Becoming Post Communist

"Across the landscape that until 1939 housed most of the world's Jewish population, the closing decade of the 20th century witnessed dramatic upheavals: the overturning of the East European communist governments and the fall of the USSR, accompanied by a major Jewish emigration movement. The legacy of the Jewish presence in those countries, as viewed from today's vantage point, and the ways in which it became enmeshed in the quest by people of the region-Jews and non-Jews alike-to secure their prospects for the future, highlighted fundamental issues about the nature and quality of the politics of memory, national identity, and the continuity and relative stability of regimes in the region. If those questions were important even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, understanding their implications now seems even more crucial. In a field fraught with conflicting narratives, the challenges of social and political reconstruction are primary concerns for peoples and governments. The experts contributing to this volume apply interdisciplinary approaches to analyze and interpret a multiplicity of post-communist social realities and aid our understanding of recent events"--

These ten essays are concerned with theoretical and empirical analyses of trust and distrust in post-Communist Europe after the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989. Differences between meanings of trust in countries with democratic traditions and in post-totalitarian countries raise questions about the ways in which history, culture and social psychology shape the nature and development of political phenomena. The authors show that while political and economic changes can have rapid effects, cultural and psychological changes may linger behind and influence the quality of political trust and representations of democracy.

The events of 1989 were the material of great reporting. They also revealed the power of journalism. Long before people in Central and Eastern Europe liberated themselves, they discovered democratic freedom, putting to print their own ideas and chronicling events of the day. Indeed, long before they had democracies in law, they had imagined them on paper.In the Solidarity network that produced books and leaflets and news bulletins, in the essays of Václav Havel, in the samizdat publishing house in Budapest that used a portable printing machine, Eastern Europeans demonstrated the organic link between journalism and self-government. They showed how journalism nurtures the imagination, dialogue, and honesty that are basic to democratic life.If history had ended in 1989, there would be cause for easy optimism. The changes that swept Central and Eastern Europe passed with relatively little bloodshed. But agonies of the former Yugoslavia, convulsions of the former Soviet Union, and enduring battles with censors and would-be censors bedevil emerging democracies. Not only does much remain for journalists to cover in Central and Eastern Europe, in some places there the fate of journalism is still an open question. For all these reasons, Reporting the Fall of European Communism explores, not only the events of 1989, but new stories that have emerged in Central and Eastern Europe over the past decade. This volume will be of interest to media professionals, academics and others with an interest in the power of journalism.

This book identifies the immediate winners and losers, and compares the costs and benefits of Poland's transformation. The research was conducted by a team of British and Polish sociologists as part of the Economic and Social Research Council's East-West Programme.

The fall of the Berlin Wall launched the transformation of government, economy and society across half of Europe and the former Soviet Union. The text compares how ordinary people have coped with the stresses and opportunities of transforming into post-Communist societies.

Offering a single, coherent framework of the political, economic, and social phenomena that characterize post-communist regimes, this is the most comprehensive work on the subject to date. Focusing on Central Europe, the post-Soviet countries and China, the study provides a systematic mapping of possible post-communist trajectories. At exploring the structural foundations of post-communist regime development, the work discusses the types of state, with an emphasis on informality and patronalism; the variety of actors in the political, economic, and communal spheres; the ways autocrats neutralize media, elections, etc. The analysis embraces the color revolutions of civil resistance (as in Georgia and in Ukraine) and the defensive mechanisms of democracy and autocracy; the evolution of corruption and the workings of “relational economy”; an analysis of China as “market-exploiting dictatorship”; the sociology of “clientage society”; and the instrumental use of ideology, with an emphasis on populism. Beyond a cataloguing of phenomena—actors, institutions, and dynamics of post-communist democracies, autocracies, and dictatorships—Magyar and Madlovics also conceptualize everything as building blocks to a larger, coherent structure: a new language for post-communist regimes. While being the most definitive book on the topic, the book is nevertheless written in an accessible style suitable for both beginners who wish to understand the logic of post-communism and scholars who are interested in original contributions to comparative regime theory. The book is equipped with QR codes that link to www.postcommunistregimes.com, which contains interactive, 3D supplementary material for teaching.

This book examines organized interests in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), providing incisive analyses in three critically important policy areas - healthcare, higher education and energy. The four countries surveyed – Poland, Hungary, Slovenia and the Czech Republic – afford rich diversity offering broad empirical material available for cross-country and cross-policy comparative analyses. Featuring interdisciplinary research, the book draws together recent developments in the evolution of post-communist advocacy organizations, their population ecology dynamics, interest intermediation, the influence of organized interests and their (bottom-up and top-down) Europeanization. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of Central and Eastern European politics, interest groups and lobbying, post-communism, transition and consolidation studies, and more broadly to European studies/politics. The Open Access version of this book, available at: http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003049562, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.