Postcommunism from Within: Social Justice, Mobilization, and Hegemony 9780814724255

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postcommunism from within

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Postcommunism from Within social justice, mobilization, and hegemony

Edited by Jan Kubik and Amy Linch

A joint publication of the Social Science Research Council and New York University Press

new york university press New York and London www.nyupress.org © 2013 by Social Science Research Council All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Postcommunism from within : social justice, mobilization, and hegemony / edited by Jan Kubik and Amy Linch. p.

cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8147-2426-2 (cl : alk. paper) 1. Europe, Eastern—Politics and government—1989– 2. Postcommunism—Europe, Eastern. I. Kubík, Jan. II. Linch, Amy. DJK51.P677

2013

320.947—dc23 2013001056

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books.

Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

Also available as an ebook.

Contents

List of Tables List of Figures

vii ix

Preface xi Seteney Shami Acknowledgments

xiii

Introduction. Postcommunism in a New Key: Bottom Up and Inside Out 1 Amy Linch

pa rt one : gener a l a pproaches to postcommu nism 1

From Transitology to Contextual Holism: A Theoretical Trajectory of Postcommunist Studies 27 Jan Kubik

2

Social Justice, Social Science, and the Complexities of Postsocialism 95 Thomas C. Wolfe and John Pickles

pa rt t wo : gender 3

Social Justice, Hegemony, and Women’s Mobilizations Joanna Regulska and Magdalena Grabowska

4

Grounds for Hope? Voices of Feminism and Women’s Activism in Romania 191 Laura Lovin

139

5

Transformation to Democracy: The Struggles of Georgian Women 211 Medea Badashvili

pa rt thr ee : pov ert y 6

Poverty and Popular Mobilization in Postcommunist Capitalist Regimes 229 Ivan Szelenyi and Katarzyna Wilk

7

“Scandalous Ethnicity” and “Victimized Ethnonationalism”: Pejorative Representations of Roma in the Romanian Mainstream Media After January 2007 265 Alina Vamanu and Iulian Vamanu

pa rt four : corrup tion 297

8

A Critique of the Global Corruption “Paradigm” Alena V. Ledeneva

9

Informal Payments to Doctors: Corruption or Social Protest? Rasma Karklins

10

Informal Relations in Public Procurement: The Case of East Central and South Eastern Europe 346 Åse Berit Grødeland Afterword. Mobilizing Justice Across Hegemonies in Place: Critical Postcommunist Vernaculars 385 Michael D. Kennedy About the Contributors Index

vi

Contents

417

409

333

Tables

1.1 Transitology, Its Radical Alter Ego, and Contextual Holism

36

6.1 Determinants of Absolute Poverty in Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Russia 243 6.2 Economic Indicators of Selected European Postcommunist Countries 247 6.3 The Paradox of Neoliberal and Neopatrimonial Policies in Postcommunist Europe 250 6.4 Results of the Hungarian Referendum, March 9, 2008 8.1 The Syntax of Corruption

253

300

8.2 Indices of Corruption, Compared and Averaged

305

10.1 The Frequency with Which Public Procurement Officials Receive and Accept Informal Request 358 A.1 Ease of Translating Injustice Across Vernaculars

402

vii

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Figures

1.1 Model of Democratic Architecture

37

1.2 Model of Totalitarian Architecture

38

1.3 Model of Posttotalitarian Architecture

39

6.1 Experience of Poverty by Country, 1988 and 2000

238

6.2 Poverty Rates by Country in PPP and 50% of Median Expenditure in 2000 241 6.3 Poverty Rates by Country, 1998–2003 6.4 GINI Index by Country, 1998 and 2003

248 249

10.1 Public Procurement in (COUNTRY) Is Honest and Uncorrupted 350 10.2 Public Procurement in (COUNTRY) Is Easy to Influence 353 10.3 Public Procurement in (COUNTRY) Is Fair and Impartial 354 10.4 Business Representatives’ Level of Trust in Public Procurement Officials 355 10.5 Business Is Honest and Uncorrupted (as Perceived by Public Procurement Officials) 356 10.6 Granting of Requests by Public Procurement Officials 10.7 Efforts to Influence Public Procurement Officials

360

361

10.8 Public Procurement Officials on the Use of Informal Networks in Public Procurement 362 10.9 The Influence of Informal Networks in Public Procurement

363

10.10 Public Procurement Officials on How Common It Is for People to Seek Informal Outcomes in Public Procurement 364 10.11 Public Procurement Officials on How Often They Are Approached with Informal Requests 365

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Preface Seteney Shami

I am delighted to see this volume go to print. As the director of the Eurasia Program at the time when the project was conceptualized, the meetings organized, and the volume planned, I was particularly fortunate to be working closely with Jan Kubik and Amy Linch, whose scholarly commitment to the vision of the volume was matched only by their organizational abilities. It is always a challenge to shepherd a group of overworked and geographically far-flung academics and mold their work into one cohesive manuscript. Jan and Amy have achieved their goal with remarkable success. Within the broader context of the Social Science Research Council, this volume is the product of both the Eurasia Program and a cross-programmatic project entitled “Responding to Hegemony: The Dynamics of Social Movements,” which was generously funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The project, organized as a series of workshops and publications, focused on the differential impact of US hegemony in various regions of the world and the kinds of social mobilization that obtained in response. This involved rethinking hegemony and how it works, the multiple sources and roles of hegemonic power in the center and the peripheries, and the ways in which people mobilize for political action in the twenty-first century. Workshops focused on Europe and Latin America, in addition to Eastern Europe and Eurasia, and the project ended with an examination of the “politics of expertise.” This included examining the role of “experts” in shaping and controlling the debate on regional and global policies through the example of the war and postwar reconstruction in Iraq, as well as the expanding role of think tanks in the United States and elsewhere and their place in the global landscape of knowledge production. In the spirit of this global project, and as Amy mentions in the Introduction below, this volume was conceived, from the beginning, as a reflexive and agenda-setting enterprise, and it is extremely pleasing that this vision

xi

is articulated through both the content and the structure of the volume. Michael Kennedy crowns the exercise in a masterful Afterword that simultaneously sums up the issues covered by the volume and opens up new debates. In this, Michael continues his intellectual role as the chair of the Eurasia Regional Advisory Panel (1999–2006) of tacking back and forth between theory and practice, framework and event. The seeds of the volume were planted in a brainstorming session organized in cooperation with Professor Stephen Kotkin and the Program in Russian Studies at Princeton University in April 2005 entitled “Actually Existing Societies: Post-Socialism.” Coming as it did in the wake of the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine, the meeting quickly turned to the well-worn phrase of “civil society” and questioned its continued utility in understanding the processes in Ukraine and the role of old and new actors, including the state and older political forces, the new business elites, and the NGO sector. The concept of “Justice” and its ready links to globalization, religion, property, law, and gender emerged as an area of particular concern. Following the Princeton meeting, Jan took the lead in developing the discussions into a background paper and identifying scholars who could contribute to setting an agenda focusing on hegemony and justice. Two conferences were then organized under the theme “Justice, Hegemony, and Social Movements: Views from East-Central Europe and Eurasia.” The first was held at Rutgers University in New Brunswick in May 2006; the second was held at the University of Warsaw, Poland, in April 2007. Thanks are due to the Center for European Studies at Rutgers and the Center for East European Studies at the University of Warsaw, and particularly its director, Jan Malicki. My colleagues at the SSRC, Anthony Koliha and Holly Danzeisen, were integral to the achievements of the project as a whole and this volume in particular. As ever, SSRC president Craig Calhoun was a ready source of advice, comparative insights, and big-picture thinking. Finally, I would like to thank the SSRC editorial and publications staff, whose hard work enables the difficult transitions from project to publication. Alyson Metzger oversaw the last stages of the production of this volume, completing the work begun by our late colleague and friend, Paul Price. We will remember him fondly through this volume and the many others that he nurtured to completion during his time at the SSRC.

xii

Preface

Acknowledgments

The generous financial, organizational, and intellectual assistance from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) made this book possible. The Council sponsored the early planning meetings and two conferences under the theme “Justice, Hegemony, and Social Movements: Views from East-Central Europe and Eurasia.” The first was held at Rutgers University in New Brunswick in May 2006; the second was held at the University of Warsaw, Poland, in April 2007. Our wonderful collaborators at the SSRC and elsewhere—Seteney Shami, Anthony Koliha, Holly Danzeisen, Alyson Metzger, and Michael Simon—have been much more than efficient organizers or indispensable intellectual partners; they have become supportive friends. Alex Giardino was an indefatigable copy editor, whose efforts are much appreciated. Thank you all very much! We would like to thank for their essential support the Center for European Studies at Rutgers and the Center for East European Studies at the University of Warsaw, particularly its director, Jan Malicki. Michael Kennedy, the “godfather” of this project, has never failed to support us in all possible ways. His wisdom and guidance have been central to our work.

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postcommunism from within

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introduction

Postcommunism in a New Key: Bottom Up and Inside Out Amy Linch

The fall of state socialism generated enormously complex political, economic, social, and cultural transformations. In many countries these changes brought democracy, political freedom, and better economic prospects for large segments of the population. Yet, at the same time, the transformation from communism produced massive social dislocation and engendered social problems that were far less pronounced under the old regime. Furthermore, where it occurred, political liberalization did not always represent a net improvement in people’s lives. In some cases, cultural narratives long contained by the communist state—or developed in reaction to communist ideology—created conditions for public endorsement of patriarchal, national chauvinistic attitudes that had dire consequences for the relative social and political freedoms of women and minorities. For most of the two decades of postcommunism, scholarly analysis focused primarily on the process and effectiveness of political and economic reforms. The accepted goals of the reforms themselves were institutional; thus, the benchmarks of progress were macro indicators of market liberalization and democratization, such as the EBRD index and the Freedom House Index of Political and Civil Rights. The people whose lives were most affected by the transformation entered the story largely from the point of view of how they influenced or were affected by the institutionalization of reforms. In most analyses, people—aggregated as “civil society”—created or foreclosed political opportunity for reform (Frye 2002, 2010; GrzymałaBusse 2007), enhanced the effectiveness of democratic institutions (Ekiert 1

and Kubik 1998), or remained passively on the sidelines (Howard 2003). They might suffer the effects of restructuring (Greskovits 2007; Crowley and Ost 2001; Kubicek 2004; Vanhuysse 2004) or benefit from rapid privatization (Aslund 2007; Campos and Coricelli 2002; Szelenyi, Chapter 6 of this volume). People, in short, could accept, obstruct, suffer, or benefit with respect to transformation. They might be “civilizationally incompetent” (Sztompka 1993) as democratic citizens, free-market competitors, or bearers of cultural resources that would make it easy to adapt to these new demands. They were rarely analyzed as contextualized actors actively interpreting and responding to particular challenges. This volume takes a different approach to the study of postcommunism. Rather than begin with established concepts drawn from democratization studies, it foregrounds the diversity of the historical experiences and current realities of people in the postcommunist region and the ways in which they are responding to political and economic changes. The project arose out of a discussion about “civil society” at a conference sponsored by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) in 2005. The concept had considerable leverage throughout the 1990s as a source of funding for research and program development, but it seemed to be falling out of fashion. What new theme might summon the same enthusiasm and flow of resources for investigating the human dimensions of postcommunist transformations and democratization more generally? What specific conceptual territory did the study of civil society mark out, and how might it be recharacterized to resist the tides of academic funding? In the most general sense, civil society was a ready referent for the ambient social dimensions of a functioning democracy. It provided both diagnosis and treatment protocol for the postsocialist “hangover” that forestalled the emergence of robust democracies. The conventional and scholarly wisdom was that too much or too little civil society frustrated the effectiveness of comprehensive economic and political reforms. Understanding how people organized or failed to organize to ensure effective and accountable government was an important means of distinguishing among the postcommunist states and (potentially) of knowing how to promote democratic reform. In postcommunist countries where the structure of social relations more closely resembled that of Western Europe, twenty years after their initiation economic and political reforms are well established (Ekiert, Kubik, and Vachudova 2007). Russia, meanwhile, is on a steep course to authoritarianism, and nearly 80

2

Introduction

percent of the people in the non-Baltic former Soviet Union live under authoritarian or semiauthoritarian regimes (“competitive authoritarianisms”).1 Civil society is central to understanding the “democracy gap” among postcommunist states in two respects. First, it conceptualizes the link between the institutions that structure people’s lives in common and their attitudes, expectations, and actions. By specifying the microfoundations of democratic institutions the concept of civil society elaborates the idea of democracy as the constraint and direction of political power through popular sovereignty. Second, it provides an implicit normative justification for the concern with democratization: an active civil society capable of organizing and directing democratic power will ultimately provide a better life for the people who comprise it. Perhaps because of the underlying premise that democracy is an inherent social good, analysis of the interaction between people and emerging democratic institutions largely focuses on what people need to know, think, and do to sustain such institutions rather than on what people are actually knowing, thinking, and doing to shape and adapt to the postcommunist environment. The political nature of people’s actions is, in effect, predetermined by the research question rather than a matter of empirical inquiry. The concept of civil society thus simultaneously recognizes the social dimension of political transformation and obscures its actual occurrence. The effort to reframe civil society ultimately led to an interrogation of the concept itself in two subsequent conferences: Was civil society an appropriate category of analysis, or did it impute to the postcommunist region a process alien to its experience through assumptions about the relationship between private and public life, the economy and politics, and the individual and society?2 Did it impose a telos of social relations that rendered the plurality of human expectation, motivation, action, and experience in terms of an inevitable path to a neoliberal order? If so, how might we analyze the region on its own terms, rather than as an inchoate version of Western democracies? In some ways these questions about the conceptualization of civil society anticipated the trend in comparative democratization studies to rethink the case histories of Western European democracies that informed the expectations of transitology by attending to the contexts in which political actors made decisions and by taking ideas seriously as a potential factor in political change (Cappocia and Ziblatt 2010; Béland and Cox 2011; Berman 2007; Hall 2006; Ziblatt 2006; Sewell 1996). The prevailing history of “the West” naturalized the development of institutions that were in fact highly

Postcommunism in a New Key 3

contingent, violent in origin, and consequent upon considerable state intervention. The political and economic failure of state socialism lent credence to the hegemonic story of liberal democracy as the inevitable end point of development. Alternative visions of the postcommunist transformations—particularly those elaborated during the struggle against state socialism—were marginalized by the apparent success of the market in promoting an affluent society and restraining the state. The desirability of a market economy and liberal democratic institutions continued to be debated in some circles, but the neoliberal path of reform was widely accepted as the necessary (and natural) route to both prosperity and political liberty. By contrast, critics of global capitalism who point out the foreclosure of (potentially more equitable) alternatives often overlook the context in which new political elites made decisions, and the concrete reasons for their preferences. These critiques view postcommunist countries as victims of capitalist predation that prevented the emergence of a different, more just, political and economic order. But despite their challenge to neoliberal hegemony, such arguments share with more mainstream analysis the tendency to view postcommunist countries in terms of the West, albeit as victims of the West’s more advanced stage of development rather than as incipient versions of it. Both paradigms preclude analysis of the conditions under which people made choices about which institutions to adopt, which regulatory bodies to engage, and which principles would best govern their nascent institutions. Global distribution of power critically influenced the trajectory of postcommunist transformations through transnational political and economic institutions that shaped domestic incentives for participation in global markets. Policies and “best practices” for economic transformation were further influenced by the dominant opinions within “epistemic communities” of policymakers and financial elites, and the universities where such opinions gained the status of knowledge.3 The “knowledge regimes” that developed around these ideas though relationships between international organizations and domestic elites facilitated translation of neoliberal ideology into local policy.4 The celebration of the market as a vehicle for promoting human freedom through economic development and decentralizing power certainly served the interest of global capitalism. Neoliberal discourse presented the state as a constraint on global trade and individual initiative rather than as a public resource to mitigate the excesses of the market. The impact of neoliberalism on how people in the postcommunist region understood the problems

4

Introduction

wrought by state socialism, as well as the strategies and resources available to address them, is clearly an important component of postcommunist development. However, it is also important to recognize the contexts from which these ideas were received by postcommunist elites, including the relative hegemony of Marxist-Leninist ideology in the period prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the nature of counterhegemonic discourses, and the material threat posed by the system itself. Critical interrogation of how global hegemony shaped the postcommunist transformations, as well as the questions that are asked about them and the means through which they are assessed, is perhaps better served by incorporating neoliberalism into analysis as an aspect of the field within which people in the postcommunist region understood the challenges they faced than by considering it an explanation in its own right. The meaning of particular discourses is a consequence of the context within which they are embraced rather than their absolute value. Analysis of the region in terms of a critique of global capitalism may provide important insight into that phenomenon, but it has significant limitations in advancing understanding of how people actually live, how they understand their situations, and what improvements or suffering the transition has brought twenty years on. It perpetuates a bipolar frame of analysis and reproduces the guiding assumption of globally hegemonic institutions that knowledge, insight, and resources flow from the West to the East. Our desire is to foreground people as actors rather than to see them through hegemonic categories of action and ways of being. This facilitates clearer empirical assessment and provides a better standpoint for normative critique. At the theoretical level then, studying postcommunist countries on their own terms requires deconstructing the hegemonic assumptions and paradigms of analysis that shape what and how we know. Scratching the surface of “civil society” demonstrates how the concept imports explanation through unexamined normative content and implicit expectations about trajectories of development. From a practical standpoint, eliminating hidden normative and teleological assumptions from analysis requires disaggregating the range of meanings, actors, and functions the concept of civil society encompasses in order to see how they bear on political processes. But at another level, hegemonic assumptions and frames of action and analysis are also an important part of the process of change and perception of how and why it occurs. They are an active force in the postcommunist context to the degree that they shape

Postcommunism in a New Key 5

discourse, expectations of what can be achieved, and the regulatory structure that constitutes political and economic reform. Furthermore, these ideas had concrete effects on domestic policy and the incentive structure of particular actors in postcommunist countries through transnational policies that controlled access to funds and markets. This project attempts to address these theoretical challenges by beginning with the causal role ascribed to civil society in theories of democratization. We parse civil society around three themes: justice, mobilization, and hegemony. Justice captures both the reasons for valuing democracy over other forms of government and the normative justification for the use of collective resources toward particular ends at various levels of social organization. Justice is not intended here in an abstract philosophical sense, but in terms of its establishment of community boundaries and articulation of entitlement and obligation within them. Mobilization encompasses the role of society in aggregating individual preferences and resources and demanding the enactment or preservation of a particular vision of justice. Mobilization might be a response to the gap between a localized understanding of justice and one that underpins national or transnational governance. Hegemony brings attention to the operation of power and opportunities for resistance at multiple levels of society through the flow of material and symbolic resources.

Core Concepts: Justice, Mobilization, Hegemony The notion of justice is intimately linked to the concept of civil society. In a basic sociological sense, justice can be understood as a means to resolve the collective action problem by specifying obligation and entitlement at the level of the group through a particular narrative of distribution. However, justice also captures what Guillermo O’Donnell describes as the lack or absence represented by democracy, “the always pending agenda that calls for redress of social ills and further advances in the manifold matters which at a certain time and for certain people, most concern human welfare and dignity” (O’Donnell 2007, 5). In the context of postcommunism, democracy was in a sense a proxy for justice, an unstated goal of the transformation from state socialism. Democracies are commonly regarded as normatively superior to authoritarian regimes because they are more representative of diverse interests and produce outcomes that more closely align with collective understanding of justice. They provide better mechanisms for disaggregating power and

6

Introduction

distributing and organizing it in the realm of society (Johnson and Knight 2007; O’Donnell 2007). Democracy also appears to have a favorable impact on economic justice, although the question is far from settled. Some evidence from large N comparative studies indicates that democratization is associated with both better long-term economic growth and more equitable distribution of wealth (Feng 2005; Rodrik and Wacziarg 2005; Boix and Stokes 2003; Boix 2003; Acemoglu and Robinson 2006). In terms of civil society, economic and political reforms ideally represented expanded opportunities for action and the ability to influence the political process. The degree to which this was actually happening in postcommunist states was a measure of whether the transformation from Soviet rule was realizing its unstated goal of producing a more just political system. Yet democracy’s normative advantages over authoritarian rule are ultimately reliant on the degree to which people exercise the political opportunities available to them as citizens. The postcommunist transformations clearly demonstrate that the legal establishment of a democratic system is not sufficient to realize the benefits attributed to democracy (O’Donnell 2007). Opportunity for people to organize and bring their preferences to bear on government is only a necessary condition for the existence of a democracy. Its effectiveness also depends on people’s capacity to build coalitions and recognize a collective interest in securing political and economic rights for all members of a society. Democratic accountability is only realized if people can bring their collective voices to bear on the exercise of power. Even in the countries that have most effectively established market economies, electoral accountability, and representative institutions, the lack of vibrancy of civic life, widespread distrust of political institutions and elites, highly politicized media, and the attraction of populist rhetoric weaken the quality of democracy and sometimes favor authoritarian challenges to it. Thus another key aspect of civil society is mobilization. The aggregation of individual preferences and direction of collective energy toward political goals is vital to the realization of the promise democracy holds for a more equitable and open society.5 Mobilization in a broad sense is a collective demand for the enactment or preservation of a particular vision of justice. Neither mobilization per se nor the goals that motivate it are an unqualified benefit to democratic government, however. Mobilization can generate support for particular policy goals and forge coalitions that promote responsive democratic government through political pressure, but it can also be destructive to democracy

Postcommunism in a New Key 7

if it is directed against the system itself. Many scholars of the region cite the lack of “virtues” of democratic citizenship, particularly tolerance, moderation, and compromise, as a major impediment to institutional functioning even among the “best” postcommunist states. From their point of view, civil society includes a dispositional capacity to mobilize without compromising the larger frame of politics. Civil society’s fulfillment of its role in maintaining and deepening democracy requires specific relational and organizational skills. The multiple and often competing visions of justice through which people mobilize are also an important dimension of civil society. Whose vision of justice, for example, was ultimately enacted through marketization and the establishment of electoral institutions? The operative answer during the period of transformation was that these institutions are not in themselves tied to a particular idea of justice but are mere facilitators of competing interests, values, and agendas. They provide procedures and conditions of exchange through which substantive outcomes might be realized rather than an overarching vision of what the outcome should be. The notion that justice consists in the political engagement of society rather than a predetermined end of political activity was appealing in part because the region had been ill served by the “state socialist” idea of justice. The old regime had murdered, dispossessed, and imprisoned people in the name of justice; it suppressed cultural expression, built a sham economy, and controlled knowledge production for a purported social ideal. But were the benefits of procedure sufficient to obviate real analysis of the advantages of democracy? Did the postcommunist societies have a choice as collective resources were privatized, or were the critical decisions a consequence of global financial interests and neoliberal hegemony codenamed the “Washington Consensus”? Economic freedom was widely perceived as a necessary condition of effective transformation both to revive the economies in the region and to provide a counterbalance to the overdeveloped state that was a legacy of communism. However, it also meant acceptance of a consumerist ethos and the priority of freedom to own, produce, and distribute over the right to access, equity, and well-being. The discursive context in which preferences are exercised has a significant influence on the appeal of particular visions of society and how they might be achieved. Thus hegemony is another critical dimension of a full conceptualization of civil society. Understanding the actions and choices of civil-society actors requires recognition of the impact of the global power

8

Introduction

structure, including hegemonic norms, opinions, and frames of analysis, on the material and conceptual resources available to formulate problems and envision solutions. Hegemony also operates in the formulation of civil society itself. The political and economic transformations that followed the collapse of state socialism occurred in an international context where the flow of resources and expertise was from West to East. The focus of international involvement was on capacity building, on a top-down movement of norms from international and transnational organizations (governmental and nongovernmental) to postcommunist societies to redress their “deficiencies” as democratic actors after half a century of state socialism. The local level was important to the degree that it was the soil in which these migrating seeds would take root. Their failure to germinate in some cases was blamed on the quality of that soil—on the attitudes, habits, values, expectations, and entrenched interests of the people who were necessary to transform institutions by accepting new ways of relating to one another and new patterns of political and economic engagement. The expectation behind these programs and often behind academic analysis of democratic progress is that democracy and the features of society it requires are known ends that people need to move toward. In this construal, people have no role in defining democracy or choosing the method of its construction, yet their ability to become the society that democracy requires is the measure of their competence. Globally hegemonic institutions also shaped people’s relationship to their incipient democracies. The European Union, international markets, and evaluative agencies that determine standards and measure compliance with international business practices influence popular perception of government and structure the incentives of domestic actors. In some respects these organizations had a salutary effect on transformations through promoting electoral accountability, security of property rights, and political transparency. However, they also represent ideals that generally reflect ownership protection rather than workers rights, protective health standards, media access, and freedom from discrimination. European Union candidacy promoted accountable, transparent, liberal government by providing political actors within postcommunist countries with incentives for reform. Membership further availed countries of resources for public investment. However, it also constituted a new type of pressure on ordinary people, particularly through its impact on the labor market and the flow of resources.

Postcommunism in a New Key 9

A Problem-Driven Approach The articles contained in this volume are the result of two subsequent conferences sponsored by the Social Science Research Council on the impact of hegemony on narratives of justice and political action in Central and Eastern Europe and Eurasia. The articles explicitly address the challenges to studying democratization without imposing a telos derived from hegemonic views about the development trajectories of advanced industrial democracies. They adopt a problem-driven approach that decouples empirical observation of political activity from an a priori assessment of the activity’s impact on democratization. Focusing on specific social problems—here we see poverty, gender justice, and corruption—enables the authors to identify how such problems are constructed at the local level and the various resources galvanized in addressing them. This approach provides a frame for investigating the dynamic interaction between hegemonic discourses propagated through transnational governmental and nongovernmental organizations and local and regional narratives of justice that specify desirable outcomes of political action, the role of government in addressing various problems, and the obligations and entitlements of the relevant community. This effort to identify collective action around specific problem areas does not abandon the question of democratization that has broadly informed postcommunist studies from its inception. Rather, it brackets this concern in order to focus on the elements of social and political life that democracies must engage in order to be effective and upon which they are presumed to have a salutary effect. By beginning with social problems, we are able to observe local (perhaps competing) strategies of political action and the resources employed to pursue them. Placing this dynamic at the center of research recognizes people in postcommunist societies as active creators and interpreters of the various aspects of collective life. It shifts the concern from how adequate or well-prepared people are to respond to political and economic transformations engineered at the top, to how people enact their vernacular visions of life, politics, and justice by responding to daily challenges. Beginning with social problems enables us to identify forms of collective action that might otherwise fall under the research radar due to blind spots in standard conceptualizations and methodologies or insufficient attention to the level of analysis. Looking first at activity and mobilization around a particular issue facilitates recognition of a broader range of collective behavior

10

Introduction

in a given society. We can then distinguish whether specific forms of collective action promote democracy, challenge oppression, or advance particular understandings of justice. A problem-driven approach ultimately facilitates reflection on emergent forms of collective action and the ways in which they may present new understandings of politics. It links the micro- and macrolevels of analysis by bringing into the same frame discourses of resistance and discourses of power as well as everyday localized concerns and hegemonic articulations of social malady and treatment.

Plan of the Book The book is divided into four sections. It begins with two chapters that address theoretical and methodological issues in studying the postcommunist region specifically and in locating the region within the larger field of democratization studies. The three subsequent sections are devoted to exploring gender equality, poverty, and corruption. These “problems” were selected because of their substantive priority in most contemporary theories of political justice, and because they are critical to the fairness of democratic procedure. In choosing poverty, gender, and corruption to explore the possibilities of a contextualized, bottom-up investigation of the complex social processes inherent to democratic consolidation we do not intend to imply that we are being exhaustive in our treatment of the potential social ills that must be addressed in a functioning polity. Nor are we interested in articulating criteria for justice understood as a universal ideal. Focusing on these issues enables us to move beyond macro indicators of democratic success or failure to investigate the concrete, daily-life problems people experience in the postcommunist region and how they respond to them. We are particularly interested in how these problems are constructed in different contexts and at different levels of political organization, and how different discourses of justice framing these problems influence strategies of action for mobilization around them. These issue areas are also the loci of significant interaction between different levels of political organization. They have garnered the attention of nongovernmental organizations, as well as transnational governance agencies within the European Union, and regulatory and monitoring agencies developed to protect global capital flows. Each section analyzes how problems related to the issue are articulated at various levels of political organization,

Postcommunism in a New Key 11

with attention to the genealogy of the issue itself and the interaction between hegemonic discourses and those employed by people within their local communities. Case studies support the thematic chapters by providing empirical evidence drawn from specific (generally national) contexts, illustrating a concrete manifestation of the problem; the local, national, and transnational discourses that influence its articulation; and the types of mobilization generated in response to it. In the opening section, Kubik (Chapter 1) and Wolfe and Pickles (Chapter 2) examine hegemonic paradigms of knowledge production in the social sciences with respect to a research agenda that seeks to illuminate the diversity of lived experience in the region and foreground localized political agency. They do so differently. Kubik approaches the problem largely through the discipline of political science. He draws “best practices” from the comparative politics literature and theoretical insights from anthropology and sociology to elaborate a research approach he calls contextual holism. This approach emphasizes the situated nature of human action and perception. People formulate problems, recognize others as allies or enemies in pursuing solutions to them, and wield shared semiotic resources such as languages and rituals in specific historical, cultural, and institutional contexts. Understanding how groups of people have responded to postcommunist transformations requires recognition of the groups’ experiences of Soviet power and the narratives of political membership prior to Soviet control that they developed in the wake of its collapse. Kubik’s approach confronts the challenge of achieving the analytical clarity and capacity to generalize especially valued in political science, without sacrificing contextual details vital to explanation. Wolfe and Pickles trace the genealogy of concepts employed in research on the postcommunist region to uncover the ideological commitments they import into analysis. Along with a number of other contributors to the volume, they hold the conviction that empirical work that neglects the reality of power relations in knowledge production is not empirical at all. Thus, accounting for the network of meanings within which social science scholarship is embedded is a basic condition of scientific integrity. They interrogate the concepts “social” and “justice” as products of the Enlightenment; as the purported objective of state socialism; and as they have been shaped by neoliberal discourse, the ethos of Europe, and postsocialist studies. Wolfe and Pickles demonstrate the particular role played by the postcommunist region in the history of these concepts as they were understood by scholars educated

12

Introduction

in the West, who valued the challenge Marxist-Leninist ideology posed to capitalism despite the travesty of its implementation. The power of Marxism as an emancipatory discourse, in the context of liberal ideology in the United States in particular, has important consequences for comparison of political development with respect to the social problems addressed here, particularly gender, race, and economic equality. As Regulska and Grabowska (Chapter 3) demonstrate in their analysis of mobilization around gender issues, the ideological legacy of Marxism persists in beliefs among gender rights activists and scholars in the region with regard to race and ethnicity. In their view, the self-concept of the region as a uniform space without racial and ethnic divisions fostered under state socialism suppresses important public debate about the complex intersection of different forms of political oppression. Nevertheless, the dominance of the liberal paradigm and categorical rejection of things “left” because of their abuse by authoritarian regimes also leave feminism without a valuable source of social justice theorizing. According to Regulska and Grabowska some feminists urge reclamation of the socialist legacy of resistance, particularly the wellarticulated philosophical critiques of Soviet authoritarianism developed in the end stages of state socialism. Wolfe and Pickles also highlight the problem of telos in the historical narrative that arises from the impulse to make sense of political change. Seeing events as developing toward a liberal present, rather than taking into account contingency and the possibility of alternative paths, has enormous consequences for the type of research questions one asks and the places one looks for answers. Like Kubik, they endorse a relational, contextualized analysis of the ways in which institutions, values, and norms shape particular understandings and practices in collective life. Kubik, Wolfe and Pickles, and Regulska and Grabowska all suggest that greater attention should be paid to the impact of imperialism in the pre-Soviet period on differences across the postcommunist space. Regulska and Grabowska echo Wolfe and Pickles’s concern with the impact of hegemony on social-scientific theorizing in speculating that postcolonial frameworks are rarely applied to the postcommunist region because inter-Europe and East-West colonization is inconsistent with the colonial paradigm. They argue that recognizing the Soviet Union as a colonizing force and foregrounding the complex relationship to imperial power of the countries of East-Central Europe and Eurasia can be useful in understanding the specific formulation of gender discourses with respect

Postcommunism in a New Key 13

to nationalism and religion. The impact of uneven democratization and the NGOization of the feminist movement during the 1990s further suggest the relevance of postcolonial modes of analysis to the postcommunist region. The importance of contextualized analysis to developing an accurate picture of the processes under investigation in the postcommunist world is evident in each of the thematic chapters. Regulska and Grabowska, for example, with the support of case studies by Lovin (Romania) and Badashvili (Georgia) argue that the intersection of gender discourses originating at the local and international levels produced a highly fragmented environment of political activism that is often interpreted as an absence of activism. People are demanding gender justice, but in myriad ways and through various ideas about what it entails. Women’s self-advocacy often exhibits locally specific understandings of justice because discourses of resistance to local hegemonies vary with respect to local experience and the immediate problems women face. Ledeneva (Chapter 8) makes a similar claim about informal practices. She traces the development of the “corruption paradigm” to demonstrate the lack of fit between corruption mitigation policies the paradigm informs and the behavior the policies are designed to target. Corruption intervention, she argues, is based on a conceptualization of the phenomena that takes no account of people’s narratives of their own actions, which in many cases are the result of habits for addressing systemic problems. The anticorruption policy regime defines the problem entirely from the outside with an assumption of the universal validity of what are in fact culturally and institutionally bound conceptions of correct behavior. According to Ledeneva, corruption should be studied as informal adaptation to changing environments. An “ethnography of corruption” that understands informal practices from the point of view of the people who engage in them is necessary to develop policies that effectively address the deleterious effects of informal practices on postcommunist institutions. Behaviors identified by international agencies and globally normative standards as “corrupt” are often merely effective ways of coping with daily life. Nor is the impact of such practices on the quality of postcommunist institutions immediately apprehensible. Ledeneva argues that informal practices can be both supportive and subversive of progress toward more democratic and just postcommunist institutions. Discerning whether and how informal practices compensate for systemic weaknesses or weaken the system further requires contextualized interpretation of the meanings of particular actions. Case studies by

14

Introduction

Grødeland and Karklins support Ledeneva’s analysis. Grødeland attempts to disentangle informal behavior from “corruption” and assess if and how the former becomes the latter. Karklins considers informal payments for medical care in Latvia as a response to the Soviet health-care system that is maladaptive in its current context. She argues that the current practices result in regressive distribution of health-care costs, erode public trust, and compromise overall quality and access to care. Szelenyi and Wilk (Chapter 6) demonstrate variations in people’s lived experience of poverty across the postcommunist region that are not captured by macro indicators of poverty and inequality. They operationalize poverty through both objective measures and subjective experience in order to identify reasons for differences in the degree of hardship people endured. Their study highlights the dramatic increase in inequality during the first decade of postcommunism and the disproportionate impact of transformation from state socialism on women. The relative poverty in different countries during this period varies considerably when assessed in terms of lived experience rather than in terms of objective monetary measures. Russia, for example, had the most extreme poverty when measured in monetary terms, yet fewer people reported experiencing hunger in Russia than in Bulgaria. Closer analysis demonstrates that opportunities for even urban-dwelling Russians to grow their own food mitigated the effects of their lack of income. Szelenyi and Wilk correlate the relative experience of poverty with the degree of popular protest against economic reforms. They address the puzzle of why there was little mobilization during a period of extreme poverty and rising inequality and a great deal of mobilization against reforms during the first decade of the twenty-first century that were far less costly. They argue that popular response to economic reforms must be understood in terms of the experience of the native population, including previous reforms and the cultural value assigned to the policies being changed. The complex relationship between social and economic institutions evident through Szelenyi and Wilk’s analysis also challenges easy characterization of “neoliberal” and “neopatrimonial” countries and blanket assessments of the impact of “neoliberal reforms.” The Central European countries that adopted neoliberal economic policies early in the post-Soviet period retained their patrimonial social institutions through the second decade of postcommunism. Restructuring the “great distributive system”—particularly higher education and health care—became increasingly difficult for

Postcommunism in a New Key 15

democratically accountable political elites. The symbolic value the system held under state socialism persisted, despite its incapacity to prepare people to participate in a globally competitive economy or provide adequate health care. By contrast, countries with neopatrimonial political systems that were less constrained by democratic processes were able to privatize aspects of their social institutions. By looking at both the microlevel impact of social institutions, specifically at their role in facilitating people’s access to the market as employees and consumers, and at the macrolevel impact of global capitalism on postcommunist countries’ capacity to simultaneously maintain economic growth and their distributive systems, Szelenyi and Wilk provide a more nuanced picture of the interaction between political development and economic reform. A full assessment of the impact of neoliberal reforms in the region must take into account the growing inequality gap and the degree of freedom actually available to members of a society. Such reforms must be considered in terms of their comprehensive impact on social well-being rather than just in terms of the security of property rights and capital flows. A case study by Vamanu and Vamanu develops one of the consequences of socioeconomic inequality by examining the treatment of the Roma in public discourse in Romania. Each of the thematic chapters and the supporting case studies emphasizes the interaction between discourses at different levels of political organization. Regulska and Grabowska, Lovin, and Badashvili all develop the interaction between local conceptions of gender justice and the liberal paradigm of gender equality that guides the initiatives of the European Union and NGOs. Ledeneva and Grødeland discuss the gap between the corruption paradigm and local interpretations of informal behavior as well as the impact of the former on postcommunist citizens’ trust in their governments. Szelenyi and Wilk consider people’s subjective experiences of poverty and the impact of the new terms of economic competition on the labor force in the context of deep transformation of the social system. The authors attend to the concrete experiences of localized actors, the ways that they conceptualize the problems they face, and how they act to address those problems. The thematic chapters particularly seek to expose the assumptions behind the concepts and frames of analysis through which postcommunist countries are studied to identify the ways they facilitate or obscure knowledge of the region.

16

Introduction

Looking Ahead The intent of the project from which this volume emerged was to examine the existing state of scholarship on the postcommunist region and set an agenda for future research. To open the conversation, the organizers convened a community of scholars from across disciplines to discuss what we know about why some postcommunist countries successfully transformed into functioning liberal democracies while others failed to do so—as well as the criteria for evaluating successes and failures, how those criteria were constructed and applied, and what was neglected or underrecognized. The scholars who participated in the project formulated research questions within different paradigms, investigated them with different methods, and grounded them in a variety of philosophical commitments. The interdisciplinary and methodologically pluralist nature of the group promoted critical reflection on how the questions we ask are shaped by our disciplinary or methodological standpoint and how research shapes and is shaped by policy goals. The fruit of these discussions is an attempt to bridge the traditional division between empirical (positivistic) and critical social science. The focus on how people formulate benchmarks of well-being and mobilize to achieve them suggests the possibility of convergence of these approaches. On the one hand, we need a critical perspective to expose hegemonic assumptions, concepts, and paradigms of analysis and to consider how they shape empirical investigation. On the other hand, a truly critical stance—one that puts human concern at the fore—requires rigorous empirical methodology. In brief, this book suggests ways of foregrounding the impact of hegemony on the imaginative terrain of social science in order to minimize its constraining effect. The next stage of postcommunist research requires reflexivity about the categories, context, and paradigms through which scholars construct knowledge about the region. It requires simultaneous recognition of the diversity of experience across the postcommunist space and attention to the microprocesses of political development in the context of multilevel and multilocal discourses. This approach foregrounds the agency of people in the postcommunist region while recognizing that they act within a specific historical and cultural context that constrains and facilitates their actions. It enables scholars to study the region on its own terms rather than as either precursor or victim of the West. It also takes an important step toward integrating the postcommunist cases into the larger field of research on democratization rather than continuing to

Postcommunism in a New Key 17

see them primarily in terms of their communist past. Careful, context sensitive research will ultimately contribute to democratization studies by enabling scholars to identify the underlying processes through which democratization occurs within a truly broad set of empirical cases.

Notes 1.

Freedom House 2010; see also Diamond 2008; Fish 2005; Levitsky and Way 2002, 2010; Hanson 2007; Way and Levitsky 2007; Merkel 2004.

2.

These conferences were sponsored by the Social Science Research Council under the theme “Justice, Hegemony, and Social Movements: Views from East-Central Europe and Eurasia.” The first was held at Rutgers University in New Brunswick in May 2006; the second was held at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland, in April 2007.

3.

Joseph Stiglitz’s (2008, 139) comments regarding the World Development Report illustrate this dynamic: “One of the hardest struggles—and I was only partially successful—was to change the concept of the WDR. Traditionally, it has summarized ‘received wisdom.’ The goal was to summarize the received wisdom in a few, easily understood ‘messages.’ The messages, in turn, were intended to set the policy agenda.” (Also available at http:// wdroline.worldbank.org/worldbank/a/c.html/development_economics_decadeschapter_commentary_world_development_report_development_theory_policy.)

4.

Pedersen and Campbell 2011. See also Aligica, Dragos, and Evans 2009; and Darden 2009.

5.

The correlation between patterns of mobilization under state socialism and the emergence of various postcommunist trajectories is well established: the stronger the former, the more democratic the latter. See, for example, Ekiert 1996; Fish 1998; Bunce 1999b, 787–90; Bunce 1999a, 784; Bunce 2003, 172; Kennedy 2002, 27; Ekiert and Hanson 2003; Bernhard and Nordstrom 2010.

References Acemoglu, Daren, and James A. Robinson. 2006. Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Aligica, Paul Dragos, and Anthony J. Evans. 2009. The Neoliberal Revolution in Eastern Europe. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Edgar. Béland, Daniel, and Robert Henry Cox. 2011. Ideas and Politics in Social Science Research. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Berman, Sheri. 2007. “Lessons from Europe.” Journal of Democracy 18: 28–41. Bernhard, Michael, and Timothy Nordstrom. 2010. “Communist Legacies and Democratic Survival in a Comparative Perspective: Liability or Advantage?” Paper presented at the 2010 Annual Convention of the American Political Science Association. Boix, Carles. 2003. Democracy and Redistribution. New York: Cambridge University Press. Boix, Carles, and Susan C. Stokes. 2003. “Endogenous Democratization.” World Politics 55: 517–49. Bunce, Valerie. 1999a. “Lessons of the First Postsocialist Decade.” East European Politics and Societies 13 (2): 236–43. ———. 1999b. “The Political Economy of Postsocialism.” Slavic Review 58 (4): 756–93. ———. 2003. “Rethinking Recent Democratization: Lessons from the Postcommunist Experience.” World Politics 55 (1): 67–92. Campos, Nauro, and Fabrizio Coricelli. 2002. “Growth in Transition: What We Know, What We Don’t, and What We Should.” Journal of Economic Literature 40 (3): 793–836. Capoccia, Giovanni, and Daniel Ziblatt. 2010. “The Historical Turn in Democratization Studies: A New Research Agenda for Europe and Beyond.” Comparative Political Studies 43 (8/9): 931–68. Crowley, Stephen, and David Ost, eds. 2001. Labor and Politics in Postcommunist Eastern Europe. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Darden, Keith. 2009. Economic Liberalism and its Rivals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Diamond, Larry. 2008. The Spirit of Democracy. New York: Times Books. Ekiert, Grzegorz. 1996. The State Against Society: Political Crises and their Aftermath in East Central Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ekiert, Grzegorz, and Stephen E. Hanson, eds. 2003. Capitalism and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe: Assessing the Legacy of Communist Rule. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ekiert, Grzegorz, and Jan Kubik. 1998. “Contentious Politics in New Democracies: East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia, 1989–1994.” World Politics 50 (4): 547–81. Ekiert, Grzegorz, Jan Kubik, and Milada Anna Vachudova. 2007. “Democracy in the Post-Communist World: An Unending Quest?” East European Politics and Societies 21: 7–30.

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Feng, Yi. 2005. Democracy, Governance, and Economic Performance: Theory and Evidence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Fish, M. Stephen. 1998. “The Determinants of Economic Reform in PostCommunist World.” East European Politics and Societies 12 (1): 1–35. ———. 2005. Democracy Derailed in Russia: The Failure of Open Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Frye, Timothy. 2002. “The Perils of Polarization: Economic Performance in the Post-Communist World.” World Politics 54: 308–37. ———. 2010. Building States and Markets After Communism: The Perils of Polarized Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Greskovits, Bela. 1998. The Political Economy of Protest and Patience. Budapest: The Central European University Press. Grzymała-Busse, Anna M. 2007. Rebuilding Leviathan: Party Competition and State Exploitation in Post-Communist Democracies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hall, Peter. 2006. “Preference Formation as a Political Process.” In Preferences and Situations, edited by Ira Katznelson and Barry Weingast, 129–60. New York: Russell Sage. Hanson, Stephen E. 2007. “The Uncertain Future of Russia’s Weak State Authoritarianism.” East European Politics and Societies 21: 67–81. Howard, Marc Morje. 2003. The Weakness of Civil Society in Post-communist Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnson, James, and Jack Knight. 2007. “The Priority of Democracy.” American Political Science Review 101: 47–61. Kennedy, Michael D. 2002. Cultural Formations of Post-communism: Emancipation, Transition, and War. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kubicek, Paul. 1999. “Organized Labor in Postcommunist States: Will the Western Sun Set on It, Too?” Comparative Politics 32 (October): 83–102. ———. 2004. Organized Labor in Postcommunist States. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Levitsky, Steven, and Lucan A. Way. 2002. “The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism.” Journal of Democracy 13 (2): 51–65. ———. 2010. Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lustick, Ian. 1996. “History, Historiography, and Political Science: Multiple Historical Records and the Problem of Selection Bias.” American Political Science Review 90: 605–18.

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Merkel, Wolfgang. 2004. “Embedded and Defective Democracies.” Democratization 11 (5): 33–58. O’Donnell, Guillermo. 2007. “The Perpetual Crisis of Democracy.” Journal of Democracy 18 (1): 5–11. Pedersen, Ove K., and John L. Campbell. 2011. “Knowledge Regimes and Comparative Political Economy.” In Ideas and Politics in Social Science Research, edited by Daniel Béland and Robert Henry Cox, 167–90. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rodrik, Dani, and Romain Wacziarg. 2005. “Do Democratic Transitions Produce Bad Economic Outcomes?” American Economic Review 95 (2): 50–55. Sewell, William H. 1996. “Three Temporalities: Toward an Eventful Sociology.” In The Historical Turn in the Human Sciences, edited by T. Macdonald, 245–78. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Stiglitz, Joseph. 2008. “Commentary: The World Development Report: Development Theory and Practice.” In Development Economics Through the Decades: A Critical Look at Thirty Years of the World Development Report, edited by Yusuf Shahid. Washington, DC: The World Bank. Sztompka, Piotr. 1993. “Civilizational Incompetence: The Trap of PostCommunist Societies.” Zeitschrift fur Soziologie 22 (2): 85–95. Vanhuysse, Pieter. 2004. “East European Protest Politics in the Early 1990s: Comparative Trends and Preliminary Theories.” Europe-Asia Studies 56 (3): 421–38. Way, Lucan A., and Steven Levitsky. 2007. “Linkage, Leverage, and the Post-Communist Divide.” East European Politics and Societies 21: 48–66. Ziblatt, Daniel. 2006. “How Did Europe Democratize?” World Politics 58: 311–38.

Postcommunism in a New Key 21

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chapter one

From Transitology to Contextual Holism: A Theoretical Trajectory of Postcommunist Studies Jan Kubik

My goal in this chapter is to outline an approach to postcommunism that I label contextual holism.1 Its elements are evident but usually underarticulated and unsystemized in the best literature on the subject. Its full articulation is as yet premature, but its theoretical contours are already clear enough to venture a preliminary outline. Practitioners of this approach emphasize the complexity and multidimensionality of the postcommunist transformations, showing renewed interest in culture, institutions, and history. There are other approaches. As in most areas of social science, some scholars of postcommunism move in the direction of increased parsimony and formalization, by and large inspired by the game-theoretic revolution spreading out of microeconomics. But it is only the former approach that I focus on here. The trip begins in comparative politics and mostly stays in its territory, but its logic eventually forces me to visit at least the edges of sociology and, particularly, anthropology. By coining the term “contextual holism” I want to emphasize two basic assumptions of the approach I am beginning to synthesize: (1) the systemic (holistic) quality of the sociopolitical phenomena under discussion; and (2) their dependence on the contexts within which they emerge, develop, or collapse (Chen and Sil 2007). “Systemism”2 or “relationism”3 would be perhaps more adequate terms, but they are cumbersome. “Holism” is more elegant, but the emphasis on “wholes” I advocate here does not mean contemplating them as indivisible entities or assuming that the only legitimate objects in the study of social action are such “wholes” as classes or nations. It is rather a call to treat each phenomenon as a part of a field of relations with 27

other phenomena, as an element interconnected with others within a specific configuration. “Contextualism” means that each “whole,” that is, a specific configuration of elements, is articulated differently in different contexts. The five elements of contextual holism are discussed in section III.4 Postcommunism, like any other social phenomenon, can and has been studied from many different theoretical angles. Positivistically oriented scholars, always keen on pursuing large-N panoramas, discovered twentyseven fascinating cases that can be mined for all kinds of variables, ranging from indicators of macroeconomic performance to crime rates and rising gender inequalities. Small-N comparativists found fertile terrain to inspect new social and political configurations. Case-study scholars finally had an opportunity to get to the bottom of many puzzling phenomena, previously concealed behind the Iron Curtain. Interpretivists jumped on a chance to peruse mysterious cultural landscapes, reconstruct their meanings, and deconstruct the rules of their construction. Critical scholars acquired yet another terrain to probe the assumptions of “normal” social science. Everybody had a chance to study a massive social experiment in statu nascendi, but scholars approached the task equipped with disciplinary lenses reflecting the assumptions, language, and methods of their particular school of thought. As a result, studying postcommunism has become an exercise resembling gazing at inkblots of the Rorschach test. The initially dominant approach to postcommunism (which remained influential in many policy circles for years) focused predominantly on the relationship between economic and political reforms. In their work on postcommunist successes and failures, the proponents of this approach often presume two conditions that are relatively uncontested in “mainstream” comparative political science: the elective affinity between a free market and effective democratic institutions5 and a positive correlation between economic development and a free market.6 Moreover, implicit in many analyses of democratization is the idea that the market drives political and cultural development, by promoting social formations that are conducive to democracy, such as civil society. Thus some early analysts and many influential policy advisers (“practical transitologists”7) assume, more or less explicitly, that the goals of postauthoritarian transformations are a Western-style democracy and market economy, and that the method of achieving these goals has to be modeled on a specific distillation of “Western experiences” (Gans-Morse 2004, 334).8 According to “practical transitologists,” moving in the direction of these two institutional

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General Approaches to Postcommunism

arrangements is construed as a desired outcome, while moving away from them or stagnating is seen as problematic if not perilous. The telos of democracy and markets, though insufficiently examined, is rather uncontroversial among scholars. Much more problematic are two more specific assumptions: (1) that the putative points of arrival, namely, the “West”/Europe (Böröcz 2001, 7) and “democracy” (O’Donnell 20019), are sufficiently homogenous to constitute stable and clear-cut referents; and (2) that there is a relatively standardized set of procedures (policy measures) that—if scrupulously followed—constitute the only viable method of realizing these twin goals. This combination of goals (democracy and market economy) and specific means of attaining them10 produces a powerful model of socioeconomic and political development whose normative yardstick is clearly derived from the history of the “West” and thus indebted to modernization theory (GansMorse 2004, 321). The interesting debate about what should come first, a prior normative predilection for “progress” à la “West” or an analysis of the alleged “inevitability” (and, thus, normative superiority) of the “Western” model is usually sidestepped. It is clear, however, that the norm and the analysis reinforce each other and generate a specific professional culture. The keystone of this culture, the universalistic neoliberal philosophy of development (“the Washington consensus”), has assumed a strong, if not hegemonic, position in the world of policymakers.11 It influenced—initially without much challenge—the design of economic reforms in all countries belonging to the Huntingtonian third wave of democratization. This transition culture (Kennedy 2002), which is produced and shared by most foreign experts and domestic policy analysts, “draws on examples from across Eastern Europe, and across the capitalist world, to provide instruction regarding how transition should be designed” (Kennedy 2002, 13). Moreover, it “tends to draw more on capitalist experiences from across the world than it does on any nation’s socialist past. Socialism is something to be escaped, repressed, destroyed” (Kennedy 2002, 13). Following the assumptions of modernization theory, participants in this culture regard the post-1989 transitions as a “return to Europe” following “socialism’s systemic exhaustion” (Kennedy 2002, 14). Characteristically, such scholars and policymakers locate the source of agency in social change with “those who are building a global capitalism, not with those who emancipated themselves from communist dictatorship” (Kennedy 2002, 14). Nor do they consider the people who need to solve problems generated by postcommunist transformations in their daily lives.

From Transitology to Contextual Holism 29

There are two influential challenges to this dominant political science paradigm, one from within this discipline, another from without. First, most political scientists who by and large work within the “normal” paradigm are also consummate experts on specific regions and, therefore, able to produce insightful studies that mix high-level theorizing with deep, contextual knowledge of specific societies, cultures, and polities.12 Second, there are scholars who postulate a radical departure from the “normal” paradigm of political science; they usually come from anthropology, geography, cultural and gender studies, and sociology. They often rail against transitology as they formulate alternative ways of looking at postcommunism (for recent reviews, see Pickles 2010; Rogers 2010). Both groups of scholars adhere to at least some principles of contextual holism. I do not intend to offer here a detailed analysis of their respective contributions to the development of this new paradigm; I merely trace its gradual emergence in the two bodies of scholarship and attempt a preliminary articulation of its basic premises. This chapter will unfold as follows. Section I outlines the basic premises of the research program dominant during the early years of postcommunist transformations, transitology. Section II provides examples of works that have moved away from transitology in various theoretical directions and offered alternative ways of looking at postcommunism. In these works I find the seeds of the research program I call contextual holism. An attempt to systematize the basic assumptions of this program follows in Section III. In the Conclusion section, I link this chapter with the rest of the volume.

I. Assumptions of “Classical” Transitology and Transitional Culture The intellectual foundations underlying transition analysis were developed by scholars who often had negligible experience in the region. Many were economists or political scientists working on economic or political transitions in other parts of the world. Their efforts produced relatively abstract, simple analyses and advocacy of institutional engineering, which were by and large dismissive of the significance of social, cultural, or historical contexts. They presumed and encouraged the perspective that the route to an advanced capitalist economy “is the same road, regardless of the starting point, whether that be Sao Paulo, Singapore, or Slovenia” (Stark and Bruszt 1998, 5). This type of scholarship clashed with the work of regional experts who emphasized history, culture, and context, without however abandoning theorizing

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General Approaches to Postcommunism

(Bernhard 2000). Bunce, an early challenger of its universalist assumptions, argued that the postcommunist countries constitute a relatively heterogeneous set of cases. She observed that the postcommunist transformations produced “too much variance—in the independent and dependent variables—to narrow the field of explanation to a reasonable number of plausible factors” (1995b, 980). Consequently, she suggested, the logic of different systems design that would allow us to compare the postcommunist transformations with transformations in other parts of the world is inoperative because the condition of similar outcomes (necessary for this logic to operate) is not met. Eventually, the attractions of institutional design scholarship dissipated, but its legacy survives, particularly in popular, journalistic accounts of the transformations. In addition to relying on modernization theory (Gans-Morse 2004), six basic assumptions underlie transitology (as a system of ideas behind some theoretical work and much of early policy advising in the region): (1) compartmentalization; (2) emphasis on agency (antistructuralism); (3) presentism; (4) naturalism; (5) focus on formal institutions; and (6) focus on (whole) states as units of analysis. These points are discussed in more detail later in the chapter, where I compare them to the assumptions that underpin the antitransitological literature. Here I briefly characterize each point and indicate its consequences for postcommunist analysis. Compartmentalization means privileging economic logic over the social or cultural embeddedness of economic processes; it is associated with the concept of disembedded economy (Bonker, Muller, and Pickel 2002, 11). It was reflected, for example, in the advocacy of what might be called decontextualized privatization. As Kornai observes, “The vast majority of the profession [economists—JK] accepted and popularized the strategy of rapid privatization, often using quite aggressive arguments to do so” (2008, 67). Yet the analytical emphasis on the agentic power of the reformers proved excessive, as all sorts of constraints complicated or derailed the course of the reforms. Presentism took the form of instant institutional engineering based on rather inflexible thinking in terms of “imperatives of liberalization” (Crawford and Lijphart 1995, 172–73). The resulting designer capitalism (Stark and Bruszt 1998, 5; Bunce 1994a, 116) uncritically accepted the premise that “the faster the reform, the faster the growth will be” (Kornai 2008, 154). This quickly proved a false generalization as it worked relatively well only in a few countries, such as Poland, Hungary, or Slovakia. Naturalism (an assumption that

From Transitology to Contextual Holism 31

the social world works and can be studied like the natural world) prevented many social scientists from paying sufficient attention to the way the “natives” subjected to this enormous social and political experiment framed their own experiences and how these framings influenced their actions. Narrow focus on formal institutions and disregard for the enduring significance of informal networks in the region (Borocz 2000) led to an erroneous understanding of postcommunist reality. Finally, the focus on states (and nations) as units of analysis resulted in a relative neglect of the tremendously important diversification of postcommunist dynamics within each country (Petro 2004, 18). Research on local and regional developments has largely remained on the periphery of postcommunist scholarship. The debate between proponents of “transitological” and “contextual” approaches to postcommunism commenced almost immediately after the fall of the old system. Schmitter and Karl suggested a sharp distinction between generalists/comparativists who “focus on generic/structural” properties and “area specialists” who “focus on particular/cultural or ideational properties,” which they often treat as “unique” (1994, 178–79). Bunce objected to the sharpness of this dichotomy, arguing that the assertion that “places matter and that scholars need expertise to understand what is going on in these places” (1995, 983) does not amount to a thesis of their “uniqueness” and the inherent incomparability of those places with other places (such as Latin America or Southern Europe). She presented evidence that the best work in the field was done by people who were simultaneously well-trained comparativists and expert area specialists. This chapter presents several works that epitomize this fruitful marriage.

II. Problems with Transitology Studies and policy recommendations based on the theoretical logic of “transitology” attracted either praise or critical scorn (see Gans-Morse 2004 for a detailed review). This polarized reaction is easy to understand given the sparseness and simplicity of the model and the brashness (often seen as recklessness) of policy recommendations derived from it. But the best work in the field of postcommunist studies, much of it focused on the specific issues and areas reviewed below, can hardly be characterized as “transitologist.” A systematic review of the literature indicates the need for more nuanced judgment. Since 1989, many scholars have produced studies whose theoretical

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savvy and attention to detail do not resemble the straw man of “transitology,” a caricature often invoked by critics of political science analyses. Very few serious political scientists would model postcommunist transformations as a straightforward, uniform, linear, and easily generalizable “progress” from totalitarianism to democracy and from command economy to market economy. Bunce’s view that there is “no single road to democracy” (2008, 25) is also rarely contested. Recognition of the region’s plurality, as Sztompka argues, is fundamental to quality scholarship: Only in the myopic perspective of distant outsiders was the so-called “socialist bloc” an undifferentiated entity, a kind of uniformly gray (and sad) area in Europe. We insiders knew better. Bulgaria was different from Czechoslovakia, Romania from Poland, Hungary from the GDR, Albania from Yugoslavia, and all were different from the imperial center, the Soviet Union. These differences have become even more salient and deeper after the collapse of communism and the dismantling of the Soviet empire. Eastern and Central Europe today presents a colorful mosaic of countries different in economic standards, political arrangements, cultural values, lifestyles, mentalities, etc.13

It is now well established that postcommunism is very diverse, politically, economically, and culturally (Pickles 2010). At least three major types of regimes have emerged after twenty years of transformations: consolidated democracies, consolidated authoritarianisms, and semiauthoritarian hybrids (Ekiert, Kubik, and Vachudova 2007).14 While some countries, particularly the Baltic and Central European states, enjoy relatively high quality democratic institutions,15 others, particularly former Soviet republics in Central Asia, suffer under authoritarian regimes of various hues. A partial reason for this may be that while in some countries these goals have been taken seriously by significant sectors of the elites and the larger populace, in others, strategically placed politicians have paid lip service to the twin ideal, while the actual transformations have proceeded erratically, tending toward increasingly nonor semidemocratic regimes.16 For example, despite the paroxysm of “colored revolutions”—an attempt to renew the commitment to democracy in some postcommunist countries—the prevailing tendency in the states that emerged from the Soviet Union is toward “competitive authoritarianism.”17 The postcommunist space produced both the leaders of what McFaul dubbed the fourth wave of regime transformations and its worst failures (authoritarian

From Transitology to Contextual Holism 33

laggards).18 The former include today’s members of the European Union, the latter the authoritarian regimes of Central Asia and Belarus. The three groups of countries seem to be on path dependent trajectories. In East Central Europe, there is a striking convergence among the new members of the EU and official candidate countries. They have introduced comprehensive reforms overhauling their states, economies, and welfare systems; they are wealthier with faster-growing economies and lower levels of income disparity; and they benefit from liberal democratic standards safeguarded by a consolidated democratic system. By contrast, the majority of former Soviet republics, including Russia, are poorer, more unequal, plagued by economic difficulties, choked by massive corruption, and increasingly authoritarian. Some countries in this group have ended up as “consolidated autocracies,” in Freedom House’s terminology, while others muddle through as semireformed democratic-autocratic hybrids (Levitsky and Way 2002, 2010). Countries such as Russia, Georgia, Moldova, or Ukraine, to name a few, tend to oscillate between semidemocratic and semiauthoritarian systems and show partial or stalled economic reforms. The poor performance of their economies is a consequence of being stuck in a “partial reform trap” (Coricelli 2007, 83–86; Hellman 1998; Bunce 1999a, 786), in which the lack of incentives for policymakers to continue reforms, popular opposition to reforms that exact initial costs with respect to living standards, and enforcement of the status quo by winners of the early stages of the reform process prevent further changes that would redress the uneven distribution of wealth and obstacles to political accountability and development. Voters are complicit in maintaining a cycle that enriches the ruling elites at their expense. How might we account theoretically for these three (at least) trajectories? Quite a few political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists—particularly those who study specific issue areas (party systems, legal institutions, economic changes in specific firms, and so on) or such problems as gender inequality or messy property relations—have been actively looking for fresh theoretical approaches to solve this puzzle. They often opt to abandon cavalier applications of large-N methodology and offer instead theories built around thoroughly examined case studies and carefully crafted small-N comparisons.19 In short, they accept the complexity of the region and focus on developing innovative ways of thinking about it, assuming that only detailed case studies, often based on “ethnographically” textured and/or historically

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grounded analyses, can produce theoretically satisfactory answers and viable policy recommendations. Some scholars who take seriously the diversity of postcommunist contexts, however, seem to have made a hobby out of complaining about the simple-mindedness and wrong-headedness of “transitology,” an approach that seems to have had more critics than practitioners, at least among serious scholars.20 While some criticisms have been right on target, 21 the tendency to equate much, if not all, work done on postcommunism in political science with transitology is wrong-headed. True, much of early “economic” transitology—mostly practiced by policy advisers—was uselessly simplistic and quite a few parachutists—as political scientists who became students of postcommunism overnight were called in the region and among area experts—knew so little about the region they studied that their “discoveries” were rather vacuous (Bernhard 2000; Greskovits 2002, 242).22 But my review of the extant literature has revealed that very few political scientists who made major and lasting contributions to the first wave of studies on postcommunism were “pure” transitologists or operated with transitology’s basic theoretical positions, summarized in the first column of Table 1.1. Most of them “flirted” at least with some of the “antitransitologist” positions (summarized in column 3 of the table); their work has often been sufficiently nuanced and “contextualized” to produce compelling analyses, which have passed the test of time better than most sparse models of generalizing parachutists. So, how might we account for the divergence of postcommunist paths, assuming that we need to pay attention to various “contexts” in which those paths unfold? The job of contextualization begins with assuming that “history matters” and trying to specify what this phrase means. It is thus useful to begin the analysis of postcommunist transformations by outlining the basic features of state socialism. Let me begin by proposing a simple model of what I call democratic architecture.23 Schematically, this architecture can be presented in the following Figure 1.1. The model has five domains: (1) state; (2) economy; (3) political society; (4) civil society; and (5) domestic society (family and kinship networks). 24 I elaborate their interrelationship elsewhere (Aronoff and Kubik 2013, 205–8), relying heavily on the pathbreaking work of Linz and Stepan (1996). For this discussion, suffice it to note that each domain needs to be fully articulated and independent, but for a democracy to function properly

From Transitology to Contextual Holism 35

TABLE

1.1. Transitology, Its Radical Alter Ego, and Contextual Holism (Early) transitology

Clear-cut (radical) alternative

Contextual holism

Basic approach to the phenomena under study

Analytical Holism compartmentalization

(Moderate) holism/ systemism

1

Location of causality

Agency (usually elite actors)

Structure

Relations of agents within structuresi “Weak” structures (Loosely) structured systems

2

Time horizon (in explanation and policy analysis)

Presentism/voluntarism (institutional design emphasized)

Historical determinism

Historicizing (legacies, path dependence emphasized)

3

Philosophy of social science

Positivism

Postmodernist focus on discourse

Constructivism (focus on semiotic practices)

4

Institutional locus

Formal

Informal

Formal-informal hybrids

5

Basic unit of analysis

Nation-state

Individual

National level and/ or regions/localities Localized agents

i. Michael Bernhard reminded me of the significance of this formulation.

all domains need to work together both as a system of checks and balances (producing accountability) and as a mutually reinforcing system of democratic governance (generating effectiveness). The institutional revolution known as Soviet-style communism produced a simpler, hierarchical system: the state “swallowed” both the economy (result: command economy) and the party system (result: party-state). Autonomous civil society was by and large eliminated (see Figure 1.2). The distinction between totalitarian and posttotalitarian regime types (Linz and Stepan 1996) 25 is helpful for analyzing the uneven dynamics of state socialism. Although this distinction is necessary for both analytical and historical reasons, it is crucial to remember that the switch from one to another did not change the basic institutional architecture of the communist system. 26 “The thaw,” following Stalin’s death in 1953 and Khrushchev’s “secret speech” in 1956, did not lead to: (1) the separation of the state and the economic system; (2) the reinstatement of the multiparty system;

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Figure 1.1. Model of Democratic Architecture

and (3) the restoration of autonomous civil society. The thaw certainly amounted to the “humanization” of the system. As a result, state socialism became more livable and “humane,” but to call the changes liberalization (in the strict meaning of the term) is imprecise. 27 However, after the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (February 1956), the party undertook a gradual—albeit arbitrary and uneven (in time and space)—reconstruction of the system. Three component processes can be distinguished: 1.

