabling properties for artistic expression and audience appreciation in Polish theatre and other cultural productions. While political censorship certainly constrained cultural expression, it also made artistic expression broadly valued and independent of culture’s commodification.

Many treatments of the intelligentsia were as concerned with power and privilege as cultural expression per se. In one of the most influential and controversial works assessing the intelligentsia, Gyorgy Konrad and Ivan Szelenyi (1979) argued that communist rule’s maturation allowed this class to shape the conditions of distribution in its own favor. Underwritten by a principle of teleological knowledge that privileged their own system of ‘rational redistribution,’ the intelligentsia was poised to come to power. With the aid of monetarist ideology, Eyal et al. (1998) argued this finally came to pass in communism’s collapse. This formulation of the intelligentsia has also been helpful in understanding how communism’s institutional politics of redistribution escalated nationalist politics among Romania’s cultural producers (Verdery 1991).

Studies of class, stratification, and inequality under communist rule were mostly unconcerned with culture, but Stanisław Ossowski’s (1963) emphasis on ideology in inequality’s study opened the way for ‘subjective’ assessments of class and stratification. A number of Polish researchers asked about the popularity of gradational, functional, and dichotomous visions of inequality in the social consciousness (Zaborowski 1986). Class consciousness was complicated by the authorities’ appropriation of that discourse, but other sensibilities of work and labor could inform peasant and worker identities (Lampland 1995). Perceptions of ‘us’ and ‘them,’ based on political distinctions were found to be quite wide-spread through survey research, and became especially powerful in Poland after the formation of the Solidarity movement in 1980 (Adamski 1993).

A substantial body of scholarship has been developed to address each period of communism’s systemic crisis—1956, 1968, 1980, 1989 (e.g., Ekiert 1997). Rock music has been analyzed as a contributor to these transformations of communism, but the explicitly cultural analysis of political crisis is not so common. Culture rather performed as the obvious background, most notably in terms of a nation’s fit with communist rule imposed by the Soviet Union. The Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the Prague Spring of 1968, the Solidarity movement of 1980–81, and the end to communist rule throughout the region in 1989 all implied a mismatch between the nation and communist rule. Studies of political culture were typically organized, in fact, to explain the conditions under which the political cultures of some nations would or would not resonate with communist political culture. More recent studies tend to break down the assumption of opposition between nationalism and communism and rather study how opposition and authorities construct the nation in their own terms. For instance, instead of treating official communist discourse as simply illegitimate and therefore unworthy of serious scholarly engagement, Kubik (1994) explains how Polish communist rulers tried to appropriate the national imaginary. He also explained Solidarity of 1980–81 as ‘oversymbolized,’ or laden with more images and meanings than that single social movement could manage. This oversymbolization in 1980–81 also helps to explain postcommunist Poland’s political divisions (Ekiert and Kubik 1999).

Not every nation developed a political regime under communist rule that could produce easily imagined dichotomies of ‘us’ and ‘them.’ Ceausescu’s Romania generated a social consciousness organized around duplicity and complicity. With symbolic violence the norm, and physical violence the backup, self-censorship and dissimulation became intrinsic features of the socialist habitus; the public sphere was based on the production of lies and regulation so profound as to destroy the meaning of public private distinctions (Kligman 1998). Civil society and the public sphere, rejuvenated in the West alongside its mobilization in Eastern Europe (Keane 1988, Cohen and Arato 1992), could not find a home in Romania. It did, however, find an important place, if in different forms, across the region.

The discourse of civil society found modes of expression, and even optimism in various cultural products and forms of social organization—in Vaclav Havel’s Power of the Powerless (1986), or Adam Michnik’s (1977) notion of ‘new evolutionism.’ Civil society’s culture was argued to be tolerant, pluralist, and progressive.

The very spaces opened up in these advocacies could also produce nationalist expressions that threatened others and even led to war (Bunce 1999). This was most clearly seen in the nationalist mobilizations within civil society around Yugoslavia’s breakup. Memories of oppression by others, rekindled by polyvalent symbols, could become the cultural stock for civil society’s mobilization to hate. Alternative narratives of the war’s making seemed to deny the possibility of panoptic stances from which to explain Yugoslavia’s dissolution. Different vantage points, shaped by variable appreciation for the survival of a united Yugoslavia and for different national narratives, have organized competing stories about the war’s making, and charged the field of their interpretations (e.g., Woodward 1995 vs. Ramet 1999).

