Eastern European Society Research Paper

1. Eastern Europe: A Region With Clear Contours, But Opaque Borders

Customarily, Eastern Europe as a geographical concept is understood to denote the region positioned east from the River Elbe and west from the Ural Mountains. Such a geographical definition meets, however, insurmountable difficulties when translated into societies, nations, and states. As to the western border of the region, the River Elbe runs through Germany. Does this mean that German society is sharply divided into a ‘Western European’ and an ‘Eastern European’ segment? Similarly, the eastern border of the region—the Urals—cut through Russia; does this mean that one half of Russia belongs to ‘Eastern Europe,’ while the other is part of the ‘non-European East’? Further, if such faultlines divide one or more countries of the region, what are the implications of their presence: do they simply carry sociocultural differences of historical and ethnographical interest, or, does their persistence endanger the stability of the affected states, and, beyond, that of the continent itself? In short: if not simply a tool of geographical orientation, what then is the function of making the East–West differentiation within Europe?

As is well known, certain sociocultural differences on regional grounds can be observed in all societies. Still, despite the remarkable differences between Northern Italy and Sicily, nobody in our times would question Italian unity, and the belonging of the entire country to the core of the West. Likewise, even the linguistic division of countries like Belgium or Switzerland would not inspire anybody to doubt the integrity and genuinely Western character of these societies. Thus, the ambiguities in identifying the borders between Western and Eastern Europe arise from deeper layers of differentiation. Their essence is neither a neutral geographical classification according to the magnetic poles, nor a definitive and value-loaded gesture of clearly circumscribing ‘togetherness’ as opposed to ‘otherness.’ The concept of ‘Eastern Europe’ represents a mixture of the latter two, and carries the inherent ambivalence of such a combination. With the very same momentum, it signals undivided ‘Europeanness,’ and also some reservations toward it. Although the societies embraced by the concept all are ‘European,’ they do not come up ‘fully’ to the standard of what ‘Europeanness’ implies. In this ambivalent classification, the implicit norm is the West, and Eastern Europe remains as much Eastern, as it maintains its ‘other than Western’ character. Thus, the concept has always been deeply imbued with politics. On the part of Eastern Europeans, its inherent political character has manifested itself in continuous attempts to close the East–West divide through adaptation to the Western norms of a given time; on the part of the West, the same politicized attitude expressed itself in the interest-driven recognition refusal of the Eastern attempts, having immediate consequences on the (re)drawing of the invisible political, economic, and military map of the continent of Europe.

The doubtfulness of the borders—both in the harsh physical and the more subtle sociopsychological sense of the term—has inspired recurrent attempts to refine the geographically founded geopolitical classifications by denoting important and ‘meaningful’ subunits within the region (Todorova 1997). Probably the most important of such attempts has been the repeated separation of ‘Central Europe’ from the rest of ‘Eastern Europe.’ The concept of Central Europe as a more ‘Westernized’ entity with coherent sociopolitical and cultural meanings on its own appeared mainly in nineteenth twentieth-century public debates by writers, political thinkers, and philosophers (Kundera 1984), but attempts at the political realization of togetherness and simultaneous separation from the rest of the region’s nations also came to the surface among the goals of the sweeping political movements of 1848, 1918, and the late 1980s.

However, the ideas of ‘Westernizing’ Eastern Europe certainly are not the fresh production of modern times. Various grandiose experiments for their realization date back as far as the time after the fall of the Roman Empire. Since those distant days, the history of the region has been accompanied by heated debates over the ‘belonging-issue,’ which, in turn, has gradually become a decisive aspect of the self-perception and identity struggle of the people living on its territory. The East–West divide, despite its opaque character, has proved extremely strong during the past 1000 years of European history, serving a variety of social, political, military, and economic interests both within and between the countries of the European continent. With this historically elaborated comprehensive political meaning of the concept, ‘Eastern Europe’ has been as much a point of departure for Western self-identification as for the shaping of programs to combat those ‘historic illnesses’ which have hindered certain societies from becoming parts of Europe proper. In other words, up to the time of writing, ‘Eastern Europe’ has been considered the embodiment of the major historical failures of the European continent. It has symbolized the stone-hard limitations of creating a Europe without any subdivisions, and has also represented the accompanying feelings of discomfort and frustration. In the course of the century-long failed efforts, these feelings have grown to become self-perpetuating mutual prejudices, which have exhibited an ever stronger influence on shaping politics of the East–West cohabitation. The persistence of these prejudices cannot be ignored when attempting to understand the difficulties that the current program of European integration (see Sect. 3) has to face in the course of its day-to-day realization.