Selective “ humanization.” The state and political society did not liberalize (party-state institutions were not abolished or decisively reformed): they became more “humane.” But the “humanization” was unevenly distributed: more advanced in Poland or Hungary, less so in the GDR, Romania, Czechoslovakia, or the Soviet Union. As a result, Poles “recovered” (in a limited manner) some prerogatives of citizenship (for example, a rationed right to travel outside of the Bloc), which were denied or severely restricted in other countries.

From Transitology to Contextual Holism 37

Figure 1.2. Model of Totalitarian Architecture

2.

3.

38

Arbitrary and limited liberalization facilitated the emergence of dissident (oppositional) civil society (Bernhard 1993; Ekiert 1996; Ekiert and Kubik 1999). In some countries (Poland, most prominently) certain civic associations were allowed to function, albeit under close monitoring. The Catholic Church (and to a degree other churches) enjoyed considerable autonomy despite continued state scrutiny. Eventually, Polish dissident civil society (the most active in the region) grew into the massive Solidarity movement (1980–81 and 1988–89). Development of massive second (shadow) economies. Society-wide participation in second economies allowed people to deal with the systemic shortages generated by the official economy. A less recognized consequence of this phenomenon is the creation of a complex informal system of mutual dependencies and patron-and-client networks that resulted in the de facto empowerment of some categories of citizens, particularly strategically placed party officials.28

General Approaches to Postcommunism

Figure 1.3. Model of Posttotalitarian Architecture

The posttotalitarian architecture is schematically represented in Figure 1.3. Juxtaposition of these three models helps to realize two important issues. First, the dual model of postcommunist transformations (democratization and marketization), the mainstay of transitology, is too sparse. The quintuple model of democratic architecture signals that not two, but five, processes need to be studied.29 They include: (1) reconstitution of the state; (2) formation of party systems; (3) creation of autonomous civil society; (4) restoration/ creation of the market economy independent of the state; and (5) transformations of domestic society.30 Second, the point of departure for pioneers in dismantling state socialism—Poland and Hungary—was not a totalitarian polity equipped only with a command economy, but a complex hybrid of selectively humanized politics (with islands of autonomous civil society and independent culture) and a multilayered economic system, with a huge informal sector.31 This underappreciated complexity of both the points of departure and the transformation processes themselves constitutes a powerful reason for

From Transitology to Contextual Holism 39

developing a contextually sensitive and holistic approach to postcommunist transformations (Chen and Sil 2007). 32 Scholars, including political scientists, have proposed many elements of such an approach. Some focused their studies on the examination of the interplay of six major factors critical for the extrication from the nondemocratic regimes and for democratic consolidation. These factors include: (1) historical legacies of both state socialism and the precommunist periods; (2) the geographical proximity to the West; (3) social and economic conditions in the country, particularly during the waning years of state socialism; (4) types of democratic breakthroughs; (5) choice of political institutions and the dominant features of domestic political competition during and after the breakthrough; and (6) the influence of powerful international actors, such as the United States, the European Union, or the World Trade Organization. Let’s examine each factor is some detail. (1) It is clear by now that the accumulated effects of specific national/historical trajectories matter both at the moment of regime change and later during consolidation of the new system (Bernhard and Nordstrom 2010; Bunce 1999a, 790; Kitchelt 2003; Kopstein 2003; Pop-Eleches 2007a, 2007b; Pop-Eleches and Tucker, forthcoming), 33 although the postcommunist states do not seem to be burdened by their pasts more that other third-wave democracies (Bernhard and Nordstrom 2010, 29). While the explanation of the postcommunist political diversity clearly needs to be multifactoral and there may not be a single cluster of causes that explains all outcomes, I am persuaded that historical legacies are the most powerful causes (Bunce 1999a, 790; and Bernhard and Karakoc 2007).34 Pop-Eleches argues: The patterns underlying this wide variety of outcomes were shaped to a remarkable degree by the past. History matters not only because some countries had a democratic head start, but because countries with different legacies experienced divergent trajectories over the course of the post-communist transition. In other words, historical legacies seem to matter more rather than less as the post-communist transformation takes its course / . . . / alternatives—such as institutional choice, initial election outcomes, and European integration—have played a much more modest role and need to be analyzed in the context of these legacy differences. (2007b, 924)

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Among “historical” factors, the presence of strong dissident movements with cross class alliances, a somewhat liberalized official political culture (selectively accepting the discourse on civil rights), and less oppressive communist rule (including relative openness to the West) are arguably the most important (Ekiert 1996; Fish 1998; Bunce 1999a, 787–90; Bunce 1999b, 784; 2003, 172; Kennedy 2002, 27; Ekiert and Hanson 2003; Bernhard and Nordstrom 2010). In the language of the model of posttotalitarian architecture introduced earlier, the most successful postcommunist countries had the (a) most humanized state socialist regimes, (b) most robust “dissident” civil societies, 35 and (c) expansive second economies with considerable elements of (proto)capitalism.36 Inherited social and economic inequalities, cleavages, and conflicts also play a significant, albeit negative, role in shaping opportunities for a successful transition. Independent statehood (current or historical) and previous experiences with democracy and a market economy have a positive influence on political and economic reforms. Finally, ethnic and religious cleavages, especially when reinforced by territorial and economic divisions, create significant problems for democratizing countries and can be exploited by antidemocratic elites (Bunce 2003). Their effect is particularly pronounced during the “early transition period” (Pop-Eleches 2007, 914). (2) The significance of the geographical location of the country, that is, the country’s proximity to developed democratic countries and a less peripheral position in the global economic system, is debated. Kopstein and Reilly argue “that geographical proximity to the West has exercised a positive influence on the transformation of communist states and that geographical isolation in the East has hindered this transformation” (2003, 148). But Pop-Eleches reaches a different conclusion: “The effect of geographic distance from the West and the country’s international openness are statistically and substantively negligible once other legacies are taken into account” (2007b, 923). He agrees, however, that under some specifications of his statistical model, the proximity to democratic states has a positive albeit small effect on the strengthening of democracy in a given country. (3) Few analysts doubt that the historically evolved social and economic conditions influence the course of post-1989 transformations, but whether structural endowments shaped by history or today’s decisions are more important remains somewhat contested. Both views have their champions, but

From Transitology to Contextual Holism 41

most students of the postcommunist transformations would agree that “the socialist past, not proximate choices, is critical (though inflation rates, and, hence, macroeconomic stabilization policies, are helpful)” (Bunce 1999a, 762). Bernhard and Nordstrom find that “transition at higher levels of GDP per capita in comparison to other Third Wave democracies is a substantial advantage” (2010, 28). Contributing to the literature on the relationship between economic factors and democratization, 37 Bunce, following Popov, cites initial conditions such as “distortions in industrial structure and trade patterns” and “the collapse of institutions during the transition (or, for example, a sharp decline in the revenue base of the government)” (1999, 771) as the most important factors influencing postcommunist economic development. However, the significance of economic legacies (measured, for example, as GDP per capita in 1989) diminishes over time (Pop-Eleches 2007b, 913). (4) The mode of power transfer also matters. Huntington (1991) distinguishes three types of power transfer: transformation (existing elites take “the lead in bringing about democracy”), replacement (counterelites lead the overthrow of the nondemocratic elites and bring about democracy), and transplacement (democratization results “largely from joint action by government and opposition groups”) (1991, 114). It turns out that transformation (particularly during the first postcommunist elections) that occurs when counterelites are nonexistent or weak tends to be followed by de-democratization far more often than replacement or transplacement (Grzymała-Busse and Luong 2002, 544–47). (5) While history and culture powerfully influence regime transformations and consolidation, their causal impact should not be seen in a crudely deterministic fashion (Pop-Eleches 2007b); institutional choices made by political leaders in new democracies also matter (O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986; Przeworski 1991). The choice of constitutional and electoral systems is particularly important (Bernhard 2005, 1–25). Adopting a parliamentary system of government with proportional representation fosters the emergence of more diverse and balanced political forces and establishes the habits of moderation and coalition building. In contrast, a presidential system facilitates the concentration of power in the hands of a small number of less accountable elites and makes reversal toward authoritarianism more likely (Fish 2001, 94–95; Pop-Eleches 2007b, 921). Similarly, establishing independent constitutional

42

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courts, central banks or currency boards, and other independent bodies endowed with regulatory functions increases transparency and accountability, constrains political leaders, and removes opportunities for corruption and illegitimate gains (Rose-Ackerman 2005). In the postcommunist context, the countries that adopted a parliamentary system and proportional representation and that delegated significant authority to the local level and to independent regulatory institutions have been more successful in consolidating democracy. In general, research on postcommunism confirms that institutions promoting dispersion of political and economic power and inclusion of various actors in the policy-making process are the most conducive to facilitating democratic consolidation. (6) There is strong evidence that the involvement of international actors ranging from multilateral organizations and individual nation-states to NGOs to private actors is crucial to successful political and economic transformations (Way and Levitsky 2007; Vachudova 2005; Pop-Eleches 2007b, 922–23). In general, countries that had more linkages to the West and those that established multiple linkages earlier in the transition process were more successful in establishing and consolidating democracy. Even in the absence of further EU expansion, which may be politically difficult, increased contact between the West and post-Soviet states does a great deal to promote democratization in the region—albeit at a slower pace. Weak social, economic, media, and intergovernmental ties to the EU and the United States have undermined democratic development in the former Soviet Union in important ways. Weak linkage has reduced constraints on autocratic behavior and undermined the development of a powerful domestic constituency for democracy and good relations with the West. The obvious correlation between EU membership and effective reform suggests EU conditionality as a likely causal factor. However, its impact in consistently pro-Western reform-oriented countries such as Poland and Hungary is difficult to detect. It seems to have at most reinforced an existing trajectory of reform and contributed to policy formation. Scholars (Vachudova 2005; Sissenich 2007; Schimmelfennig 2005; Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier 2005) generally agree that EU conditionality had a discernible effect in countries where there were both pro- and antireform parties, as it helped to tip the balance in favor of liberal democratic standards and comprehensive economic reforms. These countries include Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania,

From Transitology to Contextual Holism 43

Croatia, and potentially Macedonia and Serbia-Montenegro. In countries dominated by nationalist and authoritarian political forces such as Belarus, the EU had little impact. 38 The works reviewed in this section represent the best of what the mainstream approach, mostly in comparative politics, has to offer. By and large, most of them do not stray too much from the paradigmatic strictures of “normal” social science. Their normative assumptions are solidly “Western,” the dominant methodology tends to be positivistic, they are etic rather than emic (that is, they do not usually take into account actors’ own conceptualizations of reality), and they tend to be focused on theory-confirmation/falsification rather than theory generation. But they offer analyses whose spirit and at least some assumptions presage contextual holism, which I present in the next section. They signal and sometimes demonstrate that institutional architecture (of markets and political democracy), while necessary for successful democratization, is not sufficient. Even in the countries that have most effectively established market economies, electoral accountability, and representative institutions, the lack of vibrancy of civic life, widespread distrust of political institutions and elites, highly politicized media, and the seemingly interminable attraction of populist and illiberal rhetoric weaken the quality of democracy. Ethnocentrism and xenophobia are powerful forces in politics and become easily exploited by cynical politicians who suggest “easy” solutions to problems of unemployment or slow economic growth (Mudde 2007; Ost 2005; Roeder 2003). Habits of associating state regulatory powers with undesired and excessive control over the economy render even the most “routine” market institutions vulnerable to ideological attacks in the face of market-generated problems: populist politicians sometimes challenge their legitimacy as “alien” implants. Many scholars of the region cite the lack of “virtues” of democratic citizenship, that is, tolerance, moderation, and compromise, as a major impediment to the development of a culture of trust in formal state institutions (Sztompka 2004). Several studies show that low levels of trust and passivity of postcommunist societies derail attempts to launch collective action (Howard 2003; Letki and Evans 2005; Rothstein 2000). While the study of such “problems” and their politicization is necessary to produce more realistic diagnoses of the postcommunist condition than those offered by rather sterile transitological modes of thinking, the approach I am outlining here is based on the assumption that the very concept of “problem”

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needs to be problematized. Researchers need to investigate whether “problems” are identified as such by the actors themselves, how they are articulated within (locally) available interpretive frameworks (ideologies), and whether and how they are used as foci of mobilization. For example, what a “Western” expert may perceive as an irrational rejection of market institutions, troubling passivity of “civil society,” or explosion of xenophobia could prove to be quite different phenomena when carefully reconstructed from the bottom up. They might be strategic responses to specific “local” problems whose meanings from the “natives’ point of view” is likely to be different from the frame imposed by the researcher.39 This way of looking at postcommunist reality has been present in many works, but usually only fragmentarily and haphazardly. In section III I offer a preliminary systematization of the approaches that place local perspectives, native (vernacular) framing, and other contexts of politics at the center of analysis. Such approaches are easier to find in anthropology, geography, cultural and gender studies, and sociology than in political science. They constitute a more radical departure from transitology than the works discussed so far.

III. Toward Contextual Holism (in Five Steps) Studies of postcommunism that have proved to have lasting value are products of careful empirical analyses of specific problems or areas. They also adopt relatively complex theories of the sociopolitical reality. Over time the trend toward complexity has intensified and a growing number of scholars have begun producing works whose emerging philosophy I call contextual holism (summarized in Table 1.1, column 3). I outline the overall theoretical tenor of contextual holism and briefly examine its five basic elements. Scholars who work under the broad umbrella of this ontological stance do not necessarily accept all positions, but most of them defend at least a few. Contextual holism embraces the following principles: (1) relationism (“weak” structuralism); (2) historicizing; (3) constructivism; (4) focus on informality (formal-informal hybrids); and (5) localism. In Table 1.1, I list the theoretical positions of early transitology (column 1), their radical opposites (column 2), and synthetic (syncretic, hybridlike) theoretical solutions of contextual holism (column 3).40 The radical alternatives to transitology are rarely employed in research practice, but their articulation allows for a better specification of the logical space within which I am working.

From Transitology to Contextual Holism 45

Before I discuss each of the five components of contextual holism, I offer a brief characterization of its general theoretical “flavor.”41 Students of economic systems, including economists, have long challenged both the materialism of standard economic explanations (Mitchell 2008) and the compartmentalization of the economy (analysis of the economic sphere in isolation from other spheres) (Hann and Hart 2009). Sahlins, who spent much of his professional life clarifying the thorny relationship between practical activity and cultural representations, reminds us that materialism, which came to underpin much of “Western” economic analysis, was “invented” and is traceable to Thucydides (2004). Sahlins shows that materialism is not a neutral, default analytical position but rather a “culturally specific formation.” Consequently, two different modes of analysis are possible. One builds on the assumption of “the economic determination of history,” another—consonant with contextualism as I formulate it—assumes “the historical determination of economism” (2004, 43).42 In turn, the compartmentalization of economic analysis is seminally challenged by Karl Polanyi in his Great Transformation.43 He introduced the distinction between real (substantivist) and formalist definitions of economic activity in the opening paragraphs of his famed essay, “The Economy as Instituted Process”: The two root meanings of “economic,” the substantive and the formal, have nothing in common. The latter derives from logic, the former from fact. The formal meaning implies a set of rules referring to choice between alternative uses of insufficient means. The substantive meaning implies neither choice nor insufficiency of means; man’s livelihood may or may not involve the necessity of choice and, if choice there be, it need not be induced by the limiting effect of “scarcity” of the means. (1957, 243)

The formal understanding of the “economic” came to dominate the “compartmentalized” analyses of economic activity in the discipline of economics, while the substantive approaches have always been dominant in sociology and anthropology, where economic activity is usually analyzed as “embedded” (Granovetter 1985) in various “contexts.” In Polanyi’s formulation human economy “is embedded and enmeshed in institutions, economic and noneconomic. The inclusion of the noneconomic is vital. For religion or government may be as important for the structure and functioning of the economy

46

General Approaches to Postcommunism

as monetary institutions or the availability of tools and machines themselves that lighten the toil of labor” (1957, 250).44 The authors of Transforming Post-Communist Political Economies (Nelson, Tilly, and Walker 1997) articulated cogent criticism of the compartmentalization and formalism that underpin many transitologist studies of postcommunist economic transformations. Katherine Verdery, an influential anthropologist, struck a critical tone, but less expectedly the “substantivist” tenor of the volume was set by Nobel Prize–winning economic historian Douglass C. North. He sketched an outline of a holistic approach by emphasizing both the complexity of the task facing the architects of postcommunist transformations and, in particular, the significance of informality. For North, economic reforms need to be constructed with the help of a political “scaffold” that specifies the way we develop and aggregate political choices; the property rights structure that defines the formal incentives in the economy; and the informal constraints of norms, conventions, and internally held beliefs [emphasis added—JK]. They have evolved over many generations, reflecting, as Hayek (1960) has reminded us, the trial-and-error process that has sorted out those behavioral patterns that have worked from those that have failed. Because the experience of every society has been unique, the scaffolds erected will differ for each economy. (1997, 16)

North warns that economic reforms narrowly focused on “formally” instituted policies alone are insufficient. Such policies consist of alterations in the formal rules only, when in fact the performance of an economy is an admixture of the formal rules, the informal norms, and their enforcement characteristics. Changing merely the formal rules will produce the desired results only when the informal norms are complementary to that rule change, and enforcement is either perfect or at least consistent with the expectations of those altering the rules. (1997, 16)

Janos Kornai offers an equally powerful argument on behalf of the more holistic approach to economic transformation. Already in his seminal The Communist System (1992), Kornai provided a holistic, complex, contextualized analysis of economy. In a collection of his most influential essays on postcommunism, Kornai writes:

From Transitology to Contextual Holism 47

The transition from socialism to capitalism has to be an organic development. It cannot be done otherwise. It is a curious amalgam of revolution and evolution. It is a trial and error process, which retains or liquidates old institutions, and tries out, accepts or rejects new ones. Each element in the process might be very rapid, fairly rapid or slow. Each has its own appropriate speed. (2008, 80)

Holism, organicism (Kornai 2008), contextualism (Goodin and Tilly 2006), and embeddedness (Hann and Hart 2009) are labels that indicate various tones of disappointment with reductionism and compartmentalization predominant in today’s political science and economics, particularly in simplistic transitology. Its failure to offer sufficiently context-sensitive policy recommendations resulted in ineffective reforms. “Organicism” does not, however, result in the termination of analysis; “organic” context needs to be taken apart to identify concrete “causes” (Collier and Mazzuca 2006, 474– 75). They need to be approached, however, interactively, within some form of systemic analysis to counteract the practice of studying phenomena parsimoniously in the relative isolation of mono-theoretical or mono-disciplinary conceptualizations: Cutting-edge research focuses on the interactions between political, economic, sociostructural, and cultural change. Earlier controversies, such as shock therapy versus gradualism, have dissolved as transformation is conceived as societal evolution that takes place on many levels and includes processes occurring at different speeds. (Bönker, Müller, and Pickel 2002, 24)

Burawoy and Verdery echo this view: “There can be no pure economy, only a political and cultural economy” (1999, 14). The concept of recombination is one of the most powerful tools for focusing on holistic analysis. Stark and Bruszt see postcommunist transformations as complex processes in which innovation and tradition, “new” and “old” elements, are incessantly recombined in a creative manner: In contrast to the transition problematic . . . we see social change not as transition from one order to another but as transformation—rearrangements, reconfigurations, and recombinations that yield new interweavings of the multiple social logics that are a modern society. In struggling to cope

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with the extraordinary uncertainties of transforming economy, actors discover and reorganize resources. (1998, 7)

The emerging research tradition (contextual holism), whose basic ideas are outlined above, is promising for studying actors whose lives are turned upside down by far-reaching social, economic, and political transformations.45 In particular, it is designed to reconstruct coping strategies developed by specific groups of people whose actions are build on cultural scenarios derived from specific sociocultural contexts that are meaningful to the actors themselves. The approach is also sensitive to constraints and (enabling) resources provided by such contexts. In the next subsections, I present five building blocks of contextual holism; the elaboration of its logic is the task not attempted here. Each section provides some illustrations drawn from two sources: the general literature in comparative politics or other branches of social science and more specific examples from the studies on postcommunism. Relationism, or the Return of (Weak) Structuralism The first component of contextual holism is relationism. Relationism is an approach to sociopolitical reality that avoids the extremes of individualism and holism or agency and structure. The oscillation between these two positions is clearly visible in the studies on regime change in general and democratization in particular. Prominent studies differ with respect to their relative emphasis on the role of structure (structural preconditions) and agency (actors, usually the elites). In the 1970s and 1980s, the structuralist tradition of grand macrohistorical studies (Lipset 1959; Moore 1964) was replaced by agency-driven explanations (Rustow 1970; and most influentially O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986).46 Game theory may appear to strengthen this actor-centric orientation, yet in one of the most influential recent works within this tradition, the authors insist that “there is no dichotomy at all between structural and strategic approaches—they are one and the same” (Acemoglu and Robinson 2006, 86). Acemoglu and Robinson offer a parsimonious model in which the “structure” or “context” within which actors strategize during democratization is composed of seven elements: (1) civil society; (2) shocks and crises; (3) sources of income and composition of wealth; (4) political institutions; (5) intergroup inequality; (6) middle class; and (7) globalization (2006, 31–42). Thus, the

From Transitology to Contextual Holism 49

scholarship on regime change, including the transformations from state socialism to postcommunism, progressed through three phases. Initially, the center of explanation rested on strong structural foundations (clearly indebted to Marx). Then, the theory shifted from emphasizing strong structure to privileging abstract agency (as in game theory). Finally, there is a return to structure, but construed less deterministically than in earlier theories. The approach I advocate here emphasizes not just political or economic factors but also the social and cultural elements of different contexts. Nonetheless, I share the general idea of returning to a more systematic investigation of the relationship between “structure” and “agency,”47 particularly in postcommunist studies, where there are many examples of a complex interrelationship between human creativity and the constraining influences of various legacies. In the most recent literature, McFaul strikes a note of disappointment with the overemphasis on agency. He observes that while “actor-centric, cooperative approaches to democratization offer a useful starting point for explaining post communist regime transformations” (2010, 9), they focus excessively on elites and their deals (2010, 12), and, for example, downplay the role of popular mobilization. Other authors argue that such approaches do not provide sufficient tools to account for the various contexts within which political transformations transpire (Bönker, Müller, and Pickel 2002, 24). These theoretical developments seem to lead toward a new, middle-of-the-road position that can be labeled weak structuralism and is clearly akin to relational realism.48 Schmitter and Karl suggest that the significance of actors’ agency varies, depending on the phases of transformation. They see a heightened role of agency during the transition to the new system, but structural factors become more significant during consolidation. As they put it, during transition the role of “courageous individuals” and contingency are dominant (Schmitter and Karl 1994, 175–76), but a student of consolidation must shift attention to structural factors such as “capitalist class conflicts, long-standing cultural and ethnic cleavages, persistent status conflicts and international antagonisms” (1994, 176). In brief, researchers must retool as they move from studying transition, which is underdetermined to studying consolidation, which is overdetermined (1994, 176). They need to expand their focus from strategic elite actors in highly unpredictable situations to encompass nonelite actors responding to new situations. The

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parameters of such situations need to be carefully reconstructed because they constitute powerful, albeit evolving, constraints on collective action. Consider North’s contextualism, Kornai’s organicism, or Bönker, Müller, and Pickel’s (2002, 24) interactive effects introduced earlier. The next theoretical move, I suggest, must merge this weak structuralism with a contextualized study of agency. For example, empirical lenses need to be focused on concrete, localized, networks of actors who devise and implement strategies of “coping” within specific sets of constraints including not just economic obstacles/opportunities but also cultural contexts and political arrangements.49 Return to History/Return of History The second building block of contextual holism, historicism, is not uniform as there are at least four separate ways to introduce history to the study of politics.50 All of them play a significant role in postcommunist studies. The first is to debate the relative causal significance of “historical” and “contemporary” factors in the explanation of “today’s” politics; I reviewed some of the relevant literature earlier in this essay and concluded that indeed “history matters.” But “bringing history back” is related to at least three additional concerns: establishing sufficiently deep causal chains in explaining postcommunist transformations; properly historicizing the studied phenomena; and reconstructing the formation of historical memory as well as studying its role in postcommunist political battles. In the field of postcommunist studies, the debate on the role of historical factors in the “politological” explanation of postcommunist developments commenced with the seminal exchange between Valerie Bunce, on the one hand, and Philippe Schmitter and Terry Karl, on the other. In a special issue of Comparative Political Studies (July 1995), its editors, Crawford and Lijphart, offered a useful summary of the debate between what they call the “legacies of the past” approach and the “imperatives of liberalization.” According to the former view: The past casts a long shadow on the present, shapes the environment in which the battle to def ine and defend new institutions takes place, and ultimately undermines the liberalization process. An alternative approach emphasizes the “imperatives of liberalization.” It suggests that new institutions can be crafted and new international pressures

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can be brought to bear to shut out the negative inf luences of the past. From this perspective, the head of Leninism has been lopped off, leaving space for the development of new forces to structure incentives according to the more or less universal rules of liberal democracy. (1995, 172–73)

Crawford and Lijphart emphasize that they begin with “stylized” portrayals of the ideal types of each approach and that “no single scholar characterizes his or her approach in the stylized way we suggest here” (1995, 173). This indicates that already in 1995 the leading scholars in the field of postcommunist studies, perhaps with the exception of economists, rarely practiced bare bones transitology and some of them were incorporating “history” into their analyses.51 The second historical theme—the proper depth of historical analyses—is thoroughly discussed in a volume edited by Ekiert and Hanson (2003) and carefully analyzed statistically by Pop-Eleches (2007a, 2007b) and Bernhard and Nordstrom (2010). The Ekiert/Hanson volume includes several studies designed to investigate the conceptualization of “legacies,” offer a theory of “deep” historical causation (Kitschelt 2003), and examine the impact of legacies on postcommunist political and economic transformations. The editors suggest that analysis of these transformations should be conducted on three interdependent levels of “path dependency”: (1) interactional time (“the necessarily contextualized study of innovation and policy outcomes”); (2) institutional time (“the study of more general ‘institutional legacies’ that shape a wide range of policy domains”); and (3) structural time (“the persistent influence of historical and cultural legacies inherited from the more distant past”) (2003, 19). The level of “interactional time” is particularly relevant for the approach I advocate here, as it refers directly to the local level of the studied phenomena (a topic discussed below). The concern with proper historicization of democratization—the third important historical theme—animates the work on earlier European democratizations by Capoccia and Ziblatt and their collaborators (2010). They advocate focusing on microprocesses, reconstructing actual sequences of historical interactions, disaggregating democratizations, and observing the evolution and intertwining of their components up close. This means “reading history forward” (focusing on the often messy process leading up to the emergence

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of new institutions and observing it in its proper temporal context); analyzing “a protracted and punctuated ‘one institution at a time’ process, in which the institutional building blocks of democracy emerged asynchronically”; paying attention to “multiple lines of conflict” (for example, religious, ethnic); 52 focusing on “episodes of institutional change”; and treating democratization as “a chain of big and small events not always moving unidirectionally toward full democracy” (2010, 939–41).53 Moreover, the authors posit that their research strategy allows an accurate reconstruction of “what actors were actually fighting about” (2010, 943). Capoccia and Ziblatt’s work is the best example in the most recent literature on regime transformations and democratization of an approach that is truly microhistorical, that is, focused both on the sequence and the detail of actual historical processes. In the field of postcommunist studies, such an approach is practiced by a few political scientists, for example, Seleny (2006) on the politics of economic reforms, Grzymała-Busse (2002) on the fate of former communist parties, Inglot (2008) on the historical trajectories of Central European welfare states, Haggard and Kaufman on welfare reforms (2008), and Allina-Pisano (2009) on the evolution of property-rights regimes. It is more common in sociology (Eyal, Szelenyi, and Townsley 1998; Brubaker et al. 2006) and anthropology (Verdery 2003; Humphrey 1998). In addition to the literatures on the significance of legacies, the causal depth of historical explanations, and microhistorical mechanisms of democratization, the fourth body of literature that takes “history” seriously deals with the politics of historical memory. In several postcommunist states, the battle over the “proper” way to remember communism, particularly its crimes, has moved to the forefront of politics (Borneman 1997; Verdery 1999 on Romania; Kubik and Linch 2007 and Nalepa 2010 on Poland; Petro 2004 on Novgorod, Russia; Rossi 2010 on Serbia). The next logical stage in the development of this literature, which has already commenced, is the systematic investigation of intrastate, regional variations of “memory regimes” and their differential impact on other phenomena, such as the quality of democracy or democratic consolidation (Kubik and Bernhard 2013), formation of social capital (Kubik and Linch 2010), patterns of voting (Wittenberg 2006; Zarycki 2002) or economic development (Petro 2001; Zarycki 2007). In brief, the approach I am advocating would focus on: (1) establishing sufficiently long causal chains, at the three levels identified by Ekiert and

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Hanson (for example, examining long-term consequences of specific interactions, such as negotiations, contentious episodes, and so on); (2) exploiting the significance of temporal asynchrony of changes (some areas may be changing faster than others); and (3) analysis of political and social correlates of historical memory (who remembers what, how, and why), the coexistence of various memory regimes, and the competition for hegemony among them. Constructivism: Culture and the Native’s Point of View Constructivism, the third building block of contextual holism, assumes that the manner in which people conceptualize, model, or envision the world around them matters for what they do politically, how, and why. The ontology of constructivism is antinaturalist (the social world is different from the natural world); thus the methodology consistent with this position requires interpretation.54 Scholars who agree with an (antinaturalist) assumption that the signifying process through which people build models of the world, particularly of the social and political world, has political relevance, proceed to study how such models are constructed, transmitted, maintained, and received, and how this whole machinery of cultural construction influences, and is influenced by, political and economic transformations. While the utility of interpretivist approaches is taken for granted in anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, or feminism, it is far from obvious to many practitioners of political science. The reasons for this may be complex, but they seem to be rooted in the predominantly naturalistic tenor of the discipline.55 In postcommunist studies, constructivist or cultural approaches are employed by anthropologists and sociologists, but they are rarely utilized in political science. As a result, outside of plentiful “survey data” the perspectives of the “natives” are rarely heard, let alone systematically reconstructed and thoroughly interpreted. Many critics of the dominant “naturalist” approaches to democratization and “transitology” call for more attention to history and culture. All too often, however, the call is only half-heartedly heeded or reduced to studying political culture understood as a syndrome of attitudes concerning such issues as the support for new regimes, democracy, and/or markets; trust in institutions and politicians; interest in politics; or declarations of participation in various organizations (Ulram and Plasser 2003). Works often include a ritualistic invocation of the need to study cultural contexts or to emphasize the significance of history, but they rarely

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provide analyses of the emergence of postcommunist cultures (semiotic practices in Wedeen’s [2002] formulation), mechanisms of their maintenance, and their complex relationship with political and economic changes. Few scholars seem to accept the premise that “the cultural landscape matters in the construction of communism’s successor, and that the formation of ideologies and identities is more complicated than most discourses of transition or revolution allow” (Kennedy 1994, 1). Indeed, the complexity involved in the formation of the new cultural landscapes Kennedy talks about has been astounding. After decades of living under a system that attempted to control all forms of cultural expression through the unique mechanism of preventive censorship, thus forcing its subjects to “do their cultures” in private or in often dangerous and unstable semiofficial spaces, people responded to the abolition of censorship with a veritable flood of cultural expression. After 1989, people immediately engaged in vigorous debates and performances, generating new discourses (conceptualizations and representations) around topics long relegated from public discussion. Such issues as gender identity and relations, national and ethnic identity,56 the nature of power, scenarios of citizenship, “cultures” of democracy, the ethic of work under capitalism, social justice, cultural models of associationism, and so on that had been crudely framed within the monotonous official discourse and debated only intermittently in whispers had to be “invented,” “rediscovered,” or simply “refreshed.” Such concerns are vital to the quality of democratic performance and often drive politics, yet they have not been systematically analyzed by scholars of postcommunism. To do so, one needs to take culture seriously and this calls for an ontological commitment to constructivism. The intellectual gain from such a commitment is clear is several studies. For example, Hopf (2002) masterfully analyzes Soviet and Russian foreign policy making within a robust constructivist approach that takes seriously the complex interplay of politics and semiotics in the construction of Russian national identity. Baxandall (2004) shows that various “constructions” of unemployment, for example different in the “East” and the “West,” have quite distinct social and political impacts. Herrera (2005) investigates the rapid emergence of post-Soviet regionalism in Russia that was not driven exclusively by economic interests, but to a large degree by the manner in which regional elites “imagined” regional interests and identities.57 Anderson (2001) develops a discursive theory of democratization to show how the redefinition of both elite and popular identity influenced the course of political reforms in post-1991 Russia.

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Nicolai Petro’s Crafting Democracy (2004) is explicitly focused on both reconstructing the emergence of a specific culture and demonstrating the impact of this culture on political and economic phenomena. The initial puzzle of his studies is why during the 1990s Novgorod the Great achieved political and economic success in Russia where the overall performance in both areas was far from exemplary. Petro deems the standard political and economic explanations incomplete and proposes an approach that builds on advances in the study of the cultural mechanisms that influence (or accompany) political changes and economic development (for a useful review, see Rao and Walton 2004). Petro enters an important debate on the conditions conducive to successful economic reforms by positing the centrality of social capital and—most importantly for my argument here—the cultural factors that facilitate the formation of this capital.58 As he puts it: Ideas and symbols matter very much, for they have a direct impact on the creation of social capital. The key to the creation of social capital, the missing link that explains the speed with which new democratic values and structures have emerged in Novgorod, lies in grasping the political significance of culture and historical myth. (2001, 242)

History is seen here not as a constraint but primarily as a valuable resource, a reservoir of “usable pasts” that can be transformed into discourses skillful political/cultural entrepreneurs may employ to mobilize people for political and economic action: Novgorod has succeeded where other regions have failed because the regional elite and the regional government reached a consensus on how to address the problem of cultural discontinuity. By defining ‘reform’ as a restoration of the values of a more prosperous Russian past, rather than as something imported from the West, they were able to ease the anxieties that inevitably accompany radical change. (2001, 241–42)

A crucial component of Petro’s argument is that usable building blocks of cultural capitals, such as historical narratives, are often found at the subnational level, in regions or localities. It is, of course, a matter of empirical determination whether locality, region, or nation-state is the site where cultures and histories engage people most powerfully by resonating with their self-identification (Brubaker et al. 2006) and thus become the most proximate cultural context of social mobilization and action. All three levels 56

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of social organization are relevant to the construction of the cultural meanings that shape perception and action, despite a common assumption that the nation-state is the only pertinent unit for understanding cultural causality. As Petro’s analysis of Novgorod indicates, it is often at the regional or local level that people feel culturally comfortable to organize, mobilize, and concoct strategies of action. The effectiveness of many initiatives depends on people’s intimate knowledge of social and cultural parameters of political or economic activity. It is easier to mobilize people and overcome the collective action dilemma if the organizer possesses deep knowledge of the social and cultural context and/or the ability to actively shape this context. In the case Petro so penetratingly inspects, this was exactly what happened.59 Constructivists heed Kennedy’s admonition that both gaining insight into existing cultural frames and monitoring how they are changing will be crucial for understanding the transformation process, but they do not always pay attention to the enormous richness of cultures that emerged after 1989 in postcommunist Eurasia. It is obvious that the transition culture identified by Kennedy as the hegemonic way of thinking within and about postcommunist transformations is not the only cultural formation that has emerged in postcommunist countries. It may be hegemonic in the most influential political salons of capital cities and dominant think tanks, but it is incessantly challenged by other cultures that have emerged out of the ruins of state socialism. Consider cultures of distrust much pronounced in many localities and regions, cultures of regionalism that often spur economic development, or counterhegemonic cultures of “dissent” cultivated by left-leaning intellectuals. Yet, at least in political science, there is a paucity of studies of such counterhegemonic or a-hegemonic cultures. Petro’s studies are a perfect example of how such cultures emerge and how they work. He shows that efficient solutions to problems are often based on actors’ vernacular knowledge of specific historical trajectories and the cultural “climates” of given regions. The combination of constructivism and localism (discussed below) calls for focusing on vernacular knowledge as a hallmark of contextual holism and as one of the methodological principles animating this volume. Formal/Informal Hybrids According to the fourth premise of contextual holism much action in the postcommunist world transpires in the territory delineated by both official

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structures and informal networks. This means that in order to understand what is going on we need investigate the context-specific mix (hybrid) of formal and informal mechanisms (Guha-Khasnobis et al. 2007). State-socialism may not have survived as long as it did had it not been for extensive informal economic networks that also included party officials and massive informal (unofficial) cultures. Such networks often developed into complex social worlds that made “surviving communism” possible. Informality provided a crutch that sustained the state socialist economy, but—paradoxically—it also contributed to the system’s demise by nourishing antiregime movements (Evans and Letki 2005, 518). At least in the “pioneering” countries, such as Poland and Hungary, postcommunism emerged not out of the totalitarian barren land of suppressed society, but rather from a beehive of activity in a posttotalitarian system, where people organized in semiofficial and unofficial sectors of the economy, clandestine political spaces, and/or private networks. Not surprisingly, the legacy of informality is extensive and deeply rooted in many areas of life. For some observers, this “unwanted” and “damaging” legacy of state socialism is a burden that prevents postcommunist societies from joining the ranks of “normal” countries (Miller et al. 2001), but for others it is rather a blessing in disguise as it helps people navigate the uncertain “postcommunist” reality. It seems to be both. Postcommunism is also permeated by complex interactions between formal and informal mechanisms. Some of the most original studies in the field focus on such interactions. For example, several scholars argue for treating the postcommunist countries that have gotten stuck in the trap of partial reforms as a regime type sui generis (Burawoy and Verdery 1999; Levitsky and Way 2002, 2010) and offer creative conceptualizations and careful analyses of the role of informality in such a regime (Levitsky and Way 2010, 27–28). Woodruff shows that during the 1990s Russia was not faced with the problems of market reform (including the calibration of its “cash register,” development of viable mechanisms for raising revenue, privatizing state enterprises, and so on), but with a much more fundamental predicament. It needed to set up a whole state apparatus to procure what Woodruff calls “monetary consolidation.” To accomplish this, the government needed to acquire “the sovereign powers, dominance over money among them, that underpin a market economy of national scope” (1999, 7). The Russian government failed in this fundamental task and as a result much of economic activity transpired informally outside of the monetized, thus legible to the state, economy.60

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Three points regarding informality are central to my argument for contextual holism. First, considerable analytical leverage can be gained from thinking about informality not as an unwelcome legacy of the communist system or an undesired by-product of the new capitalist/democratic system, but rather as an inescapable albeit “functional” component of the transitory process. Second, it is important to remember that in most postcommunist states the areas of formality and informality are intricately intertwined, to a large degree as a legacy of the posttotalitarian phase of state socialism.61 Formal-informal institutional hybrids resemble neither the clear-cut blueprints of institutional reformers nor the concealed informal networks sometimes blamed for all the ills of postcommunism by conspiracy theorists. Those half-visible, half-hidden networks of influence have often been overlooked by scholars relying on “imported” analytical categories of transitology and the “normal” categories of social science. When they are noticed and studied, the operation of such networks is usually reduced to “corruption,” an unwanted and “unhealthy” legacy of communism, or the underdevelopment of precommunist societies. However, it may be more productive to study them as specific institutional arrangements of the semireformed, and in many cases semiauthoritarian, states (Helmke and Levitsky 2006). Third, the dual nature of formal-informal hybrids must be incorporated into the analysis of two levels of the transformations: elite and popular. Formal/informal networks function not only as a mechanism of empowerment for ex-communist cadres colluding with the new elites (Staniszkis 1999; Gadowska 2002), but also as a massive institutional coping mechanism that has enabled people to organize their lives during an extremely volatile period of radical regime transformations and economic “reforms” (see Ledeneva’s chapter in this volume). At the elite level, complex recombinations of the newly acquired formal prerogatives and long-standing informal connections inherited from the old regime have often functioned not as mechanisms of transition from “plan to market” (Stark and Bruszt 1998), but rather as a shrewd strategy of moving from “plan to clan” allowing many ex-communist functionaries to retain much of their power, at least behind the scenes (Staniszkis 1999).62 Some elites responsible for the reinstatement of private property rights successfully mixed formal and informal strategies to achieve political control over their communities and reap considerable economic benefits for themselves. Verdery (2003) offers a nuanced analysis of this process in her study of post1989 property transformations in Romania. Perhaps the most important

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conclusion of her work is that “the proverbial bundle-of-rights conception of property common to economists and lawyers, a conception they brought into their advisory work in Eastern Europe” is completely inadequate for the task of reconstructing what actually transpired during postcommunist privatization. “Property is not just about bundles [of rights—JK] but about the entire process of bringing a good into use. If so, then creating ownership meant bundling not only rights but the prerequisites for their successful exercise” (2003, 355). Through her detailed ethnographic work, Verdery shows how (mostly ex-communist) local elites derailed the formation of the institutional and cultural requisites of a rights-based system of property ownership. Consequently, de jure mass privatization gave de facto control over property to local elites. Allina-Pisano’s (2008) ethnographic study of the privatization of state and collective farms in western Russia and eastern Ukraine discovered an even more spectacular disjunction between the de jure and de facto property rights regimes. While in Verdery’s Romania the interplay between these two types of regimes produced formal-informal hybrids (de jure and de facto mechanisms reinforced each other), in Allina-Pisano’s Russia and Ukraine the de jure became totally divorced from the de facto. The officially pronounced privatization served merely as a Potemkin village behind which effective control over property remained virtually unchanged: it stayed in the hands of (now former) party bosses. However, formal-informal hybrids are not only the tools and/or effects of shrewd elite manipulations. Many ordinary people, who temporarily lost their footing when the familiar institutional ground suddenly shifted, developed creative strategies to negotiate the highly volatile and changing situation. Rose shows that many Russians developed complex portfolios of formal and informal strategies to cope with the dramatic downturn of the official economy in the early 1990s.63 He challenges the narrow focus on individual demand and purchasing power of mainstream economic analysis on the grounds that it erroneously emphasizes “official” incomes. He shows that households rather than individuals are the proper unit of analysis and the sources of income are a complex mix of streams of cash, resources, and services that travel through both official and unofficial channels. The human impulse to form, cultivate, and rely on informal social capital if the predictability of formal institutions is low is not only “traditional,” but also eminently rational. Such practices were often developed long before

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communism, perfected under it, and have remained highly usable under the unpredictable conditions generated by the noxious combination of botched neoliberal reforms and (semi) authoritarian political systems. Not surprisingly, given the region’s legacy of instability, the uncertainty of semiauthoritarian regimes or the lack of effective formal institutionalization, informality has become a fixture of postcommunism (Böröcz 2000). Given the weakness of formal institutions, informal networks have again become the locus of social trust. As Letki and Evans observe, social trust formed in informal networks “is more important as a resource in the absence of formal rules and rule-makers’ accountability, such as was the case under Communist rule, than in more predictable and regulated liberal democratic systems” (2005, 518). Locality (Situated Agency) The final building block of contextual holism, localism, is in tune with the recent methodological admonition to pay attention to micro mechanisms of social and political processes.64 State socialism was perhaps the most powerful standardizing and homogenizing machine in history (Scott 1998; Darden 2009).65 Yet regional differences and local specificities did not disappear completely; actually some carefully monitored cultivation of subnational traditions was officially tolerated and not infrequently financed by the partystate (Bunce 1999c). After the fall of state socialism, regionalism and localism exploded as cultural phenomena and the renaissance of subnational politics, often spurred by the devolution of power and decentralizing administrative reforms, commenced.66 Several influential recent studies in comparative politics (and historical sociology) focus on demonstrating how people who have to deal collectively with their problems organize within trust networks that are usually local (Tilly 2005). For example, local communities (of trust) are shown to be the most effective sites of resistance (Scott 1990), rebellion against foreign occupation (Petersen 2001), ethnic mobilization (Varshney 2002), as well as the locations where most fighting and violence in civil wars occurs (Wood 2009; Kalyvas 2003, 2006, 38–48).67 They are also principal sites of political socialization, thus scholars of political preferences often study regions or localities as contexts of political behavior. Moreover, after the “cultural turn” scholars rediscovered the idea that people who search for solutions to their problems tend to rely on vernacular

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knowledge: knowledge that comes from their closest social groupings—local or regional communities. Localness, as an analytical category, needs to be applied with caution, however, and it is useful to distinguish locality and location.68 The former refers to the physical site where people live and tend to engage in economic, political, or cultural activity, the latter to the relatively small fragment of cultural (often virtual) space that interacting individuals recognize as “theirs.” This space differs according to the degree of “wholeness” or “boundedness” of the cultural constructs that define it (such as their collective identity). Locality is usually a relatively self-contained village or settlement, but particularly in the rapidly globalizing world it may also be a worldwide virtual network of antiglobalization activists, who frequent the same website so people may inhabit multiple localities at the same time: they may be part of a virtual community “meeting” in an online “chat room” and live in an urban center at the same time. Location (localized culture area or simply a vernacular culture) can be tightly defined according to the rules of single cultural logic, but it may be also a syncretic, hybridized, loosely bound mosaic that nonetheless constitutes “the socially most significant context” for actors engaging in any kind of collective action (Chabal and Daloz 2006, 124).69 The concept of (traditional) community thus is best reserved only for situations when the location and locality tightly overlap.70 Both localities and locations are increasingly becoming nodal points where various flows of social and political life intersect, itinerant individuals pause, sometimes just for a moment, attracted by the memory of the once shared proximity of living or cultural commonality.71 The study of postcommunist locations and localities and their relations to macro processes of political and economic change is urgent for at least two reasons. First, the fall of state socialism resulted in a speedy and powerful revival of autonomous cultural, economic, and political activity at the level of “traditional” communities (regions, subregions, municipalities, and so on). In some cases, the reinvention of tightly formed locations/localities—as Petro’s work illustrates—has become a very powerful engine of political change and economic growth. Second, massive labor migrations, particularly pronounced in such postcommunist countries as Moldova or Lithuania, while severing people’s ties with their localities, lead to the formation of transnational locations, gradually emerging as important loci of cultural identification, political mobilization, and economic networking for the increasingly mobile populations. The revival of regionalism in postcommunist countries (and its association with federalism) has attracted several scholars in political science.72

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Sociologists and anthropologists have offered many detailed studies of revived or freshly formed transnational localities and locations. Yet not much work has been done on the local microfoundations of postcommunist political and economic macro processes or on the a-synchrony between state- and subnational speed and direction of change (Verdery 2003; Humphrey 1998; Allina-Pisano 2009). Among a few exceptions is a collection of ethnographies of postcommunist transformations, edited and introduced by Burawoy and Verdery, who write: Our view of the relation between macro structures and everyday practices is that the collapse of party states and administered economies broke down macro structures, thereby creating space for micro worlds to produce autonomous effects that may have unexpected influence over the structures that have been emerging. . . . It is precisely the sudden importance of micro processes lodged in moments of transformation that privileges an ethnographic approach. (1999, 3)

Importantly, they do not merely signal the existence of different rhythms in macro and micro changes; they claim that micro processes that tend to be overlooked by analysts and are often unintended by actors may influence, derail, or even halt macro changes.73 The program of contextual holism not only focuses on the macro-micro dynamic, but privileges the local dimension of the postcommunist transformations and attempts to generate analyses of the macro phenomena (for example, nationalism or state administration) through the study of multilevel governance (Stubbs 2005), mechanisms of reaggregation of local and regional levels into the national one, and linkages between various levels.

IV. Ethnographic Sensibility to the Rescue To execute the research program of contextual holism researchers need to rely on several methods. Among them, ethnography or at minimum a broader perspective informed by an ethnographic sensibility is central. Few people would disagree that the post-1989 political and economic transformations have been uneven, often slow, and certainly costly. As signaled at the beginning, the major point of scholarly concern is why in some places these transformations have stalled or careened onto a path of authoritarian reversal (Central Asia), and in other “got stuck” in a new regime type:

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competitive authoritarianism (Armenia, Russia, Ukraine) (Levitsky and Way 2010). Why, furthermore, do even the most successful countries experience persistent “problems,” including, for example, underperforming sectors of the economy, unstable party systems, and weak civil societies. Experts offer a variety of theories, yet in much of what they have argued, particularly during the early years of transformations, two broad descriptive and explanatory logics can be detected: social adjustment and institutional adjustment.74 Both logics are founded on the central premise of transitology that if properly designed and applied, social and institutional engineering should solve all or most problems. Proponents of each logic offer diagnoses (what is wrong?) and policy prescriptions (what is to be done?), but while the champions of social adjustment tend to locate the source of troubles in the postcommunist societies, the advocates of institutional adjustment see the principal source of problems in the reform programs, in their design or implementation, or both. Accordingly, while the former seek to formulate programs of social renewal that are aimed at changing the people (Homo Sovieticus) so they can “fit” the indispensable new institutions, the latter would rather redesign the incoming institutions so they can “fit” the people. In short, the program of social adjustment needs to focus on generating new cultural (and human) capital among the populace, while the program of institutional adjustment privileges designing better, more fitting institutions. A clear articulation of the philosophy of social adjustment comes from the Polish neoliberal economist, Jan Winiecki, who offers a succinct characterization of Homo Sovieticus: “The problem of Poland is the Poles themselves who wait for a manna from heaven and think that they deserve everything without work and commitment. It is the passive part of society that is at fault. These people are demoralized by the previous system and by those they vote for” (quoted in Buchowski 2006). Is there any empirical evidence to support Winiecki’s bold assertion? Piotr Sztompka, an internationally renowned Polish sociologist, advanced an elaborate analysis of mechanisms that contribute to the formation of cultural capital that turns people into passive robots “who wait for a manna from heaven.” He proposed (1993) a model of a specific culture, developed under state socialism that has been responsible, at least partially, for turning (some) members of Homo Sapiens into Homo Sovieticus. Representatives of this subspecies have difficulties with becoming “proper” participants in a system based on democracy and market economy because they are held down by civilizational incompetence. This cultural syndrome is characterized by

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seven attributes that need to be overcome—suggests Sztompka—if the East Europeans want to catch up with the Western part of the continent.75 He argues that getting rid of the syndrome “is prerequisite, a necessary condition for attaining true modernity [original emphasis—JK]: authentic democracy, functioning market and open society (1993, 91). Sztompka’s argument is so clearly articulated that it is falsifiable. I designed an ethnographic test to determine if a cultural syndrome he labeled “civilizational incompetence” exists in two regions of Poland I and others have studied using participant observation. Sztompka did not specify where (geographically and sociologically) civilizational incompetence is located; thus, it is fair to assume that it should be found in any region. I interrogated ethnographic data to determine whether, how, and to what degree his seven features of civilizational incompetence show up in local/regional (sub) cultures (Aronoff and Kubik 2013). The study is essentially a comparative analysis of two types of vernacular cultural capital that shape people’s coping and engagement with postcommunist transformations (for example, their visions of the political or the normative bases of their trust in authorities). In both cases, the portrayals of regional/local cultures were formed after extensive ethnographic studies (including my own ten-month work in one of the regions).76 The conclusions from the test are pretty straightforward: (1) there is no evidence of the syndrome of civilizational incompetence in the two regions; (2) some individual features of the syndrome can be detected, but they are embedded in region-specific cultural “wholes” (however weakly integrated) that have little or no resemblance to the hypothesized “culture of civilizational incompetence”; (3) regional (or local) reservoirs of cultural scripts provide people with resources that they competently utilize in developing strategies of coping with externally imposed cultural, economic, and institutional designs. The point of my analysis is not to deny that “uncivil economy” or, more broadly, uncivil areas of social life (Rose 1994; Elster, Offe, and Preuss 1998, 196) exist in postcommunist Europe. Rather, I posit that we need to be very careful in locating the pockets where such forms of behavior exist, avoid overgeneralization or false attribution to larger classes of people, and provide nuanced, contextualized and holistic (in the manner explicated here) explanations of the emergence of such behavioral patterns.77 I conclude, then, that ethnographic studies are needed to identify and ameliorate the shortcomings

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of the two broad approaches to postcommunism I label institutional and social adjustment. Ethnographers and other “ethnographically minded” researchers are guided by the methodological principle of observing actors up close and a theoretical directive of providing a reconstruction of human agency that accounts for its embeddedness in various “systems,” however weakly structured.78 If in the view of social adjustors people (often in general) are seen as the “material” that needs to be fixed and while institutional adjustors call for fixing reform programs and their implementation, in the “ethnographic” research program people are seen as agents who are capable of fixing themselves and who, in fact, are almost always doing so while acting from within of their (often localized) social worlds that are constructed according to specifiable rules. The proponents of this view emphasize agents’ ability to adjust their strategies (we might call their theory: strategy adjustment)79 in order to cope with the changing environment. Such adjustments are not random. Rather, the available scenarios of action (including norms of social justice) the actors learn and practice in their historically evolved social and cultural environments provide templates for their behavior and thus introduce an element of predictability to the seemingly contingent situations.80 The point is to remember that many such templates are formed and re-formed in institutions that are often informal-formal hybrids and as such are best investigated through case studies designed to generate richly textured knowledge. Ethnographic participant observation is particularly suited to this task. This method—or at least a research program based on what might be called an ethnographic sensibility—allows us to see how cultures are reproduced, sometimes strategically, by the specific actions of concrete actors. More generally, researchers guided by an ethnographic sensibility are positioned to observe how ensembles of discourses coalesce, how climates of opinion solidify, and how patterns of choices emerge. They can study how patterns—detected ex post facto by public opinion or exit polls—are created, reproduced, and changed within specifically located trust networks and informal power constellations. In general, research projects informed by an ethnographic sensibility make it possible to observe and reconstruct actors’ strategic creativity and thus serve as a welcome corrective to approaches that treat postcommunist transformations as phenomena of the macroscale, driven exclusively or mainly by mechanisms external to actual actors living in specific locations or communities.

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Conclusion The chief goal of the review presented in this chapter was to find a common denominator for the “best practices” in the field of postcommunist studies, both as a broad base for the rest of the volume and for further investigations of social justice in societies undergoing regime transformations. I started the review convinced that the main enemy of any evenhanded analysis of postcommunism was transitology. But I discovered that the stereotype of the simple-minded political scientist enamored with the misguided parsimony of transitology was inaccurate. True, transitological simplifications have heavily influenced both policy recommendations and some journalistic accounts (what I called “practical transitology”). However, the best work in comparative politics has displayed at least some degree of what I call ethnographic sensibility. This sensibility underpins the work of quite a few important researchers who contribute to the formulation of the research approach called here contextual holism with its five principles of relationism, historicism, constructivism, informal/formal hybridization, and localism/regionalism. The merits of this approach are demonstrated in this volume, although its systematic articulation and theoretical elaboration is still in the future.

Notes The project would not be possible without many productive exchanges with the authors of this book’s chapters and the participants of the two SSRC conferences that Amy Linch and I coorganized. My collaborations with Amy and Mike Aronoff (Aronoff and Kubik 2013) have been central to the development of many arguments. Alina Vamanu’s and Amy’s marvelously incisive comments and questions pushed me to the brink of despair—I may hide my next manuscript from them. Bob Kaufman has been, as always, a supportive yet demanding reader. I also owe a great intellectual debt to the organizers and participants of the seminar on “Vernacular Epistemologies,” which I had the good fortune to participate in from September 2008 to May 2010 at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis. My debt to Indrani Chatterjee and Julie Livingston, the project leaders, is immense. Earlier versions were presented as talks at several institutions where I received marvelous comments. I cannot list them all here, but many thanks for both the intellectual input and organizational work to Michael Bernhard, Arista Cirtautas, Grzegorz Ekiert, Stephen E. Hanson, Teresa Kulawik, Joanna Kurczewska, Jacek Kurczewski, Radek Markowski, Lech Mróz, Antoni Sułek, Jacek Wasilewski, and Glennys Young.

From Transitology to Contextual Holism 67

1.

I use the concept “approach” because I want to avoid the more grandiose “paradigm.” It is close to what Larry Laudan calls “research tradition” (1977, 1996) For a crisp exposition of Laudan’s ideas, see Sil and Katzenstein 2010, 413.

2.

For the arguably most eloquent exposition of systemism in today’s philosophy of science, see Bunge 2010.

3.

Publication of the massive reader edited by Goodin and Tilly (2006) demonstrates the renewed interest in contextual and analysis in political science. There is also a renewed interest in systemic analysis. For example, in the field of international relations, Braumoeller (2008) analyzes “systemic politics” while Jackson (2006) writes about “configurationism.” For Tilly, “Not only do all political processes occur in history and therefore call for knowledge of their historical contexts, but also where and when political processes occur influence how [original emphasis—JK] they occur” (2006, 420). Elsewhere Tilly argues, “Systemic explanations, strictly speaking, consist of specifying a place for some event, structure, or process within a larger self-maintaining set of interdependent elements and showing how the event, structure, or process in question serves and/or results from interactions among the larger set of elements” (2001, 23).

4.

In the field of postcommunist studies the seminal debate on (de)merits of contextual analysis took place between Bunce (1995a, 1995b) and Schmitter and Karl (1994) and Karl and Schmitter (1995).

5.

Berman and Offe both make a case for the a-historical nature of this claim. According to Berman, the history of the West is the story of not just democracy following ever-expanding economic “freedom,” but also popular mobilization against the exigencies wrought by markets. European social democracies are based on the idea that the proper use of political power is to direct economic forces in the service of the collective good (Berman 2006, 213). Offe shows us that the equation of capitalism, democracy, and social stability was by no means self-evident in pre-WWII Europe. Liberals thought democracy “would lead by necessity to tyranny and expropriation by the poor and uneducated” (1983, 225–26).

6.

There is no room here to summarize the truly interesting debate on this issue. See Przeworski et al. 2000; Boix and Stokes 2003; Acemoglu and Robinson 2006.

7.

Gans-Morse (2004) introduces a useful distinction between two meanings of the term “transitology.” The first meaning refers to “a body of literature developed through the study of democratizing regimes in Southern Europe and Latin America” (322). In the second meaning transitions are construed as processes that have a clearly defined telos: modern liberal democracy and market economy. I use the term here following the second meaning.

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8.

It is, however, easy to show that some prescriptions foisted on the region have not actually been followed in the “West” itself. See, for example, Böröcz and Kovacs 2001; Vachudova 2005, 120–23.

9.

“The literature on new democracies shares two basic assumptions: the existence of a sufficiently clear and consistent corpus of democratic theory, and the possibility of using this corpus, with only marginal modifications, as an adequate conceptual tool for the study of emerging democracies. Unfortunately, the first assumption—that there is a clear and consistent corpus of democratic theory—is wrong. By implication, the second, that existing democratic theory ‘travels’ well, is impracticable” (2001, 7).

10.