4. Culture In Transition

Studies of the nation and of nationalism after communism’s collapse were not restricted to those in war. Communism’s end offered peoples new opportunities to redefine their nation, and this invited substantial scholarly engagement. These transformations were apparent already in 1988, when for instance the polysemy of Bela Bartok was played out in the last summer of communist monopolistic rule in Hungary (Gal 1991). Some scholars shaped claims to national distinction with their own expertise, clarifying the ways in which proximate languages were related to one another and could distinguish nations, leading others, further removed, to explain the complexities and sources of these arguments. Some utilized less culturally reflexive approaches like rational choice or game theory, but the cultural field and historical legacies of places and peoples continued to shape scholarly approaches to national identification (e.g., Laitin 1998). While the nation demanded some attention to historical legacies and cultural formations, other subjects were more tolerant of distancing cultural analysis.

In the first years after communism’s collapse, most studies of transition to markets and democracy were rather formal and structural, as more and more scholars without contextual expertise identified Eastern Europe as the natural laboratory for testing their generalizing theories. This led to significant debate, especially in political science, about the relative value of area studies. Much of the contest hinged upon how much one needed to know about culture and history in order to produce good explanation, but it did not attend to the global cultural formation of transition itself (Kennedy forthcoming). Of course methodology also matters in this variable attention.

Ethnographies of transition were more likely to put into question the guiding concepts of transition, especially by noting the hermeneutic gap between transition’s key concepts and their everyday meaning (Burawoy and Verdery 1999). For instance, these inquiries help us appreciate money’s magical powers and land’s elasticity in transitional economies (Verdery 1996), and the difficulty of distinguishing private from public ownership (Stark and Bruszt 1998). Sometimes ethnographies even challenge the framework in which the transition is envisioned. Ought postcommunist capitalism be conceived as merchant, and not bourgeois, capitalism (Burawoy and Krotov 1992)?

A similar range of questions has emerged around gender studies. As in most transition studies, some gender analysts have kept culture at a distance. By treating gender more as a variable—asking, for instance, whether women’s employment chances have been disproportionately hurt by economic transition—cultural analysis is less obviously necessary. But when gender serves as a lens for interpreting social change, as Watson (1993) suggests in her characterization of 1989–92 as a ‘masculinist revolution,’ gender studies engage profound cross-cultural questions. For instance, terrific debates have occurred over the measure of cultural imperialism involved in Western feminism’s categories and modes of inquiry in regard to Eastern Europe (Gal and Kligman 2000).

5. Culture And Discipline In Eastern European Studies

As a field of inquiry, Eastern European Studies has been organized through culturally constituted geopolitical categories. During the Cold War, the field was driven by questions of fit between nations and communist rule. After communism’s collapse, the field has been reconstituted around questions of transition and nationalism’s threat. At the same time, however, communism’s collapse has also invited a transformation of the field’s methodological premises. With open borders to scientific collaboration, social scientists without area expertise can work with indigenous scholars to produce important findings, bracketing culture as extraneous to the scholarly enterprise in ways that area studies could never manage. More open borders have also meant, however, greater room for ethnographies and other direct qualitative fieldwork, and more intimate portraits of everyday life and assessments of its fit with the larger frameworks guiding global visions of Eastern Europe and its trajectory. This opening to methodological variety has transformed Eastern European Studies, simultaneously making more cultural analysis possible, and making culture more invisible through fusions of scientific horizons across the world.

To the extent disciplines treat culture as a variable, and therefore something that may or may not be incorporated in analysis, the meaning of Eastern Europe as a region tends to be lost, and expertise in its history, institutions, languages, and cultures can be devalued. To the extent scholars engage the ‘double hermeneutic’ in their work, or explore meaning on the ground and in the cultural relationship between scholarship and the places under study, area studies expertise and cultural theory are more likely to be valued. Indeed, the extensive engagement between social science and the design of change in postcommunist Eastern Europe suggests that culture could become more, rather than less important, in social science about Eastern Europe.

Economists advise market transition, political scientists and sociologists debate democracy’s making, linguists articulate nations, and historians adjudicate responsibility for past crimes. Not all of these disciplines are so deeply involved in engaging that double hermeneutic, however. For many, as Zizek (1993, p. 200) has observed, Eastern Europe becomes the mirror in which the West’s generalizability can be recognized. In that reflection, Eastern European Studies poses little challenge beyond extension for Western social science. But for those who take up the challenge of difference (Calhoun 1995), the category of Eastern Europe and the translation of inquiry across that space remains part of the question with which not only Eastern European Studies, but also the social sciences themselves, could be culturally reconfigured. What would Eastern European Studies look like if the privilege of nations, men, and global integration through markets became the object of reflection rather than the point of departure for social science about, and out of, the region?

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