2. The Historical Roots Of Eastern Europe’s One-Sided Development

Historians, political thinkers, writers and philosophers seem to be in full agreement on identifying the emergence of ‘the three historical regions of Europe’ (Szucs 1988) in the aftermath of the Barbarian conquest against the late Roman Empire, which resulted in the division of the occupied territories between Europa Occidens, Byzantium, and a distinct transitional territory in between. This latter region— the historical forerunner of Eastern Europe—occupied a halfway position in all senses of the term. It was neither ‘Western,’ nor ‘Eastern,’ but an ever-changing mixture of the two. First, the region’s geographic placement exposed it to frequent attacks from both of the neighboring big powers, each of whom regarded themselves the genuine heirs of the late Roman Empire—the Frank Empire and Constantinople. Second, the shaping of the region’s decisive religions, traditions, and ethos was put also under dual pressure from the West and the East alike. As pointed out by the influential work of medievalists and historians of political ideas (Gerschenkron 1962, Said 1978, Szucs 1988, Wolff 1994), although the people of Eastern Europe took up Christianity early enough in their history, but the subsequent lasting Mongol, Ottoman, and Russian invasions revitalized a number of ‘Eastern’ features in their social relations, institutions, faith, and the running of their daily life. Third, as it has been demonstrated amply by recent studies in comparative history and historical anthropology (Gerschenkron 1962, Said 1978, Konrad and Szelenyi 1979), the states of the region as potential actors of modernization played an ambivalent role in the premodern vera: Though the late Medieval centuries brought about absolutist reigns similar to those in the West of the time, the actual function of the Eastern European absolutist rule was to reinforce the estate-based power of the landed nobility, while their Western counterparts prepared the soil for the take-off of capitalism, democracy and modern bourgeois development. The repeated events of military occupations, wars, mass uprisings, and the subsequent hurried efforts at reconstruction recurrently blockaded the crystallization of fundamental institutions of statehood and administration. Instead, these events usually concluded in hasty and forceful attempts of the conqueror to employ central power to eliminate the ‘historic losses,’ at all social and political cost. Such attempts at forced and inorganic modernization, however, caused lasting deformations in the sociopolitical order that have had a far-reaching impact on the development of the affected societies. In assessing the potential and limitations of corrective societal actions, the most dramatic consequences shaping both politics and societies in modern times were discussed extensively by sociologists and political scientists in the 1980s and 1990s (Kochanowicz 1997, Garton Ash 1993, Arato 2000). According to the virtually unanimous conclusions of these studies, the historically informed and persistent deformations of Eastern European societies can be summarized in three main features which clearly distinguish them from their contemporaneous Western counterparts. These are: the one-sided development of nationhood and national identity (which led easily to repeated waves of radical populism and irredentist nationalism); the underdeveloped nature of civil society (which recurrently has provided natural justification for the states’ inclination to gain oppressive power over people’s needs); and, finally, the periodic disappearance, at best, weak institutionalization of democratic governance (which has been the cause of loose public control over administration and economic management, and which also can be seen as being responsible for the lasting symptoms of social disintegration in the region).