The set of standard economic reform measures amounting to what is usually described as macroeconomic stabilization and/or liberalization is summarized in Islam and Mandelbaum 1993. The desired sequence of the necessary, albeit minimal, political reforms constituting democratization has been recently summarized in Acemoglu and Robinson 2006.

11.

For a thorough analysis of the mechanisms leading up to the acceptance/ rejection of neoliberalism in the postcommunist world, see Aligica and Evans 2009.

12.

Gans-Morse argues that his systematic study of the literature published between 1991 and 2003 challenges “the notion that transitology has been the dominant approach to the study of post-communist transitions, at least if transitology is defined as the literature on democratization that developed out of the study of transitions in Southern Europe and Latin America. A review of the literature instead uncovers a welter of diverse and innovative approaches to the study of regime change in post-communism” (2004, 323). He also shows that much of the work on postcommunism effectively avoids falling into the trap of teleology (2004, 336).

13.

“The Condition of Sociology in East-Central Europe, Collective Review by Piotr Sztompka,” http://www.cee-socialscience.net/archive/sociology/review1.html.

14.

Ekiert, Kubik, and Vachudova (2007) designated them as semidemocratic. Freedom House offers a more elaborate typology.

15.

Note their high positions in the ranking produced by such institutions as the Bertelsmann Foundation or the Freedom House.

16.

Reviews of these divergent paths and their explanations are provided in Bunce 1999a, 2003; Ekiert and Hanson 2003; Fish 1998; Bunce, McFaul, and StonerWeiss 2010; McFaul 2002.

17.

See Levitsky and Way 2002, 2010; Hanson 2007; Way and Levitsky 2007.

From Transitology to Contextual Holism 69

18.

McFaul’s conceptualization (2002, 2010) is superior to Huntington’s “third wave.” It takes into account the fact that many postcommunist countries did not transform to regime forms resembling modern democracies.

19.

See Bunce 1995a, 980–81; Grzymala-Busse 2002; Kornai 2008, 153–55; Levitsky and Way 2010.

20.

“In many academic studies as well as popular portrayals, this ‘great transformation’ has been described in a discourse of capitalist ‘triumphalism’ that entails a certain linear, teleological thinking in relation to the direction of change; from socialism or dictatorship to liberal democracy, from a plan to a market economy” (Berdahl 2000, 1).

21.

“‘Transition’ is itself a hotly contested term. Economic and political planners (both academic and non-academic) have used ‘transition’ to highlight what, to them, is the most significant common condition of postsocialist societies: a status of being ‘in between’ a socialist past, a system from which ‘transition societies’ are moving away, and the capitalist future these societies are moving towards, even if there might be ‘setbacks’. Anthropologists, in contrast, have generally rejected the concept of transition as ideological. One critique here is that the models of transition planners and theorists, fixated on realizing a pre-determined future, analyse the present from the vantage point of this imaginary, ideal future” (Brandtstadter 2007, 131).

22.

My favorite example is the debate between Krzysztof Jasiewicz and the “parachutists” in the area of postcommunist electoral studies. While the latter arrived in the region to confirm a theory that electoral choices are primarily driven by economic motivations and actually kept confirming it, Jasiewicz has been consistently demonstrating that the main driver of electoral choices, particularly in Poland, have been cultural factors, notably the intensity and type of religiosity. No serious scholar knowing the region has serious disagreements with Jasiewicz’s analysis. See Jasiewicz 2003, 2009; and Bernhard 2000.

23.

The idea of this model is indebted to the seminal work on regime transformations by Linz and Stepan (1996, 3–65). Wolfgang Merkel offers a different model, but some of his solutions are similar to mine (2004). His ideas of embedded democracy and partial regimes strongly influenced my thinking. Elster, Offe, and Preuss formulate a similar thought when they talk about “horizontal” differentiation of institutional domains. The form of “institutional pluralism” they advocate is “a rich diversity of domains, each of them ‘staffed’ with competent actors that are capable of performing the specific function assigned to them without being under the dictate of, corrupted by, or otherwise subject to binding premises set by the agents within other sectors or domains” (1998, 31). The main difference between my model and those offered by other scholars is the inclusion of “domestic society.” I need it

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to stay focused on the complex and shifting boundary between the “private” and “public” and the significance of informality. 24.

The symmetry around the center should not be taken to mean that the relationships between civil society and the other three domains are always direct. For instance, political society often mediates between state and civil society (Michael Bernhard asked for this important clarification).

25.

Earlier, other scholars promoted a different conceptual pair: totalitarianism and state socialism (Bunce 1995a, 985).

26.

The switch from the totalitarian to the posttotalitarian phase of state socialism illustrates recent theorizing on evolutionary, gradual institutional change remarkably well (Mahoney and Thelen 2010). It is an example of what they call “institutional conversion” that occurs when “rules remain formally the same but are interpreted and enacted in new ways” (2010, 17).

27.

The humanization of the system manifested itself in the emergence of massive shadow economies, limited intraparty democratization, and “illegal” civil society (dissident movements). Such changes were, however, uneven: more advanced in some countries than others and fluctuating over time (periods of “thaw” followed by “the tightening of the screw”).

28.

Kornai 1992, 85–86; Seleny 2006, 20–32; Grossman 1977; Solnick 1998. Feige writes, “Analysis of noncompliance under the Soviet regime suggests that the circumvention of price and production controls contributed to a more efficient system and served to buffer some of the most costly consequences of allocation by administrative control. The buffer function may have extended the lifetime of the Soviet regime by ameliorating some of the costs of misallocation. But, as discussed below, the pervasiveness of noncompliance under the Soviet regime has had a pernicious effect on subsequent economic reforms” (1997, 27). According to Seleny, “more often than not, Western political scientists and economist missed the full significance of both informal institutions and economic reforms under state socialism” (2006, 29).

29.

While rejecting simple models of state socialism and democratization, researchers describe, analyze, and try to explain complex patterns of change, characterized by the variance in: (1) the points of departure (Linz and Stepan 1994; Ekiert 1996; Bunce 1999); (2) modes of power transfer (Przeworski 1991; Elster 1996; Bozoki 2002); and (3) such characteristics of the new, emerging polities, as, for example: (1) the basic features of their institutional design (Bunce 2003; Ekiert and Hanson 2003; Elster, Offe, and Preuss 1998; Stark and Bruszt 1998); (2) party systems (Kitschelt et al. 1999; Bielasiak 2005; Lewis 2006; Pop-Eleches 2010); (3) economic

From Transitology to Contextual Holism 71

and social policies (Haggard and Kaufman 1995, 2008; Frye 2010; Greskovits 1998); (4) the architecture of the state (Ganev 2007; Grzymala-Busse 2007; GrzymalaBusse and Luong 2003; O’Dwyer 2006; Sissenich 2007); and (5) civil society (Howard 2003; Bernhard and Karakoc 2007; Ekiert and Kubik 1999). 30.

This list could be extended by at least three more processes: (1) the development of the rule of law that regulates the emergent architecture captured by the model; (2) formation of the new (democratic?) political culture; and (3) formation of mechanisms determining the forms of (re)engagement with the world that is the process of globalization.

31.

Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan (1996) offer a seminal typology of regime types (five) and investigate how each type influences democratization. They conclude that dismantling a nondemocratic regime is easier and the consolidation of democracy faster and more durable if the ancient regime is authoritarian or posttotalitarian rather than totalitarian or sultanistic.

32.

Chen and Sil (2007) provide a systematic argument for the contextual approach.

33.

Pop-Eleches argues, “The prospects for democratization and democratic deepening were significantly better in countries with favorable legacies (such as the relatively developed, ethnically homogenous countries of East Central Europe with their longer histories of statehood, democracy, and bureaucratic competence) than in many of the fledgling new states emerging from the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia” (2007, 909).

34.

In Bunce’s memorable words: “Distal causes—in the postsocialist experience at least—have masqueraded as contingent causes” (1999b, 790).

35.

In his comprehensive, statistically driven review of the impact various legacies have on democratization in postcommunist countries, Pop-Eleches does not discuss this legacy, so it is not clear yet how it stakes out against other legacies in statistical analyses. There is no room here to discuss the troubling theoretical issues related to the high correlation (leading to multicollinearity) among indicators of various legacies (for a careful analysis of this problem, see Pop-Eleches 2007b).

36.

Capitalism in second economies had two basic forms: (1) “commercial” capitalism built by semiofficial petty traders (arguably most developed in Poland); and (2) “manufacturing” capitalism created by official and semiofficial entrepreneurs (most developed in Hungary; Szelenyi 1988).

37.

See, for example, Haggard and Kaufman 1995; Acemoglu and Robinson 2006; Przeworski et al. 2000; Boix and Stokes 2003.

38.

This part of the analysis comes mostly from Milada Vachudova, a coauthor of Ekiert, Kubik, and Vachudova 2005. For the full argument, see Vachudova 2005.

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39.

A persuasive case for the necessity of understanding “local framing” is offered by Ross (2010).

40.

I choose this term to signal my intention to ground my exposition in a strong ontological commitment. An epistemological stance that is clearly founded on similar intellectual choices is analytic eclecticism, recently proposed by Sil and Katzenstein (2010).

41.

The second column merely lists radical opposites of the principles listed on column 1. Its elements do not amount to a coherent research program. By contrast, I claim that a research program based on the principles listed in column 3 is feasible and indeed desired.

42.

Mitchell (2008) develops a related argument that the invention of “economics” is coterminous with the constitution of “economy” as a separate domain of human activity. Margaret Levi, a prominent representative of game theory in comparative politics, has recently reminded her discipline that Adam Smith wrote not only The Wealth of the Nations but also The Theory of Moral Sentiments “in which he states that values may trump interests” (2009, 117).

43.

With the explosion of various institutionalisms in political science (Hall and Tylor 1996) and economics (North 1990), the theme of extraeconomic drivers and constraints of economic activity moved to the center of many analyses, but as Gudeman (2009) argues most institutionalists downplay or ignore the autotelic character of many human interactions and communities that they tend to reduce to parameters influencing economic transactions among calculating/strategizing individuals.

44.

A volume edited by Hann and Hart (2009) offers a set of critical readings of Polanyi. Its authors propose several innovative conceptual tools designed to further advance the analysis of embeddedness. Constrained by the size of this essay, I am, however, unable to take full advantage of their work.

45.

One source of inspiration is the work of Elinor Ostrom and her team. See Poteete, Janssen, and Ostrom 2010.

46.

Schmitter and Karl suggest that transitology has a patron saint, Machiavelli, who argued that because during the moments of upheaval “actors behaved capriciously, immorally and without benefit of shred rules, only 50 percent of political events are understandable. The other half was due to unpredictable events of fortuna” (1994, 174).

47.

Efforts to overcome the structure-agency dichotomy are vigorous in many areas of social science, particularly in various versions of new institutionalism (Mahoney and Thelen 2010).

From Transitology to Contextual Holism 73

48.

“It is the doctrine that transactions, interactions, social ties, and conversations constitute the central stuff of social life” (Tilly and Goodin 2006, 11). See Tilly and Goodin 2006, for a useful explication of this ontological position and its contrast to other ontologies of the social.

49.

Additionally, the concept of agency needs to be carefully reconsidered because people’s ability to affect the world varies and depends on the whole set of factors. As Mahmood argues, “If the ability to effect change in the world and in oneself is historically and culturally specific (both in terms of what constitutes ‘change’ and the capacity by which it is effected), then its meaning and sense cannot be fixed a priori” (2001, 212).

50.

The field of historically oriented analyses of politics is booming quite impressively in comparative politics (Mahoney and Rueshemeyer 2003; Pierson 2004; Mahoney and Thelen 2010). However, the new historical institutionalism, as the new approach is known, is different from the macrohistorical approaches of such classics of comparative politics as Barrington Moore or Theda Skocpol. Its arguments are more sharply fleshed-out as their goal is the specification of mechanisms at the mezzo- and microlevels (Tilly 2001).

51.

Among the best works representing this tradition in postcommunist studies are studies on the role of communist institutions in the downfall of the system (Bunce 2003), the historically shaped patterns of “redeeming” of communist parties (Grzymała-Busse 2002), the impact of historical trajectories on the postcommunist reforms of welfare states (Inglot 2008), or the staying power of political cleavages at the local level (Wittenberg 2006). Bernhard thoroughly reviews the main arguments of the opposite tradition that emphasizes “crafting of democracy” and/ or “institutional choice” (2005, 1–25).

52.

Not just class conflict (emphasized in Acemoglu and Robinson 2006).

53.

Ziblatt and Capoccia: “History does not always move smoothly from period to period but instead moves via crises, or sharply punctuated episodes of change that have lasting consequences” (2010, 6).

54.

Among the phenomena routinely studied with the help of interpretive approaches are, for example: (1) legitimacy (as its standards vary from society to society and depend on contextualized, culture-specific criteria) (Aronoff 1989; Kubik 1994); (2) mechanisms of compliance, quiescence, and everyday resistance (as they involve the manipulation of cultural understandings of reality) (Wedeen 1999); and (3) generation, reproduction, and dismantling of collective identities (as such processes involve the use of “cultural materials”) (Ross 2007; Fernandes 2006; Davis 2005). Interpretive approaches also provide fresh and valuable insights into a number of problem areas usually studied

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through naturalistic modes of inquiry. Ample evidence of the fruitfulness of interpretation can be found in the study of non-Western political systems in comparative politics (Chabal and Daloz 2006; Green 2002), constructivist work in international relations (Katzenstein 1996; Klotz and Lynch 2007), “culturalist” analyses in political economy (Blyth 2002), and even economics (Rao and Walton 2004). 55.

For an alternative perspective, see Chabal and Daloz 2006; Shapiro, Smith, and Masoud 2004; and Aronoff and Kubik 2013. For a solid philosophical argument aimed at establishing viable antinaturalist ontology of the political, see Bevir 2008.

56.

“Rebuilding national identity, in the sense of ethnic and cultural identity, was an important part of rebuilding political identity” (Priban 2004, 416).

57.

“There may be multiple local interpretations of economic conditions, which do indeed affect sovereignty movements, but the multiplicity of meanings muddles the effect of particular structural variables on sovereignty movements across all regions” (2005, 9).

58.

“Lumping social capital together with all other forms of capital tends to obscure the fact that norms of reciprocity and trust are more properly the purview of culture (Foley & Edwards, 1998b, p. 135)” (Petro 2001, 240).

59.

“By systematically contrasting Novgorod’s heritage as a medieval center and cradle of Russian democracy to Moscow’s heritage of political and economic centralization, they [the Novgorod elite—JK] redefined reform as a return to the values of a better and more prosperous Russian past. Embracing a positive myth rooted in Russia’s past eased the shock of cultural discontinuity, broadened the social constituency in favor of reforms, and contributed to much higher levels of confidence in local government. The result is the remarkable level of economic and democratic development the region displays today” (2004, 3).

60.

See Scott 1998 on legibility as a prerequisite for the effective functioning of the state.

61.

For a useful typology of relationships between formal and informal institutions

62.

Some observers point to the existence of powerful informal relations even in the

(based on the Latin American examples), see Helmke and Levitsky 2006, 14. negotiating and disbursement of foreign assistance (Wedel 2001). 63.

“It is a gross ecological fallacy to infer the conditions of individual Russians from aggregate data about the Russian economy. Empirical research shows that nearly every Russian household is seeking to get by through a strategy of ‘defensive demodernization,’ relying upon a multiplicity of economies, official and unofficial, monetized and nonmonetized, legal, ‘alegal,’ or uncivil. This strategy was developed of necessity in the old command economy and will remain important until Russia nears its economic destination” (1994, 47).

From Transitology to Contextual Holism 75

64.

“Sociologists and urban anthropologists have come some distance from theory that leaves no room for agency, for messy contradictions, for internal moral debates, or for self-determination. Most especially, the ethnographic craft contributes critical perspectives on complex subjective realities that matter if our understanding of poverty is going to do anything more than recount the structural forces that impose from without” (Newman 2002, 1598).

65.

“The result of this methodically imposed project in social and political engineering was that by 1991, whether one lived in Tashkent or Tula, one was governed by identical political institutions, participated in the same centrally planned economy, and studied similar types of texts in similar schools. As famously dramatized in The Irony of Fate, a Brezhnev-era comedy, one even walked streets with the same layout and the same names, lived in the same apartments, sat on the same furniture, and ate off the same dishes. In short, by 1991, both the formal structures of the state and the informal organization of everyday life had become standardized throughout Soviet territory in a way that is historically unprecedented” (Darden 2009, 3).

66.

See, for example, Stoner-Weiss 1997 and Petro 2004 on Russia; Zarycki 2002, 2007; Gorzelak 2004; Bartkowski 2003; Kurczewska 2008 on Poland; Lewicka 2007 on Poland and Ukraine.

67.

Kalyvas writes, for example, “It is the convergence of local motives and supralocal imperatives that endows civil war with its particular character and leads to joint violence that straddles the divide between the political and the private, the collective and the individual” (2003, 487).

68.

This analysis is inspired by Trouillot 2003, but my definitions of location and locality are different from his.

69.

Moreover, the concept of community “in the classic sense of shared values, shared identity, and thus shared culture” (Marcus 1998, 62) needs to be counterbalanced with the concept of “multi-locale, dispersed identity” (1998, 63) constructed, often simultaneously, by often mutually independent flows of cultural materials, complex political dependencies, and economic relations. “It is the burden of the modernist ethnography to capture distinctive identity formations in all their migrations and dispersions” (1998, 63).

70.

For Anthony P. Cohen community does not need to be based on face-to-face interactions: “Our argument has been, then, that whether or not its structural boundaries remain intact, the reality of community lies in its members’ perception of the vitality of its culture. People construct community symbolically, making it a resource and repository of meaning, and referent of their identity” (1985, 118).

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71.

It is important to recognize that such flows are often incongruous with each other, an idea expressed, for example, in Appadurai’s influential conceptualization of several types of scapes. “Because of the disjunctive and unstable interplay of commerce, media, national policies, and consumer fantasies, ethnicity, once a genie contained in the bottle of some sort of locality (however large), has now become a global force, forever slipping in and through the cracks between states and borders” (1990, 19).

72.

Stoner-Weiss 1997. Consult also the publications of the Kazan Center of Federalism and Public Policy (http://www.kazanfed.ru/en/).

73.

Capoccia and Ziblatt formulate a similar thought in a different context. They propose to see “democratization as an inherently long-run chain of linked episodes of struggles and negotiations over institutional change. It is often in these ex post, less visible moments that the political institutions of democracy are created and reshaped” (2010, 20).

74.

Other scholars offer similar conceptualizations. Eyal, Szelenyi, and Townsley write about evolutionary and involutionary theories. The former rests on an assumption that “if you create the proper institutions, they will shape the individuals who occupy them so that individual behavior will conform to institutional constraints and imperatives. In the context of the post-communist transformation, this is the idea of capitalism-by-design.” The involutionary theory is a theory of path-dependent transformations. Individuals in this theory learn as they cope with the changing world. Importantly “they collectively [emphasis added—JK] reinterpret the roles they have to play, and in so doing they draw on shared experiences, ways of knowing, and common understandings” (1998, 9). Stark and Bruszt compare the logic of imitation (that characterizes the work of instant institutional revolutionaries who believe in “designer capitalism”) and the logic of involution (interpreted more deterministically than in Eyal et al.) preferred by those who emphasize the almost insurmountable “weight of the past.” Against both the optimism of “designers” and pessimism of “determinists” they articulate their own position that is based on such concepts as “recombination,” “innovation,” “bricolage,” but also path dependence (1998, 4–8).

75.

The syndrome of civilizational incompetence includes: (1) engaging in private rather than public (official) institutions; (2) emphasizing looking back, toward the past, rather than searching for forward-looking solutions; (3) accepting a fatalistic outlook and having minimal faith in human agency; (4) privileging negative freedom (freedom form) over positive freedom (freedom to); (5) practicing mythological thinking rather than realism; (6) glorifying “the West” and distrusting “the East”; and (7) being opportunistic by preferring usefulness to “truth, faithfulness, straightforwardness” (1993, 91).

From Transitology to Contextual Holism 77

76.

As in Sztompka’s work, the focus of these studies is not on actual actions/behavior but rather cultural scenarios that serve as models of or for actions/behavior (Geertz 1973, 93). Sztompka sees his task as “the search for underlying patterns for thinking and doing, commonly shared among the members of society, and therefore external and constraining with respect to each individual member” (1993, 87; original emphasis).

77.

There are gripping similarities between the fate of impoverished groups displaying “uncivil” behavior in the postcommunist countries and the situation of the American underclass and its “culture of poverty.” Much can be learned from the sociological discussions of these issues, also methodologically, as ethnography has become one of the key tools of research (see, for example, Newman 1999, 2002; Wacquant 2002; Wilson and Chaddha 2009).

78.

Borneman and Hammoudi 2009; Humphrey 2002, xvii–xxii; Wilson and Chaddha 2009.

79.

This approach is similar to the one taken by Stark and Bruszt (1998). The main difference is my emphasis on the significance of culture and the need to study people’s strategic agency (and their ability to “recombine” various resources or capitals) in “actual” localities and locations.

80.

As Peter Hall observes, “Institutions are instruments the actors use to negotiate the complexity of the world. Far from dictating particular actions, institutions are seen as enabling structures within which actors exercise a robust agency” (2010, 217).

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Shapiro, Ian, Rogers M. Smith, and Terek E. Masoud, eds. Problems and Methods in the Study of Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sil, Rudra, and Peter J. Katzenstein. 2010. “Analytic Eclecticism in the Study of World Politics: Reconfiguring Problems and Mechanisms Across Research Traditions.” Perspectives on Politics 8 (2): 411–31. Sissenich, Beate. 2007. Building States Without Society: European Union Enlargement and the Transfer of EU Social Policy to Poland and Hungary. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Solnick, Steven L. 1998. Stealing the State: Control and Collapse in Soviet Institutions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Staniszkis, Jadwiga. 1999. Post-Communism: The Emerging Enigma. Warsaw: Institute of Political Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences. Stark, David, and Laszlo Bruszt. 1998. Postsocialist Pathways: Transforming Politics and Property in East Central Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stoner-Weiss, Kathryn. 1997. Local Heroes: The Political Economy of Russian Regional Governance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Stubbs, Paul. 2005. “Stretching Concepts Too Far? Multi-Level Governance, Policy Transfer and the Politics of Scale in South East Europe.” Southeast European Politics 6 (2): 66–87. Szelenyi, Ivan. 1988. Socialist Entrepreneurs: Embourgeoisement in Rural Hungary. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Sztompka, Piotr. 1993. “Civilizational Incompetence: The Trap of PostCommunist Societies.” Zeitschrift fur Soziologie 22 (2): 85–95. ———. 2004. Trust: A Sociological Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tilly, Charles. 2001. “Mechanisms in Political Processes.” Annual Review of Political Science 4: 21–41. ———. 2005. Trust and Rule. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2006. “Why and How History Matters.” In The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis, edited by Robert E. Goodin and Charles Tilly, 317–37. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tilly, Charles, and Robert E. Goodin. 2006. “It Depends.” In The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis, edited by Robert E. Goodin and Charles Tilly, 3–32. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2003. Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

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Ulram, Peter A., and Fritz Plasser. 2003. “Political Culture in East-Central and Eastern Europe: Empirical Findings 1990–2001.” In Political Culture in Post-Communist Europe: Attitudes in New Democracies, edited by Detlef Pollack, Jorg Jacob, Olaf Muller, and Gert Pickel, 31–46. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Vachudova, Milada Anna. 2005. Europe Undivided: Democracy, Leverage, and Integration After Communism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Varshney, Ashutosh. 2002. Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Verdery, Katherine. 1996. What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1999. The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2003. The Vanishing Hectare: Property and Value in Postsocialist Transylvania. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Wacquant, Loic. 2002. “Scrutinizing the Street: Poverty, Morality, and the Pitfalls of Urban Ethnography.” The American Journal of Sociology 107 (6): 1468–532. Way, Lucan A., and Steven Levitsky. 2007. “Linkage, Leverage, and the Post-Communist Divide.” East European Politics and Societies 21: 48–66. Wedeen, Lisa. 1999. Ambiguities of Domination. Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2002. “Conceptualizing Culture: Possibilities for Political Science.” American Political Science Review 96 (4): 713–28. Wedel, Janine. 2001. Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Wilson, Julius William, and Anmol Chaddha. 2009. “The Role of Theory in Ethnographic Research.” Ethnography 10: 549–64. Wittenberg, Jason. 2006. Crucibles of Political Loyalty: Church Institutions and Electoral Continuity in Hungary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wood, Elizabeth Jean. 2009. “Ethnographic Research in the Shadow of Civil War.” In Political Ethnography: What Immersion Contributes to the Study of Power, edited by Edward Schatz, 229–42. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Woodruff, David M. 1999. Money Unmade: Barter and the Fate of Russian Capitalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Zarycki, Tomasz. 2002. Region jako kontekst zachowan politycznych. Warsaw: Scholar. ———. 2007. “History and Regional Development: A Controversy over the ‘Right’ Interpretation of the Role of History in the Development of the Polish Regions.” Geoforum 38: 485–931.

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chapter two

Social Justice, Social Science, and the Complexities of Postsocialism Thomas C. Wolfe and John Pickles

Making Sense of Social Justice in CEE At the outset we would like to state our interest in, and commitment to, the concerns that animate the broader project of this volume, concerns about the qualities of lives led and the well-being of the populations of the states of Central and Eastern Europe. The conceptual lens of social justice is invaluable to any evaluation of the effects of the deep structural transformations that have affected the region since 1989 and have reworked prior patterns of well-being and what constitutes justice in important and diverse ways (political, economic, cultural, and military). One broad approach to this task is to take the key terms “social” and “justice,” as they are given to us in everyday use, and assess empirically the diverse ways in which new forms of social and geographical patterns of inequality and injustice are being produced under postsocialism. This approach assumes relatively stable conceptualizations of the social and justice, ones generally informed by the operative ideals of liberal democracies and international institutions, that are then brought to the analysis by the researcher as normative standards of assessment. The result has been a rich array of empirical research assessing how and to what extent postsocialist transformations have changed the distributions of power, access to resources, and forms of participation and resource allocation in different countries and regions. In this chapter, we take a different approach. Instead of asking about the ways in which predetermined notions of justice and society work their way

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out empirically in different places, among different people, and at different rates, we hold the two terms—“social” and “justice”—open as concepts that themselves have particular histories and geographies of deployment and articulation. This enables us to consider how these forms of deployment and articulation affect and express the ways in which postsocialist lives have changed in the past two decades. In so doing, we seek to avoid too readily accepting concepts derived from—and still located in—Enlightenment beliefs and discourses about the individual and governance, and liberal beliefs and discourses about the state and citizenship rights, in contexts where radical alternatives to notions of the social and justice have been at the ideological, if not always actual, heart of political and economic projects of transformation for more than sixty years. By holding open the questions of what constitutes justice and for (and by) whom, we are not suggesting a binary distinction between Western and Eastern notions of social justice, or that state socialism was not also a manifestation of Enlightenment discourse, or that we can easily equate the West with liberalism or the East with collectivism. All of these claims would be too easy and they would do too much conceptual violence to the complexities of the historical and regional formations in socialist and postsocialist Europe. Instead, we keep the question open to consider the ways in which ideas of the “social” and “justice” have been used in particular places and times, and we consider the consequences they have had for how we now think about social justice and postsocialism. This hesitation in “making use” of the concepts as given is particularly important given the past two decades of transitology. In these years, liberal concepts have been imported wholesale into CEE social sciences with farreaching effects on institutional and intellectual practices. The fascination with liberalism in the social sciences during the 1980s and 1990s resonated or conflicted with earlier encounters with liberalism, among them the intellectual legacies of presocialist liberal capitalism of Central European states (Dunford 1998), the mediated politics of Russian NEPmen (Khaziev 2009), the political liberalism of such intellectuals and writers as Gombrowicz, Havel, Hrabal, Kundera, Skvorecky, the influences of Hayekian economic liberalism, and the rich and complex history of links and exchanges with “the West” before 1939 and again after 1956, particularly in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. Given this complex terrain of reception and transformation of ideas, we ask: What does justice mean and what work does it do as a construct in the context of societies undergoing major shifts from one social

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formation to another, from a collective state-owned and state-led organization of society to market-oriented and liberal democratic development models? How and where is justice mobilized as an engine of commentary and institutional transformation? How and why does the unit of society appear as the always implied referent embedded in the phrase social justice? These questions could be supplemented by others that have more of an edge to them, questions posed most poignantly by the feminist and ethnographic turns in the social sciences that point to the radical contextuality of our own position as scholars and the dangers and advantages of scholarly distance. When we invoke justice, what state of things do we hope to produce through intervention? If social justice is straightforward and known, then perhaps our task is to analyze and describe its complex social geographies. But, if social justice itself is complex and multiple, if it has divergent histories and its own complex geographies embedded differentially in specific social formations, how is social science to “study” such an “object”? For example, Pickles (2005) has asked whether our commonsense understanding of the politics of neoliberalism (whether one of approval or approbation) resonates adequately in postsocialist societies where individualism and market logics have often been deployed strategically to challenge residual forms of nomenklatura social power and a complex politics of state institutions. In this sense, while neoliberal policies eviscerated whole sectors of the former state-owned economy and led to personal gain and class recomposition throughout the region, advocates and critics of neoliberalism alike have yet to adequately consider the extent to which these policies also served in ambiguous ways to mobilize popular movements that did not always seek to produce the liberal subject of contemporary capitalism or even liberal representative democracy. With some caution, Pickles asks what it would mean to take neoliberalism seriously, not necessarily as a “key” or an “answer” to the economic failures of collectivism, but as a strategy of a politics struggling with entrenched social and economic formations. By contrast, Pickles suggests that the dominant perspectives on neoliberalism—as the embodiment of reason from one vantage point and as economically predatory from another—focus too onesidedly on individual rationality as constitutive of economic and social justice. Neither the advocates of neoliberal policies nor their critics adequately addressed the ways in which the priority accorded to the individual in neoliberal discourse served as a tool to undermine the collective logics that sustained state socialism and its postsocialist legacies. In this view, we should

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not think that neoliberalism triumphed in CEE because its supporters demonstrated its value as a natural alternative to collectivism, state power, and bureaucratic cronyism (Pickles 2006; Mitchneck and Pickles 2008). Instead, we are more interested in the ways in which a particular and one-dimensional understanding of neoliberalism dominated the thinking of both proponents of neoliberal reforms and their critics. Both refused to engage with the fact that such a shift was never a matter of an easy transformation from one way of world-making to another, never a matter of simply keeping a system or replacing it, and thus both elided or underestimated the opacities and densities of actually occurring postsocialist transformations, each with their own currents, eddies, and intertwined streams. If the elision of these complexities was a dominant narrative of neoliberalism, it was not the only reading of the articulations between neoliberalism and postsocialism. Others have challenged the understanding of neoliberalism as externally imposed, taking more seriously neoliberalism’s domestication and partial origins in the region itself (see Bockmann and Eyal 2002; Smith and Rochovská 2007; and Smith et al. 2010). By framing our interests in this way, we are acting on our conviction that a critical and hermeneutically oriented social science has much to contribute not only to the task of making sense of the processes at work in CEE, but to widening and deepening—to use terms from EU discourse—networks of communication and interaction that produce new forms of collective identity and belonging. It means admitting above all that we are scholars and thinkers embedded in processes that continually reform and refigure what “justice” and “society” mean as objects of our concern, whether they refer to economic justice, environmental justice, political justice, or other forms of justice. As the framing and deployment of “social justice” itself becomes an object of our analysis we need to contrast models of diffusion that focus on top-down processes or a transfer of ideas from West to East with the diverse and concrete practices of local innovations, resistance, and selective adoption that reshape these more hegemonic projects.1 In the rest of this essay, we turn first to some of the ways in which social justice has been understood in postsocialist studies, how this has been shaped by the ethos of Europe, and how social science contributes to the forms of governmentality emerging in postsocialist states. We then offer four methodological principles that help in thinking about postsocialist forms of social justice. These focus on the importance of contingent relations, hinterlands

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and contextual analysis, subtraction (or keeping things as simple as they need to be but not simpler), and emergence.

Justice, Society, and Genealogies of Government “Social justice” is all too often understood as referring to the heroic struggles of an actor known as “society” against a despotic and all-powerful “state.” Yet even cursory reflection on the most successful among the twentieth-century struggles for social justice—the fight for civil rights in the United States and the destruction of apartheid in South Africa—reveals that such a generalization does not hold. Struggles against entrenched interests involve complex coalitions of actors and their success is nearly always a function of a broad constellation of factors. The challenges to state socialism within contemporary Central and Eastern Europe were just as complicated, and twenty years hence scholarly understanding of the complex social and historical dynamics state socialism precipitated and the advanced liberal societies that developed since the system’s demise remains preliminary. The diverse trajectories “out of ” state socialism and the varieties of social, political, and economic institutions that have emerged in its wake are perhaps best considered through an historico-geographical lens, particularly one that eschews neat abstractions of “society” and “state,” emphasizing instead their interpenetration and mutual construction. The outline of such a genealogy was provided by Michel Foucault and his students in a series of works from the 1970s and 1980s, a number of which were collected in the seminal volume, The Foucault Effect (1991), in his recently published lectures from the Collège de France (Foucault 2003, 2005, 2007), and in work by a number of scholars in a variety of fields across the social sciences and humanities who take what Foucault termed “governmentality” as their main object of concern.2 For these writers, governance is more than a set of formal institutions; it is the total framework within which conduct is guided; it is, in Foucault’s oft-cited phrase, “the conduct of conduct” (Rose 1999, 3). Instances of governing are manifest not only in the actions of those who influence or act on behalf of a set of official institutions, but in all the various reflections on, and practices of, self, character, culture, history, and nature, reflections and practices that motivate, rationalize, and justify individual and group actions. Foucault and his followers outlined an historical arc in roughly four phases. First, Foucault spent considerable time and effort researching the emergence of

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what he considered the problematic of modern government in the early modern period. Here he identified intricate discussions about the relationship between the sovereign and his (or her) territory and its population. Second, by the eighteenth century a range of voices appeared that argued that good government emerged not from the sovereign’s interventions, but from the liberty of the sovereign’s subjects. Individuals were to be governed through their freedom, as opposed to being the objects of regulation and discipline. Liberal government was essentially critical, for it rejected the idea that the conduct of populations was something the sovereign could know and influence; rather, liberal government came into being in the course of the dismantling and discrediting of those sources of conduct based in custom, tradition, and habit.3 Conduct was to emerge from the resources gathered by the self for the self; from works like Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography to those of high romanticism the problematic of government worked on the plane of subjectivity, feeling, and desire. Third, the rise of industrial production, the growth of cities, the specialization of knowledge domains, everything that we think of as nineteenthcentury high modernity, brought with it new sets of problems that generated new innovations in government. Government by the social emerged both as a reaction to the immiseration created by unregulated capitalism and as a function of new technologies and techniques that provided understandings of population. Government by the social was in this sense Janus-faced and Janus-spirited: it was driven by a sense of engaged compassion, fostered on this newly cultivated field of romantic subjectivity, at the same time that it emerged from the disengaged, objective stance of scientific inquiry directed at the groups, classes, and cultures that comprised the nation. The social is not a simple adjective for society. As Nikolas Rose has written: The social . . . does not represent an eternal existential sphere of human sociality. Rather, within a limited geographical and temporal field, it set the terms for the way in which human intellectual, political and moral authorities, in certain places and contexts, thought about and acted upon their collective experience. . . . Social statistics, then sociology, and all the social sciences would play their part in stabilizing the social as a domain sui generis, whose reality could no longer be ignored. Simultaneously, political forces would now articulate their demand upon the State in the name of the social: the nation must be governed in the interests of social protection, social justice, social rights and social solidarity. (Rose 1996, 329)

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Government by the social emerged in part from the rise of the social sciences and their “discovery” of autonomous facts like those around birth and deaths, natality and morbidity, and the attribution of phenomena like criminality and intelligence to cultural and ethnic origin. The key point is that all this knowledge-making—from censuses to the mapping of urban spaces to the study of epidemics—made it possible to imagine, design, and implement, policies and programs of intervention in order to manage and change the conduct of those who came by the end of the nineteenth century to be called “the masses.” The ideas of social insurance, social security, and welfare came to provide the conceptual backbone of this social government. A fourth phase began in the post–World War II era, as another moment of liberal criticism emerged, this time focused not on custom and tradition, but on all the modern agencies of intervention that sought to dictate the improvement of society, the very institutions that had been established as vital by those who understood government to be a project of amelioration. Rose calls this period one of “advanced liberalism,” since the dominant rationale is again one of critique and the dominant mode of action is the dismantling and reduction of official government so that individuals can discover and act upon their own desires. But unlike the earlier phase of liberal governance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, freedom takes form today as a tactic of government not in terms of an ability to marshal one’s inner resources toward the pursuit of wealth, but in the construction through practices of mass consumption of a personalized environment of comfort, convenience, and efficiency. A whole panoply of institutions—official governmental, private, corporate, and a wide range of nonprofits—exist today, animated by the advanced liberal critique. For example, today individuals are governed by both institutions of “consumer protection” and easy credit, both of which are dedicated to the goal of creating private spheres of comfort and ease. The flip side of this governmental innovation, as a number of writers have pointed out, is that individuals become governed not only by desire but also by fear, for no sooner is affluence attained than people begin to fear for its security and durability.4 These phases are not neat and distinct periods; they overlap, appearing in different guises in different places. Such histories of strategies, technologies, and modes of government are also not to be read as straightforward national histories; instead, the rise of the nation as a self-evident unit of interest is itself a part of the history of government. New modes of governing

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enabled new ways of imagining the nation. For example, the co-construction of nations, territories, and populations is part and parcel of the development of liberalism, in that the wealth of citizens enacting their liberty through the market was to contribute to the security of the state in the competitive international environment of post–Westphalian Europe. And the development of government by the social, where experts dedicated themselves to the task of assessing the health, deficiencies, and productive potential of the groups who made up the population, consolidated the power of centralized, nationalizing bureaucracies. Nations continue to evolve in response to the development of ideas and strategies of contemporary governance; national states appear simultaneously hollowed out by discourses of globalization and reimagined in contexts of cultural growth fostered by the guarantees of autonomy within a global system of nation-states based on human rights and the right to cultural expression.5 A Foucauldian history of government, is, therefore a history of policies invented and imitated, a history of improvisation and experimentation in the shaping of conduct, a history, in other words, of projects, programs, and procedures that flowed and continue to flow across national boundaries. The point we would stress, though, is that what enables us to speak in terms of phases in the history of governing since the eighteenth century is the gradual transformation of a dominant way of talking about conduct, the gradual accretion of terms with which government was inflected with specific meanings by a range of often opposed social actors. Such terms include “liberty,” which posed such problems in the eighteenth century; “social,” which coalesced in the nineteenth century amid powerful and volatile antagonisms; and “welfare,” which dominated social thought and governmental practice in much of the twentieth century. Foucault had much less to say about the history of government in the Slavic parts of Europe than he did about the histories of Germany, France, and Britain. But, instead of risking a repetition of an orientalist argument that represents the eastern region of Europe as backward and struggling to keep up with the modern West, we would argue that the advent of modernity in this region was marked by a variety of trajectories within a basically similar problematic. The region is so fascinating because of the interactions, conflicts, and alliances that emerged through efforts to shape the government in particular ways. Farmers, peasants, teachers, aristocrats, bourgeoisie, engineers, scientists, bureaucrats, professionals, skilled labor, unskilled labor, to name the most prominent groups, were drawn to different governmental

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discourses, each with their own way of envisioning social life. The primary tensions within the Russian, Hapsburg, and Ottoman empires involved the struggle between impulses toward ethnic/cultural identity and autonomy, the preservation of imperial and monarchical institutions, and a nascent republicanism that sought to bring representative government to proto-national publics. The dynamics of this process varied, of course, from place to place, region to region. In Poland the struggle to re-establish an autonomous political unit required the creation of subjects with discourses about the civilizational differences between Catholic Europe and an Orthodox East; in Slovenia, by contrast awareness of a properly Slovenian culture and ethnicity emerged in the nineteenth century in more or less peaceful relationship with the wider currents of Hapsburg modernity.6 We should also keep in mind the common dynamics provided to all these debates by the cultural media of print: this governmental thought unfolded in political contexts in which imperial families and the politicians, bureaucrats and intellectuals who articulated their interests and defended imperial and royal prerogatives, zealously monitored and censored the public sphere of print. However, we should not approach these empires as simply the embryos of the totalitarian regimes that took form in the twentieth century; to differing degrees they tolerated the rise of an educated elite that promoted inquiry into government. Yet there were definite limits to these inquiries. The Romanov dynasty became more and more hostile to any criticism of orthodoxy and autocracy as the nineteenth century wore on. In this light, the “liberal” reforms of the 1860s should be seen not so much as an attempt to promote liberalism, as to preempt it and the reflection on government that defined it. Likewise the liberal reforms of the early part the twentieth century, after the disastrous Russo-Japanese war, were undermined by the imperial administration, so that by 1914 there was little interest on the part of any of the fragmented sectors of civil society in preserving any aspect of the autocracy as a part of a redesigned polity. In the Habsburg Empire, by contrast, reflection on government was active and vital because of the presence in the Dual Monarchy’s many larger towns and cities of an educated middle class that had the time and money to devote to political affairs. There this reflection was dominated by the problem that had been interrogated earlier in liberal states such as England, France, and the Netherlands, namely, how nations were to emerge from empires, how could a people marked by the possession of a unique language and culture become politically self-governing?

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The outcome of World War I severely damaged the authority of the imperial families seen to be responsible for the catastrophic suffering of the war years, leaving a complex political landscape within which the problem of governing in most countries was contested between by a range of political organizations: Catholic parties, socialist and communist parties, peasant parties, liberal parties, statist parties,7 nationalist parties, and groups that sought to resurrect aristocrat systems. Worldwide economic depression and socialist revolution in the Soviet Union, however, meant that everywhere in CEE, from Germany to Poland, Hungary, Romania, and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, groups of people across the social spectrum lost interest in democracy, which they associated with inconsequential debate and selfserving politicians, and began to believe that the only party that deserved their support would be the one that would make the problem of government go away altogether. Again at the risk of too radically simplifying a complicated history, by the late 1920s, different reactions to the dilemma posed by the strategies of liberal governance were evident throughout the region. For European socialists, the problem of government would be subsumed by the project of constructing a socialist society. The maximal solution of a socialist state would not only supply the innovations of social government, such as security of employment, health, and retirement, it would render superfluous the focus of liberal discourses on rights and freedoms since according to socialists, injustice was derived from the condition of inequality fostered by capitalism. For those on the far right, the maximal solution to the problem of governing would be solved by achieving complete unanimity around the imperative to fulfill the great destiny of the nation. This solution found its fullest expression with the establishment of fascist regimes in Italy and Germany, with regimes following the same authoritarian, racist pattern appearing on a smaller scale throughout most of the states of Eastern Europe, including Croatia, Serbia, Romania, and Hungary. The problem of government disappeared to the extent that the fascist state demanded that every citizen guide their conduct above all according to the needs of the state and leader. Loyalties to monarchs, the proletariat, or the ideal of liberty were to be eradicated, and people would fulfill their place as the single cells of the great body of the ethnos. In Greece and Spain, authoritarian regimes governed by freezing politics and society into a rigid hierarchy, supported and supervised by the military with the cultural assistance of the church.

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The defeat of fascism in Europe by the coalition of the United States and the Soviet Union meant the establishment of a stark difference between a “West” of Europe, with its own particular history of the rights of the liberal subject and the claims of the social, and an “East” where both imperial and fascist modes of thought were thoroughly discredited and coalitions of exiles and resistance fighters struggled to establish democratic institutions. By the late 1940s, however, reflection on government was preempted by the imposition of the institutional mold of Soviet socialism. In some places this involved the destruction of liberal parties and the murder of liberal politicians, as in Czechoslovakia. In other places it involved an uneasy project of persuasion and co-optation of those prewar parties that had their own vision of social order, such as the peasant party in Poland. Each country then became the site of a nearly four-decade-long process dominated by the efforts of communist parties to maintain control over populations whose mood and character were marked by often unpredictable shifts, from loyal to ungrateful, from indifferent to angry, from hopeful to cynical. The chronic problem of delivering the levels of prosperity enjoyed in even the poorer countries of Western Europe meant that the problem of governing was ever present, particularly as citizens of Eastern European were increasingly exposed to ways of life in the West via radio and television or traveled to the West to experience them firsthand. Furthermore, as we shall see in the next section, reflection on government was also sustained via the practice of the social sciences and the creation of a scientific knowledge of society. What we have tried to do in this section is to insist simply that no articulation of “social justice” can ignore the long and complex histories of governing that have brought these terms to such a state of authority. Nor can we ignore what is perhaps the most disturbing effect of a genealogical approach to social justice: the way it forces us to recognize how these key concepts shape contemporary social thought.8

Understanding CEE’s “Return” to Europe No longer constrained by the supervision of the Soviet Union and its systems of investment, production, and trade, all the newly independent states of Central and Eastern Europe opened themselves to the opportunities offered by the global economy at different rates and with differing degrees of enthusiasm. Politically and rhetorically, the states were welcomed “back” to Europe

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as members of a common civilization artificially separated for three generations by fanatics, ideologues, and the real power of the Soviets. The “Europe” to which they returned was, however, not a single or stable identity, particularly following the phase of deepening and broadening that occurred in the EU in the 1980s with the accession of the new democracies of southern Europe. Intellectuals and political figures of the newly liberated states of CEE eager to turn their back on socialized government saw the EU as the antithesis or inverted image of the Soviet Union. While the USSR was understood to have trampled on individual rights and freedoms, the EU understood its own mission as their protection, offering the reincorporation of Europeans divided from one another into a larger European family. While the USSR sought territorial security for itself and imposed its own national imperative on reluctant “border” states, the EU operated through a process of uncoerced accretion, growing through negotiation and persuasion, as elites and masses came to see membership as an indispensable good. While the USSR saw itself as the other systemic “option” in the world, in stark and superior contrast to what it considered the immoral mess of anomic, individualist America, the EU represented a path to a world of abundance, wealth, and leisure that they glimpsed on their academic visits, international travels, and through the virtual voyages enabled by television. Just as importantly, the EU seemed to offer a solution to the problems of governance. While by the late 1980s many members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had come to the conclusion that the USSR needed radical reconstruction, Eurocrats in Brussels were constructing a vision of a continent-wide zone of prosperity and progress at the heart of which were policies and institutions focused on building an efficient integrated economy (Lisbon), expanding membership (enlargement), and ensuring redistribution (cohesion and regions and border policies). Not surprisingly, East European elites and a substantial part of the broader population rushed to “candidate” status, seeing in the EU a new guarantor of social justice in our time. For many in CEE the post-1989 era marked this “return to Europe” after a forty-year period of “interrupted’’ and/or distorted development, but it involved not only the creation of new institutions, procedures, and programs, but also the transformation of the interpretive frameworks by which the citizens of CEE were asked to see and participate in the world. Joining Europe presented the problem of what to do with existing institutions, norms, and practices. Countries were challenged to declare allegiances and take sides in

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the competition between worldviews as they transformed their institutions and reinvented themselves. Some people left the discourse communities that had sustained them for thirty or forty years and joined others; some chose to remain faithful to old ones so long as they could, fearing, or simply lacking the energy, to begin the process of change; others experienced the changes as trauma. Joining the new required the acquisition of new languages of expertise and new technical skills of writing, speaking, and performing. Individuals were asked to imagine themselves as new kinds of actors who valued objects and others in new ways. The task was one in which long-held conceptions of the rights, responsibilities, and norms that governed the constitution of the self and the social were reworked and new regimes of social justice and governance had to be created. This existential transition was particularly vivid and dramatic in the academy, especially in the social sciences. In the first decade after 1945, most communist parties in CEE relied more on journalists than they did on social scientists for both empirical accounts and circumspect criticism of the policies they sponsored.9 After 1956, however, and at different rates in different countries, the social sciences grew as quasi-autonomous sites for the investigation and discussion of society and culture. Consequently, social-scientific knowledge became a potential asset to the party’s prestige and image, depending on the issue under discussion. Not everyone in the academy joined the party and by no means everyone accepted this injunction. In some cases, scholars accepted positions only on the condition that they did not have to join or serve the party. Throughout academia under state socialism there were relative degrees of autonomy under party control and complex ways of responding to the forms of weak and strong pressure brought to bear to serve the party. Indeed, many histories remain to be written about the ways in which intellectuals and institutions were able to articulate an understanding of the reality and limits of actually existing socialism. Scholars thus came to occupy an ambiguous third position: separate from the interests of the party and the political leadership, but also apart from the object of their scientific interest, society. The individual parties dealt with this ambiguity in different ways; in Czechoslovakia after 1968 and in Bulgaria, scholars were closely supervised. The processes of education and employment were saturated with the injunction that scholars served the party, and loyal academics were rewarded with privileges and perks. In Poland, Hungary, and Yugoslavia, by contrast, by the 1970s many social scientists were able to

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dedicate themselves to research without substantial meddling by the party, even concerning relatively controversial subjects. Everywhere, though, the problems of a sponsored, supervised, and monitored research sphere limited inquiry. In the most egregious cases, theories could be pronounced true with only the flimsiest of empirical evidence, and empirical investigation was, at times, “adjusted” to produce results that would confirm the opinion of party officials. Anyone who sought to construct a picture of contemporary reality by studying it empirically risked discovering something that would be inconvenient to the party. In areas where independent social science research was less problematical, researchers still faced the enormous challenges of working with circumscribed access to the findings and methodological and technical developments of the broader research community, and of integrating a sanctioned epistemology into their theoretical framework. The ideological supervision of thought in state socialist societies certainly created serious distortions in both the forms and practices of knowledge production. Social science research generally needed to be both politically correct and useful; ethnographers were to describe the cultural practices of ethnicized nationalities, historians were to explain the continuities in national economies, geographers were to investigate the distributions of wealth in the countryside, and economists and sociologists mapped out concrete plans for economic and social development. Of course, serious research institutes were established and continued their work throughout this period, samizdat “critical” studies circulated, and in some national academies (perhaps most notably in Poland and Hungary) there was a greater level of independence and exposure to the “outside” worlds of science. As one well-known contemporary Polish scholar has commented: I also realize that Warsaw and Krakow were different than “lesser” institutions, more bulldozed over by the party. And, finally, the Catholic University in Lublin, the only independent university from Berlin to Vladivostok, as someone remarked. Good philosophy—both the tradition of Polish logical positivism and phenomenology. Wojtyla was a professor. . . . I did a fiveyear program in philosophy in Krakow [and] did not have single class in Marxism-Leninism. Of course, there were some professors who employed various Marxist “frames,” usually poorly and we did not take them seriously. (Personal communication 2008)

Even in some of the more “closed” national academies, such as Bulgaria and Romania, socialist fraternalism guaranteed the opportunity for a regular flow

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of academics among the CMEA countries, which—in principle if not always in practice—permitted a secondary market in ideas. How these exchanges worked, how ideas traveled, and how social science adapted to the complex forces of transculturation and reference remains a fascinating, yet underdeveloped arena of research. In several countries the nature of thought about society underwent significant transformation in the years preceding the collapse of the Soviet Union. After 1989, when political power no longer promoted and justified itself through a culturewide project of ideological identification and official versions of Marxism had largely lost whatever purchase they once had, ideas developed in resistance found new avenues of expression. For many intellectuals, the return was marked by a newfound legitimacy for the liberal theories of individual rights or critical (Western) Marxism they had encountered through underground channels, as well as appreciation for the benefits of neoliberal capitalism. Hayek’s account of centralized state power leading to the road to serfdom, for example, which was received “like fresh water” (personal communication) in clandestine seminars under state socialism, informed the decisions of many liberal and neoliberal reformers in CEE after 1989. In the postsocialist period these discourses had a second coming throughout CEE, this time in the mediated form of neoliberal reform and its institutions, and the dogged persistence of Milton Friedman and his cohort and students. In the hands of CEE reformers, the Thatcherist spirit of individual responsibility (“pull yourself up by your own bootstraps”) and the belief that individuals—not society—were the primary actors in shaping economic futures (“there is no such thing as society”) became radical tools for weakening the claims on political life of all forms of collectivism. Scholarly investigations of a range of sites, from the collective and private agricultural units described by Mieke Meurs (1991, 2001), to the factory floors described by Michael Burawoy (1985, 1992) and Elizabeth Dunn (2004), to the highest circles of the intelligentsia studied by Michael Kennedy (1992a, 1992b), pointed to the emergence of new discourses that sought to shape individual conduct without reference to the priorities and requirements of larger collectivities. Accompanying these new discourses was a tidal wave of legal and bureaucratic reforms that changed the landscape of governance in CEE in the 1990s. Most of the reforms were designed by politicians, bureaucrats, and intellectuals, decisively influenced by this rediscovered and reinvigorated sphere of liberal thought. Naomi Klein (2007, 6–7) refers to

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Milton Friedman’s commitment to such forms of institutional transformation to overcome the tyranny of the status quo in which “only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function; to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.” Believing that any new administration had only six to nine months to implement radical reform, Friedman was convinced that there was a need to prepare plans in advance and to implement them swiftly and fully through shock tactics and technocratic power. In practice, reforms often took the form of projects designed abroad without fixed goals or metrics, implemented by foreign experts, and demanding further rounds of shock therapy as prior rounds failed to stimulate the patient sufficiently or in the right manner. These reforms tended to privilege one set of values over another (market-oriented over social democratic; the economic efficiency of private over collective ownership; individual compensation over social wages; international investment over national capital formation). Post1989 “projectification” thus arrived in many parts of the region full-blown, already marked with fixed understandings of history and agency, with projects that sought to quickly dismantle preexisting institutions and conceptions of social justice in favor of neoliberal ones (Swain 2002). Elsewhere, such as in Romania and Bulgaria, its arrival was delayed or intermittent, and in countries such as Serbia, Ukraine, and Belarus it might not have yet arrived as anything more than a surface veneer. Where it did take hold, it shared a kind of absolute historical certainty about the recent past: collective economies were inefficient, the same technologies that spawned the space race were now lagging, and the citizen-subject of reform was not yet democratic and very likely to be “corrupt.” By contrast, the rapid and forced replacement of classical political economy by neoclassical economy was taken as a given, predicated as it was on the vitality of individualized property relations, on the truth of the self-satisfying economic actor, and the collective advantage of state-stimulated wealth creation. The social sciences were both the agents of this discursive transformation and one of the objects at stake in its success. As Hsu (2007, 1) has pointed out, “From a social science perspective, [the decline of socialism] can be seen as a tale of massive de-institutionalization . . . of the wholesale retreat of the state from that active role and the concomitant dismantling of the structural

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institutions and moral underpinnings of society.” Such forms of de-institutionalization also involved the relocation of discourses from West to East as the state ceased to limit and control the flow of ideas. These new ways of valuing persons and envisioning appropriate forms of conduct under new circumstances required new instruments for seeing social life. In this process, socialist-collectivist values and norms were replaced to differing degrees and at different rates by Western liberal and neoliberal forms of individualism and their associated values. The processes and pathways by which these ideas were incorporated into everyday life was never straightforward, mediated as they were by other structures of feeling and discourses of value; religious, ethnic, nationalistic, and the vital but poorly articulated discourses built on everyday survival strategies—“networkism,” the low-key ideology of informality, and what is often captured in official and academic writings by “corruption.” From the latest computerized technologies for public opinion research to new forms of accounting and auditing, new types of social-scientific expertise rose to prominence quickly. In Poland and Hungary, survey research was well developed before 1989. In Bulgaria anthropological and sociological surveys were the official currency of many research institutes, underwriting salaries and research costs from regular and long-term commissions by state ministries. But, after 1989, the demand for these techniques expanded exponentially, offering answers to new questions, displacing old experts with new ones, “old knowledge” with “new.” After 1989, a process began by which researchers, scholars, and students were forced to adapt to the arrival of newly valued practices for the creation of knowledge and what counted as useful knowledge. Reactions to this arrival depended on many factors, from the personal circumstances of the researcher to the needs of politicians and political parties for a certain kind of information that could be fed into public relations material and other kinds of propaganda. The consequences of this process filtered their way down to shape university departments and faculties, the staffing and organization of government ministries, and the curriculum taught in classrooms, especially in conditions of chronic underfunding (Pickles and Mikhova 1998). In sum, the end of state socialism opened CEE to the phenomenon of what some scholars have referred to as the knowledge industries. Knowledge, gained via reliable social-scientific empirical and analytical methods, became an invaluable tool for companies and governments, it became embedded in the emerging regime of accumulation and the corresponding structures of

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consumption on which it increasingly depended. The need for new markets, desires, and opinions in the newly defined capitalist democracies meant that social science found a new lease on life, although not necessarily in ways that benefited those who had become social scientists in the old system. In some cases, “the old guard” survived these changes quite well. For many younger scholars, the problem was that their teachers survived them too well, blocking innovation and capturing institutional resources for projects and international travel. All scholars faced the challenge of reinventing themselves and their scholarship to a greater or lesser degree. For some, the 1970s and 1980s had already been periods of intense methodological struggle, influenced as they were by the Methodenstreiten in Western sociology and social sciences. For others, the challenges of reinvention were much greater. Where access to international journals, books, and scholars was more limited (such as in Romania and Bulgaria), the period after 1989 posed many more challenges than it did for those where a freer flow of ideas, texts, and individuals had occurred earlier (Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary). Two decades after 1989, and despite the enormous injections of EU funds to support collaborative research, scholars in Eastern Europe are still today limited by lack of support for basic research, underfunding for basic infrastructure, fieldwork expenses, and teaching and training technologies. National libraries have remained meticulous collectors of some state documents and research reports, but most have limited budgets that restrict access to international publications and encourage black-market economies in national information and data. Those who are committed to their research must either underwrite its costs from their family income, from second and third jobs, or they must take on contract research for state, private, or international research groups. The result has been that many sociologists offer their skills to TV networks and newspapers to conduct market research as well as public opinion surveys; geographers are hired to perform land-use studies and cadastral surveys for rural governments and private developers; and political scientists help governmental agencies, politicians, and political parties to shape their image and message. As a consequence, while the “knowledge sector” has boomed as institutional reform has led to increased demands for information, more basic and nontradable social sciences have been marginalized. We want to note briefly three other consequences of the transformation of the conditions under which social science discourse was produced. First, the

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rapid adoption of neoliberalism, liberal discourses of civil society, democracy, and market capitalism elided the real complexities of institutional thought and action that were at work in the reaction to Stalinism (in both West and East Europe). In some Cold War academies and universities, critical Marxism, phenomenology, and positivism were studied. In most locations they were marginalized or forbidden altogether. But the academies and universities nonetheless provided some space for the training and expression of critical thinkers of real importance. For Bradatan: The originality of thinkers such as Slavoj Zizek, Julia Kristeva, Tzvetan Todorov, Jan Patočka, Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran or Leszek Kolakowski, who have at different times made a significant contribution to the shaping of the Western intellectual discourse, is somehow taken for granted, and the character of the world they have come from is passed over in silence. It is as though these people come from nowhere—out of nothing. No significant attention is being paid to their complex backgrounds, to the specificity of their cultural origins, to the unique blend of intellectual challenges and ethical concerns that shaped their thinking, strengthened their personalities and, in the end, made them who they are. (2008, n.p.)

The scripting of state socialism as an “end” and postsocialism as a “return,” with the corollary assumptions of systemic bankruptcy, inefficiency, and corruption, seems to have erased any popular desire for complex readings of the conjuncture of state socialism at particular periods in time, or of the equally conjunctural shifts of 1989. If we are to better understand the ways in which institutions, values, and norms shape particular understandings and practices of social justice, and how they take hold and change, we need to understand much more about these specific contexts in which such thinkers and ideas were able to emerge and take hold (or be rejected). The trope of “postsocialism” may itself contribute to an impression that there is now nothing interesting to know about European societies under socialism between the late 1940s and the late 1980s beyond the basic fact of unfreedom. Historically informed critical thought is, of course, a central element of much research and writing on the region, but it must compete with a growing confidence in positivist logics that consign authors, texts, and ideas to the “dustbin of history” having been discredited by their association with a vanquished regime. Like introductory chemistry texts and modernist development theory, such history is rewritten as the natural development from

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ignorance to enlightenment, from unfreedom to freedom. The consequences for the kinds of research questions we ask and the types of archives we investigate and develop are enormous. Second, besides the elision of important strands of critical philosophical thought there has emerged what could be called the repoliticization of knowledge. The incorporation of the social sciences into national information markets of democratic societies has seen the rise of institutes, departments, and think tanks whose explicit aim is to articulate and promote a particular point of view regarding subjects of government interest. This scholarship is driven by the need of groups to continuously make certain arguments both for public and government consumption and to keep on the table powerful narratives that will resonate emotionally with policymakers and the public. While the situation in CEE has in no way reached the point seen in the United States, where public debate is sculpted by members of think tanks on both Left and Right who saturate the airwaves, editorial pages, and blogosphere, there are signs that this development is in its early stages in CEE. Third, if one wave of postsocialist social science in CEE has been largely instrumental in its approach and more contractual in outlook, a second simultaneous wave is remarkable for the ways it has provided outlets for the articulation of minority and dissenting voices from the region. Perhaps more than any other academic field, it has been the social sciences—particularly anthropology, sociology, and area studies traditions, often in conjunction with nongovernment organizations, ethnic and minority studies centers, and institutes for the study of the effects of transition on poverty and violence— that have focused attention most directly on the contemporary consequences for social justice and political harmony of the complex imperial, confessional, and linguistic histories and struggles across the region. For such groups, these diverse histories have enormous consequences for the norms of social life and forms of social justice emerging in postsocialist countries.

