Between State Capitalism and Globalisation: The Collapse of the East German Economy (Peter Lang, 2004)

2011

Obviously, the Europeanization process has not yet brought the expected “common house of Europe” with all the freedoms and values linked to the symbol of 1989. It is true that Europe has been able to give important support to the transformation processes in Central and Eastern Europe. But it is equally true that the underlying ideas of Europe have not found their way to almost all countries of the former Soviet Union. In this regard Russia stands for an ideologically and power oriented regime, contrasting its authoritarian “model” to the Europeanization process and particularly to all the “coloured” democratic experiments in its neighbourhood. The eastwards movement of experiments with democracy, as it could be observed in the “colour revolutions” in Ukraine and Georgia, is challenged by a westwards movement of the quasiauthoritarian Russian model. The recent repressions in Belarus followed by the rigged elections in December 2010 obviously stand for the westwards move of the Russian model. And it remains to be seen to what extent the achievements of the “colour revolutions” can be at least partially maintained in Ukraine and in Georgia. Freedom is not an uncontested value in the post-Soviet space. But it has been claimed at its periphery where a lot of hybrid and transitional situations can still be observed. Typically countries characterised by transitional or hybrid regimes are oscillating somewhere in a grey zone between the democratic and the authoritarian poles. They may have halted, delayed or impeded their transformation process. In order to prevent the risk of an authoritarian backlash, an European democracy promotion strategy would make sense in those countries that show unclear prospects for democracy. This would be in line with what 1989 was about: overcoming the division of Europe and avoiding new division lines between East and West. It is precisely the challenges of ambiguous transitions that the contributions to the volume try to address from their various regional and disciplinary perspectives. The book is organized into three larger parts, respectively, (1) covering ambiguities of unfinished transformations, (2) attempting to make sense of the past and its implications for the present, and (3) deliberating over values and meanings in changing contexts. They do not assemble the countries regionally, but rather attempt to organize various narratives around problems, as there seem to be three large areas of difficulties experienced along the different paths of transformation.

This article reviews the implications of the collapse of communism in Europe for some themes in recent social theory. It was often assumed that 1989 was part of a global process of normalization and routinization of social life that had been left behind earlier utopian hopes. Noting that utopia is open to various interpretations, including utopias of the everyday, this article suggests, first that there were utopian dimensions to 1989, and, second, that these hopes continue to influence contemporary social and political developments. The continuing role of substantive utopian expectations is illustrated with reference to the politics of lustration in Poland and the rise of nationalist parties in Hungary. This analysis is placed in the context of the already apparent impact of the global economic crisis in post-communist countries. It concludes that the unevenness and diversity of the post-1989 world elude overly generalized attempts at theorization and demand more nuanced analyses.

The article addresses the process of neoliberal transformation of the Soviet Bloc in the late 1980-ties and early 1990-ties as analyzed on the example of Poland. Its trajectory generally confirms Loïc Wacquant’s thesis put forward in his article "Three steps to a historical anthropology of actually existing neoliberalism", that neoliberalism tends to rather capture and use than simply dismantle and weaken state structures and power mechanisms. The author shows that the transition from planned to market economy in the former Soviet Bloc was also accompanied, backed and made possible by powerful ideological operations that reshaped the construction of subjectivity and made it compatible with the neoliberal capitalism. This proves that two modes of analyzing neoliberalism – structural analysis of state power and focus on governmentality – should be treated as complimentary tools of understanding neoliberal transitions. However, contrary to Wacquant, the author claims that in this respect there is nothing new about neoliberalism as a practice, since capitalism has always required a help from the state to maintain a seemingly autonomous rule of the market. Bilbiographical address: J. Sowa, An Unexpected Twist of Ideology. Neoliberalism and the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, „Praktyka Teoretyczna” nr 5/2012.