These historic deformations became sources of dangerous political conflicts around the beginning of the twentieth century. After the failed revolutions of 1848 which, for a century to come, represented the last heroic attempts of the nations of the region to (re)gain national independence and create their state which would guard civil rights, law and/order, and free capitalist development, the societies of Eastern Europe faced exclusion from Europe proper, and reacted accordingly—in a frustrated and hostile manner. As historical research has demonstrated convincingly (Konrad and Szelenyi 1979, Schopflin and Wood 1989), the outbreak of World War I cannot be explained without considering the preceding unhealthy nationalist rivalry within the borders of the increasingly ineffective, but still oppressive Austro-Hungarian monarchy, and the deep tensions between the cultural–political formations of the communities and their governing states in all the surrounding societies. Again, the outbreak of World War II cannot be explained merely in terms of the clashing political and economic interests of the leading powers of the European continent; the picture remains disturbingly incomplete without taking into account the extremist aspirations of Hitler’s Germany and its allies to find a ‘final solution’ for the century-long diseases of confused cultural and national identity, and also without considering their deeply embedded attempts to claim new territories and borders for their historically ‘stolen’ nation states (Bibo 1991). However, not only the two world wars, but also the ‘invention’ of the two, diametrically contrasting ways of totalitarian ruling originate from the same roots. As argued in Arendt’s and Bauman’s studies that have become classics of postwar social science, one can find in their creation the same forms of traumatized, oblique, frustrated, and confused nationalism, and the unstable institutions built on them (Arendt 1958, Bauman 1989). While the Nazi way of totalitarian rein put the superiority of race and nationhood at the center of its legitimizing ideology, communist totalitarianism— with its aim of radically transcending the past—denied the role of nationhood as such, and attempted to substitute it with values of internationalism and enforced equality. However, despite the viciously different responses of the two forms of totalitarianism, the emotionally heated attitudes toward nationhood and national identity, the conflictive relationship between the state and people’s spontaneously formed communities, the weak observance of rights and law, and, consequently, the enduring harm done to individual freedom, remained key problems of Eastern European societies until the end of the twentieth century. True, the modernization of the economies and societies of the region, and the ultimate closing down of the East–West divide belonged to the core of the communist program of the four decades following World War II. However, the domino-like collapse of the Soviet-type regimes in 1989–90 testified sharply to the failures of these attempts, and drove back the societies in question towards the lost track of classical capitalism. Perhaps the principal evidence of the failures is the fact that, with the sweeping events of the late 1980s, the allegedly abolished problems of the interwar years have come to the surface with dramatic intensity: Widespread poverty, intense racism, extreme social marginalization, sharp inequalities of income and wealth, pervasive corruption, and weak legal protection of defenseless communities and individuals are among the most disturbing troubles of Eastern European societies at the time of writing. In order to understand the unfolding of these problems, a brief examination has to be made of the legacy that the communist systems of Eastern Europe have left behind.

3. Eastern European Societies: From Where To Where?

As a number of recent studies in social and political history have shown, despite the steps taken throughout the 1970s and 1980s toward economic and political liberalization in different countries of the region, the fundamental features of the communist system of Eastern Europe remained unchanged until the late 1980s (Kornai 1991, Garton Ash 1993, Arato 2000). Backed by the military, political, and economic monopoly of the all-embracing Soviet force in the region, the communist party-states of the affected countries maintained their power over all the segments of the economy and society, including people’s most private matters of career choice, marriage, child-bearing, daily consumption, or cultural taste. Aside from the tools of enforcement solely in the hands of the ruling communist parties, the bases for such an extraordinarily extended power were provided by two major deeds: the concentration of ‘people’s property’ in the hands of the party-ruled state, and the institutionalization of the day-to-day control over society through compulsory full employment. As comprehensive studies on the working of the socialist economy have demonstrated (Kornai 1991, Sik 1991), the concentration of all the means of production was intended to induce economic rationality through the centrally prescribed production commands driven by the Plan, while compulsory employment was seen as the base for fair shares from distribution and, simultaneously, as an effective means to combat poverty. However, such a structure turned against the initial goals rather quickly: from the early 1960s onwards, the Eastern European communist regimes, one after the other, had to face recurrent deep economic crises, and an increase in social tension originating from the ‘dictatorship over needs’ (Feher et al. 1983) that led to nothing else but the equality of poverty on an unparalleled scale. Thus, the mere maintenance of the regimes required certain concessions: the most important among them were the rehabilitation of the family as a legitimate sphere of people’s undisturbed privacy, and the tacit acceptance of the slow evolution of a second, informal economy.