Social Science and the Government of Postsocialism We have suggested that historicizing the practice of social-scientific knowledge is crucial for any assessment of what “social justice” means in CEE today. Now, we turn to some of the specific ways in which the social sciences mobilize particular understandings that, in turn, entrain discrete, historically specific regimes of governance and bio-politics. In doing so, we illustrate some

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of the ways in which analyses of social justice might link together the institutional regimes that structure patterns of “justice” in a particular society with the knowledge-producing institutions that define the “social.” This involves not only thinking about the situations of institutions and researchers in the countries of CEE during successive phases of political and social reform, but also thinking about the historical nature of the practices understood to be scientific and the ways in which the terrain of the social has been reorganized. Under state socialism, social-scientific research was not primarily an abstract exercise in knowledge production; each method also assumed a practice of governance. In Poland in the 1970s, for example, the authorities permitted scholars their little zone of freedom to research and write. These writings would be censored, sometimes heavily, sometimes lightly, but little formal attention would be paid to them. The practice of governance was one in which partial zones of free inquiry and partially free inquiry functioned in similar ways to the “permitted” private use of collective farm land and equipment; they were necessary forms of state accommodation to sustain authoritarian structures of governance in the face of popular resistance. Knowledge was also produced to guide the formation of policy by authorized agencies. Social-scientific knowledge took its place as one segment of an arc of transmission and transformation, moving from problem identification to programmatic amelioration. Ministries of agriculture commissioned ethnographic studies of a village or region; interior ministries sponsored largescale sociological surveys gathered by thousands of amateur and volunteer researchers, and ministries of health-sponsored epidemiological studies. The studies themselves had a range of fates, from the oblivion of a bottom drawer in a hostile bureaucrat’s office to the socialist equivalent of the McLuhan’s fifteen minutes of fame. While the general manner in which state and academy were articulated in most countries under state socialism is relatively clear, there remains a great deal of work to be done on the specific ways in which the social sciences actually functioned in individual countries and at different times under state socialist regimes. In particular, there is a pressing need to reconsider the all-too-hegemonic (and often ideologically informed) reading of state socialist academies as transmission belts of party power. As we indicated in the previous section, it is crucial to recognize that there were different timings of reform and levels of engagement with and openness to “outside” scientific traditions, and there was always leakage. Moreover, many academics were

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driven—as they are in the West—by an unfettered spirit to know. It was also the case that, as with the discursive politics of environmental health and well-being, state institutions were always conflicted, caught in the paradox of needing to legitimize state practices by mobilizing political discourses of clean environment, conservation, or, in this case, value-free science. These were readily available state-sanctioned discourses, but they were also available to be appropriated as resources and opportunities for alternative conceptions of social and ecological justice in the name of the nation, people, and society (Pavlinek and Pickles 2000). In many ways, the challenge of undertaking such histories of the present and the recent past is the inverse of the challenge posed by a study of the social sciences under state socialism. The history of the social sciences in most countries under state socialism has been one-sidedly rendered as one in which the academies and universities worked as transmission belts of party power. The broader conceptual and scientific goals of the academy and the counterhegemonic practices of individual scientists are undertheorized. Yet after 1989, the rise to prominence of new forms of empirical science has occurred so rapidly and with the moral weight of Western (largely Anglo-American) social science that little attention was given to the institutional and ideological commitments the new epistemologies and methodologies brought with them.10 Our goal here is, thus, both ontological and genealogical. We insist that all empirical sciences must also understand themselves in terms of the regional ontology (or in Law’s terms, a “hinterland”) within which their categories and practices come to be defined in specific and limited ways. This is always a thoroughly historical ontology shaped by the concrete practices of distanciation, thematization, abstraction, and formalization that emerge at specific times and places (Husserl 1931).11 Through these practices, the “social” achieves determinate content and meaning. That such regional ontological work is historical also means for us that it has to be—as Michel Foucault argued—genealogical, focused on a parallel analysis of the specific institutions, discourses, and practices that shape the process of meaning making. While a full discussion of these practices and contexts of meaning making is far beyond the scope of this essay, we want to at least briefly mention one especially fertile strand of this critical thought. Bruno Latour, his collaborators, and their students make the point that there is always a significant divergence between what scientists believed they were doing and what

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they were actually doing. Modern science is, in their view, not to be thought of as an ever-more thorough knowledge of nature’s secrets, but as the evermore sophisticated invention of material practices that produced knowledge, which gets treated by certain social institutions as scientific truth. In this way, critical approaches (including science studies) have chipped away at the aura of heroic science to reveal not simply the importance of accident, ego, and chance, but the thoroughly social and “extrascientific” bases for what we take to be “pure” research. In Eastern Europe, these critical approaches included the debates over scientific method and positivism (Kuhn, Popper, Lakatos, Feyerabend), new-left Marxism, feminism, and to a lesser extent poststructuralism. Positivism, phenomenology, and critical Marxism in particular were all tools against primitive Marxism, as they were also in Anglo-American scholarship in the 1970s and early 1980s. Perhaps surprisingly, given the deep historical valuation of scientific and technological knowledge and expertise throughout the region, science studies found only limited purchase in these critical approaches. In Western Europe and the United States, writers in the field of science studies argued that the history of science was not explainable by recourse to stories about how a solitary genius discovered the laws by which nature operated, nor that the contemporary practice of science was understandable with reference to scientists’ own stories about the progressive peeling back of the secrets of nature. Instead, science was itself to be the object of inquiry and its products (“scientific knowledge” and its truth claims about the world) were to be interrogated in terms of the social, institutional, economic, political, and geographical conditions of their emergence and use. In this tradition, researchers approached scientists and engineers in the same way that an anthropologist approached a distant culture by becoming observers of dayto-day practices. They learned their language, followed their actions, and attended to their rituals, believing that what scientists actually did was as important as what they said they did. Science produced truth claims through the layering of citation upon citation, the transcription of one form of data to another, and the gradual embedding of their claims in ever-broader systems of annotation, concept formation, and analysis. In these practices, actors were not to be conceived apart from the networks that enabled and sustained their ideas, values, and assumptions. For John Law (2004) this presents a dual challenge. First, the knowledge created by aggregating social-scientific observations has no intrinsic claim to

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being more valuable than knowledge arrived at in other ways through other engagements with the world. Second, the social scientist faces the methodological challenge created by the fact that the social world consists of too many already constituted phenomena. Unlike physics or bacteriology where the objects of study lend themselves more readily to specific theoretical and practical purposes, only a small subset of social scientists have “laboratories,” demarcated space where technical means are concentrated and intensive transformations and translations of material objects take place. Most social scientists work with objects in locations where meaning is already rich: playgrounds, courtrooms, cubicles, boardrooms, and so on. For many, social scientists appear as fishermen casting nets. But, Law suggests, only a small part of the world consists of fish. It is not that not-fish phenomena are simply too small or too big to be caught in these nets; it is that they are phenomena wholly adjacent to the world of fish, nets, and oceans. Or, as Law puts it, “The world is not to be understood in general by adopting a methodological version of auditing. Regularization and standardization are incredibly powerful tools but they set limits. Indeed, that is part of their (double-edged) power. And they set even firmer limits when they try to orchestrate themselves hegemonically into purported coherence” (2004, 6). That is, the world is not a place where singular, definite, knowable things happen, but rather a “generative flux of forces and relations that work to produce particular realities” (Law 2004, 7). It is to this notion of the social as a complex assemblage of generative fluxes that we now turn to ask: What would a postsocialist social science look like that was not captured by logics and methodologies of social auditing, but rather was more directly attentive to the fluxes of forces and relations that generate particular realities?

Grappling with the Terrains of Social Justice The topics collected in this volume (poverty, corruption, gender) mark out some of the more important contemporary terrains where notions of social justice are being reworked, remaking the “social” and defining “justice” in new and not yet fully determined ways. The reform economies of postsocialism are, in this sense, crucibles for forging new configurations of the social and what constitutes justice. In this final section, we gesture toward the problem of how an understanding of the generative context within which empirical research operates is shaping particular notions of the social, and how it

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is institutionalizing discrete, socially and geographically bounded forms of justice on the one hand, and remaking the social sciences across the region on the other. We point, first, to the contingency of the modernities underway in the region; while we recognize the significance of a historical narration that sees the region as having undergone a similar social and political trajectory since 1945, we insist that postsocialist processes and transformations are remarkable for their multiplicity. Second, we believe that key topics like those examined in this volume can be understood like any important scientific concept, in terms of the constellation of economic, social, and political forces that enable it to exist as a neat, natural object. Law’s concept of a “hinterland” to denote what makes a concept or practice obvious or commonsensical is useful if we are to pursue justice as a question into the interstices of everyday life. Third, we believe it is important to state that each topic exceeds its framing; it always leaks from the field within which particular claims for social justice are defined. This leakage stems, in part, from the confusion of categories and the need to carry out what Deleuze and Guatarri called the task of subtraction, the stepping back from what we often take to be the key issue, concept, term—poverty, well-being, freedom, and so on—to interrogate the multitude of constitutive practices in the place of which the term stands. And fourth, we point to the need to grapple with what is new and emergent in CEE, particularly with the new forms of social action and mobilization working to frame different conceptions of justice and the self.

Contingent Modernities Our first methodological principle is derived from the historicizing of knowledge production discussed above and is one that has long been accepted in postsocialist studies. The replacement of sovietology with transitology in the 1990s and the subsequent reintroduction of modernist and developmental discourses in the neoliberal economies and polities of Eastern Europe have been paralleled in the social sciences by a bifurcation of intellectual projects. On the one hand, neoliberalism, particularly in postsocialist societies, has always been easily appropriated to development logics that presuppose or instantiate a monolithic notion of modernity (“the road to freedom”). Civil society, democratization, and market economies were all articulated after 1989 as the natural and often unproblematic goals of a normal society, the object of return, the corrective to erroneous and misguided paths taken. However,

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such views fail to account for the multiplicity of concrete social formations and actually occurring transitions already to be found across CEE. They also fail to address the highly contingent nature of each of the specific outcomes, bound as they are to political alliances and economic circumstances. The danger of such elisions is that historically contingent social formations are rendered as natural forms to be emplaced through technical means, rather than built through social mobilization and democratic negotiation. Known outcomes presuppose known techniques, and postsocialism becomes what Guy Standing (2002) has called the “first technocratic” revolution. In practice, postsocialism has always generated a diversity of social forms out of a complex articulation of historically contingent circumstances, path dependent legacies, and contested and negotiated social forces. Such forms include what Greskovits (2008) has termed the captured state, flexible developmental state, and cornered state, what Drahokoupil (2008) has termed for the Czech Republic the Klausian Welfare National State and Porterian Workfare Postnational Regime, and what Hedlund (2009) and Rosefielde (2009) have called the Muscovite Russian transition and the Muscovite state form. There is, in other words, a need for a social science that is attentive to the contingency of modernity and the multiple and diverse forms such modernities can take. Concepts of social justice are at the heart of these processes and particular issues (poverty, corruption, and gender) are exemplary sites for thinking through the ways in which knowledge, coloniality, and power are articulated in concrete settings. How, for example, do modernities frame transactional norms, how are systems of equivalence assessed and how are formal systems of value (money) moderated and structured by social and institutional norms and practices? How do these norms get framed or not framed in terms such as “fair,” “cultural,” “traditional,” or “corrupt”?

Hinterland and Context Like any social science concept, words like “corruption” or “poverty” are far from neutral, clinical terms. Defined as the absence of wealth, poverty may be measured in scalar terms against a particular social distribution of resources (such as GDP per capita) or in more pragmatic terms as the level of access to opportunity structures (for example, access to a basic basket of goods or to health care). In this natural attitude, poverty is thus an economic object that can be assessed, measured, and influenced. But these assessments,

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measurements, and policies are only possible as a result of the ways in which a particular given meaning is already stabilized socially and politically through its location in a complex assemblage of prior relations and practices—the “hinterland” of a concept. Thus, poverty “exists” as a meaningful category of analysis and public policy because of a world of routinized, regularized, known facts of sufficiency and abundance. International institutions have systematically devised instruments to provide such clear social, historical, and geographical measures of differential levels of deprivation and their consequences, particularly through indicators such as those devised to monitor relative levels of freedom (Freedom House), democracy (democratization indices); poverty (UNDP Poverty); and the ease of doing business (World Bank Doing Business indices). To these policy indicators, much social science has added richer more articulated surveys and accounts of poverty effects and consequences, as Iván Szelényi has demonstrated with such care in this volume and elsewhere (Szelényi 2001; Emigh and Szelényi 2001). To these analyses, Szelényi, Ledeneva, Regulska, and others have also argued, we need to add a relational analysis, in which concepts such as poverty, corruption, and gender are analyzed in more radically contingent ways (see Grossberg 2007). This requires delving into the contexts within which the determinative meanings are generated in the first place. Poverty, corruption, and social justice constitute a particularly complex assemblage to articulate in this way, tied as they are to specific notions of democracy, the popular, and regimes of accumulation with their corresponding modes of social regulation and norms of consumption. Thus, what constituted social justice in Western Europe under postwar Fordism was very different than under post-Fordism. Similarly, what constitutes social justice under postsocialism is not easily assumed to be the same as that in contemporary post-Fordist post-welfare-state countries being pushed to align with the priorities of the EU’s Lisbon agenda. Locating “poverty” in this way, against a backdrop of institutional practices and concepts that frame its meaning, does not mean that people are not poor and do not suffer from the violent injustice of their deprivation, or that people’s self-reporting is in some way invalid or peripheral, or that the biological condition of their existence is not open to a variety of important and useful quantitative measurements. It means that concepts such as poverty and corruption have their own histories, technics, and metrics that can also be unpacked to shed light on the ways in which they shape specific regimes of governance.

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An excellent example of this type of contextual analysis is Elizabeth Dunn’s work on postsocialist Poland and more recently on botulism and food canning in postsoviet Georgia. She demonstrates how an understanding of governmentality and social justice can be located at the level of concrete everyday practices. By focusing on the canning, regulation, and norming of food under state socialism, she reveals the construction of a technosphere within which industrial agriculture collectivized Soviet citizens and guaranteed quality canned food across the empire. Dunn is particularly effective in pointing to the significance of state regulation in extending the imperial reach of the Soviet Union and its real consequences for social well-being and the management of poverty. The collapse after 1989 of this imperial system of industrial food production and its coordinated institutions of monitoring and guarantee caused untold hardships to people for whom canned factory food meant both assurance of food safety and region-wide access to commodities such as Bulgarian tomatoes, Georgian green peppers, and Hungarian wines. In her work on Poland, Dunn shows how the subsequent construction of a new technosphere through the expansion of Western agribusiness into Poland enabled by the extension of EU regulatory institutions has resulted in a rapid decline in cases of botulism as new safety norms and institutions were introduced. By contrast, in Georgia the collapse of the Soviet technosphere of norms, regulations, and controls, compounded by civil war in Georgia and continued war in Chechnya to the north, has led to chronic collapse of collectivized production, economic involution, widespread impoverishment of the population, and the emergence of local adaptive mechanisms. Moreover, unable to afford the smuggled canned food from Turkey and neighboring states and without access to agricultural land or gardens, poor urban residents have adopted industrial canning practices but without health and safety inspectorates to regulate and with little experience of canning among an urbanized and highly proletarianized population. State norms have collapsed, industrial food production has shut down, and uninformed local responses have resulted in the widespread adoption of dangerous food treatments. Georgia is now distinguished as having the world’s largest incidence of botulism. Poverty is here an embodied effect of institutional collapse, economic involution, and consequent dislocation of norms and practices.

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Subtraction, or Keeping Concepts Complex In describing the commodity, Marx explained the importance of recognizing the ways in which concepts are fetishized. The commodity fetish was the tendency to treat a commodity in its object-form (the cotton, the coat, the loaf of bread). The fetish character of the commodity was thus understood in terms of fixed and natural characteristics; the complex nature of the commodity as a site of social relations under a particular technological regime was elided. To avoid the fetishization of the category Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri (1987, 6) suggested the value of the methodological principle of “subtraction” (n-1): “It is not enough,” they argued, “to say: ‘long live the multiple.’ . . . The multiple must be made, not by always adding a higher dimension, but rather in the simplest ways, by dint of sobriety, with the number of dimensions one already has available—always n - 1. Subtract the unique from the multiplicity to be constituted; write at n - 1 dimensions.” Through the process of subtraction the multiplicity hidden by the fetishized object can be elaborated as the multiplicity of forms and relations that constitute an identifiable assemblage. Here Ockham’s razor is extended; things should be as simple as possible, but not simpler. Each of the terms—poverty, corruption, and gender—exemplifies the difficulties these kinds of generalizations pose. Subtracting—stepping down a level from the simplicity of a unitary category or the concept—may provide a methodological tool to allow researchers to focus on complex, heterogeneous, and diverse agendas, interests, discourses, practices, and institutions. For example, social scientists and commentators commonly refer to the mass media as a powerful actor in modern societies, shaping opinions and agendas, providing vocabularies of affect and image that determine political and cultural landscapes. Yet we would argue that the term “mass media” is in an important sense a holdover from an earlier moment in the history of sociology, and that it goes too far in implying that media constitutes its own system with its own powers. In twentieth-century scholarship and public discourse, moreover, the study of mass media has too often been reduced to the study of media effects, as if there was a simple relationship between behavior and information. But consider the complexity of those institutions and practices that are awkwardly gathered under the heading “mass media.” This includes the motives of individuals behind the construction of media representations; the technical work that constitutes transmissions as objects, produced at the point of mutual invention of

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man and machine; the spreadsheets of networks’ accountants that judge what is possible at a given time for a given market in a given place; the arts and drama industries that operate on a taken-for-granted idea of how people’s emotions are to be realized and manipulated in scripts and camera shots; the existence of literary audiences and evolving subcultures of reader-consumers; the processes by which “creative” individuals are identified and brought to understand themselves as being good at “expression” who then go on to supply the “talent” in advertising firms, film-production companies, regional playhouses, drama schools, magazines; the ways that political messages are produced in the interaction of politicians’ interests and a given media technology; visions of elemental human needs that organize the association of a commodity with a meaning; and anxieties about income that drive creative workers into unions that try for the best deal within the entertainment industry. Making out of all this something unitary and unified with a power to determine the behavior of “masses” is in our view an unfortunate pursuit of economy and elegance. Media are themselves wrapped up in processes of government, and to that extent, they are specific, contingent, and local. More useful, perhaps, is to understand media as part of the wider social horizon of communication rather than simply as messages that can be dissected for their semiotic “load.” Studying media in this way involves moving beyond the boundaries of the social sciences and centering scholarly practices on the ethical dimensions of the world-making capacity of communications processes. As Wolfe has argued (2005), this tendency to understand media as a bounded subsystem has hampered our understanding of the history and development of communist societies. We have thought and continue to think in terms of the unhelpful binary of closed and open, which has the unfortunate effect of reducing all contexts of mediated communication to their roles in the official political sphere. It overlooks the important role of samizdat, other dissident literatures, movements for ecological defense, women’s movements, and movements for the defense of ethnic rights. Furthermore, we are well aware that the situation on the ground in the Eastern-bloc countries was far from homogeneous; political parties and governments treated journalists, television producers, and novelists differently, both across the region and over time. Here, the task is not to assume too quickly a seismic shift in the horizon of communications. Certainly, the postsocialist continuation of these projects took place via the creation of new legal and supervisory structures, as well

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as the new market conditions that determined the survival of many, but not all, newspapers, radio, and television networks. But more importantly, these projects were built on the same foundations that were operating in 1989. If we take inspiration from Law, we would think more broadly about how Eastern European media systems are struggling with a diverse set of inheritances in which liberal, nationalist, and socialist (and other) conceptions of the citizensubject and the self are being contested in a proliferating landscape of programs, formats, and genres. On the one hand, we might want to know how these media forms are being shaped in situations in which public spheres are virtually nonexistent (Belarus), weak but emerging (Ukraine), developed but fragile (Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia), or vigorous (Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovenia).

Engaging the Emergent If there ever was a “meta-hinterland” for the study of postsocialism, it must be civil society and its commitments. These commitments are by now widely known: the liberal juridical individual; a politics of representative democracy; a deregulated (versus social welfare) understanding of liberal capitalism; and a whole panoply of corresponding concepts and institutions (the efficiency of individual actors over collective action, the rationality of private versus socialized property regimes, the wisdom of the enabling versus the managerial state, and the privileging of international versus local actors and institutions in decision making). Of course, many scholars of postsocialism do not subscribe to these commitments, and many have challenged them, particularly by privileging the local and concrete path dependent nature of social action. But, it remains one of the great paradoxes of contemporary social science that, at the very moment that disorganized capitalism and the deregulated state have become the norm in some parts of Central and Eastern Europe and left-wing socialist parties have been periodically returned to power in some countries (for example, Slovakia, Hungary, and Bulgaria), postsocialist social sciences seem to have focused much of their attention on such singular and unitary conceptions as the political state, the formal economy, and the liberal subject. As each of these categories is decentered in a political economy of global capitalism, they remain surprisingly stable and centered in social science analyses. On the ground, however, far from converging on a single form, conceptions of the “social” and what counts as “justice” are proliferating at dizzying speed.

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Former collective institutions and imaginations are reframed along democratic, consumerist, and/or individual trajectories (among others). The deregulated state enables new power constellations to emerge and deepens the scale and pace of uneven geographical and social development. Particularly in the first decade after 1989, the unregulated economy spawned black and gray networks operating in conjunction with shadowy political power to fuel processes of creative destruction, capture the resources of enterprises, and gentrify entire established residential districts. The market enables a conjuncture of former nomenklatura and criminal capital, innovative entrepreneurs in new and old industries, and young professionals in service, information, and finance industries, while systematically undermining the ability of farmers to maintain the increasing cost of inputs and rents and sustain production unless agro-business has invested in reorienting their production to West European markets. Political integration encourages both legal and illegal migration for economic opportunities: Polish workers can relocate to the United Kingdom under EU regulations, while illegal workers are recruited from the Ukraine to take their place. Democratization opens the political space for action while simultaneously removing women from the ballot and parliaments throughout the region. Political and social freedoms fuel a desire for individual expression, but deepen the deprivation of racialized minority groups (especially Roma and Turks). In these various settings, new arrangements of the “social” and “citizenship” are emerging, with competing claims on the state and society and the conceptions of “justice” each implies. It may be too early to say which of these emergent properties is likely to be stabilized to provide the basis for even a national model of social regulation. Even EU attempts to frame a common space of economic and political well-being founded on core rights and concepts of justice failed to prevent or respond to the emergence of racialized demands for historical justice in the Balkans. Far from the possibility of a social science that tracks convergence around “European” principles of justice and rights, it is, perhaps, more likely that the task of the social sciences in the near future will be one that needs relational and conjunctural analyses of these diverse emerging social formations and the notions of rights, identity, and citizenship they each embody. Here the social sciences can learn valuable lessons from the new-new social movements that have grown up in the twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. No longer framed by Cold War politics and logics, these social movements are creatively proliferating political theories and their

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local practices. Throughout Europe, these social movements struggle to create new forms of social mobilization and extend the conceptual terrain within which the social sciences can engage with these new actors and forms of praxis. Be they global justice and European Social Forum actors or nationalist forces mobilized for social defense, these new-new social movements are reworking conceptions of justice and rights to reflect the concrete circumstances of social life and the precarious nature of lives around the globe. Theirs is a response to the challenges of working toward possible democracies-to-come at a time when the guarantees of the state are severely stretched and new forms of governance and institutions have yet to be built. Whether these forms of governance are articulating an ethics for community at a distance, a cosmopolitanism of global citizenship, and corresponding conceptions and practices of social justice or whether they are reconstituting forms of the Westphalian, Muscovite, nationalist, or some other form of the state remains an open question.

Conclusion When he became general secretary of the Communist Party in 1985, Gorbachev realized that the party did not know the society over which it ruled. The task he posed to journalists and intellectuals was to investigate it without preconceptions, without fearing the reactions of party leaders. While his injunction bore meager fruit, his inclination may still be important for those interested in grappling with the always present necessity of “democracy-tocome,” in whatever form that democracy takes, and with whatever kind of just society it envisions and creates.

Notes The authors would like to thank Jan Kubik and Amy Linch for their insightful and helpful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. Their insistence on the need to be more attentive to rich geographies of state socialism and postsocialism has helped clarify large parts of the text. 1.

See Pickles 2008, on the ways in which global models of banking, bond market, and regional development are adapted by local Central and Eastern European institutions and actors as the processes of harmonization and integration go forward.

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2.

See Dean 1999, for an overview of work in a variety of disciplines that share a concern for the discursive practices of governing and government.

3.

Karl Polanyi’s account in The Great Transformation is usefully read here not simply as a work in the history of political economy, but as a description of the upheaval created by a transformation in modes of governance. For a work that shows this evolution of liberal governance in the context of new knowledge practices, see Joyce 2003.

4.

Zygmunt Bauman has explored this theme in a number of recent books. See, for example, Bauman 2002 and 2005.

5.

See Jameson 1998.

6.

See the discussion of Slovenian-Hapsburg relations in Luthar 2008.

7.

For example, in the 1930 election to the Polish Sejm, the Non-party Block for the Cooperation with the Government received 47 percent of the vote (Rothschild 1974, 65). The authors are grateful to Jan Kubik for this observation.

8.

See Williams 1976; Bennett 2005.

9.

See Wolfe 2005, 71–103, on Anatolii Agranovskii in the Soviet Union.

10.

The ways in which these epistemologies and methodologies had (or had not) already entered into and shaped the intellectual landscapes of social science in the region is of crucial importance to their subsequent development. For example, in Poland methodological debates between positivism(s) and various form of antipositivism (including Marxist) were intense and rich, at least after 1956. These debates drew on both Hungarian (Lukacs) and Yugoslav (Praxis school) thinkers that were officially inaccessible. Konrad and Szelényi’s Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power (1979) was almost taboo in official circles, as was Djilas’s works, particularly, The New Class (1957). But, provided scholars debated methodology and did not try to study the surrounding reality critically, the party tended to remain disinterested.

11.

In the social sciences, Husserl and phenomenology have been routinely associated with de-historizing and foundational epistemologies. We read them differently. Phenomenology is not an argument for the naturalness or givenness of concepts or objects, or for a transcendental or transhistorical understanding of essences. It is an argument about the always present need to clarify the ways in which concepts, especially scientific concepts, are constituted in terms of concrete and historical horizons of meaning in terms of which particular objects and relations mean what they mean (see Pickles 1985). This is what we think Law refers to when talking about “hinterland.”

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References Bauman, Zygmunt. 2002. Society Under Siege. London: Polity. ———. 2005. Liquid Life. London: Polity. Bennett, Tony, Lawrence Grossberg, and Meaghan Morris. 2005. New Key Words: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford: Blackwell. Bockmann, Johanna, and Gil Eyal. 2002. “Eastern Europe as a Laboratory for Economic Knowledge: The Transnational Roots of Neoliberalism.” American Journal of Sociology 108 (2): 310–52. Bradatan, Costica. 2008. Call for Papers for “The Unbearable Charm of Frailty. Philosophizing in/on Eastern Europe,” a special issue of Angelaki: The Journal of the Theoretical Humanities (Routledge) 2008. http://www. webpages.ttu.edu/cbradata/Call%20for%20Papers%20(Angelaki).mht Burawoy, Michael. 1985. The Politics of Production: Factory Regimes Under Capitalism and Socialism. London: Verso. Burawoy, Michael, and János Lukács. 1992. The Radiant Past: Ideology and Reality in Hungary’s Road to Capitalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Burchell, Graham, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds. 1991. The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dean, Mitchell. 1999. Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society. London: Sage Publications. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guatarri. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Djilas, Milovan. 1957. The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System. New York: Praeger. Drahokoupil, Jan. 2008. “On the State of the State: The Czech Transformation and the Moment of Convergence in the Visegrad Region.” In State and Society in Postsocialist Economies, edited by J. Pickles, 69–91. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Dunford, Michael. 1998. “Economies in Space and Time: Economic Geographies of Development and Underdevelopment and Historical Geographies of Modernization.” In Modern Europe, Place, Culture, Identity, edited by B. J. Graham, 53–88. London: Arnold. Dunn, Elizabeth. 2004. Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business and the Remaking of Labor. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Emigh, Rebecca Jean, and Iván Szelényi, eds. 2001. Poverty, Ethnicity and Gender in Eastern Europe During the Market Transition. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group. Esteva, Gustavo. “The Society of the Different: An Interview with Gustavo Esteva, 2005.” http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/global/gest_int_3. html#Anchor-Human-49575. Foucault, Michel. 2003. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the College de France 1975–78. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2005. The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the College de France 1981–1982. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2007. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France 1977–1978. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Gramsci, Antonio. 1992. “Americanism and Fordism.” In Prison Notebooks, 279–318. New York: Columbia University Press. Greskovits, Bela. 2008. “Leading Sectors and the Variety of Capitalism in Eastern Europe.” In State and Society in Postsocialist Economies, edited by J. Pickles, 19–46. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Grossberg, Lawrence. 2006. “Does Cultural Studies Have Futures? Should It? (or What’s the Matter with New York?” Cultural Studies 20 (1): 1–32. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2004. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin Press. Hedland, Stefan. 2009. “The Property Rights Hurdle: Reconciling EU and Russian Traditions.” In Globalization and Regionalization in Socialist and Postsocialist Economies: Common Economic Spaces of Europe, edited by J. Pickles, 233–53. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Hsu, Carolyn L. 2007. Creating Market Socialism: How Ordinary People Are Shaping Class and Status in China. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1931. Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Translated by W. R. Boyce Gibson. London: George Allen and Unwin. Jameson, Frederic. 1998. “Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue.” In The Cultures of Globalization: The World-system and the Limits of Modernity, edited by Frederic Jameson and Maseo Miyoshi, 54–80. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Joyce, Patrick. 2003. The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City. London: Verso. Judt, Tony. 2005. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Press. Kennedy, Michael, D. 1992a. “The Alternative in Eastern Europe at Century’s Start: Brzozowski and Machajski on Intellectuals and Socialism.” Theory and Society 21 (5): 735–53. ———. 1992b. “The Intelligentsia in the Constitution of Civil Societies and Post-Communist Regimes in Hungary and Poland.” Theory and Society 21 (1): 29–76. Khaziev, Rustem. 2009. “The ‘Red Bourgeoisie’ in the Urals during the NEP.” In Globalization and Regionalization in Socialist and Post-socialist Economies: Common Economic Spaces of Europe, edited by J. Pickles, 18–39. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Klein, Naomi. 2007. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company. Konrad, George, and Iván Szelényi. 1979. Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power. Translated by Andrew Arato and Richard E. Allen. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Law, John. 2004. After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. London and New York: Routledge. Luthar, Oto, ed. 2008. The Land Between: A History of Slovenia. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Marcuse, Herbert. 1995. Eros and Civilization. Boston: Beacon Press. Meurs, Mieke. 1999. Many Shades of Red: State Policy and Collective Agriculture. Boulder, CO: Rowman and Littlefield. ———. 2001. The Evolution of Agrarian Institutions: A Comparative Study of Post-Socialist Hungary and Bulgaria. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Mitchneck, Beth, and John Pickles. 2008. “Inter-Asian Connections and Post-Collective Economic Lives.” A Report on the SSRC Dubai Workshop, February 21–23. Pavlinek, Petr, and John Pickles. 2000. Environmental Transitions: PostCommunist Transformations and Ecological Defense in Central and Eastern Europe. London and New York: Routledge.

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Peck, Jamie. 2008. “Remaking laissez-faire.” Progress in Human Geography 32 (1): 3–43. Pickles, John. 1985. Phenomenology, Science and Geography: Space and the Human Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2005. “‘New Cartographies’ and the Decolonisation of European Geographies.” Area 37 (4): 355–64. ———. 2006. “Collectivism, Universalism, and Struggles Over Common Property Resources in the ‘New’ Europe.” Social Analysis 50 (3): 178–86. ———, ed. 2009. Globalization and Regionalization in Socialist and Postsocialist Economies: Common Economic Spaces of Europe. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Pickles, John, and Didi Mikhova. 1998. “The Political Economy of Environmental Data in Bulgaria.” In Bulgaria in Transition: Environmental Consequences of Economic and Political Transformation, edited by Krassimira Paskaleva, Philip Shapira, John Pickles, and Boian Koulov, 105–28. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Polanyi, Karl. 2001. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon Press. Rose, Nikolas. 1996. “The Death of the Social? Refiguring the Territory of Government.” Economy and Society 25 (3): 327–56. ———. Powers of Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rosefielde, Steven. 2009. “Contingent Property Rights: The Cost to the EU of Russia’s Accession.” In Globalization and Regionalization in Socialist and Postsocialist Economies: Common Economic Spaces of Europe, edited by John Pickles, 254–66. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Rothschild, Joseph. 1974. East Central Europe Between the Two World Wars. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Rutherford, Jonathan. 2008. “The Culture of Capitalism.” Soundings 38 (spring): 8–18. Smith, Adrian, and A. Rochovská. 2007. “Domesticating Neo-liberalism: Everyday Lives and the Geographies of Post-socialist Transformations.” Geoforum 38 (6): 1163–78. Smith, Adrian, Alison Stenning, A. Rochovská, and D. Świątek. 2010. Domesticating Neo-Liberalism: Spaces of Economic Practice and Social Reproduction in Post-Socialist Cities. Oxford: Blackwell, Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) Book Series.

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Standing, Guy. 2002. “The Babble of Euphemisms: Re-embedding Social Protection in ‘Transformed’ Labour Markets.” In Work, Employment and Transition: Restructuring Livelihoods in Post-Communism, edited by Al Rainnie, Adrian Smith, and Adam Swain, 35–54. London and New York: Routledge. Swain, Adam. 1977. “Projecting ‘Transition’ in the Ukrainian Donbas: Policy Transfer and the Restructuring of the Coal Industry.” In Reconstructing the Post-socialist Industrial Region: The Donbas in Transition, 161–87. London and New York: Routledge. Szelényi, Iván. “Poverty Under Post-communist Capitalism—The Effects of Class and Ethnicity in a Cross-national Comparison.” Paper presented at the conference on “Unity and Diversity” Bruges, October 29–30, 2001. ftp://ftp.cordis.europa.eu/pub/belgium/docs/szelenyi_paper.pdf. Williams, Raymond. (1976) 1983. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New York: Oxford University Press. Wolfe, Thomas C., ed. 2005. Governing Soviet Journalism: The Press and the Socialist Person After Stalin. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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chapter three

Social Justice, Hegemony, and Women’s Mobilizations Joanna Regulska and Magdalena Grabowska

More than twenty years after the fall of state socialism, marginalization in social, economic, and political life remains a fact of daily existence for many women around the globe. Women responded to their circumstances by becoming active agents of change, inspiring, initiating, mediating, negotiating, and advocating for “gender equality” and other “social justice” concerns. In Central and Eastern Europe, and the Caucacus women’s grassroots struggles around these issues are thematically and organizationally rooted in the social and political movements of the region. However, the discourses of resistance employed in locally situated women’s movements also intersect with global and transnational discourses of gender and social justice propagated by the European Union (EU), NGOs, and transnational organizations. Some authors attribute the interaction between local and transnational gender discourses to the broader processes of political, social, and economic dislocation that accompanied transformation from state socialism to liberal democracy (Einhorn 2005).1 Barbara Einhorn, for example, argues (2005) that the EU, through its crucial role in the transition from a bipolar world to one dominated by the supranational market economy, facilitated the introduction of “gender mainstreaming” into official state discourses and “gender equality” machinery into the state apparatus.2 Because the implementation of “gender equality” requires active intervention by the state to remediate women’s unequal status, local efforts to empower women have been influenced by national and transnational framing of the issues and solutions through the impact of the EU on state policies. The particular struggles in which

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women engage are thus commonly shaped by various combinations of transnational, national, and local factors that are not necessarily in harmony with each other. Moreover, indigenous women’s mobilizations are organized and framed in response to specific experiences with communism and postcommunism, including—in some cases—the struggle against it. This chapter focuses on women’s mobilizations in postcommunist societies. Both the mobilization potential of “gender equality” discourses and the viability of women’s movements more generally have faced challenges in the context of post-1989 transformations. Nonetheless, women’s groups have become indispensable pillars of postcommunist civil societies. Women of various social backgrounds, ages, and sexual orientations have been mobilizing for diverse causes throughout the countries undergoing the transformation from communism to democracy. Furthermore, some women are mobilizing specifically around the issue of gender equality, and recognition of gender in the social justice rhetoric of various groups is widespread. Men have also mobilized for “gender equality” (in Poland in fall 2006 men demonstrated in front of the Parliament against proposed further restrictions of the current antiabortion law), but twenty years after the collapse of communism such events are still rare; men work for and collaborate with women’s and feminist organizations around the region only sporadically. The few men’s feminist organizations that exist are largely concerned with issues related to sexual orientation. These struggles are often seen as feminist, as they represent a wider struggle for gender and sexual social justice (Mizielińska 2008). Over the last two decades, various women’s organizations have vigorously advocated for social justice, especially around questions of reproductive rights, economic discrimination, sexual rights, and political representation. Advocates of women’s concerns have won official recognition for women’s organizations by working simultaneously as members of these groups and as actors in political society. Many women constantly juggle their commitment to activism with work in state institutions and/or political parties. In the realm of civil society, women’s groups have successfully initiated alliances with other social movements, such as a coalition with August ’80, a tradeunion movement in Poland, in 2007. However, despite these evident successes in bringing the question of gender into mainstream visibility, the specific employment of the concepts “gender,” “gender equality,” and “social justice” in postcommunist locations requires deeper consideration. The particular concern here is how these concepts are used as vehicles of mobilization. How, for

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example, do various groups utilize existing paradigms of “social justice” and “gender”? How can unique modes of mobilization developed by women in the wake of communism be interpreted in light of existing paradigms of social movements? What is the specificity of women’s mobilizations in the region? In this overview, we define the concept “region” according to geopolitical rather than purely geographic criteria, following the conviction that the concept of Eastern or Central Eastern Europe is in fact a creation of philosophical discourses produced within Western Europe’s Enlightenment (Wolff 1994). Given the impossibility of drawing stable boundaries between Central Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia, and Western Europe, we choose to accept the First, Second, and Third World conceptualization of the world regions. Following authors such as Edward Said and Nancy Naples, we argue that what constitutes the specificity of the region with which we are concerned is its previous membership in the Soviet bloc, its postcommunist condition or—to be more precise—its variety of postcommunist conditions (Said 1978; Naples and Desai 2002).3 We suggest that the complex and multidirectional mobilizations by women in the region challenge four hegemonies: (1) the nation-state; (2) patriarchal culture; (3) the neoliberal paradigm of economic reforms; and (4) the predominance of Western feminism. With attention to the particularities of the postcommunist context and the variety of transformative trajectories throughout the region, this chapter examines how these hegemonies are being challenged and how counterhegemonies are produced. It further delineates possible new conceptualizations of women’s mobilization that capture these fragmented, multilayered, and at times perplexing postcommunist experiences.

Locating Women’s Mobilizations The fragmentation and diversity of social mobilizations in the postcommunist context is often mistaken for an absence of social movements in the region. Existing social activism is often either overlooked or interpreted as evidence of complete demobilization of social movements after the fall of communism. Some argue that people in these societies reacted to forced participation in collective action under the communist system by turning to individualism after its collapse. They hold that social activism atrophied and social movements dissolved (see Szelenyi’s contribution to this volume).

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While we partially agree with such statements, we also contend that in order to understand the mobilization of women in the postcommunist context, the very paradigm of the mass social movement has to be reconsidered. Indeed women do not mobilize within a single “mass” social movement in the region, and this can be partially understood as a rejection of previously forced group identities. Yet in many instances, as repeatedly noted by scholars and activists, women do organize. Their efforts and agency become invisible however, if they are conceptualized through what McNay calls the negative paradigm: “the negative moment of subjection” through which women’s actions are seen as a form of resistance, rather than as “capabilities to respond to a difference in a less defensive, but more creative fashion” (McNay 2000, 3). This negative paradigm is quite common: women are frequently represented by politicians, policymakers and the media as victims of both communism and social transformation; only rarely are they portrayed as autonomous and capable creators. Marilyn Warning, in her book If Only Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics (1988), argues that if women’s work at home and in their communities was included in aggregate economic assessment, the rich countries would no longer be seen as rich and those considered poor would be seen as having enormous assets. Women’s multilayered productive capacities often remain unrecognized across the world given the emphasis on the cash-generating capacities of economic structures in assessing wealth. This undervaluing of “women’s” work is a critical source of error in analysis of the economic and political transformations in Central and East Europe and the new countries that emerged from Soviet control. Women are often the majority of the population in these societies, and by many assessments in different countries, they are regarded as flexible and adaptable to the unstable environment generated by post-1989 changes (Cerwonka 2008; Peto and Szapor 2007; Graham and Regulska 1997; Środa 2008; Sabedashvili 2007). Women are thus critical agents in mediating the new political, social, cultural, and economic context within which they live, work, organize, and mobilize along with their families, kin, friends, and neighbors. While women clearly played a critical role in shepherding their societies through the period of revolutionary changes, the political systems that have emerged in postcommunist countries are often inhospitable to women’s interests. Scholars acknowledge that there is a correlation between overall well-being in a society, political freedoms, and women’s lives, but they also point out that privileging economic or political reforms in evaluating

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postcommunist development forecloses consideration of how women mediate changes in the public sphere, at work, or in family. Evidence from individual countries demonstrates that women often suffer contradictory effects from democratization and economic change (Cermakova et al. 2000; Gal and Kligman 2000; Graff 2003; Fodor 2002; Pollert 2003; Roth 2007). Indeed, it is widely acknowledged that violations of women’s human rights, particularly in the areas of women’s reproductive rights and violence against women, persist even in the countries of the region where democratic consolidation and economic reforms have advanced (Kiss 1993; Watson 2000; Purvaneckienė 1999; True 2003). Scholars and activists in many countries of the region have repeatedly proclaimed that gender equality concerns have not received adequate attention from policymakers and politicians (for example, Sabedashvili 2007). We argue that transformation of gender dynamics is only partially dependent on political and economic reforms, and that there is no correlation between a progressive state ideology and economic transformation (Lohmann 2006; Einhorn and Sever 2003). To a far greater degree, gender disparity is a consequence of traditions and patriarchal attitudes toward women that are reflected in the state, its institutions, and policies. It is further influenced by the rising nationalism and cultural practices embraced by citizens and codified by institutions. In some countries, a relationship between economic development and gender justice may appear to exist, but in others, it is clearly nonexistent. For example, in Poland the antiwomen, antigay, and racist attitudes of state institutions and political elites (including some statements by President Kaczynski) were exhibited simultaneously with the economic growth and “Europeanization” of the Polish economy. Thus we argue that the typology of postcommunisms some scholars have used to categorize countries along a political/economic transformation continuum from the least to the most “reformed” (Ekiert, Kubik, and Vachudova 2007, 9) has only limited applicability once the gender dimension is considered. After the fall of communism, the arrival of various Western donors brought a new “Western” paradigm of what a women’s movement should be to the region. Women’s groups tactically embraced “Western” modes of women’s mobilization, particularly in the early 1990s. Agendas developed by local organizations during this period and the rhetoric they employed in mobilizing often implied the embrace of liberal or even neoliberal ideology. However, resemblance between the discourses used by women’s organizations in

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the region and those of international organizations was as much a function of the conditions attached to particular resources as to shared ideological commitments. Much social justice mobilization by women at that time employed themes of individualism, liberalism, capitalism, and gender equality. Additionally, under the strong influence of the European Union, the paradigm of “gender mainstreaming” became dominant in gender-oriented social justice discourses in the region. Pursuit of “gender equality,” particularly during the accession period, simultaneously became the measure of women’s mobilization in the context of postcommunism. To some degree the goal of gender equality did displace more contextually specific forms of women’s activism, such labor union activism, street mobilization, and cultural feminisms such as riot grrls. Our research suggests however, that gender equality is only one of the ways through which the question of social justice for women has been framed.4 We argue that international “gender equality” discourses, representing both “Western” activism and certain ideas of the “international women’s movement” (EU, the United Nations), often situate women’s rights in terms of political and economic liberalism and emphasize their consonance with a neoliberal global political-economy (Środa 2008).5 However, as many feminist scholars point out, the origins of gender activism in post-state-socialist countries are complex and irreducible to the trajectory of the liberal emancipation project (Funk 2004). In the post-state-socialist context, gender discourses that highlighted the introduction of the liberal and neoliberal economy as a precondition of women’s emancipation encountered local grassroots mobilizations whose framing reflects social, political, cultural and economic locational complexities and histories. The latter, like the discourses that predominate in postcolonial contexts, demonstrate the complex relationship between the positionality of postsocialist countries between East and West, as well as the role of nationalism, military conflict, and religion, and the specific formulation of gender discourses. The interplay between international and local struggles for gender social justice has resulted in multiple agents and audiences advocating various means of eliminating gender inequalities/ injustices. This variety of fragmented mobilizations, agents, and audiences has often been erroneously represented as a lack of mobilization. In order to understand how women mobilize to counter their own marginalization and claim political subjecthood, we need to expand our concept of mobilization beyond mass public protest.

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Understanding how women have responded to problems in the postcommunist region requires conceptualizing mobilization in terms that includes fragmented, scattered, and often (but not always) localized social actions. Furthermore, a context-specific understanding of the workings of such forms of mobilization requires analysis of their historical emergence and intent (anticommunist or becoming neoliberal) and the multilayered dynamic between hegemonies and counterhegemonies with respect to postcommunism. How have these hegemonies been imposed on groups of people? How have they been locally constructed? For example, how did liberalism come to be seen as a counter to the state or communist hegemony? Following Sandoval and Desai, we argue that a contemporary feminist conceptualization of social movements should rest on recognition of multisited sources of power and oppression as well as on the multiple scales at which mobilizations takes place (Sandoval 2000; Desai 2005). This shift from a vertical conceptualization of power to a horizontal one entails a parallel shift toward understanding the fragmented nature of hegemonies within which women act to realize specific political goals. It opens up possibilities for exploring the unexpected and often perplexing ways in which women’s political subjectivities are emerging in the postcommunist context. To capture the fragmented and multisited nature of women’s activism we propose using Mueller’s framework for understanding the diversity and heterogeneity of women’s movements (Mueller 1995). In her article “Organization Bases of the Conflict in Contemporary Feminism,” Mueller examines the ways in which women’s groups approach external conflicts (those with opponents in public debate on controversial issues such as abortion) and internal contention within feminism (struggles within the women’s movement). Mueller distinguishes three modes of activism—social movement organizations (large organizations), small (radical) groups, and service organizations that deal with particular aspects of women’s oppression such as violence. While her approach by no means encompasses the full variety of women’s activism and is focused on the United States, it offers a useful framework to explore how various spaces of hegemony/ counterhegemony production intersect with women’s multiple goals and agendas. One of the fundamental differences in mobilization practices between the United States (a focus of Mueller’s analysis) and the postcommunist countries is the disparity between membership within nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and what Mueller calls “small groups.” In the context of

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postcommunism, NGOs are rarely the site of women’s mass mobilization. Rather, they represent what is often called “professional” feminism, characterized by more open and inclusive informal groups and coalitions based on a loose membership and a wide political agenda. Such organizations seem to attract larger and more diverse groups of women. To capture and distinguish the broader range of activities that constitute mobilization by women in the postcommunist region, we utilize Mueller’s typology to specify four different sites of women’s mobilization: (1) “professional” mobilization for equal opportunities represented by NGOs and political parties; (2) service organizations that are established as an immediate reaction to certain dimensions of discrimination against women, such as violence, trafficking, violation of reproductive rights, and so on; (3) informal women’s and feminist groups featured in “street theory”6 ; and (4) transnational coalitions, networks, and other collaborative actions that span different regions and countries. In many ways, the defining features of women’s mobilization after the transformation from communism to democracy are analogous to the phenomena in postcolonial contexts. The uneven democratization of the region, and the arrival of global pressures, opportunities, and international institutions in Central and Eastern Europe and the Caucasus are factors that changed the conditions under which social mobilization—including mobilization around gender issues—takes place. The reconfiguration of social, political, and economic life included both the emergence of NGOs and the entrance of feminist politics into state policies and institutions. These processes, now visible in the region, resemble what scholars working in Latin America have been calling the NGOization of the feminist movement (Alvarez 1998; Naples and Desai 2002). Sonia Alvarez argues that the “boom” of institutional and other formal modes of women’s mobilization—particularly of NGOs professionally focused on “gender projects” and policy assessment—has been intersecting with mobilization at the grassroots level, and mobilizations by working-class women focused on “service” activities such as counseling, education, local politics, and women’s immediate needs (Alvarez 1998). To a certain extent, Alvarez contends, the arrival of global and transnational forces had a deleterious effect on women’s activism. By imposing certain tools and interests on women’s movements these agencies effectively narrowed the scope of women’s mobilizations, limiting women’s struggles to the policy-making arena

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and cooperation with national and international institutions. The NGOization and “professionalization” of women’s activism de-radicalizes the women’s agenda and eliminates the emphasis on marginal groups of women, such as lesbians or ethnic minorities. However, during its early stages postcommunist context differed from Third World locations, in the eagerness of its political elites, and to some degree of women’s groups, to incorporate the liberal and neoliberal ideals embedded in the process of globalization. This openness to liberal and neoliberal discourses can be understood in terms of a historical desire of intellectual elites and some leaders of women’s movements to be part of the West, and their identification with Western Europe and Western culture in general. Identification with the West, while often contested by younger women and women engaged in labor unions and antiglobalization campaigns, was the dominant paradigm of the institutionalized women’s movement in the region throughout the 1990s. Movement leaders commonly regarded the idea of equality in the liberal/ individualistic project as the only possible conceptualization of social justice with respect to gender. The liberal equality of free individuals was posited against the constraints of communist equality, represented as sameness for all. Some scholars interpret communist collectivism as having had a constraining effect on social mobilization. Common practices under communist regimes such as forced participation and imposition of group identities on individuals discredited the “collective” as a basis for political action. Liberalism, by contrast, with its emphasis on individual free will, appealed to both political elites and the societies more generally during transformation. A civil society based on the values of individualism and capitalism was widely perceived as a necessary component of a just political system. The emphasis on individual free will in liberalism made it an effective challenge to communist hegemony. It appealed to people who were in reaction to forced collectivity and collective activism. Immediately after the fall of previous system, liberalism was thus welcomed eagerly and uncritically in many countries undergoing transformation from communism to democracy. In the area of gender and gender equality, the notion of “women’s emancipation” and “equality of all,” often used as ideological tools by the state socialism, were replaced by ideas of “gender equality,” “gender mainstreaming,” and “equal opportunities.” These ideas have been promoted by international and EU agencies responsible for gender policies as the linchpins of a liberal, “gender-blind” society.

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Finally, another striking feature of the postcommunist context that distinguishes women’s activism in this region from its Western and Third World counterparts is the lack of recognition of differences among women. In many postcommunist locations, “difference-blind” liberal discourses took root in ground cultivated by the communist notion of a “class-free” homogenous society and in competition with (re)emerging nationalisms that sought to eliminate ethnic, religious, and sexual difference. Although women’s groups have been wary of such discourses, the idea of “gender equality” as opposed to gender difference has been the most influential in the region. In addition, as famously argued by Chandra Mohanty (2003) in the crucial debate on representation, the difference between “woman” as a cultural and ideological amalgam of the “other” constructed through diverse representational discourses and “women” as real material subjects and their collective history is rarely raised (Mohanty 2003, 22). “Gender” in the postcommunist context reflects a popular assumption that there are no profound differences between women in the region. Many argue that differences such as race, the principal ground for theorizing difference in Western and Third World contexts, are not relevant to postcommunist locations. Questions of class are often dismissed as belonging to the obsolete, undesirable Marxist discourse (Watson 2000). Many feminists insist on maintaining language that represents women as a homogenous group. As women’s mobilizations emerge in resistance to conservative, right-wing discourses, the dominant framing of action is an “us” versus “them” dichotomy. As a result, one of the major paradoxes of women’s mobilizations in the region is the concurrent deployment of seemingly contradictory social justice discourses. On the one hand, many women express devotion to liberal individualistic principles. They are wary of attempts to conceptualize equality and social justice in collective terms and frame “equality” in terms of individual freedom. On the other hand, many organizations in the region employ the generalizing and homogenizing language of “gender equality” that implies the existence of fixed gender categories and interests. This unique and complex combination of approaches has been a source of confusion among those who attempt to grasp and represent the experience of women’s mobilizations in the postcommunist context. In the next section, we explore the complexity of women’s mobilizations after communism: they are diverse, scattered, and operating at different geopolitical levels. They engage diverse agencies and audiences, and they often coexist without necessarily being in dialogue with each other.

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Confronting “Scattered Hegemonies”: Sites of Production Feminist scholars across the world point to the complex workings of market globalization and its multidimensional effects on women’s activism. These processes, many argue, can be seen as simultaneously eliminating and reproducing social hierarchies based on race and class (Bayes and Tohidi 2001; Hawkesworth 2006; Lowe 1997). To grasp the manifold ways in which globalization intersects with women’s activism, many propose distinguishing the hegemonic forces within the globalization process from local mobilizations based on cross-boundary cooperation and solidarity. Such an approach would differentiate between globalization from above and globalization from below (Naples and Desai 2002). Within the traditional “international” framework, “globalization” has too often been seen as implying a unidirectional flow of ideas and activism from West to East, North to South. The discourse of feminist transnationality, popular within the UN in the 1990s, more fully represents the character of contemporary women’s mobilizations, which go beyond the borders of nation-states and challenge existing EastWest and South-North binaries and the discourse of “development” (Grewal and Kaplan 1994). Lisa Lowe was one of the first feminist scholars to point out the contradictions within traditional conceptualizations of globalization. She argued that one of the most important features of globalization is the restructuring of capital and diversification of resources and markets. Homogenization and heterogenization of the market are simultaneous and crucial for effective globalization (Lowe 1997). One of the consequences of the search for new markets in the postcommunist region is the creation of new hegemonies of class, race, and gender. Lowe, Grewal, and Kaplan point to an important feature of the current globalization dynamic in noting that the processes of going beyond the nation-state economy and intensification of communication networks and technologies are not easily reduced to hierarchical, unidirectional, binary conceptual frameworks. Within the globalization process, power is located at various scales and held by actors who engage each other in often unexpected ways (Sandoval 2002). Alexander and Mohanty (1997) argued that one of the crucial elements in the feminist conceptualization of the effects of globalization on women is recognition of the need to destabilize the model that construes women, particularly Third World women, as victims. The process of decolonization, they argue, means simultaneous liberation of

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Third World countries from the dominant model of the metropole-controlled market economy and rejection of First World feminist discourses that construct Third World women primarily as passive victims of global processes. Yet the destabilization of traditional forms of class and gender arrangements brought about by the feminization of global labor (one of the fundamental outcomes of globalization) facilitates the emergence of women as agents. The stream of feminist reflection that builds on this observation goes along with analysis that focuses on the global movement of persons, ideas, and images and emphasizes hybridity (or heterogeneity) as one of the consequences of globalization. Many authors point out that one of the important features of globalization is the intensification of interactions among people through the increased rate of information exchange and human mobility. These processes increase “cultural heterogeneity,” but they also increase people’s capacity to make sense of the nondiminishing diversity of peoples and communities (Appadurai 1990; Hall 1997). To acknowledge the hybridity engendered by globalization within the postcommunist context, one has to examine directions, origins, and various sites of the emergence of hegemonies and counterhegemonies in such areas as the struggle for economic justice, reproductive rights, bodily integrity, or ethnic and racial oppression. In order to explore the workings of new geopolitical configurations and their effects on women’s mobilizations, we propose employing the concept “scattered hegemonies” in analysis of the postcommunist location (Grewal and Kaplan 1994). Grewal and Kaplan argue that in the new geopolitical context brought about by globalization, power dynamics and hierarchies are destabilized. The postcommunist space is not dominated by a single hegemonic narrative. Rather, the hegemonies within which women mobilize vary with respect to spatial location, the political and historic context of regime change, and the particular relationship to free-market postcommunism. The origins, directions, and vehicles of reproduction of hegemonic discourses are not easily identified because power and hegemony are produced and exercised by more than one site in the globalization process (Hawkesworth 2006; Rowbotham and Linkgole 2001). In this context, transnational feminism provides a framework within which globalization processes “from above” and grassroots mobilizations “from below” intersect to produce women’s mobilization. Exploration of both the processes through which hegemonic practices and discourses are employed “from above” and the emergence of locally produced counterhegemonies in the context of

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postcommunism requires a closer look at the specificity of the so-called Second World location, and an examination of the relevance of at least some postcolonial modes of analysis in the context of postcommunism. Focus on the particularities of the postcommunist context allows us to reveal not only the complex, multidirectional center-periphery dynamics of various women’s mobilizations but also the emergence of multisited counterhegemonies operating in the postcommunist world. To grasp the complexity of the hegemonic and counterhegemonic forces in the region, we suggest examining the various types of relationships between social, cultural, economic, and political forces. We argue that in the postcommunist context, the sites within which hegemonies and counterhegemonies are produced are not mutually exclusive, but rather intersect with and co-constitute each other. Moreover, within these various sites, different discourses are employed as concurrently hegemonic and/or counterhegemonic. For instance, although there are many cases of appropriation of the neoliberal paradigm as a discourse counterhegemonic to the patriarchal state, discourses and practices based on the critique of neoliberalism emerge simultaneously within and beyond institutionalized women’s movements. Hegemonies and counterhegemonies are produced through a number of practices such as demonstrations, petitions, Internet campaigns, publications (brochures, pamphlets, and papers), training, or education. None of these technologies of power organize collective action in a particular direction or around a single ideology. They are utilized by women concerned with diverse issues and representing numerous and often contradictory points of view and political agendas.

Facing the Hegemony of the Postcommunist Nation-State and Supranational Entities The reactionary, nationalistic, and (often) religiously radical states that emerged after the fall of communism have become the key sites of the production of patriarchal hegemonies. In the context of the rebirth of traditionalism and hegemonic nationalism, scholars, politicians, and policymakers saw women’s NGOs as the most effective means of galvanizing women’s social and political mobilization. The emergence of women’s NGOs in the region after 1989 was primarily possible as a result of support from Western European and US donors (for example, Ford Foundation, Soros Foundation, Ebert Foundation, Böll Foundation, the German Marshall Fund, among

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others) as well as from numerous UN agencies. The majority of NGOs in the region were founded between 1990 and 1998, coinciding with the 1995 Beijing Women’s Conference. To a large extent, this conference shaped the agenda of women’s NGOs for years to come. For example, over the last decade, as states began to implement a variety of gender equality policies, many NGOs focused on monitoring states’ progress in realizing the Beijing Platform for Action, in particular by assessing the introduction of “gender mainstreaming” into state institutions (Verloo 2007). Equality and liberalism are unquestionably the dominant themes of NGO-based mobilization. The liberal individualistic conceptualizations of “equality” are seen as the reverse of the leveling equality associated with communism. Many feminist activists in the region represent themselves as proponents of “equality feminism,” and therefore of liberal feminism, in opposition to a feminism of difference. The emphasis on liberal individualism required a new understanding of “equality” as equal treatment regardless of differences (such as gender) between individuals. From the point of view of liberal feminism, difference should be suppressed and undermined rather then exposed and celebrated. This uncritical subscription to neoliberalism had yet another dimension: the commitment to liberal ideals and a free-market economy. For some political elites, embrace of these features of political organization confirmed the symbolic belonging of their societies to Western Europe rather than the East, which is often associated with the previous political oppressor, the Soviet Union. Throughout the region at the end of the 1990s, the European Union became the driving force behind the introduction of “gender mainstreaming”7 into official state discourses and “gender equality” machinery into the state apparatus (Fuszara et al. 2008). In the context of women’s mobilization, the idea of “gender equality” promoted by international agencies and EU discourses has been adapted as a variation on the theme of equal opportunity for free individuals regardless of gender. The accession of some countries to the EU created momentum for the introduction of “gender equality” language; it has also meant a symbolic relocation from the East to the West, that is, to Europe. In the work of nongovernmental women’s organizations, the EU has often been utilized as a “watch dog.” It is engaged as a tool to influence nationstate agendas and institutions and to involve supranational bodies in national gender politics. Faced with the hegemony of the postcommunist nation-state, women employed the neoliberal rhetoric of the EU and the EU’s version of

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“gender mainstreaming” to link their efforts to formal politics, whether they were engaged in formal or informal activism. An interesting aspect of the rising role of EU “gender equality” rhetoric and the language of “equality” is the fact that gender within this context acquires an instrumental character. Walters and Haahr argue, “Democratic innovation at the European level is characterized by a restless search for the ways to win the commitment and identification of these subjects [Europe’s citizenry]” (Walters and Haahr 2005, 143). Ongoing controversies and critiques of EU gender policies and gender-mainstreaming approaches point clearly to the existence of governance dilemmas in contemporary Europe. It could be argued that in many ways the emphasis on gender equality and gender mainstreaming is nothing but an attempt to establish yet another dimension of the governance environment through which new subjects, in this case women, can be incorporated into the European space. It is a search for women that would “assume the subject-positions presented to [them] by the EU democracy project” (Walters and Haahr 2005, 143). The EU and other international political institutions, such as the UN, impact the relations between women’s NGOs and the state in two ways. On the one hand, they promote state-NGO cooperation by creating state institutions and units that require cooperation with NGOs. On the other, they provide NGOs with new spaces where their claims can be represented (for example, the Committee on the Status of Women at the UN level, and the Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality at the EU level). The most important role of these international, and in many respects transnational, institutional arrangements is that they allow NGOs to bypass the state level (although in the case of the UN more so than in the case of the EU) and engage in transnational dialogue and policy making as autonomous political actors. Indeed they do so by conducting research, writing reports, mobilizing media, or establishing alternative means of communication such as newsletters, bulletins, and so on (Fuszara et al. 2008).8 Besides the clear influence of supranational and global entities, two sites of “professional” women’s mobilizations are evident throughout the region: political parties and state institutions. In many cases, these sites combine existing local resources and supranational spaces in order to achieve greater visibility for their actions and expand their areas of influence. Because of their position between civil society and state institutions, political parties became the venue for women’s mobilization and cooperation with NGOs

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even before the formal presence of the EU in the region. Using examples of best practices from Western Europe, women’s NGOs encouraged women in political parties to vie for leadership positions and incorporate “gender equality” into party platforms. Mobilizing around “gender” within political parties can mean either working for women’s advancement within the existing party framework or establishing exclusively women’s parties. The first form of mobilization is carried out through the establishment of women’s units within political parties or through setting quotas for women on parties’ election lists or within parties’ leadership. Mobilizing women within political parties through quotas is particularly popular among liberal and socialist parties within the region. During the 2000s for example, several Romanian parties introduced women’s sections into their structure (the Democratic Party, the Romanian Social Democracy Party, the Greater Romania Party, and the National Liberal Party).9 However most of these adjustments are merely cosmetic. Party leaders are usually unwilling to reformulate political agendas to prioritize women’s concerns or to broaden their conceptualization of social equality. Women’s parties represent another dimension of women’s mobilization. Since the early 2000s, women’s parties have been established in Romania, Serbia, Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine.10 Although such parties often draw upon resources and transnational contacts provided by women’s NGOs, the idea of “gender equality” they employ often differs from the use of the concept in official state discourses. Women’s parties often treat women as an interest group that shares certain needs and demands, which in turn become the hallmarks of gender justice. Such parties draw upon traditional images of women, using women’s roles as mothers or legacies of the previous regime to establish an agenda of “women’s issues.”11 Women’s parties thus often distance themselves from “radical” feminist agendas, such as the right to abortion in Poland. Concerns such as adequate medical support for pregnant women, pro-family policies, or support for single mothers, while not their only policy goals, often dominate their political platforms. In the 1990s, many “professional” women’s NGOs focused solely on implementing “gender equality” in state institutions and policies. Such NGOs tended to direct the majority of their resources toward an agenda that was by and large defined in terms of “gender mainstreaming,” but nonetheless targeted toward transforming official state policies. A number of NGOs in the region, in countries such as the Czech Republic, Romania, Armenia, and Poland, defined

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their goals as “creating equal opportunities between sexes through information, advocacy, lobbying, and training courses, all of which are approached with the gender perspective” (Albania’s Gender Alliance for Development Center [GADC]).12 Many of the women’s NGOs in CEE still share the goal of Albania’s GADC to introduce “gender mainstreaming into state policies by making gender a main concern of institutions, including a gendered perspective in all aspects of the society, drafting social policies on gender, gathering information on gender, training different target groups with respect to gender, consolidating a network of collaborators, and increasing participation of women in decision-making processes.”13 “Gender equality,” as a part of such an agenda, can be achieved through NGO “participation in creating national policies, working in local, national, transnational coalitions, producing research, providing education and training with respect to gender equality, as well as producing, translating and disseminating information about gender equality.”14 In short, NGOs view mobilizing practices as a process that entails not only demanding the articulation of alternatives in state policies but also influencing their institutional practices. Between 1997 and 2000, as a result of combined pressures from the EU and women’s NGOs, the majority of EU applicant states introduced a number of laws and institutions promoting “gender equality.” For instance, new EU member, Slovenia, established a number of political bodies that promote the realization of this goal.15 Throughout the region, NGOs have often become official or unofficial advisors to state institutions by gathering data, providing information, producing reports, and establishing an extensive network of social contacts. Women who lead state “equal opportunities” institutions are often previous members of women’s NGOs.16 The EU’s “equal opportunities” language also influenced the way gender equality policies have been shaped in countries beyond the EU jurisdiction. In Ukraine, for instance, after the 2004 election, the newly appointed government quickly absorbed the EU language of “equal opportunities.” On December 27, 2006, the Ukrainian Parliament adopted the “State Program on Ensuring Gender Equality in Ukrainian Society” until the year 2010.17 Despite their success in fostering institutional reform and promoting engagement between the state and society, the involvement of women’s NGOs in state politics—“state feminism,” as some call it—has been the subject of numerous critiques. The process of formalization and specialization of civic involvement on behalf of “gender equality” and the co-optation of

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women’s agency into the state framework led to the professionalization of NGOs’ work (Hašková 2005).18 In some countries, such as the Czech Republic and Lithuania, the strategies for achieving “gender equality” are linked to state antidiscriminatory policies, many newly established “gender equality” institutions work at a fairly superficial level. As Enikö Magyari-Vincze argues, in the case of Romania, “there is no will to politicize such issues as: why women represent a significant part of the labor force in the poorly remunerated sector, why women are represented in less paid positions, why the income of women is significantly below the average income, and why their percentage as leaders is almost four times lower than men’s” (2003, 8–9).19 There is no question that both state institutions and women’s organizations have been focusing on meeting EU standards of “gender equality,” yet at a deeper level neither institutions nor social activism address concerns important to most disadvantaged women. During the same period, NGOs began losing their central position as vehicles for women’s mobilizations in the region. Many of them were undergoing major restructuring and shifting in their focus. With the eastern enlargement of the EU and the withdrawal of US donors, EU funds and its EQUAL program became the main source of financing for women’s NGOs. A shift in available financing from institutional grants to short-term projects required NGOs to initiate alliances with other NGOs or state partners, many of whom were not committed to “gender equality.” Moreover participation in some financial programs such as EU’s EQUAL, often “forced” the restructuring of an organization’s work and priorities. These processes, while designed to broaden the scope of engagement among women’s NGOs, often led to the dissolution of smaller or more radical organizations. Such restructuring yielded instability and uncertainty. NGOs responded to the new funding environment by forming broader institutional coalitions. While these new alliances broke the isolation of women’s organizations, they also tended to weaken the feminist agenda. For small NGOs, restructuring often required that they stretch their agendas to meet those of dissimilar partners and donors. Such compromises ultimately dilated generally defined “gender equality”-based agendas.20 The degree to which the state’s commitment to “gender equality” is in fact the result of NGOs mobilization is also debatable. For instance, even though through the early 2000s there were many more active women’s NGOs in Poland than in the Czech Republic, the Czech Republic was often presented

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as the more “gender-progressive” state. The extent to which the concept “gender equality” is integrated into state policies usually depends on several factors, including cultural practices, the level of nationalism and religious radicalism, the availability of resources, the government’s willingness to recognize the centrality of the gender problematique, and the degree of political pressure to adjust to Western European standards.21 Often state politics reflect the specific geopolitical location. Lithuania, for example, models its equal-opportunity policies on Scandinavian solutions. The Czech Republic similarly profits from regional cooperation with neighboring Germany and Austria; the policies of these countries are reflected in the Czech government’s attitude toward “gender equality” and the solutions being implemented.22 Yet, despite the strong impact of external forces on gender equality discourses and the use of “equality” language by many officials as well as women’s groups and even ordinary people in the region, lack of political will on the part of state institutions and elected bodies to rectify women’s marginalization and recognize women’s presence as active political subjects is common among many postcommunist countries. As of 2010 the distinct lack of collaboration between the state and civil-society institutions serves as both a deterrent and a motivation for women’s activism.