Eurasian Geography and Economics

This special issue explores how neoliberal ideology -and related economic policies -has been implemented in the once-socialist countries of East-Central Europe (ECE) and the former Soviet Union (FSU). Specifically, the issue argues that this ideology undergoes deep modifications as it meets post-socialist conditions: sometimes it is creatively appropriated, sometimes resisted, and sometimes 'purified' (i.e., implemented more thoroughly than in the Western nations where neoliberalism as an ideology was developed). In doing so, the issue illustrates how 'actually existing neoliberalism,' to use terminology, occurs 'on the ground.' It argues that the 'actually existing neoliberalisms,' which have developed in a variety of post-socialist contexts, can differ profoundly from the theoretical constructs propagated by neoliberalism's supporters, including the major international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB). As recent literature on policy mobility makes clear 'It is already widely recognized that it is rarely possible to transfer policies directly, precisely because they emerge from and are responses to particular 'local' sets of social and political conditions which are not replicated in the places to which they are transplanted' (Cochrane & Ward 2012, p. 5). 1 Neoliberalism comprises the policy applications of neoclassical economic theory. Academic critiques such as Harvey (2003, 2005) highlight the connections between these policies, the reinstatement of class power, and the emergence of the current phase of globalization. The narrative of Harvey and others describes a revival of neoclassical ideology in the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK) in the midst of the 1970s crisis of the Fordist mode of production and the Keynesian political economy model (Harvey 2010; Lipietz 2001). In the 1980s, arguably in reaction to this crisis, the Reagan administration in the US and the Thatcher government in the UK adopted policies that curtailed welfare programs and other redistributive policies; lifted barriers to trade, especially in the financial sector; reduced state intervention in the economy; and privatized many public assets. The vacuum created by the 'rolling back of the welfare state' was filled by an increasing reliance on unregulated capitalist enterprise and public-private partnerships (Harvey 2005, p. 113). Since the 1990s, the US government, along with the IMF and the WB, exerted pressure on developing and developed countries alike to adopt similar reforms (often referred to collectively as 'the Washington Consensus'). Simultaneously, the Chinese government adopted aspects of the free-market economy, marrying neoliberalism and Communist Party rule (Harvey 2005). The European Union (EU) also contributed to this process, although many of its founding members have long social democratic traditions, thus leading EU institutions to promote a medley of neoliberal and Keynesian policies in their sphere of influence. 1

Since the 1960s, the concepts of the ‘global’ and the ‘transnational’ have challenged the state-centred orientation of several disciplines. By 1989, the ‘global’ contained sufficient ambiguity and conceptual promise to emerge as a potentially new central concept to replace the conventional notion of modernity. The consequences of the 1989 revolutions for this emerging concept were extensive. As a result of the post-communist ‘New World Order’, a new vision of a single triumphant political and economic system was put forward. With the ‘globalizing of modernity’ as a description of the post-1989 reality, ‘globalization’ became the policy mantra of the Clinton and Blair administrations up until the late 1990s when ‘anti-globalization’ activists were able to question the salience of this dominant theory of ‘globalization’. In scholarly discussion, ‘globalization’ became a floating signifier to be filled with a variety of disciplinary and political meanings. In the post-9/11 era, this Western-centred ‘globalization’ has been conceptually linked to cosmopolitanism while it has played a minor role in the multiple modernities agenda. The article concludes with an assessment of the current status of the ‘global’ in theory and research.

Southeastern Europe, 2021

Social Science Information, 2020

This special issue brings together reflections that mark the thirtieth anniversary of the Revolutions of 1989 and their consequences for understanding European and global society. What seemed for some at least the surprising and rapid collapse of Eastern European state socialism prompted rethinking in social theory about the potential for emancipatory politics and new modes of social and political organization. At the same time there was increased reflection on the nature of varieties of capitalism and the meaning of socialism beyond the failure of at least its etatist and autarkic mode. The five articles here and the editors’ introduction address themes such as utopian hopes, civil society, the transformation of Europe, the world beyond 1989, and new configurations of power and conflict.