However, these concessions proved powerful tools in societies’ hands slowly to erode, then effectively to decompose the oppressive structures above them. Eastern European sociological, social-historical and economic research of the 1970s and 1980s provided a rich literature of these multifaceted processes which, in retrospect, can be regarded as the direct ascendants of the radical social upheavals after 1989–90 (Vajda 1988, Staniszkis 1991, Szalai 1991, Kochanowicz 1997). The move away from classical socialism was unstoppable. First, ever-spreading participation in the informal economy gradually took a lead in determining the standard and forms of consumption for substantial layers of society; thus, the tacit acceptance of people’s informal work and their partial withdrawal from party control, even in the strictly regulated socialist workplaces, were also in the immediate interest of those in power—otherwise, the communist parties would have risked unmanageable crises in production and consumption that could have led to the swift fading of the justification of their ‘blessing rule.’

Second, the family-based framework of the informal economy provided a forum for learning a number of market-related skills and thus assisting the under- ground continuation of the interrupted embourgeoisement process. Such an underground preservation of officially denied values, attitudes, skills, and socioeconomic arrangements later proved crucial in the post-1989 systemic changes of returning to a capitalist bourgeois track. Third, the informal economies of Eastern Europe complemented the everimpoverishing state-run welfare provisions with community-based social services, and with slowly elaborated forms of secondary redistribution. Thus, they had a role in correcting the inadequacies of the distribution of incomes driven from the ‘first’ economy, and also in developing those market-conforming forms of social protection, which then, effectively, assisted the transition process amid the rapid withering away of state-distribution some decades later.

In short, the informal economy and the social relations around it gradually became a second— mostly hidden—regulator in the functioning of the communist regimes, and an important second pillar in organizing the daily life, well-being, aspirations, and life-careers of substantial groups of Eastern European societies.

However, the emergence of this second system had also serious deficiencies. As sociological research on the malfunctions of the ‘socialist’ welfare states has evidenced it (Deacon-Szalai 1990, Kochanowicz 1997, Atal 1999, Lessenich 2000), those who, for a range of varied reasons, could not participate, became increasingly dependent on the state that gradually intensified their defenselessness, instead of mitigating it. With the spreading and tacit acceptance of the regulatory role of the informal economy, the nonparticipating groups were designated as ‘misusers’ of the public resources, and cuts in assistance for them were approved on a mass scale. Thus, the spreading of participation in the informal economy gave rise to serious social divisions which, amid the troublesome economic conditions of the post-1989 years, eventually became an open war between the ‘nondiligent’ poor and the ‘industrious’ nonpoor.

A further shortcoming of the dual system was its weak institutionalization: any claims for the formal acknowledgement of informal work-collectives, service-providers, interest-representations, and the like were seen as open attacks against the principles of the prevailing order, and were treated as political crimes. On these grounds, the informal economy became a battlefield for freedom, but at the same time, the political connotations of participation further hindered its institutionalization. The negative consequences of such a development came to light mainly after the collapse of the old rule. As in-depth studies of the democratic potentials of Eastern Europe have pointed out convincingly (Staniszkis 1991, Berend 1993, Arato 2000), despite widespread earlier practices, civil society has proven to be extremely weak, and the new system hardly could count with its provisions, protective associations, and community-run services amid the deep ‘transitional crisis’ of the 1990s.