Mobilizations Against Patriarchal Culture At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, service organizations that address the immediate consequences of gender discrimination constituted the strongest segment of the nongovernmental sector in many postcommunist countries. These organizations have been particularly important in addressing challenges posed by the resurgence of patriarchal culture in many national institutions and in the face of public critique of NGOs. Local, grassroots mobilization around specific issues related to violations of women’s rights, health care, work, and poverty were among women’s first responses to the loss of social provisions and state protection after the fall of communism. Elimination of censorship and (re)instatement of basic human rights in the wake of communism opened the public sphere to concerns that had not been discussed publicly under communism (for example, sexuality, sexual orientation, violence, and the spread of HIV/AIDS). During the transformation period, state institutions repeatedly regulated and policed citizens’ behavior by enacting new laws and policy initiatives.

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Monitoring legislation, advocating for legislative change, and launching new legal initiatives thus became the most important functions of women’s “service organizations.”23 Such organizations often addressed the immediate consequences of these new legislative initiatives and thus acquired in-depth knowledge regarding improving legislation and changing laws. They further benefited from the experiences of partners and collaborators in other countries and were well positioned to provide counsel to diverse groups of women and to a lesser degree to men. Violence against women, one of the principal concerns of these organizations, drew a great deal of public attention. Across the region a number of transnational, local, and national initiatives emerged to target all kinds of violence against women: domestic violence, war violence, and/or sexual trafficking of women. La Strada, the transnational network of women’s organizations working to stop sexual trafficking in women, was one of the first in the region.24 With branches in Ukraine, Macedonia, Moldova, the Czech Republic, and Poland, to mention just a few, La Strada brought together activists, police officers, judges, and local government officials as well as parliamentarians and scholars in an effort to train a wide range of actors to combat human trafficking. Simultaneously, various groups and organizations mobilized to protest violence against women. In Armenia the Women’s Rights Center worked to overcome the problem through a wide range of activities, including establishing a hotline, a crisis center, and a women’s support group; disseminating publications; working with the media; educating, advocating, and lobbying; and conducting research.25 B.a.B.e. (Be Active, Be Emancipated), a women’s human rights group from Croatia, focused on providing legal help for women, including legal counseling concerning protection and safety in cases of domestic and sexual violence and divorce.26 Hungary’s NANE, the Women’s Rights Association, founded in 1994, is primarily dedicated to ending human rights violations and the threat of violence against women and children through advocacy, personal support services, and public education.27 Ethnicity and sexuality have been arenas that provide many instances of women’s mobilization against patriarchal culture. While some gender equality-oriented initiatives attempted to connect women across ethnicity, sexuality, and class, others focus exclusively on ethnic and sexual oppression. In the later part of 2000s, several efforts were underway to make intersecting identities more central to the “gender equality” struggles. Roma NGOs from Romania developed projects targeting the specific needs of Roma women.28

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The OSI-sponsored Czech-Slovak Gender Studies Mini-School, for example, developed the capacity of young Roma women to research and analyze concerns specific to Roma women.29 Similar projects that focused on Roma women and young girls and on cultivating young women leaders within the Roma community have been initiated in Slovenia, Macedonia, Bulgaria, and Romania.30 These programs challenged the marginalized position of Roma women, they addressed taboos such sexuality, and engaged Roma women in an active struggle to claim their rights as citizens. Moreover, they often provided services that state institutions refuse to deliver to Roma communities. Faced with the consequences of ethnic and religious conflicts, women in the former Yugoslavia established a number of organizations to assist women during the war and in the postwar period. Zene Zenama, Women to Women Center for Women Returnees established in 1997 in Sarajevo,31 Bosnia and Herzegovina, focused its activities on creating a “safe space for women” in which they can express their war and postwar experiences. Zene Zenama provides emotional and psychological support for women in crisis. It helps women returnees with reintegration into the society and provides women with information on health and legal issues. Similarly, Medica Zenica Women’s Association, an active women’s therapy center, assisted women who were subject to violence during the war or in the context of their families or communities. Medica, founded in 1993 in Zenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina, aimed to encourage solidarity among women, protect women against exploitation, and promote women’s reproductive rights, as well as to fight aggressive nationalism and ethnic discrimination by providing women with shelter, therapy, and medical assistance.32 A similarly intense mobilization of formal and informal networks and alliances exists around sexual orientation. Across the region, several lesbians and gay groups have emerged to challenge discrimination and marginalization on the basis of sexuality. In Slovenia in 2006, lesbians collectively donated blood as a political action and organized Parade Ponosa against the medicalization of homosexuality.33 In Poland, Lesbians Alliance was established in 2005 with a network of five branches.34 Their cooperation with “mainstream” women’s NGOs resulted in a yearly Equality Parade that takes place in several cities in Poland in June and features slogans for social justice and equality regardless of gender, sexuality, or social class.35 Women’s mobilization is not limited to capital cities, national urban centers, and transnationally visible locations. An important feature of the work

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done by service organizations is their focus on particular issues that concern women in local communities. Consequently, they are very much rooted in the social networks of these communities. Although the majority of political activities take place in the largest urban centers, small and rural areas are also sites of grassroots mobilization. In Kosovo, Rural Women’s Activists, MOTRAT QIRIAZI, initiated by two Qiriazi sisters, focused on the education of women and girls. The organization’s main objective is to institute and maintain weekly meetings in villages to provide a forum for women and girls to exchange ideas and begin to examine the parameters of their lives: “The meetings contain self-esteem building elements and educational components; through them, women and girls together develop sub-projects to benefit the whole community.”36 In Poland, after 1989 the nineteenth-century tradition of Rural Women’s Circles was renewed for the purpose of grassroots organizing and self-help. Circles in various locations across the country engage in activities ranging from baking workshops to Internet courses for rural women.37 Such groups have worked mostly at the local level, where they maintain frequent contact with local authorities and public-service providers such as the police, courts, and hospitals. Ties to these networks increase the effectiveness of intervention centers geared toward preventing violence against women, as well as that of women’s rights centers and shelters. The work of such organizations often intersects with that of community-based institutions, such as the local police and church groups. Engagement with local governments or national institutions represents only one site of women’s mobilizing. When faced with resistance from local or national state institutions, women moved beyond the nation-state, especially when they concluded that they had exhausted their domestic options without positive results.38 This process of scale shift, identified in feminist literature on protest politics and feminist organizing as a ping-pong effect (Alexander and Mohanty 1997; Basu 2003; Grewal 2005; Keck and Sikkink 1998), boomerang effect (Tarrow 2005; Zippel 2004), or jumping scale (Regulska and Grabowska 2008), facilitates women’s political mobilization locally as well as transnationally. In Poland after ten years of unsuccessful struggle against the repressive antiabortion law and its effects at the local and national level, the Federation of Women and Family Planning (FWFP) turned to new transnational sites of mobilization. Alicja Tysiąc’s challenge to abortion legislation in the European Court of Human Rights39 and the arrival of the Langenort40 in Poland to call attention to antiabortion legislation in 2003 are just two

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examples of the effort to influence domestic policy through transnational channels. These and other cases prove the capacity for women’s movements to create and tap into resources at both the local and transnational level. These relationships generate new forms of social power that operate horizontally, across and above existing national boundaries. They reflect a new kind of nested mobilization practice that can confront patriarchal, “national” culture by utilizing local, national, and transnational spaces of political engagement.

Between Neoliberalism and Street Theory Toward the end of the 1990s a younger generation of women began questioning the practices, structures, and priorities of the NGOs established after the fall of communism and in the run-up to EU accession. In Women-Politics-Equal Opportunities, Jalusic and Antic (2001) argue that during the early 1990s, women’s and feminist organizations focused mostly on social issues and assistance for women. Facing exclusion from the new political leadership and withdrawal of many of the social and economic benefits provided by the previous regime, early women’s activism focused mostly on preserving existing women’s rights—such as the right to abortion—and increasing women’s participation in mainstream political institutions (Jalusic and Antic 2001). Sexual harassment, sexism in the media, the state’s responsibility to address women’s concerns, and motherhood have long been a part of the NGO agenda but they were not always central to it. These issues became particularly important to the generation of women that came of age after the end of communism without the social provisions guaranteed by the socialist state. The important generational shifts in women’s mobilizations that are taking place within the postcommunist context differ from those in other locations. Some argue that women’s activism in the postcommunist context is characterized by a combination of the features identified with discrete “waves” of feminism in Western Europe and the United States. For example, thirdwave feminism’s strategies and tools (irony, high theory, and performance) are employed to achieve goals characteristic of second wave feminism in the “West” (reproductive rights, equality in the labor market) (Graff 2003). The trajectory of women’s activism under state socialism and the intensification and consolidation of women’s activism after the fall of communism contributed to the interplay of various methods, strategies, and ideologies in women’s movements in the region. A characteristic feature in the genealogy

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of postcommunist women’s mobilization is the lack of a mass women’s movement in the 1960s, a time when only limited possibilities for women’s organizing existed within the state-funded organizations, such as the League of Polish Women in Poland or the Women’s Union in Czechoslovakia. In the opinion of some women’s activists, although on paper these organizations were devoted to women’s emancipation, they rarely worked against discrimination of women beyond party politics (Walczewska 1996). The rapid reemergence of women’s mobilizations over the last fifteen years was, in many instances, a reaction to the conservative turn, or what Graff calls a “backlash before feminism” that took place in the region (Graff 2003, 100). The rapid consolidation of issues and the emergence of a great variety of groups actively engaged in the women’s movement led to compression and diversification of methods, ideologies, and strategies to fight for basic women’s rights. The younger generation is no longer uncritically committed to the neoliberal paradigm. These women refuse to conform to hierarchical structures of power and are increasingly skeptical of the institutional model of mobilization represented by the NGOs. Instead, young women strategically combine a variety of discursive tools and are open to various women’s points of view. Although many members of informal women’s groups maintain personal attachments to women’s NGOs and even work in such NGOs as volunteers and project coordinators, they prefer to organize their own activism outside the institutional movement. Social networks and efforts to create alternative institutional structures have become the basis of younger women’s political involvement. At the same time, these women often situate their actions in particular public spaces, such as streets, parliament buildings, and art spaces to challenge the hegemonic framing of social justice concerns. Despite their critique of institutional feminism, younger women focus on forming external coalitions while using resources provided by NGOs to introduce new approaches to questions of gender, social justice, and equality. They are more often engaged in ideological debates than the first generation of postcommunist feminists, and they are less enthusiastic about the neoliberal paradigm within which most feminist NGOs operate. Informal women’s groups rarely represent fixed conceptions of “gender,” “equality,” and “social justice.” They have fluid memberships and vaguely defined agendas. Their understanding of these categories is flexible and constantly changing. Because these groups focus on concerns related to “gender equality” that require less “professional” involvement, they tend to be open to different groups of women and different

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agendas. These dimensions suggest the potential of such groups as a future vehicle of women’s mass mobilization. Unlike “professional” NGOs and service organizations, informal groups are sites of dialogue among women with different concerns and political commitments, including older women, trade union members, gays and lesbians, and religious groups. As such, they often promote rainbow coalitions that link formal feminist groups with wider communities. The Polish “8 March Women’s Agreement” is one example of the mobilization capacity of these grassroots women’s organizations. Established in reaction to the violent reenforcement of the antiabortion law by the police, the “Agreement” initially focused on organizing the March 8 street demonstration, Manifa. Since 2000, twelve Manifas have taken place, and the participation of women and men in marches across the country increased yearly, from the original two hundred to four thousand in 2009 and over six thousand in 2012.41 Manifa demonstrations have also spread from Warsaw to many major cities across Poland. Each year the Manifa focuses on a particular issue related to gender equality (violence, equality in the labor market, reproductive rights, women’s political participation), combining traditional activism (speeches given by representatives of women’s NGOs and women politicians) with elements of festival such as performance and music. By employing a variety of persuasive strategies, Manifa is able to engage a broader and more diverse public with concerns related to “gender equality.” It demonstrates how these groups develop the language of “gender equality” beyond the liberal discourse prevalent in NGOs. In 2005, Manifa focused on the rights of lesbians, and together with the newly established Lesbian Alliance, it organized “equality” marches across the country. At the same time, members of “Agreement” actively encouraged women from workers’ organizations and unions to join the feminist march. The 2007 Manifa was called “March of Women’s Solidarity” for the first time (alluding to the Polish Solidarity movement of the 1980s), importantly emphasizing the commonalities of women’s struggles across class, sexuality, and party affiliation. The 2008 Manifa demanded equal rights for women and men. In 2009 participants marched under the theme, “Kazda Ekipa ta sama lipa” (New government, same crap), signifying disappointment with the lack of state and institutional responses to their needs and demands. Since informal groups and women’s coalitions connected women across identities, without requiring subscription to what is often perceived as ideological feminism, they are becoming sites of

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mass mobilization for the younger generation of women.42 Subsequent Manifas’ have continued to address sexism, including women’s exploitation (2011) and the unequal distribution of public funds (2012). While informal feminist and women’s groups follow the rules of participatory democracy and take feminist ideology very seriously, they often fail or refuse to build the hierarchical structures characteristic of NGOs. Such an approach is the source of financial problems among informal groups, but it allows them to address the concerns and secure the participation of women who are traditionally outside what is considered mainstream, NGOs feminist activism. The uncontrolled expansion of transnational corporations after the “opening” of the Eastern European economies resulted in the emergence of a market economy imperfectly regulated by labor laws and without guarantees of job security. Women, who are overrepresented in the lowest-paying jobs, have mobilized against unsafe and unjust working conditions as well as for maternity leave and job security. Women are often subject to discrimination on the basis of their reproductive choices. During job interviews, for example, younger women are asked to provide proof that they are not pregnant and those with children are often the first victims of “job reductions.” Unemployment, job security, skill acquisition, and economic autonomy are the most prevalent economic concerns for women and have become the focus of numerous protests. Workers have organized along gender lines in the face of unequal treatment from corporations.43 How these issues are approached and the strategies and discourses women use to incorporate particular demands into mainstream state policies varies with respect to local conditions. Some of the differences can be attributed to the economy; others may be linked to the geopolitical location or the degree of engagement with transnational social justice discourses in particular countries. Women are underrepresented within the trade union leadership across CEE, but the level of women’s mobilization around issues related to workplace and labor conditions is high nonetheless. Resistance to the individualistic liberal paradigm is evident in mobilization focused on securing women’s choice to become a parent. Many women in the region expressed disappointment with the broad notion of “gender equality” employed by women’s NGOs in their campaigns to influence existing state institutions. This framing of women’s concerns often precludes consideration of the experiences of mothers, reducing the debate about maternal rights and the distribution of caretaking responsibilities to questions of

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balancing professional and family life. Occasionally groups do embrace a different set of concerns, as in case of “mothers’ centers” created in the Czech Republic at the beginning of the 1990s to mobilize mothers at the local level. These organizations promoted women’s traditional roles as caregivers and community builders, to secure the survival of such roles in the neoliberal society.44 Many of these women combine “service” duties, such as caregiving and household responsibilities, with an effort to place the experience of motherhood at the center of social life. “Mothers’ centers” also serve as support groups, community-based day-care centers, and self-counseling groups for women during pregnancy and maternity leave.45 The neoliberal paradigm has also come under criticism from more conservative groups, comprised primarily of rural, older, and/or religious women who embrace a lifestyle rooted in tradition and religious beliefs. These women are rarely in favor of the free-market economy and equally rarely identify with feminist values. In Poland, some of these older, conservative women have been raising their voices against neocapitalism and the European Union. Radio Maryja, Poland’s Catholic radio station, is one such a voice. Within a short period of time, Reverend Rydzyk, the stations’ leader, created the Family of the Radio Maryja, a community of radio listeners with more than six hundred branches in almost every church district throughout Poland. Most of the listeners and financial supporters of this right-wing, radically nationalist station are women aged sixty and older who live in rural areas and small cities. These women have remained on the margins of both the transformation of the economy and most of the efforts to organize collective action discussed here. Their collective agency can be formidable nonetheless. The strength of this group was especially visible during the 2005 parliamentary elections when the League of Polish Families that Radio Maryja promoted won 8 percent of the seats in Parliament, electing many women representatives with right-wing convictions.46 The neoliberal paradigm became the subject of contestation in many locations across the region. Although antineoliberal groups are united in their ambivalence toward the free-market economy and capitalism (represented by international institutions including the EU), the impetus for mobilization varies significantly among them, ranging from specific labor concerns to general challenges to the global economic order akin to the motivation of the antiglobalist. The Alter-Globalists, for example, protested EU enlargement on the grounds that it effectively imposed a border between Eastern

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and Western Europe. They argued that such a development would create new sites of exclusion and hostility toward immigrants from outside of the EU in direct contradiction to the European Union’s rhetoric of integration.47 Mobilization framed in terms of antiglobalization, antifascism, and antineoliberalism has largely attracted the younger generation. While earlier actions of young people around these themes involved street demonstrations and riots, more recently, they have embraced alternative lifestyles and anticonsumerism promoted by various independent media48 as powerful mobilizing discourses. Feminism remains a crucial aspect of such challenges to the dominant economic and social systems.

Struggling with the Hegemonies of Western Feminist Movements The powerful influence of foreign donors and feminist activists—from the United States and Western Europe, and now the EU—on women’s mobilizations in the postcommunist region has been the subject of numerous debates and critiques. Many activists in Central and Eastern Europe as well as in the Caucasus argue that the language of “gender equality” that predominates in Western Europe and the UN does not easily translate in the context of the unique traditions of civil and social movements in the region (Graff 2008; Einhorn 2007; Grabowska 2012). Moreover, the almost exclusive financial dependence of women’s mobilizations on Western donors has resulted in the emergence of organizations whose structure may not necessarily capture the mobilization potential of women in the postcommunist context and precludes representation of certain concerns important to women in the region, such as reproductive rights or immigration. Since the early 1990s, numerous efforts have been made to destabilize this one-way (West to East) communication and knowledge production/translation process. These efforts have challenged the hegemony of the Western social movement paradigm, in particular with respect to the feminist movements in the region. Among the most important points of entry into the transnational/ global women’s movement for women’s and feminist groups from Central and Eastern Europe was participation in the 5th International UN Conference of Women in Beijing in 1995. The impact of the Beijing Conference goes beyond simple framing of gender equality and gender-based political claims. The regional and transnational cooperation facilitated by the conference has been critical to the mobilization of women’s and feminist groups in

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the postcommunist world. Many women and women’s groups in this region responded to new opportunities to work transnationally and globally with great enthusiasm. However, some activists are skeptical about the costs of accessing the resources and visibility transnational women’s organizations represent. Many are fearful that their more powerful collaborators will eclipse their voices and their agendas. In addition to the financial and informational support women in the postcommunist region drew from the “West” at the beginning of 1990s, early attempts to build dialogue between women from the “East” and the “West” during this period had far-reaching effects. The Network of East-West Women (NEWW), a transatlantic and transnational cooperation network, was founded in 1991 as an independent association. NEWW’s initial headquarters was in Washington DC, but it operated primarily throughout Central and East Europe. Subsequently its offices were moved to Gdańsk, Poland. NEWW-Polska continues to carry out NEWW’s mission, with thirty member countries, hundreds of individual members, and numerous institutional members. Within that framework, NEWW collaborates with many women’s and feminist organizations by focusing on economic empowerment, legal counseling, capacity building, and information distribution, as well as other activities.49 During more than twenty years of activism, NEWW undertook a wide range of initiatives, such as establishing the first communication networks in the region, providing hands-on training for young women lawyers, and expanding women’s studies libraries through the “Book and Journal Project.”50 In 2001, NEWW began to establish a new institute on economic justice for women in CEE/NIS countries by “building the capacity of women NGO activists and women politicians from CEE/NIS to actively influence and shape policies aiming at the improvement of [the] economic situation of women in countries which have been deeply affected by the transition to the market economy and by globalization.”51 Another organization, KARAT Coalition, established on the train to Beijing in 1995 by women’s activists from the region, emphasizes the need for women’s groups to retain regional identity in the face of the disintegration caused by the selective eastern enlargement of the European Union.52 Among the coalition’s activities are yearly training events, such as Capacity Building Seminars. Through such initiatives, the KARAT Coalition brought together participants from Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine, as well as from EU member countries such as Romania, Poland, and the Czech Republic.

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In conjunction with the project “Building Capacity of NGOs from Eastern European Neighboring Countries,” the seminar focused on monitoring gender equality standards in the process of European integration. KARAT’s members were also among those most skeptical about joining the European Women’s Lobby (EWL), a pan-European, EU-funded umbrella organization that aims to represent European women’s concerns at the level of the EU.53 Together with many other organizations in the region, KARAT activists pointed to the fact that European women’s organizations initiated a transnational dialogue only at the very end of negotiations with the EU in 2004, and only after receiving additional funds from the EU. Others argued that because the politics of the EWL were designed narrowly to meet the financial and structural limitations imposed by its sponsor, the EU, certain topics important to Central and Eastern European women were excluded from its agenda. For instance, the EU prohibited interference with the nation-state’s regulation of reproductive rights and therefore would not provide support for Polish women’s groups struggling against the restrictive antiabortion law. Similarly, the EU’s strict financial rules regarding cooperation with member states did not support transnational cooperation with nonEU locations. In this way, despite its rhetoric emphasizing European integration, the EU reinforced new divisions within Europe. In addition to NEWW-Polska and KARAT, which focused on building regional networks, several other organizations established connections and opened dialogue between women from the region and those from non-European locations. Groups such as Women in Development Europe (WIDE) and the Central and Eastern European Women’s Network for Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (ASTRA) were leading these efforts.54 WIDE brings together NGOs, human rights activists, and gender specialists. Since the early 2000s WIDE has not only developed closer contacts with women’s and feminist NGOs in the region, but also it has been working with women’s organizations from South America and Africa. This international network “monitors and influences international economic and development policy and practice from a feminist perspective.”55 WIDE strives for “a world based on gender equality and social justice that ensures equal rights for all, as well as equal access to resources and opportunities in all spheres of political, social and economic life.”56 Established in 2004, ASTRA focuses on the quest for reproductive rights among women in Central and Eastern Europe. ASTRA has also established contacts with organizations in Africa and South

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America. These links between women’s organizations in the region and those in non-EU and non-European locations are important for the region’s position within the transnational context. Women see these transnational processes and connections as possible new tools in the development of strategies for social change. Einhorn follows Fraser in arguing “greater social justice can be achieved through transnational solidarity, backed up by supra-national institutions of governance that are in a position to mediate between local (or national) claims and the forces of economic globalization” (2005, 1029). These new transnational spaces and connections are seen as containers and conduits for ideas, resources, people, and capital. While such transnational collaborations have increased the region’s global visibility, some scholars have warned against importing agendas from abroad. Hemment (2004) argues that transnational agendas often do not reflect local concerns and may have negative consequences. She stressed, “Ironically, ‘NGOization’ has demobilized social movements. It has contributed to the formation of new hierarchies and allowed former elites to flourish. In many cases it also signals the triumph of Washington- or Geneva-based agendas over local concerns” (2004, 821). In the postcommunist context, transnational and transregional networks have challenged the hegemony of Western feminisms, donors, agendas, practices, and coalitions. As these networks focus on particular issues and concerns, such as women’s reproductive rights, they seek new collaborators and alliances. By producing new partnerships, they destabilize fixed geopolitical and institutional divisions and bring together women from within and beyond the EU and Europe. In this way, they form new collective identities that are bound by a common agenda but informed by localized histories and experiences.

Conclusion One of the most striking features of women’s mobilization in the context of the transformation and “Europe-ization” of the postcommunist space is the diverse and innovative nature of mobilizing practices. Local, national, or transnational domains no longer neatly bound mobilizing sites. The fusion of mobilization strategies (for example, street demonstration, organization building, lobbying, performance, text writing) and their employment at the intersection of different spheres of life (for example, politics, economy,

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private life, academe, art) create a web of power relations that is a part of the new governance environment within which gender equality is practiced or pursued. As examples in this chapter show (and many other initiatives that have not been mentioned here indicate), women mobilize against oppressive states, challenge patriarchal practices, confront neoliberal hegemonies, and establish their own analyses and practices in dialogue with those of Western feminism. Over the last two decades, NGOs that combined a strong tradition of civil organizing—a legacy of resistance to communism in many postcommunist states—with the ideals of Western liberalism have emerged as major challengers to hegemonic discourses in postcommunist states. Women’s NGOs have attempted to destabilize the state’s power and enter public discourse in two ways: by developing counterhegemonic relations beyond the state and by producing counterhegemonic discourses within state institutions. In many cases, when women were denied direct voice in state institutions at the point of transition from communism and in the first stages of postcommunist transformations, they reacted by appropriating the neoliberal discourse and reaching out to institutions that embody the neoliberal paradigm, such as the EU. The (re)emergence of nationalism and patriarchal values in the postcommunist context affected women’s lives in both the public and private spheres. Women’s mobilization around specific concerns, such as gender violence, reproductive rights, health (for example, breast or cervical cancer), or childbirth emerged simultaneously with mobilization against the nationalism and xenophobia rising in some segments of the postcommunist societies. Concerns about such issues as domestic violence, sexual harassment, violence against children, rape, and trafficking in women generated both immediate assistance (such as service delivery) and demands for legislative intervention. While locally embedded, these actions often became sites of transnational women’s activism through which their efforts were linked to supranational institutions. In the early 1990s, the neoliberal agenda helped to frame mobilization against the hegemony of the state institutions. Later, however, a growing number of particularly younger women began organizing to contest the hegemonies of the state without turning to the neoliberal discourse that continued to frame most NGO-driven activism. Thus national and transregional feminists organizing around neoliberal values encountered local and transnational grassroots mobilizations against the hegemony of neoliberalism.

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This mobilization either invoked alter-globalist paradigms, addressing labor issues, or was organized around conservative, often religious values. Simultaneously, the Western paradigm of women’s social mobilization, predominant among women’s nongovernmental organizations, was challenged. Many women across the region argued that the mass-scale, middle-class model of women’s social movements was ill-suited to social mobilization in the postcommunist context because of its distinctive genealogy. Thus in terms of civil society, the process of building a public sphere outside of institutionalized politics was no longer limited to a dialogue with an often repressive and resistant state. Rather, it came to include disruption of institutional politics flowing from various “official” positions (NGOs, political parties, academe) and began influencing national politics through interaction between local and supranational political bodies and institutions. Activists working to implement “gender equality” policies within their own national contexts changed the way that “gender” and “equality” were understood by both state actors and transnational advocates of gender equality. The increased visibility of women’s domestic concerns, along with increased international attention to EU negotiations and post-Soviet countries more generally, led to new opportunities for women to link local and national campaigns for change to transnational power and resource networks. The EU’s Eastern enlargement presented opportunities for women in the region to rethink the notion of citizenship in a new and multiscalar way and to exploit the opportunities for reform within the individual nation-state. Women’s NGOs realized that despite the limited ability of international or supranational bodies to intervene into member-states’ domestic affairs (as the national state remained the locus of decision-making power on gender equality and women’s positions in the public sphere), they could nevertheless use the transnational and global resources of the UN and the EU to pursue gender equity. Through experiences with the EU, women’s groups gained new practical tools to cope with intractable domestic environments. Yet, the question of how transnational women’s mobilization should be conceptualized within the postcommunist context as well as questions regarding the particularities, possibilities, and limitations of the Second World conditions still need to be addressed. The lack of acknowledgment of different needs and concerns among women is another prominent characteristic of women’s organizations in the region. The presumption of homogeneity precludes questions of class, race,

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or ethnicity, and the “difference-blind” liberal discourse of social justice reinforces wariness among activists about the question of “difference.” The surprisingly uncritical deployment of the vague, broad definition of “gender” offered by Western liberalism parallels the lack of critical debate about the past socialist system from a gender perspective. Until recently, social and intellectual elites in the region, including feminists, decisively evaluated the previous regimes as politically and ideologically depraved. Many leaders of women’s organization were active in the opposition movements against authoritarian communist states and are understandably suspicious of leftist and socialist discourses. One of the crucial intellectual challenges in the postcommunist world is deconstructing the prevailing view of the socialist state as one-dimensional and dissociating the oppressive practices of the authoritarian communist state from the socialist politics that could be utilized in mobilization for social justice. Transnational dialogue between women from First, Second, and Third World locations is not only critical but also must take place simultaneous with the aforementioned effort to deconstruct the socialist past. The so-called Second World is significantly absent from postcolonial feminist scholarship; gender relations within postcommunist Europe remain at the periphery of transnational feminist theory and practice. Although within the postcommunist context, the Russian empire and its descendant, the Soviet Union, can surely be considered an example of imperialism and the cultural dynamics it generated. However, the postcolonial framework is rarely brought to bear in analysis of the Second World. If the imperialism of the Russian empire and the Soviet Union is recognized, why do scholars resist seeing the Second World in light of the postcolonial framework? Is it because Western or European imperialism focuses exclusively on the appraisal of capitalism (and draws from the Marxist critique of capitalistic societies), or does it have to do with the status of the region within the East-West and South-North dynamic and inchoate theorizing of colonization dynamics in the region? Recognition of the Soviet Union as a “colonizing” force in the region would require redefinition of the direction of the “colonial” dynamic. Postcolonial scholars as well as others recognized colonial dynamics as flowing from West to East and therefore omitted the East-West colonization processes that took place in Central and Eastern Europe and the Caucasus. Reconceptualization of these regions as postcolonial spaces requires taking into account both internal and external colonial and postcolonial dynamics. Additionally, any attempt

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to conceptualize the Second World within the postcolonial framework will have to take into account its position between the East and the West, and its experience of imperialism from both directions. Particularly the countries in the central part of the region endured “colonization” from both Eastern (Russia and Soviet Union) and Western (Prussia and Austro-Hungary) powers. Moreover, countries such as Poland have an even more complex relationship to geopolitical forces, given their historical experience as “colonized” from both the East and the West, and as “colonizer” of the countries to the east. Considering the Second World countries in the context of the European empires would introduce a major challenge to postcolonial categories and test the limits of the theoretical framework. Can we really claim that throughout European history there have been instances of European empires with European colonies? The overseas aspect crucial for the colonial dynamics is missing here, and the lands appropriated within the European continent were never actually called “colonies”—the term was reserved for noncontiguous protectorates. In this context, what is the position of the so-called Second World in relation to the First and Third Worlds? How do these relationships implicate women’s mobilizing practices and their struggles with Western neoliberal hegemony? How should we understand postcommunist women’s mobilizations within the larger context of the transnational women’s movement? How can the legacies of the communist past and the labile positionality between East and West, South and North, enrich our understanding of the politics of location and representation within transnational women’s movements? The complex position of the region in current geopolitical debates significantly affects the conceptualization and practice of women’s mobilization in the postcommunist context. Yet, these ambiguities and tensions await recognition and theorizing. Moreover, the question of race and ethnicity requires more attention within the debates over women’s mobilization in the context of postcommunism. Throughout the region’s history, practices of “racializing” certain groups and nations have been employed by both the Eastern and Western empires as well as by countries within the region to distinguish “more” and “less” developed nations and social groups. Recently, “racialization” in the region has taken the form of anti-Semitism, anti-Romaism, and ethnic cleansing. Yet the significance of “race” in relation to complex postcolonial dynamics and rising nationalism in the region remains unexplored. In many locations, with the exception of the former Yugoslavia, the assumption of

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ethnic homogeneity within postcommunist societies is part of the (re)emerging traditionalist and nationalistic rhetoric. In the context of women’s mobilization for social justice, the belief among women’s activists and scholars that race and ethnicity are not as visible in the Second World as in other locations suppresses debate about important race-related questions. The presence of the EU in the region has a significant impact on the framing of ethnicity and gender-related questions. On the one hand, the EU, as we have shown, supports projects related to ethnic diversity, which tend to focus on protecting the rights of ethnic minorities, such as Roma, and incorporating minority groups into mainstream state policies. On the other hand, the EU itself struggles with its immigration policy; it only cautiously considers minority groups from outside of its present borders. The impact of restrictive EU immigration policies on the construction of non-Europeans in the region—as well as the whiteness of the EU member countries—is yet to be addressed. How do these conceptualizations reinforce neoliberal hegemonies and produce counterhegemonies that result in new forms of social action? The EU’s presence also requires that women’s mobilization in the region is understood with respect to the larger context of a changing Europe. The spatial, social, and political identities, geopolitical meanings, resource distribution practices, and spread of new technologies of power that comprise “Europe” powerfully shape the political imaginaries and material resources of women’s movements in postcommunist countries within Europe and beyond. How do the regulatory practices of Europe and the emergence of new forms of governance and collectives affect the ways that women mobilize? How are women’s actions and responses influenced by the decoupling of regulatory practices from the traditional nation-state and the emergence of new forms of governance around centers of power that are often eclectic, hybrid, nonlinear, and temporal? Women’s mobilization must be seen within a complex, changing web of diverse gender ideologies, market practices, institutional power relationships, resource distribution networks, and elite politics. Faced with many challenges, groups organizing on behalf of social justice engender fragmented and multisited mobilizations as they continually adjust their strategies, agendas, and actions to the multidimensional hegemonies and counterhegemonies of the nation-state, patriarchal culture, neoliberal economic reforms, and Western feminism.

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Notes 1.

Following Steinhilber, Daskalova, Gapova, and Regulska, Barbara Einhorn argues that the withdrawal of the state welfare provisions was a consequence of the imposition of the neoliberal paradigm on Eastern European countries and led to some negative effects such as increase of poverty, widening of income gap, and reemergence of the class structure (Einhorn 2005, 1024).

2.

In the context of women’s mobilization in the postcommunist region, the framing of gender justice promoted by international agencies and EU discourses as the language of the “international women’s movement,” that is, “gender equality” and “gender mainstreaming,” has been adapted as a variation on the theme of equal opportunity for free individuals regardless of gender. “Gender equality” language gained momentum in the region through the accession of some countries to the EU, which marked a symbolic relocation from the East to the West, that is, to Europe. The EU accession process also coincided with and related to the Beijing mobilizations, the brief stage of “NGOization” of the women’s movement.

3.

In such formulations, the Second World locations represent countries that have previously been part of the Soviet bloc. So understood, the Second World includes countries that are located in Central (for example, the Czech Republic, Hungary), Eastern (for example, Ukraine), Northern (the Baltic countries), and Southern (the broadly understood Balkans) Europe as well as countries located in the Caucasus.

4.

This overview draws from the literary and Internet research conducted for this project by Laura Lovin (doctoral student in women’s and gender studies, Rutgers University) between November 2006 and February 2007. Additionally, we draw from our research conducted during 2002–5 as a part of the NSF-funded project (# BCS-0137954), “Constructing Supranational Political Spaces: The European Union, Eastern Enlargement, and Women’s Agency.”

5.

As Mary Hawkesworth argued during the 1990s, the critique of neoliberalism understood in this manner became one of the core features of the broad agenda of transnational feminisms (Hawkesworth 2006). In feminist theorizing, neoliberalism is conceptualized as an ideology according to which “the primary task of the state is to support unrestricted operations of the market, providing a legal framework that protects private property, enforces contracts, promotes law and order and provides a common defense” (Hawkesworth 2006, 8). Neoliberals support privatization of public companies and elimination of public spending on health, education, welfare, and art (Hawkesworth 2006, 8). At the global scale the

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transition to neoliberalism included feminization of the international labor force and the elimination of labor and environmental protection that lead to the feminization of poverty. Feminist critiques of the “global sisterhood” in the 1990s pointed to the various effects that the transition from Keynesian to neoliberal economics had on women, particularly in non-Western (northern) societies. These new forms of feminist theory and practice were formulated in opposition to an old model of the “global sisterhood” based on anticipated convergence of feminist activism across the globe. Feminist critiques of neoliberalism included a critique of both structural-adjustment policies and the conceptualization of progress in the area of gender social justice solely in terms of disseminating the “equal rights” paradigm. Many perceived this understanding of gender social justice as insensitive to local contexts and the diverse effects of globalization on women’s experiences (Desai and Naples 2002; Grewal and Kaplan 1994; Hawkesworth 2006; Moghadam 2005; Mohanty 2003). 6.

The concept of “street theory” was introduced by Jane Mansbridge in her article, “What Is the Feminist Movement?” (1996, 29). In this piece, Mansbridge advocates a broad definition of feminism as a “discursively created movement,” consistent at its core with “the commitment to ending male domination.” Such conceptualization of feminism, according to Mansbridge opposes limited understanding of feminism as feminist theorizing and feminist activism. It incorporates the broader audiences of women who engage in the “street theory” and produce feminism as “the movement that is made up of women figuring out and telling one another what they think makes sense, and what they think can explain and help crack the gender domination that they feel” (Mansbridge 1996, 29).

7.

Gender mainstreaming stipulates that gender equality is central to all EU activities—policy development, research, advocacy/dialogue, legislation, resource allocation, planning, implementation, and monitoring of programs and projects—at all stages. Gender mainstreaming has been the official European Union approach to issues of gender equality since the Amsterdam Treaty. The concept derives from the 1996 Beijing Conference’s final document, the Beijing Platform of Action. It is thus also an official UN strategy for achieving gender equality. In the UN documents mainstreaming as a gender perspective is defined as “the process of assessing the implications for women and men of any planned action, including legislation, policies or programmes, in all areas and at all levels. It is a strategy for making women’s as well as men’s concerns and experiences an integral dimension of the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies and programmes in all political, economic and societal spheres so that women and men benefit equally

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and inequality is not perpetuated. The ultimate goal is to achieve gender equality” (“Gender Mainstreaming” 1997, 2). 8.

For instance, Polish shadow reports provided statistics about the efficiency of the equality mechanism implemented in the country over the last twenty years to meet the requirements of the Beijing Platform of Action and the EU directives. Since 1994, Polish women’s NGOs have presented at least fourteen shadow reports including the “Shadow Letter 2004,” and, in 2005, a report on women’s and adolescents’ reproductive rights. Among other reports were “Shadow Report Republic of Poland” (2006), “On the Implementation of the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women,” and “Independent Report submitted to the UN Human Rights Committee” (2004) (www.karat.org). These reports point to disparities between official governments’ arguments about women’s participation in the political processes and various domains of social life and provide statistics proving that the mechanisms implemented by the state are inadequate. In addition, these reports play an important role in pointing to failures of the official state reports to capture the impact of the current social and economic reforms and of the antiabortion law. According to the state reports, no more then four hundred abortions a year are performed in Poland; the Federation for Women and Family Planning, by contrast, estimates the number of illegal abortions at up to eighty thousand a year (www.federa.org.pl).

9.

Similarly, in Serbia, there is the Serbian Forum for Gender Equality within the Civic Alliance of Serbia, and in Slovenia there is the Slovenian Committee for Equal Opportunities within the Slovene Liberal Democrats Women’s Forum (www.quotaproject.org/CS/Slovenia.pdf).

10.

The agenda of the Ukrainian party Women for the Future, which rose to third place within thirty-six election blocs and electoral initiatives in the 2004 elections, primarily focused on issues such as maternity and education (Kuzio 2007). In Poland, the Women’s Party (established in 2006) attracted thousands of women as it aimed at positioning itself beyond the traditional political divisions of LeftRight and liberal-socialist politics. While it relied on analyses provided by women’s NGOs and attracting women previously involved in NGOs, Women’s Party leaders emphasized the necessity of providing women with equal opportunities in the labor market and the capacity to balance the demands of a professional career and motherhood. At the same time, however, this party refused to voice an opinion on reproductive rights. During its first months of existence, it attracted more than ten thousand women across the country and became a catalyst for the establishment of sixteen local branches and four “transnational” Women’s Party units around the

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world (Ireland, London, Berlin, and the United States). However, during the October 2007 elections, it received only 45,121 votes and did not secure any seats in Parliament (www.polskajestkobieta.org). 11.

For example, the Lithuanian Women Party formed in 1996 was established as a “party, which represents interests of family and children, defends and represents women’s rights. It is the only party where women are in majority” (Prunskiene 1997, 4).

12.

http://www.stopvaw.org/19Aug200414.htlm.

13.

http://www.gadc-al.org. The agenda of Armenia’s Women’s Rights Center is similar, as it aims to “support democratic change in Armenia and rising of women’s role in social, cultural, political life, to change the mentality and the social attitude toward women’s issues, to protect women’s rights and gender equality through advocacy, education and outreach programs, services consulting, publications, cultural traditions initiatives, and the creation of the new working places for women” (http://stopvaw.org/19Aug200413.htlm).

14.

www.stopvaw.org/19Aug200413.htlm.

15.

Among these new units were the Office for Equal Opportunities in the Government of the Republic of Slovenia and the Women’s Policy Office, which was renamed the Office for Equal Opportunities in 2001. In 2002, Slovenia passed the Equal Opportunities Act, the Employment and Parental Care and Family Income Act. It further established the Advisory Body for Women within the Ministry of Labor, Family, and Social Affairs. Since 2003, coordinators for equal opportunities have been appointed in each of the fifteen ministries and within local governments throughout the country. In addition, the government appointed a governmental official “ombudsperson” and established the Women’s Reproductive Prevention Programs, the Women’s Health Institute, and the Coalition for Establishing a Balanced Representation of Women and Men in Public Life composed of NGOs, governmental representatives, and political parties (www.ilo.org/public/english/ region/eurpro/budapest/download/gender/slovenia.pdf).

16.

In Poland, the Plenipotentiary for Equality between Women and Men, Izabella Jaruga-Nowacka, appointed in 2000, was previously the head of the Polish League of Women. Her successor, Magda Środa, has been a longtime feminist activist and scholar. Finally, the women’s issues advisor to the conservative president, Lech Kaczyński, appointed in the summer of 2007 had previously led the Polish branch of the European Union of Women. By 2008 Radziszewska was appointed the Plenipotentiary for Equal Treatment, thus making the focus on women invisible.

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17.

The goals of the program were to create and foster a public policy of gender equality, to develop a legislative basis for gender equality, to integrate the special and normative law on gender equity into the Ukrainian law, and to incorporate the EU’s legislation on gender equality into the Ukrainian legislation. The program also strove to create “institutional mechanisms” for realizing gender equity. So far the new law had no real implementation mechanisms. Amongst non-EU countries only the Belarusian government still represents the “communist-era” approach to gender equality, claiming that this country is the leader in equal opportunities among the Eastern European states (www.stopvaw.org/Gender_Equality_in_Ukraine.html).

18.

Hašková (2005) (in the case of the Czech Republic) and Regulska and Grabowska (2008) (in the case of Poland) argue that upon becoming members of various consultative bodies, women members of NGOs, were able to use their knowledge from grassroots activism and transfer it into the governmental negotiations as well as disseminate and apply it within the NGO community.

19.

The implementation of the EU directives by the Romanian state institutions is often unproductive since the “institutional inflation/ overinstitutionalization” goes hand in hand with a lack of “transparency regarding the funds allocated to the development of the institutions that work with equal opportunities agendas” and a lack of social negotiations “about how to mainstream the national budget” (Magyari-Vincze 2003, 8–9).

20.

For instance, the Feminoteka Foundation, based in Warsaw, established primarily as an independent Internet bookstore and portal, was financed mainly through a Gender Index project between 2005–8. As the Gender Index was funded by the EU, the project required close collaboration with the employees’ organization (in this case “Lewiatan”), as well as with organizations such as the UNDP Poland, the Warsaw School of Economics, leading advertising agencies, and mainstream national media (the production of a nationwide media campaign promoting gender equality in the workplace represented one aspect of the project). The project caused a shift in the organization’s agenda as the Gender Index became its primary focus. Nevertheless, the Internet portal and bookstore remain active (www.feminoteka.pl).

21.

In Poland, the state’s commitment to gender equality has changed with the political situation, particularly the position of ultraconservative parties and the role of the Catholic Church in politics. During the negotiations with the EU, Poland adjusted its Labor Code to meet the EU directives. However, major disagreements between leading actors of the “gender equality” debate—the state, the Catholic Church, and the women’s movement (particularly those related to women’s reproductive rights) remained unresolved. In this context, the presence of the EU has only a limited

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empowering effect; in fact, some would even argue that it has a destabilizing effect on the Polish debate on the “gender equality.” While on the one hand, the EU is committed to “gender equality,” on the other, it is unwilling to challenge state policies on specific gender concerns (for example, in case of Poland, it is abortion) (www.federa.org.pl). 22.

In Lithuania, the Parliamentary Commission for Family and Child Affairs has been functioning since 1996. The commission initiates or considers laws or their amendments that concern the rights of women and children, family policy, and other related pieces of legislation. In addition, the Office of Equal Opportunities Ombudsman was established in 1999. The ombudsman investigates individual complaints on gender discrimination and sexual harassment, submits recommendations and proposals to Parliament, and monitors governmental institutions on the priorities of gender equality policy. She or he takes the overall responsibility for the supervision and implementation of the Law on Equal Opportunities for Women and Men in Lithuania (www.genderequality.webinfo.lt/results/lithuania.htm). In the Czech Republic, the Government Council for Equal Opportunities for Women and Men is mainly responsible for “gender equality” within the state apparatus (www.gender-equality.webinfo.lt/results/czech.htm).

23.

For example, in 2006, NGOs organized a Protest Against the Total Ban on Abortion in Poland as well as the abortion coming-out events in October and December 2006, organized by the informal group Pro-Choice (www.feminoteka.pl). The attempt to change the legal status of abortion laws in Poland has also taken the form of a draft bill on Parental Awareness. In July 2003, the Federation for Women and Family Planning prepared the draft on reproductive rights and health in consultation with women’s NGOs and other stakeholders. The Parliamentarian Group of Women and NGOs joint efforts resulted in working out a bill on responsible parenthood. This draft was submitted and tabled by Parliament in 2004, and it waited the whole year to be considered. Despite recommendations of the UN Committee on Human Rights, Parliament decided against debate on changing the law in 2005 (www.federa.org.pl).

24.

www.lastradainternational.org.

25.

http://www.hra.am.

26.

www.babe.hr.

27.

www.nane.hu/english/index.html. ROSA from the Czech Republic represents similar goals (http://www.stopvaw.org/Czech_Republic3.html). Estonian Centre for Social Programs’ main objectives are gender equality and human rights with a particular emphasis on domestic violence www.stopvaw.org/19Aug200410.htlm. In

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Lithuania, the Center for Equality Advancement aims to collaborate with international, national, and local communities and NGOs in order to foster policies targeting domestic violence (www.igpn.net/members.php). In Romania in 2003, ApoWer participated in the 16 Days Against Violence Against Women (http:// www.apfr.ro). In Macedonia, the Women’s Rights Center Shelter organized a roundtable meeting titled “Sexual Reproductive Health and Rights,” which aimed to create a coordinating body to construct a National Strategy and Platform for Sexual Reproductive Health and Rights (http://www.mwrc.com.mk). 28.

The first NGO of Roma women in Iasi County, Romani Baxt aims to create an adequate organizational framework for the Roma women in order to facilitate their relationships with other Roma NGOs in the country as well as with the whole Roma community (http://www.soros.org/initiatives/women/ focus_areas/g_romani_women). The Association of Roma Women established the “Educational Cultural Center for the Roma Children” project. The project “For Our Children” aims to tutor students who are past school age and no longer enrolled in a public school. In another effort to reach out to a wider audience, Roma’s Life Organization: The Romani Foundation gathers information for a series of three documentaries (the wedding, the baptism, and the Roma woman within the Roma family). It promoted the project by broadcasting the series on the Iasi branch of the national television (http://www.donorsforum.ro/index. php?src=db&go=glroma1).

29.

http://www.soros.org/initiatives/women/focus_areas/g_romani_women.

30.

In Slovenia, the ACT brought together women from “three different cities . . . who direct their multiculturality and diversity towards a global women’s active art.” Transnational initiatives include also the second minischool from January 24–28 in Brno for Czech and Slovak participants, hosted by the Gender Center of the School of Social Studies at the Masaryk University, the activity originally initiated by the Belgrade Center for Women’s Studies in August 2002. According to the organizers, their main objective was “to introduce gender studies and feminist activities in the Czech and Slovak Republics” to Roma women students (http://www.romawomensinitiatives.org).

31.

www.zenezenama.com.ba.

32.

www.peacewomen.org/contacts/europe/bosnia/bos_index.html.

33.

http://www.ljudmila.org/lesbo/english.htm.

34.

www.porozumienie.lesbijek.org.

35.

www.paradarownosci.pl; over the last few years many of the Equality Parades could not take place as they did not receive permits from local authorities. When the

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parade was held, it was often the subject to hostile attacks from ultraconservative groups. 36. 37.

http://www.peacewomen.org/campaigns/Kosovo/KosovoInitiatives.html. The activities of Rural Women’s Circles are often sponsored by the EU and Western European funds.

38.

In many ways, transnationalism had already begun to facilitate the mobilization of women and to impact the conceptualization of equal opportunities in the region by the late 1980s when the weakening of communist state control over civil society started to take place (Walczewska 1996). The transnational networks created by the bypassing of the communist state that reached beyond the limiting communist state institutions were mainly devoted to the exchange of information and knowledge about various women’s centered initiatives, as well as resources indispensable to women’s mobilization (www.federa.org.pl).

39.

In 2004, Alicja Tysiąc was denied a legal abortion, even though her pregnancy caused a serious threat to her vision and could have resulted in blindness. Polish courts refused to recognize Alicja’s case as a violation of the Polish antiabortion law, so Tysiąc, with the assistance of the Federation of Women and Family Planning, sued the Polish state at the European Court of Human Rights (Tysiąc v. The Polish State). In June 2006, the court recognized the legal preconditions for further consideration of Tysiąc’s case. On March 20, 2007, the court concluded that in denying access to a therapeutic abortion, the Polish state failed to safeguard Tysiąc’s right to the respect for her private life and was therefore in breach of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (www.federa.org.pl).

40. In 2003, women’s and feminist NGOs Langenort, the ship of “Women on Waves,” arrived to Poland on the invitation of the committee “STER.” This group of Polish women’s NGOs, concerned with the existing antiabortion law, decided to reach out transnationally to women activists mobilizing in other countries, in this case in the Netherlands. Langenort’s visit was a successful media event that broke the silence around the need for changing the antiabortion law in Poland and thus acted as a catalyst for an initiative to prepare a new draft of the law on abortion (www.federa. org.pl). 41.

http://porozumieniekobiet.home.pl/news.php.

42.

http://porozumieniekobiet.home.pl; Ul. Siostrzana (Sisterhood Street), the informal group from Poland, aims to focus on women with children during their summer camp activities, as children are often omitted in the work of women’s organizations. Held since 2002, these camps incorporate a free children’s camp as a part of the group’s summer retreat. Since the camp takes place in rural areas of Poland, various

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special activities are designed to include local women’s communities into the camp activities (http://siostrzana.org.pl). Some of the informal groups also include men. For example, Wiedźma, an anarcho-feminist group funded in 1996, includes both women’s and men’s activism, as the group believes that “the liberation of women is the liberation of men as well” (www.wiedzma.most.org.pl). In fact, many informal women’s groups oppose the idea of separatism of women and men because they perceive it as a negation of equality. 43.

In Poland in 2005, several hundred women sued corporations for unjust working conditions. The same year, Bożena Łopacka, a store manager nicknamed “Wałęsa in a skirt,” won a case against the Portuguese supermarket chain Jeronimo Martins for unlawful employment practices. See www.karat.org/userfiles/biedronka%20 case.pdf. Also in Poland, in June and July 2007, thousands of unpaid and underpaid nurses performed a March on Warsaw, a mass strike in front of the prime minister’s office to demand higher wages and better working conditions from the government. When they were denied a meeting with state officials and parliamentary representatives, the nurses established a “white village” in front of the Parliament building where they continued to demand their rights for several weeks (praca.w.polsce. org/396311–praca).

44. 45.

http://www.materskacentra.cz. In Poland over the last few years, motherhood became one of the most debated public issues. Several groups of women rejected both the nationalistic state discourse and the liberal paradigm, attempting instead to situate the issue with respect to the actual experiences of mothers and the structural obstacles women faced in becoming and being mothers. For instance, the Mama Foundation in Warsaw organized several street actions called “I can’t get through here with my stroller” to expose how city architecture restrains mothers’ mobility. More recently, Mama has been cooperating with the local city officials in the “Baby on the way” initiative that focuses on making room for pregnant women in public transportation. Mama’s involvement in this action, however, has become highly controversial among other women’s groups as many argue that the language of the campaign emphasizes the safety of children but not that of women. For some women, antineoliberal mobilizations constitute a difficult predicament since they do not necessarily share the traditional views that constitute the core of the antineoliberal discourse. Obviously, this situation is especially problematic for neoconservative women (www.fundacjamama.pl, www.feminoteka.pl).

46.

In the 2007 elections, the league received only 1.3 percent of the vote and did not take any seats in Parliament.

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47.

Women have been crucial agents in organizing antiborder camps around the region. Organized in the region (Poland, Russia, Romania, Ukraine) since 1998, these camps addressed issues often disregarded by other social movements, such as immigration and the role that borders play in creating political exclusion and economic divisions in the region. In 2007, the latest antiborder camp took place. It was held for the first time in Ukraine as the Ukrainian-Polish border became a crucial frontier in the new EU immigration policy, especially for Ukrainian women who come to Poland often illegally as low-wage laborers (cleaners, caretakers, nannies, housekeepers) (http://poland.indymedia.org/pl/2004/05/6555.shtml).

48.

In Romania, Indymedia Romania is part of the Global Indymedia, the Independent Media Center, whose network is committed to promoting social justice, human rights, minority struggles, feminism, ecology, peace and freedom, and noncommercial uses of IT. Ladyfest, a women’s festival organized yearly in Bucharest, features workshops on antifascism, self-defense, and the creation of alternative women’s media (http://romania.indymedia.org).

49.

www.neww.org.pl.

50.

Since 1991, the “Book and Journal Project” has focused on the exchange of ideas and knowledge between women’s movements in the United States and Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics. The project has donated books and journals to women’s organizations and provided small grants to feminist scholars and activists. It has helped establish gender studies and women’s organizations and libraries and has also supported publications on women’s issues in the region (http://www.neww.org.pl/en.php/fellow/ksiazka/0.html).

51.

http://www.neww.org/en/achivements/projekty/0,2.html.

52.

www.karat.org.

53.

www.womenlobby.org.

54.

www.astra.org.pl.

55.

www.wide-network.org.

56.

Ibid.

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[Cooperation or conflict?: State, the European Union and women]. Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Akademickie i Profesjonalne. Gal, Susan, and Gail Kligman, eds. 2000. Reproducing Gender: Politics, Publics, and Everyday Life after Socialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. “Gender Mainstreaming” 1997. Extract from Report of the Economic and Social Council for 1997. (A/52/3, September 18), UN. Grabowska, Magdalena. 2012. “Bringing Second World In: Conservative Revolution(s), Socialist Legacies and Transnational Silences in the Trajectories of Polish Feminism.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 37 (2): 385–411. Graff, Agnieszka. 2003. “Lost Between Waves?” Journal of International Women’s Studies 4 (2): 100–16. Graham, Ann, and Joanna Regulska. 1997. “Expanding Political Space for Women in Poland: An Analysis of Three Communities.” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 30 (1): 65–82. Grewal, Inderpal. 2005. Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Grewal, Inderpal, and Caren Kaplan. 1994. Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hall, Stuart, ed. 1997. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Thousand Oaks. Hašková, Hana. 2005. “Czech Women’s Civic Organizing Under the State Socialist Regime, Socio-Economic Transformation and the EU Accession Period.” Czech Sociological Review 41 (6): 1077–110. Hawkesworth, Mary E. 2006. Globalization and Feminist Activism. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Hemment, Julie. 2004. “Global Civil Society and the Local Costs of Belonging: Defining Violence against Women in Russia.” Signs: The Journal of Women in Culture and Society 29 (3): 815–40. Jalusic, Vlasta, and Milica Antic. 2001. Women—Politics—Equal Opportunities, Prospects for Gender Equality Politics in Central and Eastern Europe. Ljubljana, Slovenia: Peace Institute. Keck, Margaret, and Kathryn Sikkink. 1998. Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Kiss, Judit. 1993. “The Second ‘No’: Women in Hungary.” Feminist Review 39: 49–57. Kuzio, Taras. 2002. “Gender Issues Hijacked by ‘Party of Power.’” The Ukrainian Weekly 70 (11): 2–23. Lohmann, Kinga. 2006. “What Has Happened So Far? A Review on EU Policies on their Way to Gender Equality and Civil Society Participation.” Paper presented at the conference, Equal Chances in Europe. EU-Enlargement—Gender Equality—Participation.” Bonn, Germany, September 7–8. Lowe, Lisa, and David Lloyd, eds. 1997. The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Magyari-Vincze, Eniko. 2003. “Gender (In)equality in the Post-Socialist Romania.” Paper presented at The 5th European Feminist Research Conference: “Gender and Power in the New Europe.” Lund University, Sweden, August 20–24. Mansbridge, Jane. 1996. “What Is the Feminist Movement?” In Feminist Organizations: Harvest of the New Women’s Movement, edited by Myra Marx Ferree and Patricia Yancey Martin, 27–33. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. McNay, Lois. 2002. Gender and Agency. Malden, UK: Blackwell. Mizielińska, Joanna. 2008. “(Re)negocjowanie tożsamości. Wpływ rozszerzenia Unii Europejkiej na relacje w ramach ruchu kobiecego w Polsce.” In Współpraca czy konflikt?, Państwo, Unia i kobiety [Cooperation or conflict?: State, the European Union and women], edited by Małgorzata Fuszara, Magda Grabowska, Joanna Mizielińska, and Joanna Regulska. Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Akademickie i Profesjonalne. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 2003. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mueller, Carol. 1996. “Organization Basis of Conflict in Contemporary Feminism.” In Feminist Organizations: Harvest of the New Women’s Movement, edited by Myra Marx Ferree and Patricia Yancey Martin. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Naples, Nancy A., and Manisha Desai, eds. 2002. Women’s Activism and Globalization: Linking Local Struggles and Transnational Politics. New York: Routledge. Pető, Andrea, and Judith Szapor. 2007. “The State of Women’s and Gender History in Eastern Europe: The Case of Hungary.” Journal of Women’s History 19 (1): 160–66.