The weakness of civil society has given rise to serious crisis phenomena amid the two intertwined major processes of post-communist transition: the decomposition of the formerly unlimited power of the central states, and the privatization of the earlier anonymous ‘people’s properties.’ Paradoxically, the earlier resistance to the state as oppressor is now quite clearly being reversed, and while the various corporate bodies and interest alliances only clung to the state distribution policy out of fear and defenselessness, they now make angry claims on it. Behind the opposing principles of privatization intended to ‘regulate’ the plundering of public assets, one finds intensely competing demands for compensation. Having the arguments justifying these claims accepted and embodied in the legislation is a question of raw political force. As comparative economic studies in the region have demonstrated with ample empirical evidence (Rona-Tas 1994, Stark 1996), in this way, privatization and the creation of a bourgeoisie is the direct function of the latent bargaining positions established over past decades. Hence, the process of privatization has led to a jump in uncontrolled and unregulated inequalities of income and wealth, and to the emergence of a new. prosperous elite with little legitimization. At the same time, the process has produced masses of victims at the other end of the scale. Besides depriving them of any access to the newly distributed properties, the easiest compromise to find resources to meet the hunger of the vocal groups has been to cut back sharply on state expenditures on welfare and social services. With these steps, however, Eastern European transition societies have produced vast numbers of chronic poor, whose fate has been extreme social marginalization. Thus, despite the initial hopes of 1989–90, massive poverty and the accompanying syndromes of dramatic social disintegration have not disappeared with the recovery from the crises of the early 1990s, but have become the decisive indicators of a still non-Westernized path of current Eastern European development. The conflicts that arise from this situation have further consequences. The still excessive presence of the state in most of the region’s economies, as well as the understandable open aspiration of the earlier overblown state bureaucracy to reinforce its own position of power, at most only help broad strata of societies to reach the recognition that the creation of a private market in the Western sense is a ‘foreign’ prescription for the process of embourgeoisement in the region— their ‘genuine’ path still leads through nationalized modernization. Thus, it is hardly surprising that Western and Eastern economists, sociologists, and political scientists analyzing the major sociopolitical processes of postcommunist transition arrived at largely consensual conclusions by the late 1990s (Kochanowicz 1997, Standing 1997, Arato 2000). There seems to be a general agreement that the spreading of anti-West feelings provides a fertile soil for heated nationalism, aggressive racism, and the re-emergence of authoritarian tendencies; hence, these recent tendencies in the changes of popular attitudes endanger seriously the once vivid hopes of creating a Europe without boundaries. However, these unanimous warnings have little impact on actual politics: at best, social science reflects and informs the ongoing attempts of European integration, but can hardly influence it.

4. Eastern Europe’s (Re)Turn To Europe: As Social Scientists See It

With the collapse of communism in 1989–90, both Western and Eastern social scientists investigating Eastern Europe had to face a number of new challenges. It was not only the ‘subject’ of their research which suddenly changed its framework, but the formerly prevailing concepts and methods of scientific analysis had also to be reevaluated. Such a simultaneous change of ‘subject’ and ‘approach’ is a rather rare development in the history of the social sciences. However, the collapse of communism swept away a sociopolitical reality together with its prevailing ideological reflection: the death of communism put an end to the scientific lead of Marxism, and forced this powerful worldview into the background of the history of philosophy. Marxism as a frame of reference ceased to function as an adequate and applicable conceptual model for postcommunist scientific research.

Among the multifaceted consequences of these changes—that have affected as much the structure and content of higher education, as the composition of the academic community, or the financing of research and its accessibility to the broader public—there are two major aspects of the profound renewal of scholarly work that have to be underlined here. First, as an immediate outcome of the fall of communism, certain areas of research once so important in characterizing Eastern European social science have disappeared completely, while formerly nonexistent approaches and strands of thinking have gained substantial influence. It is enough to refer here to the utter disappearance of ‘scientific socialism,’ or ‘socialist political economy’ on the one hand, and the impressive rise of ‘political science,’ ‘constitutional studies,’ or ‘microeconomics,’ on the other. Second, due to the radical switch in the politics of science, one can record a remarkable shift in the topical composition of research, together with a fundamental institutional reorganization of academic work. Due to the preceding monopoly of Marxism as the official stand of the social sciences in Eastern Europe, previously suppressed intellectual strands demanded their well-deserved institutional acknowledgement after 1989– 90, bringing to the forefront the ‘underground’ culture of formerly nonaccessible research on ‘forbidden’ subjects such as the history of the Gulags, the persistence and reproduction of poverty, the critical analysis of the planned economy, or the sociology of the hidden embourgeoisement process in societies under Soviet rule. With the now formal acknowledgement of these areas of research in the 1990s, marked shifts of emphases as well as an increased pluralism of approaches to issues at the core of social science interest were registered. However, one has to remark: these developments signal more a ‘back to normal’ state of affairs in research than the appearance of a genuinely new voice that one could call ‘Eastern European social science.’ It is better to characterize the situation as Eastern Europe’s reintegration to the universal world of the academia. True, the paths to this scholarly universe have had markedly different histories in the West and the East. As to the East, the potentials of the current surprisingly quick reintegration have to be identified in the widespread underground movements of ‘flying universities,’ samizdat publications, and secret mass-events of the so-called ‘secondary public’ under communism, which not only formed the bases of strong national communities of social scientists, but also embraced a great number of cooperating groups of dissident intellectuals from Moscow to Warsaw, and Prague to Sofia. After the lifting of the political barriers, the preceding long history of such extensive underground experimentation and the simultaneous preservation of the critical stand of social science have provided a rich foundation to a strong theoretical orientation, as well as to the internationally acknowledged high qualities of empirical research in Eastern Europe.