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Pollert, Anna. 2003. “Women, Work and Equal opportunities in Post-Communist Transition.” Work, Employment and Society 17 (2): 331–57. Prunskiene, Kazimira. 1997. “The Role of Women in Democracy: The Experience of Lithuania.” Speech delivered at Vital Voices Conference, Vienna, Austria, July 10. Purvaneckienė, Giedrė. 1999. “Violence Against Women Victim Survey Report.” Violence Against Women in Lithuania. http://www.lygus.lt/ITC/ smurtas.php?id=204. Regulska, Joanna, and Magda Grabowska. 2008. “Will It Make a Difference?: EU Enlargement and Women’s Public Discourse in Poland.” In Gender Issues and Women’s Movement in the European Union, edited by Silke Roth. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Roth, Silke. 2007. “Sisterhood and Solidarity? Women’s Organizations in the Expanded European Union.” Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society 14 (4): 460–87. Rowbotham, Sheila, and Stephanie Linkogle. 2001. Women Resist Globalization: Mobilizing for Livelihood and Rights. London: Zed Press. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism: Western Representations of the Orient. New York: Pantheon. Sandoval, Chela. 2000. Methodology of the Oppressed: Theory Out of Bounds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sebadashvili, Tamar. 2007. Gender and Democratization: The Case of Georgia 1991–2006. Tbilisi: Boll Foundation. Środa, Magdalena. 2008. “Nie wszystkie feministki muszą być socjalistkami ekonomicznymi.” http://www.feminoteka.pl/readarticle. php?article_id=420. Tarrow, Sidney. 2005. The New Transnational Activism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. True, Jacqui. 2003. Gender, Globalization, and Postsocialism: The Czech Republic After Communism. New York: Columbia University Press. Verloo, Mieke, ed. 2007. Multiple Meanings of Gender Equality: A Critical Frame Analysis of Gender Policies in Europe. Budapest, Hungary: CEU Press. Walczewska, Sławomira. 1996. Damy, Rycerze, Feministki [Dames, knights, and feminists]. Krakow, Poland: eFKa. Walters, William, and Jens Henrik Haahr. 2005. Governing Europe: Discourse, Governmentality and European Integration. London: Routledge.

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Warning, Marilyn. 1988. If Only Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Watson, Peggy. 2000. “Re-thinking Transition: Globalism, Gender and Class.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 2 (2): 185–213. Wolff, Larry. 1994. Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Zippel, Kathrin. 2004. “Transnational Advocacy Networks and Policy Cycles in the European Union: The Case of Sexual Harassment.” Social Politics 11 (1): 57–85.

Relevant Websites Albania’s Gender Alliance for Development Center: www.stopvaw.org/19Aug 200413.htlm; http://www.gadc-al.org Antiborders Camps: http://poland.indymedia.org/pl/2004/05/6555.shtml ApoWer Women: http://www.apfr.ro Armenia’s Women’s Rights Center: http://www.stopvaw.org/19Aug200413 .html; www.hra.am ASTRA: www.astra.org.pl B.a.B.e. / Be Active Be Emancipated: www.babe.hr Estonian Center for Social Programs: www.stopvaw.org/19Aug200410.html European Women’s Lobby: www.womenlobby.org Facts and Figures on Gender Equality Slovenia: www.ilo.org/public/english/ region/eurpro/budapest/download/gender/slovenia.pdf Federation on Women and Family Planning: www.federa.org.pl Feminoteka Foundation: www.feminoteka.pl Gender Equality in Czech Republic: www.gender-equality.webinfo.lt/ results/czech.htm Gender Equality in Lithuania: www.genderequality.webinfo.lt/results/lithuania.htm Gender Equality in Ukraine: www.stopvaw.org/Gender_Equality_in_ Ukraine.html Indymedia Romania: http://romania.indymedia.org Karat Coalition: www.karat.org, www.karat.org/userfiles/biedronka%20case .pdf La Strada: www.lastradainternational.org Lesbians Alliance www.porozumienie.lesbijek.org/

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Lijudmila: http://www.ljudmila.org/lesbo/english.htm Lithuanian Center for Equality Advancement: www.igpn.net/members.php Macedonia, Women’s Rights Center Shelter, Rights: www.mwrc.com.mk Mama Foundation: www.fundacjamama.pl Medica Zenica-Women’s Association: www.peacewomen.org/contacts/ europe/bosnia/bos_index.html Mothers Centers: www.materskacentra.cz NANE: www.nane.hu/english/index.html Network of East West Women: www.neww.org.pl Parada Równości: www.paradarownosci.pl Peacewomen Kosovo: www.peacewomen.org/campaigns/Kosovo/KosovoIni tiatives.html Polska Partia Kobiet: www.polskajestkobieta.org Porozumienie Kobiet: www.porozumieniekobiet.home.pl, http://porozumieniekobiet.home.pl/news.php Praca w Polsce: http://praca.w.polsce.org/396311–praca Quota Project (Slovenia): www.quotaproject.org/CS/Slovenia.pdf Roma Women Initiatives: http://www.romawomensinitiatives.org Romani Foundation: http://www.donorsforum.ro/index.php?src-db&go -glroma1 Rosa: (http://www.stopvaw.org/Czech_Republic3.html Rural Women’s Centers: http://gkgw-w-sekowej.blog.onet.pl; http://www .krzyzanowice.pl/kluby_kulturalne.htm) Soros Foundation-Romani Women Focus Area: (http://www.soros.org/initiatives/women/focus_areas/g_romani_women Ulica Siostrzana: www.siostrzna.org.pl WIDE: Network Women in Development Europe: www.wide.global.net, www.wide-network.org Wiedzma: www.wiedzma.org.pl Zene Zenama, Women to Women Center for Women Returnees: www. zenezenama.com.ba

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chapter four

Grounds for Hope? Voices of Feminism and Women’s Activism in Romania Laura Lovin

Let me begin with a ‘cartoon’ of contemporary Romania with respect to gender relations. A high proportion of the population—over 40 % lives in rural areas, where traditional patriarchal relations survive, and domestic violence is common. At the same time, Romania has one of the most active and successful sex industries in the region. In glossy women’s magazines, on the other hand, post-feminism reigns supreme. EU policy on gender equality has been faithfully replicated in legislation and Government policy initiatives. . . . I am simplifying, of course, but I don’t think the more complex reality is too much less contradictory than this cartoon. —Norman Fairclough, 2005 Why isn’t feminism successful in Romania?—a strong, outspoken, claiming question . . . —Petruţa Teampău, 2007

At a conference entitled Gender and Language held in Athens in 2005, cultural theorist Norman Fairclough offered this simplified, but from his perspective, accurate picture of “contemporary Romania with regard to gender relations”: rural, traditionalist, patriarchal, and violent, yet consumerist, postfeminist, and conforming with EU directives. Romania’s spatio-temporality of unaccomplished modernity, surprisingly synchronized legislation,

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and manifestations of consumerist postfeminism are cartoonlike in their contradictions. This “contemporary Romania,” and the implied criteria for what counts as “contemporary” are my concern here. Too often, despite the critiques of paradigms of linear development, progress, and modernity, “contemporary” implies economic development and the achievement of a sociopolitical order organized around Western European values and liberal capitalism. The term perpetuates the notion that there is a correct path toward a common telos and obscures the reality of multiple coeval trajectories. My goal is to bypass the pessimistic announcement of feminism’s failure in Romania as stated by the second epigraph, refuse its gloomy closure, and articulate an analytical framework that does more justice to what I consider numerous, diverse, more or less visible, and more or less effective political engagements with sexist, racist, and homophobic practices. My study thus aims to provide a wide-ranging survey of women’s mobilizations in Romania, following Regulska and Grabowska in foregrounding fragmentation, diversity, and hybridity as the defining characteristics of women’s mobilization in Eastern Europe.

The Language of Disappointment A close look at accounts of women’s and feminist movements in Romania during the past two decades shows that they are mostly narrated in a language of disappointment. In 2001 Denise Roman noted, “12 years after 1989, although the overall gendered civic and political condition of Romania is prefeminist, the dawn of a Romanian modern feminist movement is gradually emerging” (2001, 53–54). Mihaela Miroiu and Liliana Popescu call attention to the fact that most women-oriented NGOs in Romania tend to undertake charity projects offering support to women and their families. So far as women’s emancipation goes, the authors stress that women’s mobilization around such causes can only be seen as “factors” of a women’s movement, rather than as a movement in itself (1999, 21). It is largely acknowledged by feminist analysts that the retreat of the state from the provision of caretaking services has seriously impacted women. Paradoxically, however, some feminist commentators look down on the initiatives of women’s organizations to provide such services. Efforts to address the gap in services is evident, for example, in the work of The Orăştie Girls’ Society (Societatea fetelor din Orăştie), which developed a canteen and after-school

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programs for children; The Single Mothers Association1 (Asociaţia femeilor care îşi cresc singure copiii) in Ploieşti, which provides counseling, support, and legal advice around divorce for women with children; and the Women’s Association (Asociaţia femeilor) in Sibiu, which provides counseling and shelter for survivors of domestic violence. Yet Romanian academic feminists often regard such practices as inadequate interventions that do little to challenge the existing gender regime. Because the scope of service provision projects is confined to the space of the family, some feminists claim: Few visible attempts have been made by women to fight the traditional stereotypes: one or two small women’s rights organizations, overwhelmed by the needs of their target group and poorly funded, can scarcely be considered a powerful voice. . . . As long as women don’t stand up for themselves gender issues will remain within the realm of studies and surveys. . . . Change cannot come from above, and it cannot be expected. Indeed, it is not enough for the European Union to impose its equal opportunity standards as requirement for accession; instead, these standards have to emerge from women themselves. (Dumitrică 2000) 2

However, it is important to stress that even a short list of service-oriented women’s NGOs and projects challenges the alleged division between serviceoriented and so called truly emancipatory political initiatives. The women working for and benefiting from service projects are addressing the concrete problems they face. Their responses are the result of critical and constructive engagement with their material situations. In this respect they might well be considered emancipatory. Teampău’s assessment of Romanian feminism as lacking “a clear-cut common agenda of things to fight for, things that actually touch upon women’s experiences” (2007, 71) represents another dimension of an elite critique of women’s activism. In short, as the success, status, or feminism of the sociopolitical mobilizations around women’s and gender issues are passionately debated, these efforts are frequently interpreted as lacking focus, impetus, authenticity, and orientation toward emancipatory ends. But why should they be otherwise? What does emancipatory mean? Emancipation for whom? Are clear-cut common agendas even possible? Is change better achieved through top-down or bottom-up enterprises? Regulska and Grabowska’s analysis departs from vertical conceptualizations of power, linear causality, and mass-protest paradigms. It brings to the

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fore more horizontal models of power and illuminates multisited, fragmentary, scattered, multidirectional, and possibly contradictory forms of political engagement. While emphasizing the significance of local genealogies, Regulska and Grabowska draw attention to mobilizing practices ranging from Internet petitioning and campaigning to web art, from music, theater, and street demonstrations to labor activism, education, and the production and circulation of gender-centered publications as well as institutional women’s activism. They identify a variety of factors that inform the specific ways women mobilize in Central and Eastern European postcommunist contexts. Among these factors are strong anticommunist sentiment, eagerness to create liberal and neoliberal spaces, NGOization of the civil society, global and transnational opportunities and disadvantages, new and old patriarchal practices, emergent postcommunist nationalisms, reorganization of labor markets, and the increased influence of the church on sociopolitical processes. These factors interact and facilitate, in Regulska and Grabowska’s terms, the emergence of “locally produced counter hegemonies” or “spaces of hegemony/ counter-hegemony production intersect[ing] with women’s multiple goals and agendas.”3 In Romania, collective action for women’s and gender issues is evident in the activity of women’s NGOs, women’s organizations within political parties, campaigns to stop violence against women, and participation in women-related international projects, as well as women’s festivals and LGBT festivals. Women and gender concerns are developed and pursued through women’s and gender studies programs in university curricula, the publishing of feminist journals, and cultural activities to promote female artists and engage themes related to gender and sexuality. The launching of gender studies collections, literature for and by women, and the presence of women’s professional organizations also advance the conceptualization of women’s and gender issues and galvanize public energy toward addressing them. Most of the time, such projects create and awaken tensions and fresh normative impulses, but they nonetheless introduce new vocabularies that facilitate the assertion and affirmation of activist subjectivities.

The Language of Gender Equality and Equal Opportunities The Black Book of Equal Opportunities, compiled by feminist researchers from AnA, The Society for Feminist Analysis (AnA, Societatea pentru analize

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feministe), rightfully points to the “unclear terminology” and “induced conceptual ambiguity” employed in expressing gender-related issues. The researchers identify eight ambiguous phrases, featuring in different assortments and frequencies the terms: “women and men,” “sexes,” “gender,” “equal(ity),” “chances,” and “opportunities.”4 They highlight tendencies toward generalization and erasure of “the diversity between and within certain groups,” as well as toward a deployment of these vocabularies as slogans (Grunberg et al. 2006). But before dealing with the consequences of such generalizing, homogenizing, and depoliticizing gestures, I want to first call attention to notion of “equal(ity).” The language of “gender equality” in the Romanian context stems from multiple sources. It is ultimately an amalgam of the “[s]ameness of equality imposed by communism and its communist collectivism” and “the liberal version of equality for all [as] a space of gender equality, gender mainstreaming, and equal opportunities as promoted by EU liberal discourses” (Regulska and Grabowska 2008, 5). Teampău argues that during communism the goal of the equality discourses was “to homogenize the entire population into a coherent whole subjected to the will of the [Communist] Party,” by not recognizing gender and ethnic differences (Teampău 2007, 71). Under state-socialism the emancipation of women was essential to both the modernizing and the revolutionary communist projects (Bucur 1994; Hulland 2001; Mudure 2004; Roman 2001; Teampău 2007). Some feminist commentators argue that gender emancipation as operational under the communist regime was in fact “an illusion and a trap for women” (Teampău 2007, 72). Roman underscores “the communist legacy of the double, triple, or quadruple burden for women; public job, household, bearing children, and coping with backward technology at home” (Roman 2001, 55). Maria Bucur (1994) and Annette Hulland (2001) bring to our attention the 1966 outlawing of abortion and unavailability of other forms of birth control in Romania as factors adding to the hardship of women’s lives under communism. While the gravity of the conditions brought about by the communist dictatorship and the repressive character of the regime cannot be overstated, it is important to consider the positive impact of post-1944 reforms on women’s rights and opportunities. Women’s political enfranchisement under communism along with their equal access to education, expansion of professional opportunities, and civil equality with men represented a significant improvement in women’s status. Furthermore, social assistance programs for mothers including pre- and

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postnatal health care, free child care, government subventions for each child, and maternity leave (Bucur 1994, 225); a media environment free of consumerist deployment of exploitative images of women; and gender quotas for political participation (Hulland 2001) were distinguishing aspects of women’s experience under communism that inform current meanings, practices, and visions. Analyses that connect the gender reforms of the communist regime with women’s lives and political participation before and after 1989 have already been undertaken. Nevertheless, to the degree that these analyses adhere to simple models of causation in pursuit of parsimonious explanation, multiple expressions of agency are elided and women’s subjectivities are characterized in terms of passivity, false consciousness, and victimhood. For example, simple and deceiving causal relations between women’s level of education and their capacity for engaging projects of sociopolitical transformation are suggested by Bucur: Women did not win these rights through a conscious fight and organized movement but were given them before most Romanian women could read and write—before they would even understand the meaning of voting rights. As a result of these developments and of other changes since 1989, most women in Romania have remained reluctant to change their genderdefined roles. (1994, 225)

Elsewhere, Mihaela Miroiu speaks about the civic minimalism of people from Romania evident in their distrust for institutions and the law, lack of awareness with regard to the language of contractualist democracies such as rights and liberties, and their preference to live invisibly (1999). Together with Popescu, Miroiu argues that “in the case of women, civic minimalism generates a vicious circle of lack of social involvement and strengthens a behavioral trait showed by many sociological studies: women are more conservative than men” (Miroiu and Popescu 1999, 10–11). Such analytic models foreclose consideration of certain types of women’s mobilization in their conceptualization by constructing the right female political subject as always “elsewhere,” and an operative model of power allowing only women’s oblivious complicity with patriarchy. The complicity with power and institutional and economic privilege of academics, meanwhile, remains unexamined, as do the differences in women’s lives, priorities, visions, desires, vocabularies, allegiances, protests, time availability, and material resources. Scholars have discussed the influence of the EU equal opportunities legislative framework on Romanian legislation and the impact of EU and

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American funders’ priorities on the development of local agendas in conjunction with the role of conceptual frameworks of Western feminism. Eniko Magyari-Vincze fairly critiques the superficiality of the public debates on equal opportunities between women and men. She argues that the discourse of equal opportunities is developed on a rather abstract level, resulting in a split between normative assertions and the everyday lived reality of gender inequality (2006, 119). Nonetheless, as a result of EU accession negotiations, a number of institutions aimed at facilitating women’s equal citizenship were put in place at the governmental,5 parliamentary,6 interministerial,7 ministerial,8 and central administrative level9—a phenomenon sometimes labeled “institutional mushrooming.” These institutions have significant shortcomings as implementing agents of an equal-opportunity agenda. Feminist critics have noted among their liabilities lack of policy expertise with regard to equal opportunities, insufficient funding, and counterproductive centralization (Bocioc et al. 2004; Ghebrea et al. 2005; and Grunberg et al. 2006). The agencies established at these multiple levels of administration are intended to implement equal-opportunities principles in national legislation, monitor and evaluate various actors’ compliance with gender equality legislation, implement informative programs on gender equality legislative provisions, and improve the mechanisms for eliminating gender discrimination. It is difficult to assess the efficacy of these institutions definitively. The websites of these governmental organizations do feature information about legislation, as well as studies and projects related to gender equality and equal opportunities between women and men. Additionally, they produce relatively numerous publications on these topics, conduct training events to develop gender expertise among their personnel, and promote collaboration with women’s NGOs.10

From Liberal to Neoliberal: The Pursuit of Synchronicity with the “West” Regulska and Grabowska fairly attribute “the eagerness [among postcommunist elites] to incorporate liberal and neoliberal ideals” to “the historical desire to be part of the West and identification with Western Europe and Western culture in general.”11 Signs of such eagerness can be recognized in the space of contemporary Romania, too. In one respect, it manifests in feminist knowledge production in efforts to establish genealogical links between the late

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nineteenth- and early twentieth-century feminist movement and postcommunist forms of feminist mobilization, or to promote comparison between the two phenomena. What for Denise Roman is merely a “tiny liberal feminist movement” evidencing “a structural lack of feminist gendered discursive social and political space” (Roman 2001, 53), for other feminist writers constitutes a wellarticulated sociopolitical movement (Mihăilescu 2002; Miroiu 2005). Stefania Mihăilescu emphasizes the “ample social action, pre-eminently democratic, part and parcel of the efforts of all those political, cultural and religious orientation and trends seeking to eliminate the barriers hindering the countries’ development and its synchronization with western civilizations” (Mihăilescu 2002, 5). The author calls attention to feminism’s embeddedness within a European identity and regards Romanian feminism as a confirmation of the country’s belonging with Europe: “We may say that Romanian feminism proved from its very inception to be the bearer of a genuine European spirit. There is no contradiction between feminism and Europeanism, but, on the contrary, there is an in-depth convergence between them, as natural and noble in scope” (Mihăilescu 2002, 15). For Mihaela Mudure feminism provides an alternative narrative for nation building that has the potential to “overcome chauvinistic, xenophobic, even anti-Semitic discourses” of the time (2004, 5). Mudure also draws attention to the problems of an exclusively liberal emplotment of feminism. Neglecting the “leftist component” disengages Romanian feminism from its roots, obscuring the relationship between feminism and the socialdemocratic movement, as well as the activism of female communist militants12 and the presence of “an intellectual feminism”13 in Romania. The liberal narrative renders communist Romania a time/space devoid of “any genuine political agency because of the imposition of communist dictatorship” (2004, 6). The relations between various political actors from Romania and the “West” are diverse and seemingly contradictory. The “West” maintains an important role in the negotiation of local political agendas, but its roles are shifting and multiple: it is variously a desired terminus of Romania’s transition, the current neoimperialistic hegemon, a site of optimally functioning democracies, and a (more powerful) partner in transnational collaboration and coalitions. For example, in 1994 Maria Bucur stressed the importance of appropriating Western models for achieving gender equality, arguing that by interacting with Western feminism through professional networks and texts, “Romanian women [would] be able not only to understand the political and cultural legacy of the West, but also appropriate and adapt it to their own

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setting, just as generations before appropriated liberalism, constitutionalism, and democracy” (Bucur 1994, 229). Dialogue is an incontestable aspect of the relationship between Romanian feminism and the West, but so are the power differentials playing out in these interactions and visions, agendas, vocabularies, and actions. As such, Romanian feminisms are undoubtedly limited to and by their Western referent, as the efficacy of the former is assessed in accordance with standards set by the latter. In her analysis of Romanian feminists’ appropriation of Western models of eliminating gender-based discrimination, Laura Grunberg critically points out the limited productivity of such an approach: In Romania, there was a combination of all [waves of American feminism]. We have condensed stages, not fully internalized each period, being in a hurry to “catch up” to the Western feminisms and experience of “waves of feminisms” and do in a couple of years what has been done over decades in the West, often taking for granted the western models/ theories and not contextualizing, adapting them to the Romanian/regional specificities. (2004, 3)

Attempts to render the Romanian experience in terms of the three discrete waves commonly understood as characterizing Western feminism are bound to fail. As an historiographic production, the wave model is continually complicated by imputing new voices, data, actions, alliances, tensions, and events. The “West” often figures in the Romanian feminist imaginary as a well-synchronized and uniform spatiality, unencumbered by the poverty, state violence, and sexist, homophobic, and racist attitudes that continue to plague Romania. Nevertheless, the dialogue with Western feminists is valuable. Isabela Mihalache, for example, argues that concepts and debates with respect to diversity usually associated with second- and third-wave feminism in the West can help Romanian feminism confront the generally ignored problems of women from minority groups. Roma women’s issues in particular would be better tackled from the perspective of multiple discrimination (2006, 116) articulated in this later feminist scholarship.

Women’s NGOs: A “Clear-Cut Common Agenda,” or Problem-Oriented Coalitions The roles played by women’s NGOs in the ongoing restructuring of gender relations in contemporary Romania have been amply discussed by Romanian

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feminists. There are about fifty to sixty women’s NGOs with diverse agendas and priorities. Some feminist critics implicitly complain about this diversity as they point out the lack of a common platform, limited will for collaboration, rejection of an overtly feminist allegiance, and at times complicity with patriarchal arrangements. In her essay “Women and Diversity,” Laura Grunberg ingeniously shows that gender is not necessarily the ascendant factor in shaping identities and interests: An unmarried woman and a divorced women with three children are not the same. . . . A 40 year old woman from a Moldavian village shares more of a problem with the men from her village than with Monica Tatoiu, . . . sometimes one’s gender identity is more important, other times one’s ethnicity or one’s belonging to an age. Sometimes our interests as women coincide in a greater degree with those of certain men than with those of women. Women, diversity, but is there . . . unity? Unity in Diversity. Does this thing exist in Romania? (2006, 107–8)14

Unity is in itself a rather ambitious goal, and it is all the more so when it requires the preservation and expression of diversity. Collective action is perhaps more fruitfully envisioned as an open-ended process of negotiation and dialogue. A case in point is Enikő Magyari-Vincze’s intervention against the discriminatory admission practices at the Institute for Protestant Theology from Cluj. Vincze’s initiative unleashed predictably nationalistic and antifeminist responses, but in her opinion the dialogical space that she opened is an important achievement. Her challenge revealed the support of many people within the Protestant Church for women’s equality and provided them with the opportunity to publicly express their commitment to women’s rights (Magyari-Vincze 2006, 112–23). Furthermore, a survey of annual reports and websites indicates that women’s NGOs are rather likely to associate, create coalitions, and develop collaborative projects with diverse societal actors. The Pro Women Foundation (Fundaţia ProFemei) from Iasi, for example, reports an extensive network of partners and collaborators. Among the organizations with which it has cosponsored initiatives are NGOs with gender expertise or feminist commitments, NGOs active in other fields, local authorities from a number of communities in the Moldovan region, as well as central administrative organizations, educational institutions, the Moldavia and Bucovina Metropolitan Church, and television and radio stations.15 The Pro Women Foundation is also part of a network bringing together trade unions and nongovernmental organizations.

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It participates in a regional partnership for development and, last but not least, holds membership in four European networks addressing women’s issues: the Regional Initiatives for Women’s Promotion, Network of East-West Women, TRIALOG, and KARAT.16 To take just one more example, Artemis, the Counseling Center Against Sexual Abuse and Violence (Artemis, Centrul pentru consiliere împotriva abuzului sexual şi violenţei) from Cluj has built effective partnerships with the city police, the Direction for Children’s Rights Protection, the Direction for Labor, Social Protection, and Employment, the County Inspectorate for Education, and a number of local schools. The center has further collaborated with Babeş Bolyai University, the DESIRE Foundation, women lawyers from the Cluj Barr, well-recognized women’s organizations from Timisoara, The Association for the Promotion of Women from Romania (APFR), and Bucharest, Partnership for Equality Center (CPE), as well as NGOs from both Eastern Europe, Incest Trauma Center in Belgrade, and Western Europe, Wildwasser and Strohhalm in Germany and the Austrian Women’s Shelters Network. The same sources show that these organizations are not exclusively reliant on Western support. Rather, they have built up partnerships with local private entrepreneurs. These lists demonstrate a coalition model of action that places a specific problem at the center of analysis and identifies the nexus of agents, practices, and institutions involved in the problem’s reproduction. This knowledge in turn becomes the basis for organizing ways of addressing the problem. Interestingly these collaborations shed light on another important line of criticism of women’s mobilization and its relationship to the West. Regulska and Grabowska’s analysis of the Central and Eastern European region indicates that the phenomenon of NGOization might have demobilized social movements and marked “the triumph of Washington or Geneva based agendas17 over local concerns” (2008, 15). Yet, their analysis shows that the conditions that contributed to this demobilization were also potential opportunities for particular agents of the civil society from the region. The relationships built by some NGOs with their Western institutional supporters have allowed them to transcend the national scale of policy making. By voicing their issues at the transnational level they have been able to create leverage that eventually ends up in local reforms. The combined lobbying campaigns of ACCEPT Romania18 and its partners brought the criminalization of homosexuality to the fore of public debate and achieved its decriminalization in January 2002. Interestingly, the agenda-constraining

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effect of Western donors and funders is also evident in the same organization. A quick scan of the organization’s projects demonstrates disproportionate foreign support for STD- and HIV/AIDS-related work, reflecting Western discursive framings of homosexuality. Finally, many organizations from Romania have participated in subregional, regional, and international networks. Notable among them are the International Women’s Media Foundation, International Roma Women’s Network, the coalition of NGOs working in the area of violence against women, 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence, the European Network Against Trafficking in Women for Sexual Exploitation, the Regional Initiatives for Women’s Promotion, Network of East-West Women, and KARAT, the regional coalition for gender equality in the CEE/CIS countries. Local initiatives toward building networks, such as Gender Romania’s project of regional networking of feminist academics in the CEE,19 have firmly expressed goals of sharing ideas, strategies, and resources to address the problems women are confronting and to promote a gender-sensitive approach to policy making, politics, and knowledge production.

“Street Theory” and Alternative Forms of Mobilization Focusing exclusively on NGOs risks obscuring alternative approaches to mobilization by women. At the same time, a rigid distinction between NGOs and uninstitutionalized activism would also be a mistake, given significant convergence between the goals, methods, activities, means of expression, and audiences of the different forms of organization. The 2006 Association for the Promotion of Women from Romania (Asociaţia pentru promovarea femeilor din România) from Timişoara’s annual campaign against gender violence, for example, has characteristics normally attributed to NGOs, but it also illustrates what Regulska and Grabowska call “street theory.” The 2006 event brought together several traditional forms of activism, including a private rally; a debate involving diverse actors from NGOs, local administration, and the private sector; and a hybrid art exhibit. “The Silent Witness,” exhibition entailed crafting lifelike silhouettes to represent victims who died as a result of domestic violence that were then carried in peaceful processions through various Romanian cities (APFR 2008). The organizers of the 2005 Ladyfest-Timişoara, the 2006 LadyActBucharest, and the 2007 Ladyfest-Bucharest 20 produced similar hybrid spaces

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of mobilization, emphasizing the advantages of fluid coalitions and dialogic strategies. The range of themes developed by these festivals indicates their openness to diverse points of view. The formal topics of discussion included “The Right to Be Different, or the Double Courage to Be a Woman and a Gay Person in a Misogynist-Homophobic Society,”21 “The Antifeminism of the Mass Media,”22 “All Together for Interculturality,”23 and “The Woman Who Writes of the Women Who’re Written About.”24 Additionally participants shared their perspectives on antiracist strategies; vegan baking; queer identities/(bi)sexuality; maternity and its social political implications; gender and Internet spaces; video activism; women and science/technology; nonhierarchical, feminist, nonviolent communication and group organizing; prostitution; human trafficking; and violence against women.25 The themes were developed through workshops, exhibitions, debates, film screenings, arts and crafts workshops, marches, activist fairs, and live concerts. This mixed strategy engages a large and diverse public in a unique space of encounter, sharing, and mutual identification of commonalities (Kovacs 2005).26 Regulska and Grabowska see these sites as potent new forms of mass mobilization by women in Central and Eastern Europe because of their capacity to circumvent “what is often perceived as ideological feminism.” In response to criticism of the 2007 Ladyfest as “a weak event” responsible for “chopping off the legs of Romanian Feminism,”27 Bori Kovacs, one of the organizers, replied: I don’t know what your expectations were. Is it the class movement of the past decades and centuries? Why is it crucial for feminism to manifest itself through imposing, robust, and forceful ways, even intimidating ways in order to be noticed, taken into consideration, or allowed to express itself and attempt to persuade? . . . This preference for hierarchically organized, structurally monolithic mobilizations what, with all the voices in unison has been the norm from the first communist international on. But it is not the only modality of change, despite the legitimization received from you or other groups of people. (Kovacs 2007)

These festivals provide an alternative, nonhierarchical, flexible space of engagement with women’s and gender issues. Ladyfest initiated a resignification of what counts as political action by foregrounding the creative input of female musicians28 and visual artists.29 Moreover, many activists at these festivals are critical of the values associated with neoliberalism and the free global market Grounds for Hope? 203

economy. Their interest in delocalization, migration, and “women’s work” (Ladyfest 2007) is a timely response to new power arrangements produced by the increased mobility of people and capital. They speak to scenarios difficult to imagine a decade ago, such as the mobilization of four hundred Chinese women laborers from the beginning of 2007 in Bacău, Romania. The women went on strike, demanding better pay and living conditions30 for their work in the production unit of the Swiss textile concern “Wear.” The question, then, is not whether there is feminism and mobilization by women in Romania, or whether feminism is successful, subservient to the West, or powerful enough. Beyond the concern for unity, autonomy, and emancipatory capacity, the question of women’s mobilization should attend to the kind of counterhegemonic spaces that women and their communities construct in order to deal with their situations. As my analysis demonstrates, these spaces are created through small-scale protests as well as through overarching information-sharing networks and narrow, task-oriented coalitions. They emerge as projects tending to the concrete needs of women and their children, as well as through analytical projects, debates, workshops, seminars, teachings, and roundtables exposing sexism, homophobia, and racism. They are developed within the framework of Ladyfest and Lady Act events, as well as by organizations such as AnA, the Society for Feminist Analyses, 31 and the Center for Partnership and Equality. 32 They are equally created through activities targeting the professional development of women, legislative reforms, festivals, art shows, and alternative music concerts. The complex reality of postcommunist Romanian activism around women’s and gender issues cannot be captured through cartoonish portraits, mass mobilization paradigms of activism, Western referents for assessing development, tropes of modernity and progress, and reductionist causal analysis. Rather it requires an analytical space that sheds light on initiatives that are more limited in their scope and emerge from less obvious locations, such as web blogs and music and art venues. Emphasis on temporary alliances that bring together regional and cross-regional partners around topical issues and transient projects that respond to practical needs will allow more nuanced and optimistic evaluation of the current state of feminism in Romania.

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Notes 1.

Valentina Vuxanovici, “‘Mă simt valoroasă numai când reuşesc să ajut pe cineva’: Interviu cu Mariana Duran, preşedintele Asociaiţei mamelor care îşi cresc singure copiii,” [“‘I feel worthy only when I succeed in helping someone’: An interview with Mariana Duran, the president of the Association of Single Mothers”], October 23, 2003. http://www.121.ro/content/article_print.php3?article_id=1767&page_nr=1.

2.

Commenting on the status of current gender policies, Miroiu critically draws attention to their emphasis on protecting women rather than emancipating women. Regarding the relation between the feminist movement from Romania and the influence exercised by the EU, she coins the term “room-service feminism” to describe a strategy of emancipation from above, consisting of “the imposition of gender sensitive legislation in CEE through the authority of international political actors, in particular European ones, before internal public recognition of such needs.” As pressuring external agents, Miroiu identifies “the EU, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and even NATO (concerning women in the military force)” (Miroiu 2005, 9).

3.

See Regulska and Grabowska’s contribution to this volume, Chapter 3.

4.

“Equal opportunities for women and men, equal chances between women and men, equal opportunities and treatment between women and men, gender equality, equal opportunities between women and men, equal chances, the principle of equal chances between sexes” (Grunberg et al. 2006; emphasis mine).

5.

The Direction for Equal Opportunities.

6.

The Sub-Committee on Equal Opportunities.

7.

Inter-ministerial Advisory Commission for Equal Opportunities (CODES).

8.

Ministry for European Integration, Ministry for Education and Research, Ministry for Labor, Social Solidarity and Family.

9.

The National Council for Combating Discrimination; the Department for Children, Women and Social Protection; the National Action Plans after the Beijing Conference; the National Institute for Statistics; the National Authority for Consumers’ Protection; the National Authority for Persons with Disabilities; the National Council for Adults’ Professional Training; and the National Agency for Labor.

10.

For a more complete picture of the outcomes of such collaborations, visit the web pages of the National Council for Combating Discrimination at http://www.cncd. org.ro/; and of the Ministry of Labor, Family and Social Security at http://www. mmuncii.ro/ro/website/ro/.

11. 12.

See Regulska and Grabowska’s contribution to this volume, Chapter 3. Mihaela Mudure points to Elena Filipescu-Filipovici, Ecaterina Arbore, and Constanța Crăciun (2004, 5).

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13. 14.

Mihaela Mudure mentions the writer and film critic Ecaterina Oproiu. Monica Tatoiu is a successful businesswoman from Romania. She’s a visible media figure taking up feminist causes.

15.

The website of the Pro Women Foundation is available at http://www.prowomen. ro/english/partnership.htm.

16.

“Funders, partners, collaborators, networks.” http://www.prowomen.ro/english/ partnership.htm.

17.

Laura Grunberg is critical of these dynamics, which she evaluates as an abstract movement and the institutionalization of a “women’s movement that are not feminists” imposed hurriedly from abroad. It was implemented in more than sixty women’s NGO’s existing now in Romania (7), but did not generate solidarity among women as women vis-à-vis the negative impact of these years of transition on their public and private lives. The NGOization of the women’s movement in Romania has been produced in a climate of declining public awareness of gender issues. It has been produced without “popular will.” It was born of an accumulation of discontent by the target group (women), who theoretically had to give meaning to the movement itself. It was not a consequence of large-scale democratic discussions between feminists–whether female or male; men who were feminists were nonexistent at the time and remain scarce today. We don’t have a women’s movement justified and built on the experiences and problems of women in this country. In our country an institutionalized women’s movement (NGOization) oriented in the first place toward intervention strategies and secondarily toward emancipatory ones appeared suddenly enough. An abstract movement, disconnected from the gender realities of contemporary Romania, unsympathetic in reality to the majority of women, most of them different from the typical NGO person (that is poor, subjected to violence, single, older, rural, Roma, and so on).

18.

ACCEPT is the most effective and visible NGO that defends and promotes the rights of LGBTs in Romania.

19.

Gender Romania has organized international academic workshops on the following topics: “Sharing Experiences, Projects, and Hopes” (2003), “Gender and the (Post) East/ West Divide” (2004), and “Who’s Afraid of Feminism? Teaching and Researching Gender” (2005). http://www.feminism.ro/activities.htm.

20.

The web pages and blogs that the organizers of these festivals keep online are themselves forms of women’s activism. They pull together texts, media clippings, art pieces, and fora. For a complete picture of these activities, see http://ladyfest-ro. pimienta.org/weblog/.

21.

Discussion session organized and facilitated by Florentina Ionescu. The LadyAct blog is at http://ladyact2006.blog.

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22.

Discussion organized and facilitated by Oana Baluţă (LadyAct blog http://ladyact2006.blog).

23.

Discussion organized and facilitated by Crina Morteanu (LadyAct Blog http:// ladyact2006.blog).

24.

Discussion session organized and facilitated by Andreea Florentina Popa (LadyAct blog http://ladyact2006.blog).

25.

For the complete program of the Ladyfest Romania 2007, visit http://ladyfest-ro. pimienta.org/weblog/?p=419#en.

26.

The organizers of Ladyfest 2005 describe their event “as a space designed for women and their creative, or interactive pieces, and a space to come together and teach one another and discuss, to debate if needed be, and to exchange information about one another, to get informed regarding the feminist scene in Romania, to get acquainted with what other women do and what lies as a foundation of their determination to want to engage in grassroots movements and sporadic, but dedicated, fieldwork.” See Regulska and Grabowska’s contribution to this volume, Chapter 3.

27.

These criticisms were formulated by Alex Vă rzaru and published in Academia Cațavencu, October 17–23, 2007.

28.

LadyAct 2006 featured DJ Rouă, DJ DropDread, and the visual artist Mono.

29.

Ladyfest 2007 involved the H.arta collective, a group of three women artists, Maria Cristea, Anca Gyemant, and Rodica Tache, dedicated to projects foregrounding dialogue and critical attitude. For more details on H.arta’s projects, visit http:// www.spatiul-public.ro/eng/h.arta/harta.html.

30.

The workers’ protest failed. The management of Wear refused to increase salaries and the Chinese women had to leave Romania.

31.

AnA’s projects are excellent examples of critical engagements with the operations of power along gender, sexuality, race/ ethnicity, or disability lines: Practices of Multiple Discrimination in Romania (2007); Gender Stereotypes in Mass Media from Romania (2006); Women and Disabilities: Towards Gender Sensitive Policies in Romania (2006); the Black Book of Equal Opportunities Between Women and Men in Romania (2006); and Integration vs. Segregation: For a Gender Sensitive Activism (2004).

32.

The following are examples of projects that provide strong analyses of the gender relations from particular social contexts and also that propose ways of addressing the urgent situations girls and women are confronting: The Gender Dimensions of Pension Reform in Romania; Girls and Boys: All Different, All Equal; Education for Gender Equality; and Education of Young Girls from Orphanages in Order to Decrease Their Vulnerability to Trafficking.

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References Bocioc, Florentina, Dimitriu Doina, Teşiu Doina, and Cristina Văileanu. 2004. Gender Mainstreaming. Metode and Instrumente. Ghid practice pentru abordarea integratoare a egalității de gen. Bucharest: Centrul parteneriat pentru egalitate. Bucur, Maria. 1994. “An American Feminist in Romania.” Social Politics 1 (2): 223–30. Clej, Petru. 2007. “Chinese in Romanian Job Protest.” BBC News, January 25. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/6286617.stm. Drăghici, Daniela. 2000. “Femeile sunt pe agenda lumii şi fac reforma pe planeta Pamânt.” AnAlize-Revista de Studii Feministe 9: 20–22. Dumitrică, Despina. 2000. “Romanian Women Don’t Wear the Trousers.” Central Europe Review 2 (39). http://www.ce-review.org/00/39/dumitrica39.html. Fairclough, Norman. 2008. “Transition, Patriarchy and ‘Room-Service Feminism’ in Romania: A Critical Discourse Analysis Perspective.” Paper presented at the Gender and Language Conference, Athens 2005. http:// www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/staff/norman/roomservice.doc. Ghebrea, Georgeta, Marina Tataram, and Ioana Cretoiu. 2005. Implementing Equality Acquis. Bucharest: Nemira Publishing House. Grunberg, Laura. 2006. “Femei și diversitate.” In Cartea neagră a egalităţii de şanse între femei şi bărbaţi, edited by Laura Grunberg, Ioana Borza, and Teodora Văcărescu, 107–9. Bucharest: AnA Societatea pentru analize feministe. ———. 2008. “(Com)promises in Institutionalizing Gender Studies: Expert in Gender (in Romania)—What For?” Ad Astra. Young Romanian Scientists’ Journal 1 (3). www.ad-astra.ro. Grunberg, Laura, Ioana Borza, and Teodora Văcărescu. 2006. Cartea neagră a egalităţii de şanse între femei şi bărbaţi. Bucharest: AnA Societatea pentru analize feministe. Hulland, Annette. 2001. “Western Standards for Post-communist Women?” eumap.org (December). http://www.eumap.org/journal/features/2001/ dec/westernst. Kovacs, Bori. 2005. “Ladyfest Timişoara: Post-script to an Event.” http:// romania.indymedis.org/en/2005/.

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———. 2007. “Către Alex Vărzaru de la Academia Caţavencu, care nu s-a bucurat de exclusivitatea de a scrie despre a doua ediţie a Ladyfest Romania din Octombrie 2007.” http://ladyfest-ro.pimienta.org/weblog/?p=499. LadyAct 2006 blog. http://ladyact2006.blogspot.com. Magyari-Vincze, Enikö. 2006. “Bilele negre ale egalităţii de şanse între femei şi bărbaţi.” In Cartea neagră a egalităţii de şanse între femei şi bărbaţi, edited by Laura Grunberg, Ioana Borza, and Teodora Văcărescu, 119–23. Bucharest: AnA Societatea pentru analize feministe. Mihăilescu, Stefania. 2002. “Feminism și Europenism” AnAlize-Revista de Studii Feministe 12: 4–16. Mihalache, Isabela. 2006. “Femeile Rome și egalitatea de şanse.” In Cartea neagră a egalităţii de şanse între femei şi bărbaţi, edited by Laura Grunberg, Ioana Borza, and Teodora Văcărescu, 116–18. Bucharest: AnA Societatea pentru analize feministe. Miroiu, Mihaela. 2005. “The Costless State Feminism in Romania.” Paper presented at the Department for Russian and East-European Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington, March. http://www.indiana. edu/~reeiweb/events/2005/Miroiu%20text%20.pdf. Miroiu, Mihaela, and Liliana Popescu. 1999. “Condiţia femeilor din Romania între tradiţie si modernizare.” In Gen și politică. Femeile din Romania în viaţa publică, edited by Liliana Popescu, 3–27. Bucharest: UNDP and AnA. Mudure, Mihaela. 2004. “A Zeugmatic Space: East/ Central European Feminisms.” In Gender and the (Post) ‘East’/ ‘West’ European Divide, edited by Mihaela Frunză and Teodora Văcărescu, 1–10. Cluj-Napoca, Romania: Limes. Roman, Denise. 2001. “Gendering Eastern Europe: Pre-Feminism, Prejudice, and East-West Dialogues in Post-Communist Romania.” Women’s Studies International Forum 24 (1): 56–66. Teampău, Petruţa. 2007. “‘It Won’t Go Away’: Surviving a Feminist Consciousness in Post-socialist Romania.” Intersections: Women’s and Gender Studies in Review across Disciplines 5: 70–75. Vuxanovici, Valentina. 2003. “‘Mă simt valoroasă numai când reuşesc să ajut pe cineva.’ Interviu cu Mariana Duran, preşedintele Asociaiţei mamelor care îşi cresc singure copiii.” October 23. http://www.121.ro/content/article_print.php3?article_id=1767&page_nr=1.

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Relevant Websites Ana-Societatea pentru Analize Feministe: http://www.anasaf.ro/ro/index .html Asociatia femeilor rome: http://www.romawomenandkids.org/ Asociatia pentru promovarea femeilor din Romania: http://www.apfr.ro/en/ home Center for Partnership and Equality: http://www.cpe.ro/english/ Pro-women Foundation: http://www.prowomen.ro/english/partnership.htm Gender Romania: http://www.feminism.ro/activities.htm Ladyfest Romania 2007: http://ladyfest-ro.pimienta.org/weblog/?p=419#en Ladyfest Timiosra 2005: http://ladyfest-ro.pimienta.org/index.php?id=pages/ resurse.txt 2005

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chapter five

Transformation to Democracy: The Struggles of Georgian Women Medea Badashvili

The Georgian Government commits itself to secure effective implementation of equal rights and opportunities for women and men in the political, economic and social spheres. —The State Concept of Georgia on Gender Equality, 2006 The Law establishes the fundamental guarantees of equal rights, freedoms and opportunities of women and men granted by the Constitution, defines legal mechanisms and conditions for their implementation in relevant spheres of social life. —Law of Georgia on Gender Equality, Article 1, March 2010

Women’s struggle for social and political equality is shaped by historical, political, social, economic, ethnic, and everyday life characteristics of the particular countries in which they live. Feminism in the Soviet Union developed quite differently than it did in the West, where there was also significant variation across political context. In the Soviet Union the women’s movement was designated by the Communist Party to deal with “women’s issues.” Women’s political participation and institutional equality were established from the top down through the creation of a women’s committee and legal declaration of equality of the sexes. Under communism the state ensured equal educational

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opportunities for women and opened avenues for women to do professional work. Women’s participation in socialist societies nonetheless varied across the Soviet bloc at the individual and collective level. At the individual level the type of employment and the nature of the woman’s family were the principal determinants of participation, while the sociopolitical situation in the country was correlated to women’s overall participation in society. In order to stimulate women’s participation in public life the communist state extended assistance to mothers, including long-term maternity leave, child care, and guaranteed right to access to abortion. Women’s representation in the labor force was considerably higher in the countries of Eastern Europe than in those of Western Europe. Nonetheless, the favorable political and economic environment for women’s rights under communism still fell short of de facto gender equality. While the guarantee of equal opportunities for both sexes was widely touted by socialist regimes, women in these societies entered the postcommunist period facing significant challenges to full emancipation. This study looks specifically at the impact of the transformation from communism on women’s social and political status in the Georgian context. It identifies the factors that shaped Georgian women’s experience during the first twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and demonstrates the steps taken institutionally and through women’s activism to address women’s marginalized status.

Women’s Position Before Transformation Concern about gender equality is not a recent phenomenon in Georgia. The issue of equality between women and men is evident in Georgian folklore and classical literature, as well as in legal documents and other records throughout Georgian history. During the twelfth century, when Georgia was ruled by Queen Tamar, a woman’s right to divorce in cases of unfaithfulness or a husband’s impotence was a significant indicator of her legal status (Gugushvili 1999). In his classic poem, “The Knight in the Tiger’s Skin,” the greatest Georgian poet from the period, Shota Rustaveli, declared, “The lion’s whelps are equal, be they male or female.” But much water has flowed since that time. Women’s status and roles with respect to politics and other spheres of life have changed considerably, and not necessarily for the better. The concept of “gender” developed in the West came later to the Georgian reality. In the early 1990s the majority of people considered the struggle

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for gender equity to be merely a “women’s issue.” The notion of gender as a social construct with the power to shape culture, the public sphere, and state institutions, as well as people’s self-perceptions, decision-making processes, and interpersonal interactions, was not articulated in public discourse. Consequently, the main concern among feminist activists in the postcommunist period was to overcome the mindset that institutional, attitudinal, and cultural discrimination on the basis of gender is reducible to biology. Feminists have struggled to win broad social acceptance of the idea that gender is not about biological relations between the sexes or the distribution of roles in the process of reproduction. The pervasive influence of gender is irreducible to “feminism” or “women’s issues.” The Soviet period spanned seventy years of industrialization, intense urbanization, and scientific-technological revolution in Georgia. In the very first years of Soviet power, the Communist Party issued numerous decrees on the equality of men and women. State doctrine regarding women’s emancipation envisaged complete liberation of women, including the right to vote and to be elected to public office. Women were availed free-of-charge and extensive educational and employment opportunities. At the same time they were not appointed to high government posts, nor did they hold influential positions only in the sectors of culture and social service. Quotas ensured proportional representation for women at lower levels of government, but in the Supreme Soviet only 30 percent of positions were given to women. During the Soviet period in Georgia, women’s employment was promoted and normalized by the official propaganda through images of working women, and women became full participants in the functioning of the economy. Before the onset of the economic crisis in 1990, 1,250,000 women were involved in the national economy, representing 46.3 percent of the total workforce and 80 percent of able-bodied women (Census 1989). Women’s participation in Georgia’s workforce reached its peak between 1980 and 1990. At that time, only women on maternity leave stayed at home. The proportion of women was especially high in agriculture, public catering, communications, and various industrial sectors (food and chemical industries), as well as in all major nonindustrial sectors of the economy. Women also constituted the majority in prestigious professions in such fields as teaching, medicine, culture and art, and industrial engineering. Georgian women were the leaders in the Soviet bloc in general education achievement and professional qualifications. However, in the context of the state-planned economy, women’s

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participation in management was strictly limited. Women were largely relegated to midmanagement positions in organizations and enterprises, while men held almost all of the top managerial posts.

The Postcommunist Context Women’s roles in Georgia changed significantly in the postcommunist period. Extensive socioeconomic transformation in the twenty years following the collapse of the Soviet Union substantially affected the prevailing role and meaning of gender in the society. Collapse of the old system impacted men and women differently. Devaluation of cultural and traditional values contributed to painful transformation of intrafamily relationships. The social and economic upheaval in Georgia during this period forced changes in family income structure and management that undermined traditional male and female roles in the family resulting in increased domestic conflict. International law also played a significant role in shaping how gender was perceived and addressed in Georgia during the postcommunist period. Legislation and practice with respect to women’s rights were shaped by international conventions and treaties. On September 22, 1994, Georgia acceded to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW),1 assuming responsibility to conform to its demands. In the context of Georgia’s nascent democracy and market economy, becoming a signatory to this convention represented an important symbolic commitment to the realization of social, economic, and cultural rights. In September 1995 representatives from governmental and nongovernmental sectors of Georgia participated in the Fourth World Conference on Women’s Issues in Beijing. The participants agreed to implement a fiveyear action plan to promote the social, economic, and political empowerment of women. Georgia adopted its own plan of action, incorporating points from the Beijing Platform, and agreed to make the following issues national priorities: increasing women’s role and participation in decisionmaking processes, addressing the effects of the transition period and the separatist conflicts on women, improving health care for women and children, and addressing women’s rights. The establishment of women’s parliamentary groups was one of the important steps in implementing the Beijing Platform. The Parliamentary Women’s Club in the Georgian Parliament was established in June 1997.

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Other initiatives dedicated special attention to women’s role in the peace processes in the Caucasus and to addressing the problem of homeless children. The project “Gender and Development” was launched in 1999 (it was concluded in 2002) to facilitate broader, more active, and ultimately equal involvement of women in the country’s socioeconomic and political life. The program provided assistance to the Georgian government in implementing a sustainable gender program through capacity building and education. It sought to strengthen the State Commission on Elaboration of State Policy for the Development of Women and to promote gender sensitization in legislation and ministry programs. Regional forums established under the program created a central resource and information center to facilitate training, research, policy recommendations, and public awareness with respect to gender. The 1995 Beijing Conference helped to increase the visibility of women’s issues, which until that point had not been a priority either for the Georgian government or for the society at large. It set the agenda for the women’s NGOs that were rapidly emerging to advance women’s issues in the country. By 2000, the number of women’s NGOs already exceeded 70 (IHFHR 2000, 182); by 2008 there were more than two hundred registered women’s NGOs, though not more than eighty of them were active and functioning.2 A study undertaken by the NGO International Centre of Civic Culture (ICCC) in 1998 showed there were only six women’s NGOs created from 1991 to 1994, but about twenty-five nongovernmental organizations devoted to women’s issues were established between 1994 and 1998. One of the reasons for this dramatic increase may be the fact that the country became a signatory to CEDAW in 1994 and became more involved in the international struggles to secure women’s rights and gender equality. The International Center of Civic Culture (ICCC) study also revealed that the majority of the thirty-seven women’s NGOs included in its analysis expressed enmity toward the term “feminism” and did not identify themselves as feminist. According to the ICCC, women’s membership in those thirty-seven NGOs was estimated at twenty-seven thousand, with the majority of the members concentrated in eight big NGOs: the Women’s Council of Georgia (almost 10,000 members); Women for Peace and Life (5,000 members); the Soldiers’ Memory Foundation (4,500 members); White Scarf (4,000 members); Georgian Women for Elections (2,500 members); the Tbilisi Women’s Council (2,000 members); the Association of Women

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with Large Families (1,500 members); and the International Association of Georgian Widows (1,500 members). The remaining twenty-nine NGOs averaged sixty-five members.3 According to the Initial State Report submitted to the CEDAW Committee in 1998, “the majority of women’s NGOs were involved in charity, job placement, and cultural and educational work, and there were no exclusively feminist organizations in Georgia.”4 The initial shadow report on this issue asserted that although “the main interest of women’s NGO activities is related to the economic and social fields, the number of NGOs working on feminist issues is also increasing.”5 “Thus the report drew a line between NGOs comprised of women but not working for women’s empowerment and gender equality, and NGOs comprised of women working on feminist issues. Resistance to being called ‘feminist’ is still strong among NGOs that have clearly feminist agendas—such NGOs outnumber the NGOs comprised only of women and not working on women’s issues” (Sabedashvili 2007, 37). One of the most financially powerful NGOs of the post-Beijing period was Women for Peace and Life, headed by Georgia’s first lady, Nanuli Shevardnadze, and comprised mainly of the wives of the political elite and their friends. In 2008 no single NGO stood out in terms of financial resources or membership. The majority of NGOs were concentrated in the capital of the country, Tbilisi, and in other big cities. A few NGOs served in places with a large concentration of internally displaced people (IDP). Two NGOs working in Western Georgia, Atinati and Gainati, are especially active among the general local population, as well as with internally displaced persons living in settlement centers in terrible conditions and deep poverty. From 1998 to the time of this writing in 2009, both organizations prioritized charity work, job placement, and cultural and educational work. In June 2000 the Coalition of Women’s NGOs was established in Georgia, and thirty organizations joined forces to promote women’s rights and status through concerted action and coordination with the support of the local Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights / Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (ODIHR/OSCE). In 2006 the leader of this special program, Gender Advisor of the Gender Unit of ODIHR/OSCE Tiina Ilsen, states in her article for the information bulletin of the coalition: “We changed community from the inside, because only equal opportunities make it truly democratic. We worked for comprehensive

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change of the society we live in. For only community that can provide equal opportunities for men and women can be regarded as democratic.” Within the coalition nine main working groups were created to cover the following specific issues: Women and Politics, Women and Education, Women and Health Care, Women and Economics, Women and Peacebuilding, Women and Media, Women and Global Environment, PR Working Group, and Institutional Machinery Working Group. The coalition was launched in response to both acute necessity and the conscious desire for change expressed by women of Georgia. It enhanced women’s initiatives by articulating the idea of gender equality and making the activities directed toward realizing it more realistic, unified, and successful. The coalition presented an excellent opportunity for women to tackle problems and was actively involved in the political life of Georgian women until 2007. In 2002, the Unity of Women and Peace was established with the support of UNIFEM’s regional project “Women for Conflict Prevention and Peace-Building in the South Caucasus.” The network united more than one hundred women’s organizations, women’s groups, and individual women and extended and developed representation in the regions of the country. The main goal of the network was the enhancement of a sustainable peace through women’s active participation and the achievement of greater gender equality (Sabedashvili 2007, 40). The pace of change in the political and economic life of the country considerably accelerated after the “Rose Revolution” in November 2003. The new government declared its eagerness to strengthen the democratization process of the country and gave special attention to gender concerns at the state level. Georgia’s National Report on the Millennium Development Goals, approved by the government in 2004, emphasized the importance of providing equal opportunities for both male and female participation at all levels of government. The third goal, “To Promote Gender Equality and Empower Women,” required gender equity in the employment sphere. In pursuit of this goal the report stipulates compilation of data that will enable labor market analysis through the prism of gender, such as wage comparison between males and females and assessment of the number of preschool institutions. The report further affirmed the need for rehabilitation/development of the social aid system (Millenium 2004). The Gender Equality Advisory Council was created in October 2004 with the support of UNDP project “Gender and Politics in the South

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Caucasus.” The council was comprised of members of Parliament and representatives of governmental and nongovernmental organizations and headed by the chairperson of the Parliament of Georgia. Active members of the coalition and the network were nominated as civil-society representatives to the council (five representatives), and one year later, in 2005, to the Governmental Commission for Gender Equality (four representatives). The council was mandated to lobby for gender issues, promote gender-mainstreamed legislation, and ensure the implementation of international agreements and conventions involving gender equality. A few months later, in June 2005, the Governmental Commission on Gender Equality (GCGE) was established for a period of one year to elaborate a national concept and plan of action for gender equality in partnership with the Parliamentary Council. The commission and the council included active representatives of women’s movements from around the whole country. In February 2006, the GCGE and the council established a joint working group that received financial and technical support from UN agencies. The group was comprised of nominees from the GCGE and the council and included representatives of NGOs working on women’s issues and representatives of the executive and legislative branches of the government, including the Office of the Human Rights Ombudsperson. After a series of working meetings and extensive consultation with civil society, governmental offices, and development organizations, the working group introduced the Gender Equality Strategy of Georgia (GES). GES is comprised of three interlinked documents: (1) the State Concept on Gender Equality, adopted by Parliament in July 2006; (2) a three-year plan of action for the implementation of the concept of gender equality, adopted by the government with significant alterations in September 2007; and (3) recommendations to the legislative and executive branches of government for the establishment of permanent mechanisms to monitor and coordinate gender equality issues, which had yet to be considered as of September 2008. Among several important achievements, the most notable has been the National Gender Equality Action Plan, including the section on Peace and Security, which became one of the very important issues after the war of 2008. International organizations with the governmental stakeholders and the representatives from the Parliament of Georgia developed the new National Action Plan for 2010–13. The State Commission on Elaboration of the State Policy for Women’s Advancement, established in 2005 within the Office of the State Minister

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on European and Euro-Atlantic Integration, was reestablished in September 2007 as the Inter-Ministerial Commission on Elaboration of Gender Equality Policy in Georgia, headed by the State Ministry on Reforms Coordination of Georgia. The year 2006 was a watershed for the adoption of gender-sensitive legislation. Parliament adopted laws against human trafficking6 and domestic violence.7 During the plenary hearings on the domestic violence legislation, the majority of the male members of Parliament were cynical about the new laws. They embraced the laws, as an observer put it, “more for the sake of political correctness than an actual acknowledgment of their necessity” (Sabedashvili 2007, 24). Several observers also noted that in the longer run, “effective implementation of these laws (would) not be ensured as long as adequate finances (were) not secured for these purposes” (Sanikidze et al. 2006, 12). The new legislation called for administrative, criminal, and civil penalties where appropriate and created two new remedies to provide immediate protection for victims, a protective order and a restrictive order to be issued by courts and police. It also required the establishment of shelter and social services for victims and specified other police obligations to ensure victim safety. Unfortunately, from the 1990s until late 2008, social services for domestic violence victims in Georgia were the domain of the NGO community. During this period NGOs were actively involved in direct service and advocacy for domestic violence victims. They addressed prevention of domestic violence by participating in the preparation of the aforementioned domestic abuse law and conducting trainings on domestic violence for the police and other professionals. A few NGOs also monitored domestic violence through surveys, which demonstrated it to be a pervasive and devastating social problem. NGOs provided legal, medical, and psychological assistance to victims and ran the only shelters in Georgia. At the end of the second decade of postcommunism, lack of sufficient shelter space remains a significant barrier to victim advocacy. In 2008 there were only two shelters specifically for victims of domestic violence, and their combined capacity met the needs of fewer than twenty women. By 2010 there were four shelters operated by NGOs—Sakhli, Saphari, and the Anti-Violence Network of Georgia (AVNG)—with limited space devoted specifically to victims of domestic violence. Most of these shelters are located in the country’s capital, thus legal aid, psychological counseling, and medical examination for victims of domestic violence is severely limited in many regions of the country. Georgia lacks viable long-term solutions

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for domestic violence victims, such as access to adequate housing. The new domestic violence legislation empowered police to remove victims from their homes, but without adequate shelter space to accommodate women, such removal is not practical. NGOs also promote implementation of the law by encouraging victims to seek protection under it and providing women with legal representation to demand its enforcement (Nato Shavlakadze, personal communication). One NGO, founded by Ms. Shavlakadze, the Anti-Violence Network (AVN), has eleven crisis centers throughout Georgia that provide psycho-social rehabilitation to women and children. The organization conducts ongoing police trainings in every region of the country and operates a hotline for victims of domestic violence. In July 2006, the Georgian Parliament adopted the “State Concept of Gender Equality,” a political statement that introduces definitions for “gender,” “gender equality,” “direct and indirect discrimination,” “gender mainstreaming,” and other important terms based on CEDAW and Council of Europe definitions. The “Concept” does not have the force of law, but its approval by Parliament nonetheless establishes it as a policy framework for the executive branch of the government, or at least as a blueprint for more gender-sensitive language to be used in future legislation. The Concept initiated the Gender Equality Law adopted by the Parliament of Georgia in March 2010. The law provides the establishment of a national women’s machinery, the enhancement of women’s security, equality in the labor market, and the strengthening of women’s political participation. It also introduces genderresponsive planning and budgeting on the part of the government. As deputy chairman of the Georgian Parliament and chair of the Gender Equality Advisory Council (2008–2012) Ms. Rusudan Kervalishvili, said in one of her interviews to the newspaper, the law is only a first step in addressing the gender equality problem in Georgia: However, implementation of the law is a more important process, in which I see a huge role for active public participation. One of the ways can be to promote political parties that will set internal quotas and include more women high in their election lists. Without such measures, I personally do not see gender equality taking place either in politics or in society, and it is essential for civil development.8

Despite advances in equality on legal ground, gender equality is far from being achieved, and women are still hardly represented in political and

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economic decision making. The fraction of women elected to public office in the five parliamentary and four local elections during the last decades following the collapse of the Soviet system clearly indicates that the political and economic environment in the country is unfavorable to the active involvement of women in political and economic life. Throughout this period the number of women holding positions in the Georgian Parliament and the organs of local government remained relatively static. The 2004 elections saw a slight increase in the number of women elected to Parliament, bringing women’s representation to 10.4 percent of the Parliament members, but in the 2008 elections women’s representation decreased dramatically to 5.9 percent, the lowest in the history of Georgian parliamentarism (Sumbadze 2008, 35). Gender expert Ms. Marina Tabukashvili states, “Simple representation in due quantities in politics or Parliament is not enough, even if those elected are representatives of the women’s movement. The women’s movement needs leaders who are motivated to make the voices of women audible, and are not ashamed to speak about women’s needs publicly and before Parliament. Today these issues are marginalized and considered shameful” (Sumbadze 2008, 33). Former member of Parliament and one of the leaders of the opposition party New Rights, Ms. Manana Nachkebia, argues: Society consists of men and women, so both should be represented in decision-making. But with the increase in numerical representation I would love to see a rise in quality as well . . . gender in politics has two sides, one is women’s representation and the other is concern for women’s issues. Representation on its own cannot guarantee the desired outcome. Today many women can be seen in street demonstrations or busy in pre-electoral activities and the problem does not lie in the low participation of women, but in the discrepancy of power between the interest and the activities of women on the one hand, and their representation in decision-making bodies, on the other hand. (Personal communication)

The political landscape changed dramatically in Georgia over nearly twenty years of postcommunism. Many political parties active in the early years of political and economic transformation completely disappeared from the political arena, and many new ones emerged. Two months before the parliamentary elections in March 2008, Ms. Guguli Magradze, a former member of both Parliament (2004) and the Gender Equality Advisory Council, founded

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the Women’s Party. The party was 80 percent female and consisted of nearly 2,700 members from all over the country. It collaborated with the Traditionalist Party in the 2008 parliamentary elections without a great deal of success. The Women’s Party defined its postelection agenda around improving the educational and social life of women and raising general political awareness among the local population in the regions as well as in the country’s capital. Toward this end they anticipated establishing resource centers in different regions and editing and distributing free newsletters to avail the local population of information about political developments. Their initiative would address the need for information in the regions due in part to the lack of media outlets—there are only two TV channels, for example. One of the party’s principal objectives was to advance women’s representation in politics. As the leader of the party pointed out, “It’s extremely difficult for women to advance in the party hierarchy” (Guguli Magradze, personal communication). Political parties often consider men their reliable base, though women frequently fulfill important party functions, particularly public relations and the internal administration of the party. On the eve of the parliamentary elections in May 2008, the Women’s Coalition of Georgia forwarded to the Parliament thirty-two thousand signatures in support of amendments to the election legislation and bringing more women into politics. Women’s NGOs urged the authorities to amend legislation so that the Parliament could introduce temporary measures (quotas) to achieve gender parity in representation. As the previous experiences showed, it is extremely hard for women to be elected from single-mandate constituencies. The dominating masculine political culture provides male candidates with better chances of being elected. Thus, inclusion in party lists is the only means by which women can be elected to Parliament. At the end of 2010, the issue remained unsettled. The project “Gender and Governance—Promoting the Participation of Women in Electoral process in Georgia” is another effort to increase the representation of women in the political life of the country. Implemented by the human rights organization World Vision Georgia, the project was supported financially by the joint effort of the European Union and the Council of Europe. The main goal of the project was to promote gender equality in Georgian public life through enhanced gender awareness and women’s participation in the parliamentary elections of May 2008, with the specific aim of increasing the percentage of women voters. Ultimately, the project expected that an increase in the number of women voters would increase the

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representation of women in the Georgian Parliament and other government institutions. It undertook numerous activities to increase women’s electoral participation, including workshops in different regions of the country and an informational campaign encouraging women to vote. Yet, despite these efforts to raise the rate of women’s participation, the elections yielded a disappointing decrease in the number of women elected. The presence of women’s issues on the political agenda is an even more vexing problem than the issue of representation. Women’s issues rarely capture the attention of Parliament and, as gender experts often note, women deputies do not differ much from their male colleagues in gender advocacy. Women’s representation in local self-governance is slightly better than it is on the national scale. In the local elections of 2006, 11.5 percent of those elected were women. In 2010 only 10.3 percent of elected officials were women. The overall decline in women’s representation in public office since 1998 is most probably due to changes in the electoral law. Analysis of the situation clearly indicates gender imbalance in the participation of Georgian citizens in public life. While men and women do not differ significantly in their interest in public affairs and politics, men have much more power over public decision making than women. The gender disparity in public life can be addressed by raising awareness of gender issues. The need for greater representation of women in elected offices and governing structures is overwhelmingly recognized. Nonetheless, deeply rooted discrimination against women’s active involvement in the public realm persists because of cultural stereotypes. Lack of gender awareness, lack of coherent state policy for attaining gender equality, and lack of motivation, capacity, and time among women are further explanations for the low involvement of women in public life.

Conclusion Much has been achieved with respect to gender equality in Georgia during the first decade of the twenty-first century, yet much is left to do. Gender equality is one of the topics that still needs to be successfully integrated into the state’s policy agenda. The gender-mainstreaming process must be integrated more effectively, especially in the political and economic policy of the government, allocation of government funds, regulation of the labor market, social policy, and health care.

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Further improvements require active measures to tackle the obstacles to women’s full participation in public life. Increasing public awareness of gender issues and challenging traditional notions of women’s place in society are essential steps toward gender equality. Media campaigns and formal education are thus important supplements to legal and policy tools. It is evident from the Georgian experience that adoption of a legislative and strategic framework alone is not sufficient to advance gender equality. Public awareness, political commitment, and continued follow up at all levels of society are also necessary. Discriminatory gender stereotypes are deeply rooted and widespread and consistent effort is needed to transform them.

Notes 1.

The Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (the CEDAW Convention) is a human rights treaty for women; the substance of the convention is based on three interrelated core principles: equality, nondiscrimination, and state obligation. The UN General Assembly adopted the CEDAW on December 19, 1979; it came into force as a treaty on September 3, 1981. CEDAW is one of the most highly ratified international human rights conventions having the support of 186 state parties. The convention is being continually updated.

2.

Data from NGO Women’s Information Centre: www.wcg.org.ge.

3.

International Center of Civic Culture: www.osgf.ge/iccc/.

4.

Consideration of Initial Report Submitted by States Parties under Article 18 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, paragraph 15.

5.

Report on Nongovernmental Organization on the Status of Women in the Republic of Georgia under CEDAW, Article 3.

6.

Law of Georgia on Combating Human Trafficking, 2006.

7.

Law of Georgia on Elimination of Domestic Violence, Protection of and Support to Its Victims, 2006.

8.

Georgia Today (newspaper), no. 510, May 14–20, 2010.

References Gugushvili, Nino. 2000. “Images of Women in Middle Ages Georgia.” PhD diss. (in Georgian), Tbilisi.

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International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights. 2000. Women 2000: An Investigation into the Status of Women’s Rights in Central and South–Eastern Europe and the Newly Independent States. Millennium Development Goals in Georgia. Tbilisi, 2004. Population Census. 1989. National Statistics Office of Georgia. Sabedashvili, Tamar. 2007. “Gender and Democratization: The Case of Georgia 1991–2006.” Tbilisi: Heinrich Boll Foundation. Sanikidze, Lia, Tamar Pataridze, Irma Aladashvili, Mari Meskhi, Violeta Neubauer, et al. 2006. “Reality: Women’s Equal Rights and Equal opportunities in Georgia.” Tbilisi: Poligraph. “Status of Women in Georgia.” 1999. Tbilisi: United Nations Development Program, NEKERI. Sumbadze, Nana. 2008. “Gender and Society: Georgia.” Report prepared by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and published within the framework of the UNDP Project “Gender and Politics.” Tbilisi.

Relevant Websites International Center of Civic Culture: www.osgf.ge/iccc/ NGO Women’s Information Center: www.wcg.org.ge

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chapter six

Poverty and Popular Mobilization in Postcommunist Capitalist Regimes Ivan Szelenyi and Katarzyna Wilk

Posing the Problem Central and Eastern Europe saw an explosion of poverty and inequality after the fall of communism. According to World Bank estimates, during the late 1980s in the former Eurasian socialist countries less than one out of twentyfive people lived below the “absolute poverty line” of $2.15 a day. Ten years later one out of five people subsisted on less than $2.15 a day (The World Bank 2000, 1). Income inequality increased dramatically during the same period, to the point where the region that had been among the most egalitarian in the world became one of the most unequal. GINI coefficients between the late 1980s and the late 1990s increased in all countries. In Central Europe the increases were relatively modest, from around .20 to .25, with the exception of Poland where it increased from .28 to .33. While in Russia the index of inequality jumped from .26 to .47. The change in South Eastern Europe was somewhat less severe. In Bulgaria and Romania, for example, inequality increased from around .25 to .30 and .40 respectively (The World Bank 2000, 140). Given the extreme deterioration of the living conditions of large segments of the population and the striking increases in inequality, popular response was surprisingly subdued. The first decade of postcommunism can be characterized as popular demobilization. Since during this period of the postcommunist transformation the countries had respectable—though not impeccable—records of human rights, and were by no means oppressive regimes, the near complete absence of popular resistance is puzzling.

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By 2000 the countries in Central and Eastern Europe had undergone complete transformation to market economies and entered a period of rather steady economic growth.1 The poverty rates and the GINI coefficient stabilized during the first decade of the twenty-first century, and in some cases both indicators improved slightly. But the European postsocialist countries faced new challenges. Despite the apparent cessation of growth in poverty and inequality there was a rise in protest/mobilization that observers might have expected but did not see during the earlier period. This chapter takes as its point of departure the puzzle of the absence of popular mobilization under conditions of economic privation that might be expected to favor public outcry and the presence of mobilization as the economies in the region stabilized. It begins by problematizing measures of poverty and inequality, rendering the impact of economic restructuring in terms of the everyday lived experiences of people in the postcommunist region rather than just in terms of objective indicators such as income. By supplementing absolute measures of economic well-being with subjective experiences of privation in the operationalization of poverty, we demonstrate the disparate impact of economic restructuring across the postcommunist space and the consequences of various reform strategies over time. The restructuring of the 1990s left many countries in a state of unsustainable partial reform. While the economic institutions of the Central European states underwent dramatic changes, social institutions such as health care, pensions, education, and research funding by and large remained “socialist.” State control of these sectors of the economy, which in East European parlance are often referred to as “the great distributive systems,” resulted in increasing budget deficits and rising national debt. Hungary and Poland are particularly obvious and rather drastic examples of the problems arising from segmented reform. Consequently, after 2000 most European postcommunist countries undertook (largely unsuccessful) efforts to reform their great distributive systems. This second round of reforms was much less costly to societies than the economic restructuring in the 1990s. Nevertheless, dismantling the great distributive systems met much stronger popular resistance than establishing market capitalism, at least in Hungary (Greskovits and Várhalmi 2009). This chapter first poses a theoretical puzzle: Why was public response to unpopular and painful policies at the beginning of the twenty-first century so different from that during the first transitional crisis? Why, in effect, did the population mobilize against the second round of reforms and remain

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quiescent during the first? It then offers a brief overview of the transformation of economic institutions and presents data on growth in poverty during the 1990s in European postcommunism. Through analysis of data illustrating protest events as well as socioeconomic conditions of selected postcommunist countries we generate a few hypotheses regarding the relative weakness of popular mobilization during the restructuring of economic institutions. The third section of the chapter provides a brief narrative of popular mobilization against reform of the great distributive systems with two “case studies” of the history of successful resistance against the health-care reform in Hungary and Poland. We consider possible reasons for the depth and violence of recent popular protest movements and conclude by anticipating the impact of the global fiscal crisis on the region.

The Theoretical Puzzle: Costs of Transition and Intensity of Popular Mobilization According to most theorists the transition to democracy (and by extension, we argue, the transition to a market economy) creates political opportunities for various groups. It introduces freedom of expression for citizens, which tends to lead to more frequent protests in more radical forms (Tarrow 1989; Tilly 2003). Przeworski et al. showed that strikes are three times more frequent in democratic regimes than in dictatorships, while demonstrations and riots are twice as frequent. In the 1970s and 1980s waves of protests and strikes occurred in many countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, in the wake of major transitions that caused significant increases in unemployment and poverty and decline in real income (Przeworski et al. 2001). Generalizing from these cases scholars expected the economic crisis in the 1990s in Central and Eastern Europe to result in an increase in strikes, riots, and civil violence (Haggard and Kaufman 1992, 350). Ekiert, for example, was concerned that collective protest would intensify in response to dramatic increases in unemployment, general decline in economic well-being, and increases in poverty and inequality (1991). Walton and Seddon similarly expected that popular discontent would feed a great upsurge of mobilization across Central and Eastern Europe (1994, 327). Some observers predicted that protests would be exceptional in intensity and magnitude during the 1990s. They argued that this would in turn contribute to political instability (Ekiert and Kubik 1999; Seleny 1999).

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In fact, transitional social costs were even higher than expected in Central and Eastern Europe. There was a significant decrease in real wages, an increase in unemployment rates, and cuts in social expenditures and states subsidies.2 Additionally, in the early 1990s, the rates of poverty and income inequality rose significantly. By the mid-1990s, the GINI coefficients in some of these countries, including Russia, were close to that of Latin America (Havrylyshyn 2004, 10; Hellman 1998).3 Particular groups suffered more than others during the transformation. Among the most affected were those whose well-being was tied to the old system, including the lower social classes, the elderly, and women (Shabad and Slomczynski 2002; Wilk and Shabad 2002; Grzymala-Busse 2003, 2005). Many workers, especially the older generation, lost their retirement benefits and monthly pensions, and as a consequence, the majority of them fell below the poverty line.4 The number of “abnormal pensioners”5 increased dramatically as postcommunist governments created favorable incentives for early retirement through welfare programs (Vanhuysse 2008, 91). This period also saw an increase in income disparity between men and women due to the repeal of female-specific policies and the institution of labor legislation that was unfavorable to women (Glass 2005).6 However, despite the similarities in structural indicators between postcommunist countries and countries that underwent transformation from other types of authoritarian regimes, the postcommunist transformations saw comparatively fewer strikes. The nascent postcommunist democracies remained relatively peaceful in the face of social hardship, output losses, and precipitous decline of many core industries during this period (Vanhuysse 2004, 421 and 428). Ekiert and Kubik offered several theoretical explanations for the lack of disruption, but among these they noted “the demobilizing effect of the opportunity support structure’s ‘excessive’ openness and the weakness of institutional support structures for protest activities (including the availability of organizational, material, and symbolic resources), in comparison with Western democracies” (1998b, 572–73). Vanhuysse argued that industry strategies to reduce the labor force undermined the organizational capacity of the hardest hit workers. Some workers received unemployment benefits while others were offered “abnormal” pensions—early and disability retirement (2008, 5). This divided the interests and spatial distribution of local clusters of workers, making it more difficult for workers to mount a unified response to the policies. Both groups became welfare dependent and

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were “deprived of key elements needed for successful mobilization,” such as social networks and union membership (Vanhuysse 2008, 57; Golden 1997; Dixon and Roscigno 2003). Crowley and Ost (2001) explained the lack of evidence that economic hardship caused social unrest in the postcommunist states (the mobilization that did occur was not linked to the labor movement) by the fact that “union leaders may have feared that union organizing in such circumstances carried too much risk of backlash; and strikes are difficult to organize when factories have stopped production and unemployment looms a real threat” (Iankova 2003, 742). Even in Poland, where contentious politics were highly developed under communism, postcommunist mobilization was far from widespread.7 Poland was more contentious than other postsocialist countries, but the Polish case was not outstanding by international comparison (Vanhuysse 2004, 428). Greskovits (1998) suggests relative income equality as an explanation for the lack of mobilization in postcommunist countries in general compared with other third-wave democracies.8 Some scholars suggest “the novelty of political order” as an explanation for the comparative peacefulness of the Central and Eastern European transformations. Protest culture had yet to develop in response to the newly established polity and political institutions (Szabó 2000, 64). Greskovits (1997, 1998) further argued that public passivity in the face of painful policies might signal democratic loyalty while disguising adaptive strategies of “informal exit,” including tax evasion, organized crime, and illegal employment. The solitary and secretive nature of these forms of protest mitigate against collective contentious actions. Vanhuysse argued that the early theories (Tarrow 1989; Tilly 2003; Przeworski et al. 2001) “are less than convincing because they are specified predominantly though macro-contextual variables that are not always consistent with intra-regional protests variation” (2004, 422). Greskovits also cited cultural factors, including high education standards, high proportion of the population living in rural areas, and the rise of social expenditure as a percentage of GDP as explanations for the comparatively low level of protest in postcommunist Central and Eastern Europe (Greskovits 1998, 76–77).

Reform of Economic Institutions and the Social Costs of Transition The reforms of the 1990s were arguably “one-sided,” mainly targeting economic institutions while leaving social institutions by and large intact.

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Property relations changed in fundamental ways during the first decade after the fall of communism in all European postcommunist countries. Stateowned industries were converted to private property, and the socialist command economy was dismantled and replaced by market mechanisms or a combination of markets and networks. These first reforms culminated in a “transitional crisis.”9 The reforms were mainly driven by privatization of the large public sector, which exposed relatively small domestic industries to international competition. As foreign trade was deregulated, the small domestic private sectors, which emerged in the 1980s in Hungary and to a lesser extent in Poland (Szelenyi 1988), proved to be noncompetitive. As a result, many “socialist entrepreneurs” were wiped out. The shrinking domestic private sector could not, therefore, create employment for those who lost jobs due to privatization of the “socialist,” publicly owned corporate sector. The single most devastating—and unanticipated—consequence of the transitional crisis was the destruction of jobs. Employment declined 30 percent in Hungary and Poland between 1988 and 1995, and by 2000 reached similar lows throughout postcommunist Europe. The loss of jobs was not necessarily reflected in unemployment rates and the degree of unemployment varied across countries. Poland, for example, had relatively high unemployment that persisted at least through the end of the first decade of the twentyfirst century, while in Hungary the jobless rate was below the EU average during the same period. Statistics, however, do not necessarily reflect the actual rate of unemployment. Job loss was “swept under the rug” by excluding women and retired workers from the ranks of the unemployed. Women who lost jobs were recategorized as on “home duties” if they gave up hope of finding new employment. In some countries early retirement policies were used to cut jobs. In Hungary, in particular, people as young as fifty were offered retirement, and those who did not meet the reduced retirement age could be transferred to disability pensions. Consequently, the economic impact of the transformation to a market economy was largely borne by the pension system. The costs were transferred to the great distributive systems. The Central European countries entered a growth trajectory after 1995 (this happened much later, around 1999–2000 further east), but economic expansion did not result in a concomitant increase in jobs. By 2008, employment levels in the postcommunist EU member countries continued to lag behind EU averages. Governments and leaders of political parties considered

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reforms of social institutions during the first phase of the transformation, but relatively little was achieved (Haggard and Kaufman 2008). Private pension insurances were supposed to complement publicly funded pensions, for example. However, efforts to shift some of the burden of restructuring to newly privatized industries were not far reaching enough to ease the increased pressure on public pension funds. Almost twenty years after the fall of socialism the health-care system continued to function very much as it had during the forty years of state socialism. During this period of economic expansion there were also attempts to consolidate the fragmented, overspecialized tertiary education system into genuine universities that would be more responsive to the rapidly changing needs of the labor market. The changes were largely cosmetic, however, and the institutions continued to operate separately despite formal consolidation. As a result, the reforms did nothing to reduce redundancy and concentrate resources to improve the overall quality and efficiency of the system. Nearly two decades after the onset of economic and political transformation institutions of tertiary education, which cater to a rapidly increasing college age population, continue to prepare students to enter the job market in a rather similar manner as they had under state socialism. Despite advanced training, young people are without the skills to be competitive in a price-regulated labor market. As a result unemployment and underemployment of university graduates reached unprecedented levels. With the exception of East Germany, no government dared to dismantle the archaic, expensive, and inefficient Academies of Sciences. These extensive systems of research institutes are part of the legacy of communism and employ thousands of full-time researchers, many of whom lack fundamental qualifications. Reform of social institutions has proved much more difficult than implementing a market economy. The tenacity of the great distributive system resulted in an increasing gap between a liberal capitalist economy and social institutions that are incompatible with market capitalism no matter how functional they might have been under socialism (Haggard and Kaufman 2008). By 2005 this contradiction had slowed down economic growth, and a domestic fiscal crisis was in the making well before the global financial crisis hit the region with vehemence in the second half of 2008. Additionally, the European Union began exerting pressure on the new member countries (the Baltic states, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria) to reduce their overall debt and budget deficits. To cope with these challenges, ECE

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governments undertook a second wave of reforms. The societal reaction was immediate: the intensity of protest increased, most dramatically in Hungary (Greskovits and Várhalmi 2009). This constitutes the key puzzle this chapter tries to address: Why this outburst of social movements in the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, while in the more difficult times of the 1990s the masses were politically demobilized?

Poverty: Extent and Measurement Poverty is often seen as a powerful mobilizing factor. We begin, therefore, with an analysis of postcommunist poverty, using statistical data generated by surveys conducted in the six postcommunist countries of Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Russia during the fall of 1999 and the winter-spring of 2000.10 In these surveys we asked retrospective questions about experiences with poverty in 1988 (see below) and in 2000; hence, data can be used for longitudinal comparison, and we can try to measure the dynamics of poverty in these countries during the first decade of postcommunism. There are no reliable data available for 1988 for most of the countries we studied. Therefore retrospective data, while not an ideal measure of living conditions in the past, are still the best data available for historical analysis. The main shortcoming of the data set is its termination in 2000, but we know that trends observed during the first decade began to accelerate substantially during the second decade. To extend the temporal frame of analysis we use the most recent World Bank data on poverty in these countries. Unfortunately, even with the World Bank data we have reliable statistics only through 2003. Hence we can merely speculate about the potentially significant changes through much of the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Measuring Poverty We use various measures of poverty; some rather conventional, others less so. In order to assess the changes in living conditions between 1988 and 2000 we asked identical sets of “subjective” questions about the respondents’ experience of poverty in 1988 and 2000. We consider these questions to be subjective measures of poverty because they explore the lived experiences of the respondents. We consider measures that assess incomes or expenditures in monetary terms to be objective.

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The set of subjective measures used in this chapter we call the experience of poverty. We asked four questions with the intent of capturing the subjective experience of absolute poverty: (1) whether the respondent went to bed hungry recently because he or she could not afford to eat enough food; (2) whether the respondent had the financial means to eat enough; and (3) whether the respondent had adequate clothing, such as shoes and a winter coat. We classify as “very poor,” those who reported experience with hunger. People were regarded as “poor” if they reported deprivation in at least one of the three other indicators. Those who did not report any deprivation were regarded as “nonpoor” (see Figure 6.1). We calculated “objective” poverty measures by following the procedures applied by the World Bank.11 We asked questions about income and expenditures, or consumption. The World Bank methodology evaluates well-being and establishes poverty thresholds on the basis of household consumption rather than on the basis of income.12 The formula includes money expenditures plus the value of food produced on a household plot. In our questionnaire we used an abbreviated version of the World Bank instrument and relied on consumption in some cases and on income-based measures in others. Following the conventions of the World Bank we calculated two types of poverty lines from these data: an absolute poverty line set as $2.15 and $4.30 per person of consumption or income, and a relative poverty line set at 50 percent of the median income. In order to facilitate cross-country comparisons we converted currencies into US$, using purchasing power parity (PPP) exchange rates as established by the IMF and World Bank. PPP rates measure the relative purchasing power of different currencies over equivalent goods and services.13 Both poverty lines are calculated per capita and also per equivalent adult. Conversion from per capita into per equivalent adults takes into consideration that the well-being of a household is influenced by the size and age and gender composition of that household (see Figure 6.2 for 2000 and Figure 6.3 for 2002–3; both report data collected by the World Bank).

The Social Costs of Market Transition, 1988–2000 In this section we execute three tasks. First we document how much change— growth—there was in the extent of poverty in various postcommunist societies. We do so by using retrospective and subjective reports on the experience

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Figure 6.1. Experience of Poverty by Country, 1988 and 2000. Data in this chart come from the “Poverty, Ethnicity and Gender in Transitional Societies” survey. The variable used here is the subjective measure of “experience of poverty” as described above.

of poverty in 1988 and 2000. Next, we present objective measures of poverty from our year 2000 survey (proportion of families earning less that $2.15 and less than $4.30 per day and proportion of families earning less that 50 percent of the median income14 income. Finally, we speculate on the reasons why, faced with such a sharp decline of living standards, so little popular resistance can be observed. Impoverishment, 1988–2000 First, we present data from the “Poverty, Ethnicity and Gender in Transitional Societies” survey conducted in 2000, but with data on “experience of poverty” in 1988 and 2000.

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Poverty

The proportion of “very poor” (lighter bars in Figure 6.1) increased in all countries between 1988 and 2000. In terms of “deep poverty,” however, the conditions in Bulgaria and Romania appear even more dire than in Russia. The fall of the Russian economy was steeper than that of any of the Central and East European economies, and the country experienced an equally rapid growth of poverty and inequality if these conditions are measured purely in monetary terms (GINI in Russia exceeded .4, which was well above GINI in the former satellite countries of Europe). It is therefore surprising that more people report hunger in Bulgaria and Romania than in Russia. About 16 percent of the respondents in these two countries reported experiencing hunger on a weekly basis and are thus classified as “very poor.” The deterioration is even sharper in Bulgaria than in Romania, since “deep poverty” was already relatively widespread in Romania in 1988. In Bulgaria the increase of “deep poverty” is tenfold, while in Romania it increased by a factor of three. According to the memories of our respondents—which accords with received wisdom about the region—Romania was the poorest among the six European communist countries in 1988. Arguably, the Central European countries and Russia entered different trajectories out of communism. The former adopted neoliberal policies, deregulated the economy, privatized public property in competitive auctions, and established fairly well-functioning market institutions by 1995. Russian Prime Minister Gaidar also promised capitalism in five hundred days in the wake of state socialism’s collapse, but Russia was bogged down in internal struggles and re-retreated from radical market reforms. Rather than implementing neoliberal reforms, Russia entered a neopatrimonial path, whereby privatization took place under the tutelage of political authorities, who bestowed ownership in exchange for clientelist loyalties. The level of deep poverty in neopatrimonial Russia is not significantly different from that in the neoliberal regimes. This may be due to the involutionary character of Russian development (Burawoy 1996), in which selfprovisioning of food persisted. Russians are poor, but they are not hungry since they grow their own food. Earlier research documented that Russia did not dismantle the kolkhoz system; instead, it was generalized.15 During the 1990s civil servants and industrial workers were frequently not paid or their pay was in arrears for many months (Woodruff 1999). Firms offset the financial difficulties experienced by their employees by giving them access to what used to be “family lots” (gardens) in the kolkhozes. Consequently,

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people were able to avoid starvation by growing their own food (Southworth 2004). The shallower measures of poverty tell a somewhat different story. The proportion of those who were “poor,” that is, did not experience hunger but lacked basic necessities (see the darker bars), was already higher in Russia in 1988 than in the other countries. It skyrocketed by year 2000. In 2000 only 27 percent of the respondents in Russia reported that they had the necessities of life, 65 percent were “poor,” and 8 percent were “very poor.” Between 1988 and 2000 there was also a dramatic deterioration of living conditions in the South Eastern European countries—Bulgaria and Romania. Only about 30 percent of the respondents reported that they did not experience deprivation in any of our measures. The data suggest that in 1988 the rate of poverty was fairly constant across the socialist bloc. All countries reported more or less similar levels of hunger in that year. Hungarians fared the best, but Bulgarians also remember 1988 quite favorably—more favorably than the Poles. This is surprising since according to all objective indicators Poland had a higher standard of living during the 1980s than Bulgaria. According to the “shallow” measure of poverty, Romania and Russia were the worst off in 1988, Bulgaria and Poland fared better, and Hungary had the least deprivation. While socialism is remembered—and rightly so—as a gradual leveling off of cross-country differences, postcommunism is a process of fast and visible differentiation across social systems. In the first decade of postcommunism the differences in poverty levels between countries increased substantially. As a result, the relative conditions in Poland became more similar to Hungary. Conditions in Bulgaria, by contrast, deteriorated to resemble those found in Romania and nearly equal those found in Russia, where the poverty rate was the highest. The countries that fared relatively well in the initial postcommunist period (Poland and Hungary) had clearly taken the most significant steps toward transformation to a market economy. Poverty Rates and Social Determinant of Poverty in 2000 Next we look at objective indicators of poverty to assess whether the subjective measures we used so far are sensible, and whether the differences between the subjective and objective measures are indeed those we hypothesized earlier in this chapter. Income and expenditures are converted to US$

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Figure 6.2. Poverty Rates by Country in PPP and 50% of Median Expenditure in 2000. Source: Data from 2000 survey “Poverty, Ethnicity and Gender in Transitional Societies.”

with PPP (purchasing power parity calculations). Poverty thresholds are set in three ways: at $2.15 per day, $4.30 per day, and at 50 percent of the median expenditures and income for each country (see Figure 6.2). Comparison of poverty rates on the basis of objective monetary measures (see Figure 6.2) demonstrates a clustering of countries similar to the results produced with poverty operationalized through subjective experience (see Figure 6.1). Hungary is rather similar to Poland and quite different from Bulgaria, Romania, and Russia. The clearest picture is presented if $4.30 PPP per capita expenditure per equivalent adult is used as the “poverty line.” In this case the proportion of the population living in poverty is 9 percent and 11 percent in Poland and Hungary, respectively, while it ranges between 30 and 54 percent in the other three countries. When poverty is established on the

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basis of income and expenditures rather than through the lived experience of members of the societies (as in Figure 6.1), Russia displaces Bulgaria as the most extreme case. While in Bulgaria many more people reported hunger than in Russia (16 percent in Bulgaria and 8 percent in Russia), in monetary terms Russia was significantly poorer than Bulgaria. If the poverty line is set at $4.30 PPP of adjusted expenditures, 38 percent of the Bulgarian population is classified as poor in 2000. With the monetary measure 54 percent of Russians would be considered poor during the same period. We believe this indicates that the subjective measures might be more accurate than income and expenditures. In 2000, Russians were undoubtedly income poor, but because of the involutionary nature of the Russian economy they had a more extensive system of self-provisioning. The ability to grow their own food offset lack of income and fewer people experienced extreme poverty. If we draw the poverty line at per capita expenditures of 50 percent or less of the median, then we see a rather different picture of cross-country variation than we do with a $4.30 PPP threshold or through the subjective measure of “reporting hunger.” Based on this measure, in 2000 Bulgaria and Hungary had the lowest proportion of poor people, with 9 and 11 percent of households respectively falling below 50 percent of median expenditures. Poland was closer to Russia at approximately 12 percent poverty, and Romania stands out as the “poorest” country during this period, with 18 percent of the population spending less than 50 percent of the median. The use of median income and expenditures indicates “relative poverty,” which in our view is really a measure of inequality rather than poverty. While the rate of absolute poverty indeed seems to be highly impacted by the nature of the regime, this is not the case with levels of inequality. Bulgaria and Hungary have the most equal distribution of wealth (data using GINI coefficients also show the same results), while Poland, Romania, and Russia show significantly more wealth inequality. While the structure of the economy and its dynamism has a lot to do with levels of absolute poverty, levels of inequality appear to be influenced by country specific variables. In fact, culture and politics may have greater impact on the level of inequality than the degree of economic growth or the nature of economic policy. By asking pointed questions we can identify a range of variables that are vital for identifying disadvantaged social groups and establishing the potential for popular mobilization. Such questions include: Who was exposed to poverty during the first decade of postsocialism? How much of postcommunist

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TA B L E 6.1. Determinants of Absolute Poverty in Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Russia (Poverty based on $4.30 per capita daily expenditure, adjusted to equivalent adults.) Logit estimates, odds ratio.i

Independent Variables

Model 1 Full model

Model 2 M1—class

Model 3 M2 —feminization

Demography

Number of children

1.380***

1.340***

1.210***

Rural residence

2.112***

2.594***

2.589***

Single women

2.351***

2.442***

-

Single mothers

1.765***

1.791***

-

Elementary education and less

1.942***

-

-

Head of household unemployed or out of workforce

2.014***

-

-

Liberal countries

.102***

.111***

.114***

-3393.6116

-3617.6351

-3686.2807

Feminization Class

Country Log likelihood

i. Data from 2000 survey, “Poverty, Ethnicity and Gender in Transitional Societies,” significance at .05 level, ** at .01 level, *** at .000 level.

poverty can be attributed to demographic factors, such as number of children or rural residence? To what extent is poverty feminized? How strong is the effect of social class under comxmunism on the likelihood that an individual would end in poverty after the fall of socialism? (See Table 6.1.) Demographic factors are strongly predictive of the likelihood of poverty. Gender, number of children, and rural residence are significant in all three models. Single motherhood is significant, but the likelihood of older single women to end up in poverty is a greater factor in the feminization of poverty. Education level, employed as a proxy for social class, is one of the strongest predictors of poverty. Households where the head has only a primary-school education or less are twice as likely to spend less than $4.30 PPP, when compared with households where the primary source of income has a secondary-school education or higher. While the coefficients for the “class variables” are modest, the decline in log likelihood statistics is the most impressive when one adds the class/education variables to the model. Regime type has an extraordinary effect in all three models. In 2000 people who lived in Hungary and Poland, where

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liberal political reforms were carried out earlier than in Bulgaria, Romania, and Russia, were ten times less likely to have expenditures below $4.30 than people who lived in countries where liberal reforms were delayed. The data demonstrates that in 2000 people with low levels of education were the most likely to become unemployed in all postcommunist countries, and the combination of lack of education and unemployment are the strongest indicators of poverty. People with large families who lived in rural areas and single women, especially older widows, were at greater risk of poverty, irrespective of their class position.16 The cross-country differences in 2000 were more robust than in 1988. Neoliberal reform did hurt people, but inconsistent reforms and the persistence of patron-client relationships were more damaging to the overall economy and wealth distribution within the societies: the fall of GDP was deeper and more enduring in neopatrimonial regimes than in neoliberal ones. For example, Russia achieved the highest GINI in postcommunist Europe. Neoliberal reform might not have been a good idea, but the lack of reform or inconsistent reform, often associated with involutionary adaptation, at least during the first decade, was even worse. Apart from some strikes in Russia and Romania during the early 1990s and at least one rather violent resistance movement (the so-called taxi blockade) in Hungary, the impoverishment that resulted from the restructuring of economic institutions—no matter how painful it was or how concentrated its effect on specified social groups—did not lead to popular protest in these countries.17 The Polish case is slightly different, but the level of protest was still comparatively low. In the early 1980s, under a rather oppressive paternalistic socialist regime, the Polish working class responded to much milder austerity measures with massive strikes and a highly organized social movement. In the years following the collapse of communism this labor militancy persisted, and mobilization in Poland was the highest among postcommunist countries. Between 1989 and 1992 there were about three hundred protests a year (Ekiert and Kubik 1998). But in comparison with labor militancy in Western Europe, even Poland was relatively quiescent, despite the economic hardship experienced by a broad segment of society. More importantly, the protests that did occur had virtually no impact on the general direction of the economic transformation of the country. Why wasn’t the unionized Polish working class more successful in protecting its interests between 1989–92, given its considerable success in challenging

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the communist regime? Why didn’t the Hungarian workers and peasant-workers spoiled by János Kádár’s “goulash communism” respond when the goulash pot was taken away from them? It certainly must have taken the Polish workers by surprise when a party that emerged from their own trade union, “Solidarity,” began to implement shock therapy in the wake of an overwhelming electoral victory. Policies that effectively imposed the costs of market transformation on the bottom half of the society were hardly consistent with the ideals of solidarity that helped to build the labor union and inspired a countrywide movement. Hungarian intellectuals who formed the core of the “democratic opposition” under state socialism and saw themselves as “left” critics of the system (they advocated worker’s rights, criticized inequalities under socialism, and questioned whether socialism was the dictatorship of proletariat) by 1989 embraced liberal and neoliberal policies. They ceded the “left” of the political spectrum to the technocratic successors of the Communist Party. Thus in some respects the intelligentsia did betray its self-defined mission as social critics who articulate the interests of the “voiceless masses.” The postdissident technocrats were too busy appropriating public goods as their private property. Humanistic and social science intellectuals either vied for political and state administrative positions or enjoyed being in the spotlight of the media without fear of arrest or state harassment. The reaction of intellectuals, furthermore, was overdetermined by structural conditions. In 1989, the postcommunist world entered the era of neoliberal ideological hegemony virtually overnight. The sudden meltdown of state socialism created the impression of the “end of history”; it appeared to the overwhelming majority of the population that there was no alternative to neoliberal capitalism. Or to be more precise, there was an alternative: religious fundamentalism or patriotic xenophobia, or some combination of the two. Some former communist parties and former intelligence services transformed themselves into “national” movements by embracing these rhetorical and symbolic strategies. This process took place during the early 1990s in Bulgaria and Romania; although as these countries were entering the EU, they were also moving ahead on neoliberal economic and political reforms. This alternative strategy— one might call it “neopatrimonialism” (Southworth 2004; King and Szelenyi 2005)—not only persisted, but gained strength in Putin’s Russia. In each of these cases substantial coercive force was used in conjunction with symbolic politics to redefine the polity in nationalist, “right-wing” terms. Journalists and civil rights advocates were murdered for openly criticizing the regime, in all likelihood with

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the cooperation of the reorganized intelligence services. Nonetheless, the lack of popular resistance to the deteriorating social conditions in neoliberal regimes with substantial civil liberties and free presses remains a puzzle. Our simple explanation for the lack of mobilization is the unchallenged hegemony of neoliberalism in the immediate postcommunist period. During the first decade of postcommunism in the countries that instituted neoliberal reforms, the electorate and the impoverished masses were too sober not to respond to the rhetoric of political populist adventurers, such as István Csurka in Hungary, who tried to cash in on the fundamentalist/xenophobic appeal but without much success. Changing Trends After 2000 Major changes took place in the European scene of postcommunism since the completion of the survey, “Poverty, Ethnicity and Gender in Transitional Societies,” in 2000. The second decade of postcommunism differs from the first in at least three respects (see Table 6.3). First, at the turn of the twentyfirst century Russia and other countries of the former USSR, including Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Armenia, Georgia, and Byelorussia, experienced accelerated economic growth. Year after year, from 1999 until 2008, Russia’s economy grew at an annual rate of 6–8 percent, falling only slightly behind China. Notably, this economic expansion occurred within the framework of neopatrimonialism, without reform of the political institutions. In 2008 the growth of the Russian economy outpaced the Central European neoliberal regimes and was well ahead of the EU. The second important difference is that South Eastern Europe assumed a neoliberal course of political and economic change. Between 2000 and 2008 these countries outperformed their neighbors to the north in terms of economic growth. Hungary and Poland, early recipients of foreign direct investment (FDI), lagged behind Bulgaria and Romania, where cheaper labor and an increasingly predictable business environment became attractive to foreign investors. Rather promisingly, both countries achieved this with a spectacular drop in government debt. The third difference is that in the Central European neoliberal regimes— especially in Hungary, but to some extent in Poland and the Czech Republic— the great distributive systems remained essentially unreformed, thus less and less corresponding to radically reformed economic institutions. Their economic growth rates slowed (though remained on the whole above the EU average),

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TA B L E

6.2. Economic Indicators of Selected European Postcommunist Countries Hungary

Poland

Romania

Russia

GDP

Debt

GDP

Debt

GDP

Debt

GDP

Debt

1990

-3.5

na

-11.6

95.1

-5.7

na

-3.0

Na

1991

-11.9

77.4

-7.0

81.8

-12.9

na

-5.0

Na

1992

-3.1

79.0

2.6

86.7

-8.8

na

-14.8

Na

1993

-.6

90.4

3.8

88.7

1.5

na

-9.7

Na

1994

2.9

86.0

5.2

72.4

3.9

na

-12.7

47.8

1995

1.5

84.3

7.0

49.6

7.1

20.5

-4.0

46.3

1996

1.3

71.5

6.2

43.9

3.9

27.8

-3.6

49.0

1997

4.6

64.2

7.1

43.0

-6.1

16.5

1.4

57.2

1998

4.9

61.9

5.0

39.5

-4.8

17.8

-5.3

81.9

1999

4.2

61.2

4.5

39.7

-1.1

24.2

6.4

90.0

2000

5.2

53.8

4.3

36.8

2.1

22.7

10.0

62.5

2001

4.1

50.7

1.2

37.6

5.7

26.0

5.1

48.2

2002

4.4

54.0

1.4

42.2

5.1

25.0

4.7

41.4

2003

4.2

58.0

3.9

47.1

5.2

21.5

7.3

32.4

2004

4.8

59.4

5.3

46.7

8.5

18.8

7.1

25.9

2005

4.0

61.7

3.6

47.1

4.2

15.8

6.4

16.5

2006

4.1

66.0

6.2

47.6

7.9

12.4

7.4

10.6

2007

1.1

65.8

6.6

45.4

6.0

13.0

8.1

9.5

and the countries began to “live beyond their means.” The unreformed social institutions consumed far too much of the tax revenues. Furthermore, given the socialist style “universal insurance schemes,” they tended to redistribute tax revenues regressively, with more of the benefits received by higher-income groups (Haggard and Kaufman 2008). The disproportional benefit to the wealthy is the most apparent in the fee-free tertiary education system. Higher-income groups, especially businessmen and multinational corporations, can reduce their tax contributions with tax breaks. Consequently, the tax burden falls heavily on the middle and lower classes, a situation exacerbated by the increasing importance of the VAT in the total tax revenues. Most disturbingly, government debts began to climb again during the first years of the twenty-first century, particularly in Hungary, but the trend is similar in Poland. (See Table 6.2.)

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Figure 6.3. Povery Rates by Country, 1998–2003i Source: World Bank staff estimates using ECA Household Survey Archive (“Growth, Poverty and Inequality: Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union,” The World Bank Report), 2000 PPP.

Figure 6.3 shows an increase in poverty in Poland during the first years of the twenty-first century. By contrast, the poverty rate in Russia fell sharply, and Bulgaria and Romania saw at least a temporary decline in early 2000s. Nonetheless an increase in poverty rates throughout the region is a likely impact of the global financial crisis. For example, although we do not have recent data, we expect increasing poverty rates in Hungary as a result of the 2006–7 austerity measures. Dramatic increases in heating and transportation costs are a particular consequence of such measures. Changes in levels of social inequality are not quite as dramatic as changes in poverty levels, but in both areas the direction of change is the same (see Figure 6.4). The GINI coefficient declined for Russia but increased in Poland, while it remained constant in Hungary. We see therefore an unanticipated reconvergence between levels of economic development and levels of poverty, but with only a partial convergence of the neopatrimonial model with the neoliberal one. At the beginning of the

248 Poverty

Figure 6.4. GINI Index by Country, 1998 and 2003i Source: World Bank staff estimates using ECA Household Survey Archive (“Growth, Poverty and Inequality: Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union.” The World Bank Report). GINI index for per capita consumption. No data for Bulgaria for 1998 available.

twenty-first century, Russia and most of the rest of the former USSR remained firmly neopatrimonial, but it nevertheless produced surprising economic dynamism and even some filtering down of the benefits of growth to the poor. Russia’s impressive growth rates were accompanied by an equally impressive decline in government debt, which can be attributed to oil revenue. But during the first years of Putin’s rule Russia also managed to reform its great distributive systems. Russia’s social welfare institutions conformed to the neoliberal market model, while the political and economic institutions retained their patrimonial character. Neoliberals of course would argue that Russia’s economic success is the result of the reform of the welfare system, but it is more likely that it can be attributed to high oil prices during the

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TA B L E 6.3. The Paradox of Neoliberal and Neopatrimonial Policies in Postcommunist Europe

Russia

Central Europe

Economic Institutions

Neopatrimonial

Neoliberal

Great Distributive Systems

Neoliberal

Patrimonial

middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century. By contrast, in 2009 the Central European countries had yet to reform their distributive systems. Although their economic institutions came as close to the “Chicago cookbook” as anyone could expect, their welfare institutions retained significant features of socialist paternalism. We present this paradox in Table 6.3. Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic (2003–2013) and former finance minister and prime minister, made some intriguing comments about the Slovak reform of its welfare system. Slovakia could hardly be called “liberal” during most of the 1990s. Mečiar followed policies that were not that different from the neopatrimonial practices in Russia. When the liberal Dzurinda government came to power in 1998, however, it implemented some radical neoliberal reforms. He introduced a 19 percent flat tax rate, created a mixed pension system with half of the pension funds in the hands of private insurers, and introduced multiple insurance companies for health care with copayments by the insured. Klaus offered this commentary on the changes to the Slovak social welfare system: “As a liberal economist, I view the Slovak economic reforms positively and I prefer [them] to our [Czech] ‘quasireform.’ However, the fact that the whole reform process in Slovakia went so smoothly would suggest to me it progressed without any public support. It is extremely unlikely that such reform could be undertaken in Germany, France, Italy or the Czech Republic” (O’Dwyer and Kovalčik 2007, 3). Whether Klaus’s tacit criticism of government accountability in Slovakia is fair is debatable. Dzurinda was democratically elected and governed as a liberal politician. Nonetheless Klaus’s observation might explain Putin’s success in carrying out radical reform of the Russian welfare system while governments in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland failed to do so. Indeed two prime ministers who attempted reforms of the sort Dzurinda achieved had already fallen at the time of this writing: Ferenc Gyurcsány of Hungary resigned on March 21, 2009; and the Czech Parliament passed a no-confidence vote against Mirek Topolánek. Donald Tusk of Poland who

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pushed for similar reform since November 2007, however, enjoyed very strong support at the end of 2009. In the last section of this chapter we offer case studies of Hungary and Poland to describe the dynamics of popular mobilization against attempted reforms of the health-care system.

Popular Mobilization as a Response to Attempted Reform of Great Distributive Systems (The Example of the Health-Care Reforms) The Hungarian Case In September 2006, shortly after the Socialist Party’s electoral victory, a secret speech delivered by Hungarian prime minister, Ferenc Gyurcsány, to the parliamentary caucus was leaked to the press. In that speech Gyurcsány confessed that before the elections the government misled the public about the state of the economy. During the campaign the party did not tell the electorate that reform of the welfare system with severe austerity measures would be needed once they took office. Hungary quite clearly had begun to live beyond its means as early as 2000. The governing right-wing party, FIDESZ, began to accumulate a budget deficit and increase the national debt by handing money out left and right to make sure they would win the 2002 elections. In 2002 FIDESZ and the Socialist Party outbid each other in promising the sky to the electorate. The Socialist Party won the 2002 election, and Medgyessy, the new prime minister, delivered on his promises by boosting public spending without regard to revenue. Deficit spending continued under Gyurcsány after he replaced Medgyessy in a coup-d’état of sorts in August 2005. In an attempt to address the problems wrought by several years of fiscal mismanagement, the prime minister followed his 2006 victory with a strongly worded speech intended to unite the socialist parliamentary factions. He hoped to galvanize the party’s resources to make sure that the radical reforms would be carried out. The reaction to the leaked speech was extraordinary. Large demonstrations erupted, and on the first night the demonstrators, who called themselves “revolutionaries,” stormed the national television building, which was shut down for that night (recalling 1956 when the revolution started by masses storming the building of the public radio). A police car was burned and more than a hundred policemen were hospitalized. Mass protests continued for another month, culminating in a major confrontation between demonstrators

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and the police on October 23, 2006, when the fiftieth anniversary of the “glorious 1956 revolution” was to be commemorated. The demonstrators demanded the immediate resignation of the government and some called for new elections. At one point a radical group even called an open “constitutional assembly” in front of the Parliament to pass a new constitution by popular acclamation. There was nothing comparable in terms of popular mobilization and collective actions since the “Orange Revolution” in Kiev and nothing like this in Hungary since 1956. The streets by and large quieted down after October 23, but tension remained high. There were numerous promises of strikes and a massive demonstration by medical doctors against reform of the health-care system. The oppositional right-wing party, FIDESZ, exploited the popular uprising by accusing the government of indiscriminate use of police force against the demonstrators. The violent episodes during the demonstrations were the responsibility of a relatively small group of people with far-right sympathies. However, the political opportunism of a few political entrepreneurs cannot be seen as the real reason behind this mass mobilization. What happened on the streets of Budapest and many other Hungarian cities was the expression of massive popular discontent with new reforms. The socialist government somehow survived the crisis and began to implement its austerity measures, which included reform of the healthcare system and introduction of fees for tertiary education. In December 2007, after lengthy bargaining between the social democratic wing of the Socialist Party and its liberal coalition partner, the Parliament finally passed a bill that introduced modest tuitions at universities and a half-baked reform of the health-care system. The liberals wanted a health-care system in which multiple private insurance companies compete with each other in the free market. Under pressure from the social democratic wing of the Socialist Party they compromised and established regional health-insurance firms with joint state and private ownership. They also introduced a modest fee for any visit to the general practitioners (the equivalent of US$2) and a copayment for hospitalization. There were sporadic strikes and demonstrations against the bill, but more importantly FIDESZ, the conservative-populist opposition party, called for a referendum on the measure. The referendum took place on March 9, 2008. The turnout was high, and people overwhelmingly rejected the proposed reforms. (See Table 6.4.)

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6.4. Results of the Hungarian Referendum, March 9, 2008

TA B L E

1. Abolish hospital fee

Yes

No

84.1

15.9

2. Abolish fee for GP visit

82.4

17.6

3. Abolish university tuition

82.2

17.8

Following this devastating defeat the government backpedaled and withdrew the medical bill. As a result the liberals left the coalition and Gyurcsány attempted to govern with a parliamentary minority. On March 21, 2009, after a year of ineffective government and facing new pressures from the global fiscal crisis, Gyurcsány called for a “constructive no-confidence vote” against himself.18 After lengthy negotiations with the liberals, the Socialist Party named the former minister of economic affairs, Gordon Bajnai, as its candidate for prime minister. Bajnai promised to implement a radical set of reforms, including transformation of the welfare system from a universal insurance scheme to a means-tested system. On the day of his nomination, twenty-five thousand people demonstrated against him and called for early elections. The Case of Poland Much like in Hungary, reform of the great distributive system was not a top priority in Poland before 1999. The first major reform, the General Health Insurance Act of 1999, created a Health Insurance Organization (HIO) and separated health-care funds from the general budget of the government. HIO was an autonomous, nonprofit body in charge of collecting funds from premiums, managing funds, and contracting with providers to render health services. While HIO was eventually reorganized as National Health Fund (NHF), it continued to operate as a publicly funded compulsory insurance system. Private voluntary insurance was available, but its role was negligible. In 2008, the Tusk government (in power since November 2007) proposed the privatization of the entire health sector, much as the Gyurcsány government in Hungary had in 2007. Tusk also faced similar challenges from the Right. This time it was Law and Justice, the opposition party led by Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the president’s twin brother.

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All attempts to reform the health sector provoked popular opposition, which was sometimes quite intense. Wages in the medical sector were not indexed to inflation, and medical workers consequently had experienced a 20 percent decline in real wages since the collapse of communism. The most spectacular actions took place in 1997–99, 2000, and 2007. In July 1998, the National Labor Union of Nurses and Midwives organized action against the Ministry of Health and Social Reforms protesting the low salaries of nurses. In the summer of 1999 nurses occupied the Ministry of Health for about a month. Ultimately, the government agreed to increase salaries by 2 percent above inflation in all health institutions. In 1998–99 a mass strike of anesthesiologists brought hospital functioning to a halt. The government eventually met most of the doctors’ demands. In 2000, the National Labor Union of Nurses and Midwives organized a nationwide protest demanding higher salaries. Nurses and midwives occupied the building of the Ministry of Health and went on a hunger strike. In the summer of 2007 the Kaczynski government announced a salary freeze, catalyzing another significant wave of protest by doctors and nurses. Doctors demonstrated in front of government buildings, and some hospitals went on strike. Other hospitals admitted only emergency patients, and doctors refused to fill out the National Health Fund forms. Doctors threatened to take voluntary layoffs, a drastic form of protest. In June 2007 nurses joined the action. When nurses were threatened with criminal prosecution for protesting, doctors supported them with a hunger strike. The Tusk government tried to win over the doctors and nurses by offering higher salaries and better working conditions through privatization of the health-care system. The Hungarian and Czech experiences indicate that such reforms can only be successful if health professionals are persuaded that the reforms will improve their incomes and working conditions. Without the support of health professionals the government faces a formidable coalition of care providers and clients capable of paralyzing the system in protest.

Why the Militancy Against the Reform of the Great Distributive Systems? The outburst of popular discontent is puzzling given the potentially low cost of the proposed reforms. Why were people, who accepted a three- to fivefold increase in poverty between 1989 and 1995 without much public protest, suddenly up in arms when at least the immediate price of the reforms appeared to

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be almost trivial, on the order of US$2 per visit to the doctor? We suggest five reasons for strong popular mobilization against changes in the great distributive systems. First, the public is usually more sensitive to changes in welfare systems than they are to economic reforms. Even in the United States no administration has undertaken serious changes to the social security system. Ideas about privatization of social security were floated by the Bush administration, but strong popular opposition quelled serious attempts to implement them. Under postsocialist conditions, the welfare system is even more sensitive. People suffered a considerable and apparently permanent loss of security after 1989 as a result of the transition from socialism to market capitalism.19 Universally available free health care and an adequate pension are the last pillars of the economic security that compensated for the lack of freedom under socialism. Second, variations in the intensity of antireform movements are correlated to the nature of the political system. Under Putin’s managed democracy politicians are less sensitive to popular discontent than they are in democracies, where there is a greater degree of electoral competition. In Central Europe the strength of democratic institutions appears to be strongly correlated to the likelihood of collective action. For instance, Greskovits and Várhalmi (2009) demonstrated a positive correlation between voter turnout and protest events in Hungary. Voter turnout was higher in 1998 and 2002 than in 1990 and 1994; indeed, during the first five years of the twenty-first century they found a substantial increase in protest events. Third, by the second decade of the transformation from state socialism reform exhaustion was setting in. Early in the postcommunist period people expected the transformation of the system to be difficult, but the reality was far worse than they anticipated. The very term “reform” took on negative associations. Fifteen years after the fall off state socialism people were weary of social experiments and yearned for stability. Another dose of shock therapy seemed unbearable. Fourth, as the French social thinker Julien Benda suggested early in the twentieth century, the role professionals, intellectuals, and elites play in popular mobilization is indeed important. During the initial phase of economic transformation interests were divided. On the whole, workers were the losers in the rapid mass privatization of the public sector. Managers, by contrast, benefited from the restructuring. They profited from management buy-out

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or from selling their companies to Western business partners in exchange for well-paying managerial positions. By contrast there was more uniform social investment in the great distributive systems and thus greater potential for a “rainbow coalition” to protest its dismantling. Teachers, students, and parents are similarly invested in free education; health professionals and patients are on the same side of the barricades resisting reform. The socialist healthcare system was not particularly efficient, and it was fraught with problems such as tipping doctors and nurses for their services. Nevertheless, health professionals and patients alike were accustomed to it and were reluctant to exchange a familiar system for the uncertainties of the market place. Privatization of health care will only be possible if the antireform rainbow coalition can be broken up, for example, by persuading health professionals that such a change is in their interests. Fifth, the early years of the transition were characterized by a worldwide hegemony of neoliberal ideology, which became dominant in the European postsocialist societies. This ideology is now bleeding from multiple wounds. It did not quite deliver on its promises in the former socialist societies of Europe. In 1989–90 people were ready to accept sacrifices in the hope that living standards would improve over the long term. But even when the economy began to expand, few jobs were created and incomes did not increase as fast as the population hoped. As Gerber and Hout put it, there was more shock than therapy (1998). Neoliberalism also came under criticism worldwide as the global financial crisis exposed its liabilities. In most postcommunist countries deregulation of markets created speculative booms; more rather than less government regulation was needed. The neoliberal dictum that the government is the problem rather than the solution proved false. This chapter showed that the popular responses to the increase in poverty and inequality in the postcommunist region were rather subdued. Between 1989 and 2000, when poverty increased significantly and the proportion of “very poor” rose substantially in all countries, popular response to these deteriorating conditions was very limited. Postcommunism, particularly its first decade, can be characterized as a period of popular demobilization rather than mobilization, as earlier theories may have suggested. One example stands out, however: the Hungarian explosion of “fundamentalist” protests, which took place in 2006. These radical popular responses “derailed” earlier theorizing about “peaceful” and “modest” tenor of public life in postcommunist Hungary (Ekiert and Kubik 1998; Seleny 2006). But there is evidence showing that these

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protests were no longer rooted in “interests,” that is, defense against poverty; they were to a large degree identity driven (Greskovits and Várhalmi 2009).

Postscript: The Impact of the Global Fiscal Crisis When we started to work on this chapter the global financial crisis was not yet on the horizon. The greatest social and economic challenges the transitional societies were facing were related to the need to reform their great distributive systems. This changed in 2008, as the global financial crisis hit some of the European postsocialist countries particularly strongly. There are at least three reasons for this. First, the Central European countries were already in a vicious cycle of debt before the debt crisis exploded in the fall of 2008. The global crisis imposed further fiscal constraints on these governments by raising the costs of financing their considerable debt. Typically, loans were registered in foreign currencies, and during the last six months of 2008 local currencies lost up to half of their value. These currencies were arguably overvalued in the first place, but the adjustment made debt servicing much more expensive. The Hungarian national debt for instance is 3,500 billion Hungarian Forint but 60 percent of this is held in Swiss franks, yen, or euro. The consequences are not unlike the subprime mortgage crisis: people find themselves in situations where they have larger loans than they can service. The new member states of the EU, aspiring to enter the euro zone, are also under a great deal of pressure to reduce their budget deficits to the required 3 percent. Even in the context of an expanding economy the 3 percent target was difficult to reach and had been pushing new member states to cut welfare expenditures radically. Ironically, the European Union was pushing its new member states to adopt the Anglo-Saxon “liberal welfare regime” rather than the European social model (Esping-Andersen 1990). Second, in context of the fiscal crisis, budget-cutting austerity measures are particularly problematic. The unusual mix of overconsumption and overproduction that spawned the crisis requires a cocktail of medication that includes neoliberal and Keynesian elements. Demand management is necessary to reverse economic contraction, particularly the decline in domestic consumer demand and rising unemployment. Hence, low interest rates, expenditures on public works, and bailout funds for industries in trouble are required, all of which involve an increase in government spending. Cutting

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budget deficits in times of a major recession could backfire, making the economic crisis much worse. The reindustrialization of European postsocialist societies was impressive from the point of view of quality and efficiency, but the industries themselves are poorly adapted to a worldwide recession. Car manufacturing is a prime example. Car production is crucial for the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland, while heavy industry is vital for Slovakia. These industries are export-driven and thus rely on healthy external markets. As export markets collapse, the region is threatened with high unemployment rates. Third, Central Europe is also greatly dependent on foreign direct investment (FDI). The relatively fast recovery from economic restructuring (by about 1995) was to a large extent attributable to foreign capital investments. Given the worldwide recession, it is not obvious that this high dependence of foreign investments remains an advantage. Russia faces rather different challenges than the Central European postcommunist countries in the context of the global financial crisis. While the Russian stock exchange was devastated and oil revenues shrank, in all three dimensions we just mentioned Russia’s outlook in 2009 was rather positive. It entered the crisis with surpluses (much like China) rather than debt and was thus well positioned to weather the economic contraction so long as it did not turn into a depression. Russia also has the advantage of a potentially large domestic market (again like China). Russia’s “import substitution policy,” implemented after the ruble’s collapse during the late 1990s, made imports prohibitively expensive. This might be a viable strategy for coping with the decline in export markets. The Russian economy is export-dependent. As the world economy shrank, demand for oil also declined, but this is likely to be the first to recover. Finally, Russia is much less dependent on foreign investments. Given its potentially large domestic markets and less exposure to foreign capital, in principle it can isolate itself more from the impacts of the global fiscal crisis. The bottom line is that by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century the new EU member states appeared to be in a double jeopardy. They struggled simultaneously with the need to reform their great distributive systems—a challenge that has proved insurmountable for twenty years—and to cope with the global recession. The cure for the first disease just makes the second illness graver. But on an optimistic note, times of crisis also provide opportunities to effect comprehensive change. The European Union has an interest in preventing the new member states from

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sinking into a deep crisis and thus may provide critical assistance. And given the severity of the worldwide recession people may once again be willing to swallow a bitter pill.

Notes 1.

As expressed in GDP (constant prices, annual percent change); for details, see Selected Countries Report for 2001–2005, World Economic Outlook, International Monetary Fund.

2.

In 1993, compared to 1989, average real income per capita decreased by 13 percent in Hungary, 12 percent in Poland, and 18 percent in Czech Republic. In 1991, unemployment rates increased to 8 percent in Hungary and 12 percent in Poland. (UNICEF 1995, 138; cited from Vanhuysse 2004)

3.

In some of countries, primarily in Central and Eastern European States, income inequality, however, narrowed after the mid-1990s (Havrylyshyn 2004; Vanhuysse 2008).

4.

However, the younger generation suffered from posttransition trauma as well, encountering new difficulties in entering the labor market and low wages and security if they did find a job. The middle generation, in contrast to the other two groups, tended to be the least harmed by the transition and thus gained, relatively speaking, from the postcommunist transitions.

5.

The term “abnormal pensioners” is used for those who went on early retirement.

6.

Under socialism, women had enjoyed a range of state-sponsored benefits including free child care, guaranteed maternity leave, and parental leave, which the new system did not offer. Moreover, during the transitional period, women, especially those of child-bearing age, became regarded as a high-risk, burdensome category and were less likely to be hired than men.

7.

In Poland in 1990 only 1 percent of all working adults participated in strikes and lockouts, and in 1992 only 3 percent.

8.

Income inequality in most Central European postcommunist countries was comparatively low; thus, it did not contribute to increase in the number of protests (Greskovits 1998).

9.

Janos Kornai called it “transformational recession,” though the drop in GDP and destruction of jobs was extensive enough and lasted long enough to deserve the term “crisis.”

10.