Given the major aim of the postcommunist transition in closing down the East–West divide within the shortest possible time-span, it is understandable that the bulk of social science research in and about Eastern Europe has addressed issues of the greatest political importance of the time: marketization, democratization, issues of institution-building, and Eastern Europe’s integration into an undivided Europe are in the forefront of the ongoing investigations. Following predominantly the theory of neoliberal economics, research on the changes in property relations, the institutional conditions of transition from the command ruled economy to a market regulated one, the creation of a banking system from scratch, and Eastern Europe’s participation in the processes of globalization have served mainly to provide assistance to the newborn governments in the region, to orchestrate the difficult processes of transformation with the least possible social and political conflict. With such a shift toward applied research, little has yet been done, however, toward the establishment of an original economic theory which would provide ample concepts and explanations to one of the most disturbing puzzles of the late 1990s: though the neoliberal prescriptions of transformation have been followed in practically all of the 28 countries of the former Soviet empire, their markets rarely resemble those of the Western societies.

The dominance of descriptive empirical studies and applied research is perhaps even more characteristic in other areas of the social sciences. True, the relatively unstable political processes in the region require a close follow-up of party affiliations and social movements, and a regular monitoring of people’s political attitudes. Similarly, the success of institution building has to be measured against people’s use misuse of the new institutions. The list of examples can be followed with equally justifiable descriptive studies on the restructuring of people’s value orientations and daily consumption, or their evaluation of the old–new institutions of public administration. Although one can hardly question the usefulness of any such research from the point of view of administrative and political decision making, as at the time of writing, it has made little contribution either to the building of a richer theory of capitalist societies, or to the deeper understanding of the still prevailing marked differences between the two halves of Europe.

Some steps toward a more thorough analytical examination of the peculiarities of contemporary Eastern Europe have been made, however, in a few novel comparative studies on state–society relationships, the characteristics of the welfare states, and the features of ‘old’ and ‘new’ poverty in both the West and the East. These studies have been initiated mainly by huge international organizations (ILO, OECD, the World Bank, UNESCO), and were run on principles of equal participation by Eastern and Western European scholars. Though it is perhaps too early to arrive at definitive conclusions, the lessons of these recent studies indicate unanimously the persistence of a sharp East–West divide, much in accordance with the sociocultural faultlines that have been explored by the historical studies on earlier centuries. It seems that in their post-1989 development, Eastern European societies have taken a lead toward increasing social disintegration between their adaptive majorities and the extremely marginalized minorities in long-term poverty. The states of these new democracies are squeezed between the contradictory challenges of accomplishing marketization and combating social disintegration at the same time; due to the weakness of their civil societies, they have postponed repeatedly the addressing of the latter problem by creating the required strong welfare systems. As a result, the current social map of Eastern Europe resembles more some Latin American societies than those of the neighboring Western Europe.

5. Summary

Though meant also as a geographical classification for denoting the region between the River Elbe and the Ural Mountains, the concept of ‘Eastern Europe’ is used mainly to express certain historically informed sociocultural differences within the European continent. It carries heavy layers of ambivalence: although the societies embraced by it all are regarded as ‘European,’ they do not come up ‘fully’ to the standard of what ‘Europeanness’ implies.

Such historically informed ambivalence characterizes deeply as well as the current efforts to unite Europe. Besides, they leave their mark on the internal social development of the region’s societies, and also have serious consequences for the endurance of their post-1989 as the crisis.

Social science research of the past decades has centered around the historical origins and perpetuating factors of the East–West divide. Nevertheless, following the collapse of communism, it has turned more toward investigating the potentials and limitations of closing it down. The necessary shift toward the dominance of descriptive research in assistance of the politics of integration has slowed down, however, the in-depth exploration of those aspects of recent Eastern European development which carry the potential of repeated diversion from the Western path.

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