The survey was called “Poverty, Ethnicity and Gender in Transitional Societies,” and it was directed by Rebecca Emigh, Éva Fodor, János Ladányi, and Ivan

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Szelenyi. The study was supported by a generous grant from the Ford Foundation. The surveys were based on random samples of the general population in each country. In Russia, we selected twenty-five hundred households on a national random sample west of the Urals; in the other countries the sample size was one thousand. 11.

We are grateful to Jeanine Braithwaite and Dena Ringold—both from the World Bank—for their assistance in constructing our questionnaire and working out the strategy of data analysis of expenditure-based measures of poverty.

12.

For reasons of consumption-based measurement of well-being and poverty, see Appendix A in World Bank, Making Transition Work for Everyone, 367–77.

13.

World Bank, Making Transition Work for Everyone, 370.

14.

The 2000 World Bank report on poverty in Central Eastern Europe and the CIS established a poverty line of $2.15 a day, arguing that a higher than $1-a-day poverty line is needed in the region. The cooler climate necessitates additional expenditures for heat, winter clothing, and food. Another higher threshold of $4.30 was used on account of the fact that what may be considered as “subsistence needs” inevitably varies with the level of a country’s development. See “Poverty in Eastern Europe and the CIS” in United Nations Economic Commission for Europe. The third measure, the proportion of families earning less that 50 percent of the median income, is a measure of “relative poverty,” which in fact measures inequality level.

15.

Southworth (2004), for instance, shows that Russian firms often kept workers in their firms who were not paid in a timely manner by offering them household plots, on which they could grow their own food. This therefore is an expansion of the kolkhoz system even to industrial firms. This is consistent with Burawoy’s (1996) notion of involution and Woodruff ’s (1999) emphasis on the role of barter in postsoviet Russia

16.

Here expressed by the education level.

17.

See also Robertson 2007.

18.

This “constructive no-confidence vote” is a rather odd Hungarian legal construct: if in such a motion a new prime minister is named who receives the simple majority of votes then Parliament can continue to serve its full term and does not have to call for early elections.

19.

The older generation was mostly harmed by the removal of previous welfare policies, since those people did not hold the appropriate assets that would have enabled them to adjust to a new system. They lost their former retirement benefits and monthly pensions; as a consequence, the majority of them fell below the poverty line. The removal of socialist welfare policies resulted in abandoned citizen’s syndrome (Burgorn 2001; Streeck and Achmitter 1991).

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References Atkinson, Anthony B., and J. Micklewright. 1992. Economic Transformation in Eastern Europe and the Distribution of Income. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Benda, Julien. (1927) 1969. The Treason of the Intellectuals. New York: W. W. Norton. Braithwaite, J., C. Grootaert, and B. Milanovich. 2000. Poverty and Social Assistance in Transitional Countries. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Burawoy, Michael. 1996. “The State and Economic Involution: Russia Through a China Lens.” World Development 24 (6): 1105–17. Dixon, M., and V. J. Roscigno. 2003. “Status, Networks, and Social Movements Participation: The Case of Striking Workers.” American Journal of Sociology 108(6): 1292–327. Ekiert, Grzegorz. 1991 “Democratization Processes in East Central Europe: A Theoretical Reconsideration.” British Journal of Political Science 21(3): 85–313. Ekiert, Grzegorz, and Jan Kubik. 1998a. “Collective Protest in Post-Communist Poland, 1989–1993: A Research Report.” Communist and PostCommunist Studies 31 (2): 91–117. ———. 1998b. “Contentious Politics in New Democracies: East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia, 1989–93.” World Politics 50 (4): 547–81. ———. 1999. Rebellious Civil Society Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Emigh, Rebecca, and Ivan Szelenyi, eds. 2001. Poverty, Ethnicity and Gender in Eastern Europe During Market Transition. Westport, CT: Praeger. Esping-Andersen, Gosta. 1990. The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ferge, Zsuzsa, ed. 1995. Societies in Transition: International Report of the SOCCO Project. Vienna, Austria: Institute of Human Sciences. Gerber, Theordore P., and Michael Hout. 1998. “More Shock than Therapy: Market Transition, Employment, and Income in Russia, 1991–1995.” American Journal of Sociology 104 (1): 1–50. Glass, Ch. M. 2005. “Work and Gender During Market Transition.” PhD diss., Yale University. Greskovits, Béla. 1997. “Crisis-Proof Democracy: On Failed Predictions and the Realities of Eastern Europe’s Transformations.” International Politics 34 (3): 193–211.

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———. 1998. The Political Economy of Protest and Patience. Budapest: Central European University Press. Greskovits, Béla, and Zoltán Várhalmi. 2009. “Social Protection, Identity, and Contentious Politics in Hungary (1995–2004).” International Conference, “The Logic of Civil Society in New Democracies: East Asia and East Europe,” Institute of Political Science, Academia Sinica, June 6–7. Grzymala-Busse, Anna. 2003. “Redeeming the Past.” In Capitalism and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe: Assessing the Legacy of Communist Rule, edited by Ekiert Grzegorz and Stephen Hanson, 157–81. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2005. “Formal Demands, Informal Responses: The EU and State Reform in Candidate Countries.” In Globalization and Social Stress, edited by Gregorz W. Kolodko, 223–39. New York: Nova Science Publishers. Golden, M. A. 1997. Heroic Defeats: The Politics of Job Loss. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haggard, Stephan, and Robert R. Kaufman. 1992. “Economic Adjustment and the Prospects for Democracy.” In The Politics of Economic Adjustment, edited by Stephan Haggard and Robert R. Kaufman, 319–50. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2008. Development, Democracy, and Welfare States. Latin America, East Asia, and Eastern Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Havrylyshyn, O. 2004. “Fifteen Years of Transformation in the Post-Communist World.” CATO Institute. Hellman, Joel S. 1998. “Winners Take All: The Politics of Partial Reform in Postcommunist Transitions.” World Politics 50 (2): 203–34. Hutton, Sandra, and Gerry Redmond, eds. 2000. Poverty in Transition Economies. London: Routledge. Iankova, Elena. 2003. Review of “Workers After Workers’ States: Labor and Politics in Postcommunist Eastern Europe,” by S. Crowley and D. Ost. Industrial and Labor Relations Review 56 (4): 742–43. King, Lawrence P., and Ivan Szelenyi. 2005. “The New Capitalism of Eastern Europe: Towards a Comparative Political economy of Postcommunism.” In Handbook of Economic Sociology, edited by Neil Smelser and Richard Swedberg, 205–29. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kornai, János, and Karen Eggleston. 2001. “Choice and Solidarity: The Health Sector in Eastern Europe and Proposals for Reform.” International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics 1 (1): 59–94.

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Lal, Deepak, and H. Myint. 1996. The Political Economy of Poverty, Ethnicity, and Growth: A Comparative Study. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Milanovic, Branko. 1998. Income, Inequality, and Poverty During the Transition to a Market Economy. Washington, DC: The World Bank. O’Dwyer, Conor, and Branislav Kovalčik. 2007. “And the Last Shall Be the First: Party System Institutionalization and Second Generation Reform in Post-Communist Europe.” Studies in Comparative International Development 41 (4): 3–26. Przeworski, M., J. Adam, A. Alvarez, J. A. Cheibub, and F. Limongi. 2001. Democracy and Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Robertson, Graeme B. 2007. “Strikes and Labor Organization in Hybrid Regimes.” American Political Science Review 101 (4): 781–98. Shabad, Goldie, and Kazimierz Slomczynski. 1999. “Political Identities in the Initial Phase of Systemic Transformation in Poland: A Test of the Tabula Rasa Hypothesis.” Comparative Political Studies 32: 690–723. Seleny, Anna. 1999. “Old Political Rationalities and New Democracies: Compromise and Confrontation in Hungary and Poland.” World Politics 51 (4): 484–519. ———. 2006. The Political Economy of State-Society Relations in Hungary and Poland: From Communism to the European Union. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Silverman, B., and M. Yanovich. 2000. New Rich, New Poor, New Russia: Winners and Losers on the Russian Road to Capitalism. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Southworth, Caleb. 2004. “The Development of Post-Soviet Neo-Paternalism in Two Enterprises in Bashkortostan.” In Russian Transformations: Challenging the Global Narrative, edited by Leo McCann, 191–208. London: Routledge. Streeck, Wolfgang, and Philippe Schmitter. 1991 “From National Corporatism to Transnational Pluralism.” Politics and Society 19 (2): 133–64. Szabó, Mate. 2000. “Some Lessons of Collective Protest in Central European Post-Communist Countries: Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and East Germany in 1989–1993.” East Central Europe 27 (2): 59–75. Tarrow, Sydney. 1989. Democracy and Disorder. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Tilly, Charles. 2003. The Politics of Collective Violence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Vanhuysse, Peter. 2003. Divide and Pacify: The Political Economy of the Welfare State in Hungary and Poland, 1989–1996. London School of Economics, unpublished manuscript. ———. 2006. Divide and Pacify: Strategic Social Policies and Political Protests in Post-Communist Democracies. Budapest: Central European University Press. Verhoeven, Willem-Jan, Wim Jansen, and Jos Dessens. 2005. “Income Attainment During Transformation Process.” European Sociological Review 21 (3): 201–26. Walton, J., and D. Seddon. 1994. Free Markets and Food Riots. Oxford: Blackwell. Wilk, K. M., and G. Shabad. 2002. “The Impact of Social Class and Political Experience on Support for Poland’s Joining European integration in Post-Communist Poland.” In Social Structure: Changes and Linkages: The Advanced Phase of the Post-Communist Transition in Poland, edited by Kazimierz Slomczynski, 242–60. Warsaw: IFiS Publishers. Woodruff, David. 1999. Money Unmade: Barter and the Fate of Russian Capitalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. The World Bank. 2000. Making Transition Work for Everyone. Washington, DC: The World Bank. Yogesh, Atal, ed. 1999. Poverty in Transition and Transition in Poverty: Recent Developments in Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Georgia, Russia, Mongolia. New York: Berghahn Books.

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chapter seven

“Scandalous Ethnicity” and “Victimized Ethnonationalism”: Pejorative Representations of Roma in the Romanian Mainstream Media After January 2007 Alina Vamanu and Iulian Vamanu

Back to “Ţigan”—the Anti-Roma Legislative Initiative of Jurnalul Naţional On March 3, 2009, a leading Romanian daily, Jurnalul Naţional (National Journal), featured an article titled, “Proposal by Jurnalul Naţional. ‘Ţigan’ instead of ‘Roma.’” The article called for a popular legislative initiative to replace the term “Roma” with the traditional ethnic label “Ţigan”1 in official documents referring to the Roma minority in Romania and abroad. While “Roma” is the politically correct and self-chosen name of this ethnic minority, “Ţigan” has strong pejorative connotations. The “argument” put forward by this media piece is worth quoting at length: The recurrence of crimes committed by Ţigani in Italy and elsewhere and the association of these acts with the Romanian people, regarded as a people of rapists and thieves, have a negative impact not just on the image of our country, but also on decent Romanians who go abroad to make honest money. We have reached the paradoxical situation where the press and public opinion abroad no longer perceive Romania as the country of Nadia Comăneci, Constantin Brâncuşi, or George Enescu, the country of folk traditions and ravishing landscapes. Rather, Romania is now seen as a country of barbarians who steal, rape, and murder. And all of this is due to an unfortunate confusion of terms: “Roma”/“Romanian” are words that sound similar in other languages, such as Italian (“rom”/“rumeno”), and, therefore, the

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differences between them disappear from the collective imagination; as a result, these words become synonyms and one no longer knows whether the person who stole or committed rape was Romanian or Roma.

These complaints were followed by a firm demand for the use of the term “Ţigan” in official documents, “to avoid any confusion between this ethnic group and Romanians.”2 In a follow-up piece the next day, Jurnalul Naţional stated explicitly that its goal was to collect one hundred thousand citizen signatures in support of this petition and submit it to Parliament for review.3 This media campaign must be understood against the background of years of intense struggles around the name of the Roma minority in Romania. In the 1990s, the Council of Europe took several steps to address the socioeconomic marginalization and cultural discrimination of Roma in Europe, including adopting and promoting the term “Roma” as the politically correct term to use in reference to this ethnic minority.4 Roma organizations, politicians, and public figures in Romania started mobilizing in support of the substitution of the pejorative term “Ţigan” with the term “Roma.” Their demands sparked fiery debates throughout the country but had no legislative impact during the 1990s. In 1995, the Romanian minister of foreign affairs, Teodor Meleşcanu, recommended the continued use of the word “Ţigan” in the country’s official documents in order to prevent linguistic confusion between Roma and Romania.5 It was not until 2000 that Minister of Foreign Affairs Petre Roman submitted a memorandum to Prime Minister Mugur Isărescu, requesting that the politically correct name of the Roma community be used on a preferential basis. However, the memorandum spelled this term “Rroma” with a double “r,” to reduce its resemblance to the word “Romanian.” Moreover, the language of the memorandum was highly ambiguous: on the one hand, Petre Roman stated defensively that his proposal had been put together in response to the “pressure exerted by the majority of the Roma associations in Romania,” while on the other hand, he presented it as the outcome of “consultations between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a series of specialists, international organizations (The Council of Europe and OSCE), national institutions (the Department for the Protection of National Minorities, the Ministry of National Education, and the Romanian Ombudsman), and Roma associations.”6 The name change was approved, but the linguistic struggle did not die down. On the contrary, it flared up again with renewed vigor after Romania’s

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accession to the European Union. In 2007, Deputies Mircea Costache and Ioan Aurel Rus and Senator Gheorghe Funar (representatives of the extreme-right Greater Romania Party) proposed legislation to restore the use of the term “Ţigan” in public administration because it was under this name that this ethnic minority had “entered Europe in 1345.” The goal of the proposal was to “eliminate the artificially created confusion between Roma and Romanians, and between Roma and Italians, especially in the countries of the European Union.”7 The initiative not only constructs Roma as a “foreign,” “migratory,” and “non-European” population but also seeks to establish a strategic anti-Roma alliance between Romanians and Italians (presumably the inhabitants of the city of Rome, whose name might be “mistaken” for that of the Roma community). This proposal came in the context of heated media discussions about Romanian labor migrants facing rejection and abuse in Western Europe, particularly in Italy. Prime Minister Călin PopescuTăriceanu rejected the proposal, justifying his response by referring to the recommendations of Petre Roman in 2000 and various European documents addressing the issue of Roma rights. However, his language was also ambiguous: he pointed out that the legislative initiative suggested “discriminatory intent on ethnic grounds, even though, in reality, its proponents may have had no such intention.”8 The term “Roma” is protected by Romanian law, but the struggle to force the pejorative ethnic label “Ţigan” onto the Roma community has continued unabated in public discourse, particularly in the mainstream media. The March 2009 proposal by Jurnalul Naţional represents a turning point; the newspaper went from being a site for these anti-Roma contestations to actively attempting to mobilize the country’s citizenry to demand a change in the law stipulating how this ethnic minority should be referenced. This deeply disturbing evolution of the Romanian mainstream media motivated us to look more closely at negative and stereotypical representations of “Romaness” and inquire into what these representations tell us about the underclass status Roma occupy in Romanian society, as well as about contemporary Romanian ethnonationalism.

Background and Methodology This chapter looks at the prejudiced discourses about what it means to be Roma that have circulated in the Romanian mainstream online media since

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Romania’s accession to the European Union in January 2007. Its purpose is to demonstrate what we refer to as the production of “scandalous ethnicity” and to articulate its role in contemporary Romanian ethnonationalism. The Roma have been pejoratively constructed as people who not only offend the moral sensibilities of ethnic Romanians through shocking and shameful behavior but also ruin their reputation in the eyes of Western Europeans. Thus, Roma-related media discussions offer insights into Romanian ethnonationalism: the Ţigan “Other” and the Romanian self are intricately bound together and mutually constituted. Two bodies of literature inform this chapter. First, it draws on a corpus of studies that has recently begun taking shape within the vast literature on ethnicity and nationalism. The core concern of these studies is to illuminate the role that an “Other” construed as threatening or hostile plays in the formation of national identities (see, for instance, Michlic 2006, 2007; Triandafyllidou 1997, 1998; Wingfield 2003). As Michlic (2006, 4; 2007, 129) notes, these new and exciting projects explore an area left underinvestigated by major theories of nationalism and, thus, open up a fruitful research avenue. They have offered us guidance in our efforts to articulate the dynamic linking the construction of the Romanian ethnonational self to a particular kind of threatening Other, namely, the “scandalous” Ţigan Other. Second, this chapter is indebted to an incipient literature exploring stereotypical and discriminatory representations of Eastern European Roma (see, for instance, Erjavec 2001; Fosztó 2009; Fosztó and Anăstăsoaie 2001; Kligman 2001; Leudar and Nekvapil 2000; Tileagă 2005a, 2005b, 2006a, 2006b, 2007; Woodcock 2007). Within this literature, however, the close relationship between Romanian ethnonationalism and the layers of meaning constructed around “Roma-ness” has not been investigated. A notable exception is Woodcock’s (2007) article, which contends that the Ţigan ethnic Other has been central to the discursive construction of “Romanianness” in the postcommunist period. According to this article, between the fall of communism in 1989 and Romania’s accession to the European Union in 2007, Romanians spent almost two decades worrying about their marginal status in Europe and the EU’s constant refusal to recognize them as “authentic Europeans.” In response, the media and other popular discourses projected the blame onto a stereotypical Ţigan Other, arguing that Western Europeans did not regard Romanians as belonging to Europe because they mistook them for Ţigani. Put differently, in order to define themselves as

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“European,” ethnic Romanians made aggressive efforts to dissociate themselves from the allegedly “uncivilized” Ţigani. We draw our inspiration from these two bodies of literature converging in Shannon Woodcock’s article, whose argument we reconsider in light of Romania’s EU accession. The following questions guide our inquiry: Has joining the European Union alleviated the identity crisis Romanians suffered while being denied EU membership? Have Romanians started to feel more confident about their European status and gradually let go of the need to blame Ţigani for their marginal position in Europe? Or do these identity struggles persist to the detriment of the Roma minority? If so, what are the mechanisms through which hate speech has been perpetuated? With these questions in mind, we investigated Romanian media discourses between January 2007 (the date of Romania’s accession to the European Union) and January 2010. We conducted our research through the website of a widely accessed online newspaper aggregator (www.ziare.com), which, in addition to running its own news stories, pulls together articles from the most important mainstream newspapers circulating in Romania at the national level. The online database enabled us to examine not just Romarelated media articles but also the comments of the readers (the large majority of whom are ethnic Romanians). To identify specific articles for analysis, we performed searches using such key words as “ţigan,” “rom” (Roma), “rrom” (Rroma), and their grammatical variants. We found that hate speech targeting Roma persisted in online newspaper articles and the comments of the readers and even escalated on several occasions. We argue that “Roma-ness” continues to be constructed as a “scandalous ethnicity” in a European context where the former communist-bloc countries are still regarded as “inferior” to the West, and Eastern European labor migrants face rejection from Western populations. In response, the Romanian mainstream media lashed out against Ţigani, blaming them for many of the ills that Romanian citizens purportedly suffer as the most recent and least wanted members of the European Union. These points are elaborated in the first section of the chapter. We also examined the justifications for hate speech mobilized in antiRoma discourses in order to shed light on the mechanisms that enable media contributors to rant violently against the Roma yet simultaneously see themselves as “decent” Romanian and European citizens. We argue that both authors and readers of media pieces operate a discursive inversion of the

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power relation between the Romanian majority and the Roma minority: the Roma minority has always been a disadvantaged group in Romania, but the mainstream media portray Romanians as the victims of allegedly “aggressive,” “cunning,” and “vicious” Roma. This discourse of ethnonational victimization assumes various forms, but they all confer moral righteousness upon extreme hate speech. This point is developed in the second section of the chapter.

The Romanian Media After January 2007: Continued Production of “Scandalous Ethnicity” The three-year period following Romania’s accession to the EU witnessed a steady stream of stereotypical and often extremely abusive media portrayals of Roma.9 These negative representations have contributed to the continued production of Roma ethnicity as “scandalous.” The notion of “scandalous ethnicity” captures particularly well the distinct character of the derogatory representations of Romanian Roma. Webster’s New World College Dictionary defines “scandalous” as (1) “causing scandal; offensive to a sense of decency or shocking to the moral feelings of the community; shameful” and (2) “consisting of or spreading slander; libelous; defamatory.” Indeed, Roma have frequently been depicted as shameless people, whose outrageous behavior shocks and frightens “decent” communities in Romania and Europe as a whole. Romanian mainstream newspapers seethe with stories of all sorts of crimes perpetrated by Ţigan migrants in Western European countries (particularly Italy and Spain). Ţigani are accused of human trafficking and kidnapping, stealing, raping, murdering, begging, and organizing bands of beggars to be sent to operate in the streets of European cities, as well as numerous other unlawful activities. For example, an article published by Jurnalul Naţional in November 2007, entitled “Franco-Romanian Raid in Ţigan Neighborhood, in Search of Beggar Network Barons,”10 presents Romanian Roma as organizers of beggar networks in the main capitals of Europe. They are characterized as exploiting orphans and physically challenged people to make money that they launder in Romania. Another piece featured by Libertatea (Liberty) in July 2007 reports a kidnapping attempt by a band of Romanian Ţigani.11 Readers learn of a “nightmare experience” tourists endured “on a pleasant beach located three kilometers from the city of Palermo . . . when a band of Romanian Ţigani tried to kidnap a

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three-year-old boy.” A Ţigan woman is described as having “attempted to hide the child underneath her gypsy skirt, typical of this ethnic group.” Through this assertion, the article links an alleged outer marker of “Roma-ness” (the “typical” gypsy skirt) to crime, suggesting that crime is inherent in Roma ethnic identity. In the same vein, a story published by Gândul (Thought) in July 2008 bears the title “Ţigan Human Trafficking Network Annihilated by Timişoara Border Police.”12 Another article, published in Gardianul (The Guardian) around the same time, discusses the feeling of exasperation Norwegians experience as hoards of Eastern European Ţigani flood their country.13 In January 2009, Libertatea ran a piece titled “‘Romanian Ţigani Are Getting on Our Nerves,’” which describes the Spanish as frustrated with rude and indecent Roma women who harass people in the streets.14 Such stories filled mainstream Romanian newspapers throughout the three-year period we examined. But negative reports about the Roma reached a peak in the fall of 2007, when the infamous Mailat case exploded in the Italian and the Romanian media. On November 1, 2007, Romanian newspapers and television channels reported the outrage expressed by the Italian media in regard to a heinous crime committed in Rome by Nicolae Romulus Mailat. Mailat, identified as a Romanian immigrant of Roma ethnicity, had attacked, raped, beaten, killed, and dumped in a gutter Giovanna Reggiani, the wife of a high-ranking Italian naval officer. Over the next days, grim reports from Italy continued to appear in the Romanian media: articles about Romanian migrants (including children) being insulted, threatened, attacked, and murdered by enraged Italians abounded in Romanian newspapers. Some of the more notable headlines include “Italians Want Auschwitz Reopened for Romanians,”15 “A Romanian in Italy Says: They Wrote on the Walls ‘We’ll Crack Your Heads Open!’”16 “Romanian Children Insulted and Threatened in Italian Schools.”17 In response, much of the Romanian media lashed out against Roma, claiming that it was because of “Ţigan” criminals that “respectable” and “hardworking” ethnic Romanian migrants were undergoing persecution in Western Europe. In the wake of the Mailat case, the Romanian media characterized the Roma as “scandalous” in the second sense of the word: it suggested that Ţigani discredited Romanians in the eyes of Europe. Indeed, the title of an article published by România Liberă (Free Romania) immediately after the incident read “Mailat from Avrig, the Man Who Tarnished a Whole Country.”18 Newspaper articles reinforced the view that Ţigani shamed Romania by association, by quoting Corneliu Vadim

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Tudor, leader of the extreme-right Greater Romania Party, who stated in reference to the Mailat case: “Italians are perfectly right, this is an incredibly barbarous act, which shatters our country’s image in the world. I beg you not to use the word ‘Romanian,’ because that bastard is not Romanian, but Ţigan.”19 These crime stories are but a few illustrations of the prejudiced discourses targeting Roma in mainstream Romanian media during the three-year period covered by this study. But why did this trend persist after Romania’s accession to the EU? One might expect that the latest wave of enlargement would have reassured Romanians in regard to their “European-ness” and led them to invest less energy in scapegoating Ţigani. Unfortunately, newspaper articles and reader comments after January 2007 demonstrate that Romanians still see themselves as occupying a marginal status in the newly enlarged European Union. Labor migration undoubtedly contributes to this perspective, as numerous Romanians report experiencing discrimination and abusive treatment within the host societies of Western Europe (the anti-Romanian violence in Italy following the Mailat case is perhaps among the worst situations of this kind). To these perceived injustices, ethnic Romanians react by continuing to represent Ţigani as a “scandalous” ethnic group responsible for many of the problems they are facing in today’s Europe. As their “argument” goes, the shameful behavior of Ţigani disgraces “decent” and “hardworking” ethnic Romanians in the eyes of Western Europeans. Such discriminatory discourses targeting Roma simultaneously perpetuate the construction of the allegedly “worthy” Romanian ethnonational self through dissociation from “scandalous” Ţigani. This dynamic is evident in numerous online comments posted in response to Roma-related articles. For instance, one reader noted the following in November 2007: I am amazed by the fact that all pieces of news begin by saying that a ROMANIAN has committed rape and murder. I’ve been living and working in the West (not Italy) for more than ten years. After everything that Ţigani have done, starting with the infamous swan incident in Vienna, 20 I’m truly ashamed to admit I am Romanian.21

This comment implies that, since the authors of crime are Ţigani, the media should present them as such, in order to shield Romanian labor migrants from having to take the blame for their actions. “Romanian-ness” is constructed in ethnic terms and denied to Ţigani, despite the fact that they too are

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Romanian citizens. Many other comments express similar feelings of shame and frustration from the marginalization and harassment that ethnic Romanians see themselves as experiencing in Western European countries. These people are often victims of discourses and practices that project an image of East European EU members (particularly the most recent to accede) as “backward” and “undeserving” of their European status. In response, ethnic Romanians vent their anger on “scandalous” Ţigani and create a sharp boundary between themselves and this “unworthy” Other. The following comments posted by readers in 2009 are variations on this theme: I don’t think I’m a xenophobe, but I’m sick of being mistaken for a Ţigan when I go abroad. I’m sick of feeling ashamed of my Romanian citizenship and of being treated with contempt. I have many friends and relatives who do honest work abroad and are highly appreciated at their respective workplaces, but have to endure a lot of suffering in their communities because they are often conflated with criminals, who are Ţigani in the majority of cases, whether we care to admit it or not. It’s because of Ţigani that they check me on European airports as if I were a criminal, it’s because of them that I have to feel ashamed of being Romanian whenever I visit a civilized country, it’s because of them that I won’t be able to go to Italy any time soon, it’s because of them that those of us who are honest people and work hard day after day can’t live peaceful lives. Ţigani do what they have learned best: they commit fraud, steal, and engage in scandals, thereby managing to draw the hate of the whole world upon Romanians. Because of them, soon enough not even Africa will welcome us anymore. It’s because of Ţigani that Romanians in Italy and Spain are suffering right now. It’s because of the same despicable ethnic group that Romanians are looked down upon by all Europeans. It’s because of them that you have to always watch your back while walking in empty streets or riding the tram or taking out your wallet. It’s neither normal nor right that an ethnic group should steal the identity of another group. We’ve seen situations where Ţigani from Bulgaria, Hungary, or Slovakia are presented by the mass-media as Romanians, just because they call themselves Roma. This is unbearable, ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!22

These comments illustrate the anger and frustration many Romanians feel when confronted with unfair and biased treatment within Western European

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communities and institutions. In a desperate effort to ally themselves with the “civilized” countries of Europe, Romanians argue that they are resented and marginalized as a result of foreigners’ inability to distinguish between “honest” and “hardworking” ethnic Romanians and “scandalous” Ţigani (not least because of the similarity between the ethnonyms “Romanian” and “Roma”). Ethnic Romanians revolt against what they view as an outrageous act of deceit on the part of this “despicable ethnic group,” which has allegedly worked hard to “steal” their identity. In short, these comments amount to a Romanian claim for recognition within the European network of power relations, formulated as a rejection of “scandalous” Ţigani. This strategy of dissociation from Ţigani that Romanians employ in constructing their ethnonational identity is manifest in the 2009 legislative proposal initiated by Jurnalul Naţional. This was an unprecedented and deeply worrying case: never before had the media taken an active role in mobilizing the citizenry for the purpose of changing Romanian law and forcing the Roma community to adopt the pejorative label “Ţigan.” The Romanian National Council for the Elimination of Discrimination responded promptly, issuing a resolution denouncing the initiative as discriminatory and asking the media to avoid prejudice and promote intercultural dialogue and balanced viewpoints, to encourage readers to form their own opinions rather than accept prepackaged ones. Jurnalul Naţional published the resolution, declaring itself a “true friend of Ţigani.” The newspaper argued that the proposed legislation had no discriminatory intent: it was not anti-Roma, but rather pro-Ţigani.23 Of course, the term “Ţigan” has strong pejorative connotations and Jurnalul Naţional reinforced them through the way it justified its initiative by tying Roma ethnicity to crime. Additionally, the follow-up articles it published over the next days were far from balanced. Statements by Roma leaders denouncing the newspaper campaign were often mocked or presented in biased ways. For instance, President of the National Agency for Roma Robert Laurenţiu Iapornicu stated that a genuine debate on the situation of Roma was useful, but he also expressed concern that Jurnalul Naţional had abused its agenda-setting power, potentially catalyzing interethnic conflict. Jurnalul Naţional published Iapornicu’s opinion under the misleading headline “An Extremely Useful Debate.” The whole discussion was trivialized in another article suggesting how ridiculous it would be to eliminate the term “Ţigan” and its derivations from phrases designating various types of dishes. This piece was derisively entitled “Roma Go on the Offensive Against Ţigan

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Ham” and part of its summary ran as follows: “What should we call ‘Ţigan ham?’ ‘Romales’ Ham . . . or ‘Romanes’ Ham? (This adjective doesn’t even exist in the Romanian Dictionary.)”24

“Victimized” Ethnonationalism and Hate Speech Disguised as Legitimate Self-Defense The production of “Roma-ness” as “scandalous ethnicity” persisted and even intensified in the mainstream media after Romania’s EU accession in January 2007. Romanians continue to construct their ethnonational identity through dissociation from “scandalous” Ţigani, in response to the marginalization and rejection they see themselves as experiencing within the network of EastWest European power relations. However, the brutality with which media contributors often articulate their anti-Roma views cannot be fully accounted for by ethnic Romanians’ desire to project a positive, “Europe-worthy” image of their ethnonational self through “othering” Ţigani. There is a wide discrepancy between these violent anti-Roma discourses and the fact that ethnic Romanians are, at the same time, able to see themselves as “good” and “decent” citizens. These contradictory stances, which are highly reminiscent of Nazi ideology, require further explanation. But before we discuss the mechanism that enables people to engage in virulent anti-Roma hate speech despite its apparent affront to values they purport to hold, it is worth considering a few examples drawn from reader responses to online media. One reader suggests, “Extermination, the only solution” for Ţigani, once all “humane and civilized” approaches have failed.25 In a post entitled “We want a hitler,” another reader makes explicit reference to the Holocaust when stating that the Roma “should share the fate of the Jews,” all the more because they are not as “educated and wise” as the Jews were.26 The Holocaust theme recurs often. One reader claims not to be an anti-Semite, but immediately goes on to contend that “those at AUSCHWITZ did kind of the right thing.”27 Another angrily demands that Ţigani “should be gassed without delay.”28 Yet another reader argues that Roma are anything but a “sociable community” and adds that “the best job for them [Ţigani] is to inhale gas,” since “a good Ţigan is a . . . dead one.”29 Other readers invoke the names of Vlad Ţepeş, General Ion Antonescu, and Corneliu Vadim Tudor as the only political figures capable of dealing with Ţigani. All three are infamous for their extremism: Ţepeş was the medieval

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voivode who allegedly impaled criminals and enemies of the country, General Antonescu deported large numbers of Roma to Transnistria during the Second World War, and Vadim Tudor has been the leader of the extremeright Greater Romania Party since 1991. For example, one newspaper reader laments, “So much scrap iron stolen [by Ţigani] from dismantled factories and carried away in horse-drawn carts, to be sold for good money. Where are you, Voivode Ţepeş?????”30 Another hopes that “Vadim Tudor will become president one day, and then you’re all going to see that he will deal with them [Ţigani] like antonescu and hitler did, we’ll get rid of these dregs of society in no time.”31 Yet another media user regrets that “Antonescu or Hitler are no longer alive, may they rest in peace. . . . [T]hey could easily solve the Ţigan problem; chemical castration would be a useful solution for humanity.”32 One last example runs as follows: “They all curse Ţigani like crazy in the privacy of their homes, but those of us who are real men have the guts to ask for the Antonescu solution out there, in public.”33 These extremely hostile discourses are pervasive in the comments section of the Romanian online media. In order to shed light on the discursive mechanism that enables ethnic Romanians to articulate such violent antiRoma rants and present themselves as “good” and “decent” citizens at the same time, we examined the justifications these people mobilize in support of hate speech. We argue that media users often operate a discursive inversion of the power relation between the Romanian majority and the Roma minority: Roma have always been a disadvantaged ethnic group in Romania, but media discourses construct ethnic Romanians as victims of allegedly “aggressive” Ţigani. In the context of Romanian victimization, anti-Roma sentiment becomes a legitimate act of self-defense by a threatened ethnonational self against its destructive and “scandalous” Other. In the subsequent discussion, we draw on the large pool of readers’ comments we analyzed, to identify specific patterns within this discourse of ethnonational victimization. Numerous comments warn that ethnic Romanians are in danger of being “taken over” by Ţigani. Allegedly, Roma threaten not only Romanian ethnocultural and national identity but also the very physical survival of ethnic Romanians as a people. Many readers lament that Roma aggressively promote their “backward” way of life and suffocate Romanian “culture.” For instance, one reader angrily remarks that Ţigani “manele-ize us, stifle us with their lack of education, day after day, hour after hour; it’s like they’re making us go through Water Torture, Chinese style.”34 To clarify, “manele” refers to

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a particular kind of song associated with the Roma community, considered to be of “low quality” and “Oriental” in origin. This comment implies that Ţigani force manele onto ethnic Romanians and “spoil” not just their “good taste,” but their “European” ethnocultural identity, as well. Other readers go so far as to suggest that many ethnic Romanians have started showing signs of degeneration, loss of decency, weakness, and unhealthy tolerance and are, therefore, likely to give in to the temptation of embracing Ţigan lifestyles. In this sense, one reader warns that “uncultured” and “dim-witted” Romanians willingly adopt “typical” Ţigan practices: they listen to “tasteless” music and engage in early sexual activity and gang behavior. His rant is worth quoting at length: Mădălin Voicu35 once said that Ţigani represented one third of the population of Romania. It won’t be long before they become half of the Romanian population and then they’ll be the majority. With their trashy music—and I am talking about manele—they’ve managed to Ţiganize a good chunk of the Romanian population. I mean those Romanians whose level of culture and intellectual thinking is the same as theirs. We’re witnessing a gradual assimilation of the Romanian population by the Rroma ethnic group. Our daughters have started having fiancés and giving birth when they’re only 12–13–14–years-old, while our young men seem to have a great deal of fun listening to the music of Adi the Wonder Kid 36 in discos and at wedding parties. And then there are these neighborhood guys who go out at night and walk around in gangs just like Ţigani do, disturbing our peace and quiet.37

This notion of an increasingly powerful process of assimilation of ethnic Romanians to Ţigan “subculture” causes intense anxiety among mainstream newspaper readers. One comment makes explicit reference to the “voluntary Ţiganization of Romanians.” The media contributor uses many slang terms and phrases (see italicized text below), which either derive from the Romany language or designate stereotypical Ţigan practices. This choice of words gives the comment a highly pejorative and derisive tone: I’m sick of listening to you, my whiny fellow citizens, complain about the fact that Ţigani steal your identity. It’s clear to me that you’re out of touch with reality. . . . Let’s face it, don’t you watch TV Ţigan-like shows, which attract loads of viewers? Don’t you have fun on New Year’s when you spend

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hours watching manele and crappy Ţigan fiddler’s music on television? Can’t you see that uncivilized guys litter our streets without a care in the world? Don’t you notice how rudely soccer fans curse on stadiums ca la uşa cortului [as they do at the tent door] and then se iau la mardeală [start punching each other]? Don’t you realize that everybody’s adopting the Ţigan slang nowadays, thinking it’s shucara [cool]? No! You aren’t paying enough attention! In vain do you complain that your identity is being stolen, because in fact it’s us, Romanians, who have begun adopting other people’s identity. Some culture we’ve got! Pathetic!!! 38

Similar worries are voiced by a reader who predicts that Romanians will soon become a minority in their own country, because “10–15 percent of Romanians already live, think, and behave like Ţigani.”39 Another reader bitterly notes, “We talk like them, we dance like them, we behave like them, and we idiotically buy their trashy manele. So it’s they who Ţiganize us in our own country, it’s they who integrate us. Well done, Romanian nation! This is what we have become.”40 Many readers lament that their “future as a democracy, as a tolerant nation” is severely endangered as a consequence of their Ţiganization.41 Their comments suggest that ethnic Romanians have been too permissive and are being taken advantage of and threatened by Ţigani as a result. This construction of the Romanian-Roma dynamic illustrates our argument well. Ethnic Romanian readers contend that democracy and respect for diversity simply do not work in dealing with “scandalous” Ţigani because this ethnic minority abuses the opportunities offered by tolerant environments. Once this claim is made, the road is open to extremist anti-Roma discourses masking themselves as “legitimate”: Romanians must renounce tolerance in order to defend their ethnonational identity “under siege.” But it is not just that Ţigani are constructed as having “hijacked” and “corrupted” Romanian ethnocultural and national identity. They are also regarded as an imminent threat to the physical survival of ethnic Romanians as a people and a nation. Many online media users describe Roma as a “primitive” but “strong” ethnoracial group, which has “invaded the body” of the Romanian nation and is subjecting it to such violence that complete extinction may soon occur. In this context, one reader enumerates the acts of aggression he/she believes Ţigani inflict upon ethnic Romanians: “They kill us, steal from us, cheat on us, spit on us, humiliate us,” the consequence being that it is “us who struggle to survive in any way we can, while they persecute

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us.”42 This fear of ethnonational annihilation is frequently framed in the language of biology and demography. For instance, one reader rants that Ţigani “multiply like viruses. Soon they will kill the organism they inhabit as parasites.”43 Others predict takeover through population growth: “Judging by the speed with which the Ţigan population has been growing, this country will belong to them one day,”44 or “If you think that there will be any Romanian left in this country in 30 years’ time, you’re wrong!”45 Another reader laments, “Romanians will soon disappear and Ţigani are going to have their own country in Europe,” adding “[i]f we had been more determined in 1940–41, we wouldn’t have had these problems now.”46 The allusion, of course, is to the Roma deportation policies implemented by General Ion Antonescu during the Second World War. This Roma “threat” is presented as manifest not only in Romanian everyday life but also at the highest (national, transnational, and international) levels of political decision-making. Thus, numerous media readers elaborate on the alleged acts of aggression to which ethnic Romanians are subjected by Ţigani on a daily basis. These cover the widest range of imaginable crimes: Roma are regarded as people who steal, cheat, rape, murder, beg, and harass people in the streets, kidnap and maim children to transform them into beggars or prostitutes, as well as engage in fortune telling and fake witchcraft, while ethnic Romanians do honest work.47 This discourse is taken to the level of a full-blown anti-Romanian conspiracy theory, when readers claim that Ţigani have “infiltrated” the highest tiers of (national, transnational, and international) political decisionmaking bodies and are, therefore, in a position to dictate the fate of ethnic Romanians. In this vein, one reader declares that a “politics of Ţiganization of Romania” was put in place during communism and has been continuing to this day. According to the contributor, Ion Iliescu, the first president of post-1989 Romania, made great efforts to promote Ţigani, to the point where he helped them “penetrate the whole political system.”48 Interestingly, Iliescu himself is assigned Ţigan origins,49 just as other Romanian politicians seen as having advanced the “Ţigan cause” against ethnic Romanians are often described as “foreign.” As one reader comments, “It is to be noted that all the high officials who have ever supported the use of the term ‘Roma’ (Petre Roman, Adrian Năstase, Ion Iliescu, Călin Popescu-Tăriceanu) are foreigners or only partly Romanian, at best.”50 The assumption is that one cannot be an ethnic Romanian and uphold the rights of the Roma community at

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the same time. This discourse takes an anti-Semitic turn when readers start claiming that Jewish politicians are involved in this anti-Romanian “plot.” One media contributor says, “Petre Roman is not Romanian, he is the son of a Jew who brought communism to Romania. What did you expect of him? To care about Romanians? He’s here to destroy the Romanian people, Ţigani are just a weapon in his hands!”51 As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Petre Roman, who was minister of foreign affairs in 2000, supported the use of the politically correct term “Roma” in official documents. The comment above constructs him as “alien” to the Romanian ethnonation and interprets his stance not just as an act of “betrayal,” but as a deliberate attempt to “subjugate” ethnic Romanians. Many similar posts are informed by this catastrophic imagination of an insecure and ethnocentric media audience, for whom ethnic difference means inherent danger and ethnic relations can only be conflictual. The following comment is worth quoting at length, as it illustrates the will of online media readers to project the mark of “Jewish foreignness” onto political figures who have supported the Roma community’s choice of its own name: Throughout the post-communist period, certain organizations and politicians (high officials of Roma origins) have exerted constant pressure to impose the use of the ethnic label “Roma” in official documents. Pressure continued and, in 2001 [sic!], Minister of Foreign Affairs Petre RomanNeulander (a Jew) submitted Memorandum no. D2/1094 of February 29, 2000 to Prime Minister Mugur Isărescu (another Jew). This memorandum invoked the minority right to self-identification and required that the term “Roma” be used to identify the Ţigan ethnic group in all official Romanian documents. . . . I’m sick of “civilized” and “tolerant” people who ally themselves with the enemies of Romania and try to destroy the traditional values of our people, those values our ancestors built through hard work over hundreds of generations! 52

For many newspaper readers, the alleged anti-Romanian “plot” orchestrated by Roma in collusion with politicians of “foreign” origins has resulted in the “oppression” of ethnic Romanians. One reader comments, “In Romania, Ţigani have more rights than ethnic Romanians themselves,”53 while another says that the “Ţigan dictatorship in Romania has been forced on us from the highest political levels and shuts ethnic Romanians’ mouths up when they complain about Ţigani.”54 Yet another reader warns that “Ţigani have control 280

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over the Romanian political elite, they have occupied the highest positions in the Ministry of Finance, in the bank system, in parliament, in the government, in the mass-media, etc.”55 Of course, these statements are completely disconnected from the reality of Roma representation in Romania’s political institutions. According to the 2002 census (INS 2002), there are 535,250 Romanian Roma, that is, 2.5 percent of the population. However, the census is notorious for underestimating the number of Roma in Romania, particularly because many members of this disadvantaged minority refrain from declaring their ethnicity. Roma organizations suggest that there may be between 1.8 and 2.5 million Roma in Romania (see, for instance, CRISS and AMP 2007). With the Roma Party holding only one of 315 seats in Parliament since 1990, this ethnic group is severely underrepresented in Romanian politics. And yet, ethnic Romanians see themselves as victims of Roma. This alleged anti-Romanian “plot” extends to the transnational and international levels according to some media readers. One reader wonders: Why have the leaders of global Ţigan associations chosen Romania of all places to put their perverse plan into practice? They first want to create a new name (ethnonym) for Ţigani and then, when the Roma-Romanian confusion has taken root in the mind of the whole world, they’re going to use the devastating demographic strategy typical of this race to dislocate the Romanian people from its historical space.56

Another reader says he/she does not believe in this conspiracy theory, but then adds that “a Ţigan state will most certainly be created here.”57 Anti-Semitic and anti-Hungarian views are often interwoven with discourses about these alleged Roma “schemes” devised to “displace” and eventually “eliminate” ethnic Romanians. Many readers refer in pejorative ways to George Soros, the Jewish-American philanthropist of Hungarian origin, whom they present as an “enemy” of the Romanian nation. Soros founded the Open Society Institute, a transnational organization that promotes the rights of various disadvantaged minorities around the world, including East European Roma. Media contributors frequently interpret the activity of the institute as a Jewish-Hungarian attempt to “control” and “disgrace” ethnic Romanians. One reader raises the following rhetorical question: “Do you actually think that Freemason Brother Soros is going to allow Trădiceanu, his subordinate, to ruin his assiduous efforts to denigrate our national image?”58 Obviously, for this reader the answer is “no.” To clarify, “Trădiceanu” is a pun on the name

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of Prime Minister Călin Popescu-Tăriceanu and “trădător,” the Romanian word for “traitor.” Tăriceanu is constructed as a “traitor” of the nation for rejecting the legislative initiative to restore the use of the term “Ţigan” in official documents. But this reader goes further, suggesting that, in fact, George Soros dictated Tăriceanu’s actions with the intent to “harm” the Romanian nation. Moreover, Soros himself is presented as a member of the Freemason Fraternity, an international organization that ethnic Romanians often view as a “secret society” working against Christianity to ensure “world domination.” Obviously, these discourses have a strong anti-Semitic tone. Such narratives project an image of the Romanian ethnonational self as victimized by “dangerous” ethnic groups (particularly Roma, Hungarians, and Jews), acting in concert at the global level to weaken and ultimately annihilate it. Not only do numerous ethnic Romanian newspaper readers talk about these sorts of large-scale ethnic conspiracies, but they also often suggest that international institutions and powerful countries (for example, the European Union, the United Nations, or the United States) support and participate in them. Thus, one reader asks, “Might the EU/UN aim at creating a Ţigan/Roma state here, in Romania? I find this scenario very plausible: we’ll soon witness the formation of Romia and the destruction of Romania.”59 Another reader states that Ţigani “aim at the systematic extermination of the local population. This is a process which has been unfolding slowly but surely under the protection of the UN.”60 Finally, yet another reader laments that “occult circles from Western Europe and the United States” intend to disgrace the Romanian nation through their strategy of “placing a graft onto the skeleton of our ethnonym, thereby generating a new name for Ţigani everywhere.”61 The medical metaphor is particularly interesting: it suggests that the ethnic Romanian “body” has been reduced to a lifeless bone structure, onto which the foreign “Ţigan element” can be grafted to form a thriving “organism.” Such narratives project an image of the Romanian ethnonational self as multiply victimized: by Ţigani and their elites, by ethnic Romanian politicians who have “betrayed” the people, by multiethnic conspiracies, by various transnational and international organizations and institutions, as well as by allegedly “deceitful” world powers. These discourses of ethnonational victimization enable the production of anti-Roma hate speech disguised as a legitimate act of self-defense. In other words, ethnic Romanians frequently portray themselves as a people “under siege” doing their best to survive in the face of multiple threats. This construction of the persecuted Romanian self

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allows media readers to explode the boundaries of discursive decorum and engage in aggressive anti-Roma rants, while continuing to see themselves as “decent,” “tolerant,” and “moral” persons.

Conclusion This chapter was born out of a concern about the pervasiveness of prejudiced representations of Roma in the mainstream Romanian media. We examined these stereotypes with an eye for what they might tell us about the marginalized Roma community and, most importantly, about ethnic Romanians themselves. After the fall of communism, Romanians invested much hope in the process of “reentering Europe.” At the same time, however, they frequently saw themselves as facing rejection from the more powerful European states, particularly because Romania’s admission to the European Union was a long and strenuous process. Through the experience of hovering on the margins of a symbolic “Europe,” but not quite belonging to it, ethnic Romanians saw their ethnonational anxieties deepen and scapegoated Roma for their misfortunes. But particularly worrisome is the fact that anti-Roma hate speech persisted in the Romanian media well beyond the country’s EU accession in 2007. Evidently, many Romanians still see themselves as occupying a marginal position in the recently enlarged European Union. This perspective is sustained at least in part by experiences of discrimination and abuse in the context of labor migration to Western European societies. In response, Romanians often seek to project a “Europe-worthy” ethnonational self through dissociation from “scandalous” Ţigani. However, this strategy of constructing “Romanian-ness” in opposition to “scandalous Roma-ness” does not fully account for the extremely hostile tones that media discourses targeting Roma frequently assume. We argue that the intense aggression in the media is facilitated by a discursive inversion of the actual power relation between Romanians and Roma: while Roma are the disadvantaged group from both a socioeconomic and a cultural point of view, ethnic Romanians construct themselves as victims of allegedly “vicious” Ţigani. This discourse of ethnonational victimization enables Romanians to cast extreme hate speech against the Roma as a legitimate act of self-defense and, therefore, as morally justified.

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Notes 1.

In this chapter, we use the terms “Ţigan” (singular) and “Ţigani” (plural) based on Woodcock (2007). This article argues that much would be lost through translating these Romanian terms as “Gypsy”/ “Gypsies” in English-language articles. The connotations of these pejorative ethnic labels do not fully overlap. It is better to maintain the Romanian terms in this context, in order to mark the specificity of the stereotypical construction of Roma in Romanian public discourse.

2.

Antoniu, “Propunere Jurnalul Naţional. ‘Ţigan’ în loc de ‘rom.’” All translations from Romanian into English belong to the authors.

3.

Article 74(1) of the Romanian Constitution provides that “legislative initiative shall lie, as the case may be, with the Government, Deputies, Senators, or a number of at least 100,000 citizens entitled to vote. The citizens who exercise their right to a legislative initiative must belong to at least one quarter of the country’s counties, while, in each of those counties or the Municipality of Bucharest, at least 5,000 signatures should be registered in support of such initiative.”

4.

See, for instance, the following documents issued by the Council of Europe: Recommendation 1203 “On the Situation of Roma in Europe” (1993), Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (1995), and Resolution 44 “Towards a Tolerant Europe: The Contribution of Roma” (1997). Article 14 of Resolution 44 “[r]esolves to use the spelling ‘Roma’, with a single ‘r’, in future so as to comply with usual practice within the Council of Europe and the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe).”

5.

Teodor Meleşcanu, Memorandum no. HO3/169 and 5/390/NV (1995).

6.

Petre Roman, Memorandum no. D2/1094 (2000).

7.

Mircea Costache, Ioan Aurel Rus, and Gheorghe Funar, Legislative Initiative no. 621 (2007).

8.

Călin Popescu-Tăriceanu, Government Standpoint on the Legislative Proposal Entitled “Law Concerning the Terminology Used for the Gypsy Ethnicity,” initiated by Deputies Mircea Costache and Ioan Aurel Rus and Senator Gheorghe Funar (2008). The European documents to which Tăriceanu referred were Resolution 44 “Towards a Tolerant Europe: The Contribution of Roma” (1997), Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (1995), ratified by Romania through Law no. 33 (1995), and European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (1992), ratified by Romania through Law no. 282 (2007). Article 3 of the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities states, “Every person belonging to a national minority shall have the right freely to choose to be

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treated or not to be treated as such and no disadvantage shall result from this choice or from the exercise of the rights which are connected to that choice.” Tăriceanu interpreted this article as providing that “persons of this ethnicity have the right to self-determination and to self-identification as Roma.” 9.

This finding is supported by a number of studies that cover limited periods of time or particular events. See, for instance, AMP 2008. This report shows that Roma were presented in biased ways in the newspaper articles covering the infamous Mailat case between November 1 and 10, 2007. We too address the Mailat case in this section of the chapter. See also ENAR 2008. This report contains a section on prejudiced media representations of Roma associated with three major events involving this ethnic group. Other reports and surveys suggest that stereotypes about Roma are also prevalent in public opinion. See, for instance, Gallup Romania 2008. This survey found that the three most common attributes Romanians used in describing Roma were “inclined to steal,” “dirty,” and “lazy.” Also, only 14 percent of Romanians disagreed with the statement that “Roma are an embarrassment to Romania,” and only 6 percent disagreed with the statement that “Most Roma break the law.” See also INSOMAR 2009. This survey found that 72 percent of Romanians believed that Roma tended to break the law.

10.

Kiss, “Razie franco-română în ţigănie, în căutarea baronilor cerşetoriei.”

11.

Vlad, “‘Plecaţi de la noi, ţiganilor!’”

12.

Boţa, “Reţea ţigănească de trafic de persoane anihilată de Poliţia de Frontieră

13.

Matei, “Ţigănie rai, caravanserai: norvegienii—exasperaţi de ‘năvala’ şatrelor din

Timişoara.” Europa de Est.” 14.

Vlad, “‘Ţiganii români ne toacă nervii.’”

15.

Boga, “Italienii vor Auschwitz pentru români.”

16.

Chiş, “Un român din Italia: Ne-au scris pe ziduri ‘O să vă crăpăm capul!’”

17.

Şandru, “Copiii români, insultaţi şi ameninţaţi în şcolile din Italia.”

18.

Anghel, “Mailat din Avrig, omul care a murdărit o ţară.”

19.

Şandru, “Vadim Tudor: ț iganii ne fac ţăndări imaginea în lume.”

20.

The incident to which this reader alludes is a story most Romanians know well. Allegedly, soon after the 1989 collapse of the Romanian regime, a group of Romanian Ţigani migrated to Austria and ate the black swans on a Viennese lake.

21.

Comment posted in response to Şandru, “Vadim Tudor: ț iganii ne fac ţăndări imaginea în lume.”

22.

Comments posted in response to Antoniu, “Propunere Jurnalul Naţional. ‘Ţigan’ în loc de ‘rom.’”

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285

23.

“Jurnalul Naţional, un prieten adevărat al ţiganilor.”

24.

Cireş, “Romii atentează la muşchiul ţigănesc.”

25.

Comment posted in response to “Împuşcături la Caracal: rromii cer o şedinţă a staborului ţigănesc.”

26.

Comment posted in response to Antoniu, “Propunere Jurnalul Naţional. ‘Ţigan’ în

27.

Comment posted in response to Olteanu, “Rromi sau ţigani? Cât contează?”

28.

Comment posted in response to “Frankfurt-ul blocat de un botez ţigănesc.”

29.

Comment posted in response to Antoniu, “Propunere Jurnalul Naţional. ‘Ţigan’ în

loc de ‘rom.’”

loc de ‘rom.’” 30.

Comment posted in response to Drăghia, “Spuneţi voi ce sunt: ţigan, rom, român, european sau nici una?”

31.

Comment posted in response to Drăghia, “Spuneţi voi ce sunt: ţigan, rom, român, european sau nici una?”

32.

Comment posted in response to Drăghia, “Spuneţi voi ce sunt: ţigan, rom, român, european sau nici una?”

33.

Comment posted in response to Drăghia, “Refuzaţi să credeţi că există ţigani mai corecţi decât românii!”

34.

Comment posted in response to Antoniu, “Propunere Jurnalul Naţional. ‘Ţigan’ în

35.

Mădălin Voicu is a Romanian politician of Roma ethnicity.

36.

Adi the Wonder Kid is a famous manele singer of Roma ethnicity.

37.

Comment posted in response to Drăgotescu, “Editorial—ț iganii pentru

loc de ‘rom.’”

totdeauna?” 38.

Comment posted in response to Antoniu, “Propunere Jurnalul Naţional. ‘Ţigan’ în loc de ‘rom.’”

39.

Comment posted in response to “ONU: în România, discriminarea rromilor la diferite nivele continuă.”

40.

Comment posted in response to Ene, “Romii—românii: prizonierii cercului vicios.”

41.

Comment posted in response to Antoniu, “Propunere Jurnalul Naţional. ‘Ţigan’ în loc de ‘rom.’”

42.

Comments posted in response to Antoniu, “Propunere Jurnalul Naţional. ‘Ţigan’ în loc de ‘rom.’”

43.

Comment posted in response to “AFP: Rromii din Romania nu mai vor să se ascundă.”

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44.

Comment posted in response to “Regele Cioabă a făcut conferinţă de presă să spună că nu e ‘ţigan.’”

45.

Comment posted in response to Serghescu, “Guvernul ceh îşi cere scuze pentru sterilizarea femeilor de origine rromă.”

46. 47.

Boţa, “Vrem la voi. Azil! Suntem ţigani.” Such representations of Roma abound in the online media. See, for instance, the comments posted in response to the following articles: “AFP: rromii care o însoţesc pe Madonna în turneu regretă atitudinea românilor”; “Mădălin Voicu: începând cu Băsescu, toată lumea se ia de ţigani.”

48.

Comment posted in response to Nicolae, “CSM ţigănesc—fondat ieri la Bucureşti.”

49.

In a similar vein, Fosztó (2009) shows that, after the fall of communism in December 1989, journalists started presenting Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu, Romania’s much hated dictatorial couple, as “Țigani.”

50.

Comment posted in response to Antoniu, “Propunere Jurnalul Naţional. ‘Ţigan’ în loc de ‘rom.’”

51.

Comment posted in response to Olteanu, “Rromi sau ţigani? Cât contează?”

52.

“La Roma, Iliescu se dezice de ţiganii români.”

53.

Comment posted in response to “ONU: în România, discriminarea rromilor la diferite nivele continuă.”

54.

Comment posted in response to “AFP: rromii care o însoţesc pe Madonna în turneu regretă atitudinea românilor.”

55.

Comment in response to Nicolae, “CSM ţigănesc—fondat ieri la Bucureşti.”

56.

Comment posted in response to Antoniu, “Propunere Jurnalul Naţional. ‘Ţigan’ în loc de ‘rom.’”

57.

Comment posted in response to Antoniu, “Propunere Jurnalul Naţional. ‘Ţigan’ în loc de ‘rom.’”

58.

Comment posted in response to Ene, “Rromii, între politica struţului şi aberaţii

59.

Comment posted in response to Grigore, “De ce rrom şi nu ţigan.”

legislative.” 60.

Comment posted in response to “ONU: în Romania, discriminarea rromilor la diferite nivele continuă.”

61.

Comment posted in response to Antoniu, “Propunere Jurnalul Naţional. ‘Ţigan’ în loc de ‘rom.’”

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———. 2005b. “Talking About Integration and Discrimination: Accomplishing Difference and Foreignness in Romanian Talk about Romanies.” International Journal of Critical Psychology 14: 119–37. ———. 2006a. “Representing the Other: A Discursive Analysis of Prejudice and Moral Exclusion in Talk About Romanies.” Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology 16: 1–23. ———. 2006b. “Discourse, Dominance and Power Relations: Inequality as a Social and Interactional Object.” Ethnicities 6 (4): 476–97. ———. 2007. “Ideologies of Moral Exclusion: A Critical Discursive Reframing of Depersonalization, Delegitimization and Dehumanization.” British Journal of Social Psychology 46: 717–37. Triandafyllidou, Anna. 1997. “Nationalism and the Threatening Other: The Case of Greece.” Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism Bulletin 13: 6–21. ———. 1998. “National Identity and the ‘Other.’” Ethnic and Racial Studies 21 (4): 593–612. Vlad, Alina. 2007. “‘Plecaţi de la noi, ţiganilor!’” Libertatea, July 31. http:// www.libertatea.ro/stire/plecati-de-la-noi-tiganilor-183839.html. ———. 2009. “‘Ţiganii români ne toacă nervii.’” Libertatea, January 23. http://www.libertatea.ro/stire/iganii-romani-ne-toaca-nervii-227575. html. Wingfield, Nancy M., ed. 2003. Creating the Other: Ethnic Conflict and Nationalism in Habsburg Central Europe. New York: Berghahn Publishers. Woodcock, Shannon. 2007. “Romania and Europe: Roma, Rroma and Ţigani as Sites for the Contestation of Ethno-national Identities.” Patterns of Prejudice 41 (5): 493–515.

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chapter eight

A Critique of the Global Corruption “Paradigm” Alena V. Ledeneva

The corruption “paradigm” prevalent in both scholarly and policy circles was consolidated in the 1990s. In an IMF Working Paper, Vito Tanzi (1997) distinguished a number of factors that contributed to the salience of corruption and linked them to the breakdown of communism and postcommunist transformations. The factors include the collapse of the centrally planned economies; an increase in the number of democracies with free media; increased contact between countries and individuals due to globalization; the heightened role of international organizations, such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Organization for European Cooperation and Development in national affairs;1 the growing role of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), such as Transparency International; and the centrality of corruption in debates concerning privatization and restructuring of the economic institutions in transition countries.2 One could further argue that the same factors facilitated the consolidation of the corruption “paradigm” in the transitional agenda, which occurred through the interaction between domestic reformers and international agencies. Postcommunist countries were expected to adopt policies recommended by international organizations as a condition of integration into the wider global community. They were charged with freeing themselves of “corruption” in order to become “transparent” recipients of aid, or to satisfy various conditions attached to the funds, loans, and memberships of international organizations. The corruption “paradigm” predominant in the literature on postcommunism since the mid-1990s is the result of a process through which 297

international organizations specified expectations of governing standards and fostered and assessed their achievement. In order to evaluate the suitability of the corruption paradigm to the postcommunist context, I begin by examining its three core assumptions: (1) corruption can be defined; (2) once defined it can be measured; and (3) measurement can in turn lead to policy that eliminates corrupt practices.

Assumptions of the Corruption Paradigm Definition There are a number of problems with defining corruption. Firstly, corruption is an umbrella term for a variety of complex phenomena, characterized by betrayal of trust, deception, deliberate subordination of common interests to specific interests, secrecy, complicity, mutual obligation, and camouflage of the corrupt act (Alatas 1990, 1–2). The historical and institutional specificity of the designation of particular practices as “corrupt” makes it difficult to find a simple formula relevant to all of them. The practices that we today designate as “corruption” are not new phenomena. Betrayal of public trust and the tendency to use collective resources to private advantage are evident throughout documented human history and have played a role in both the downfall and development of societies. In a broad characterization, Brooks refers to corruption as “the intentional misperformance or neglect of a recognized duty, or the unwarranted exercise of power, with the motive of gaining some advantage” (quoted in Alatas 1990). The concept of corruption that underlies international regulatory standards is of much more recent vintage. It is associated with the transformation from what Weber described as patrimonial power structures, where decisions are made on the basis of people’s relationships and traditional forms of authority, to rational-legal systems, where institutionalized rules are the basis of governance. The establishment of a rational legal order and institutionalization of rules are necessary before corruption can be conceptualized as deviation from them. The modernization campaign initiated by Peter the Great in Russia is one example of such a transformation. By undermining and subsequently criminalizing the custom of paying tribute to officials, he transformed an acceptable practice into an illegal act, that is, bribery (Lovell et al., 2000). Similarly, the efforts of postcommunist societies to synchronize their legislative and institutional frameworks with those of advanced market

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democracies during the 1990s resulted in the specification of common practices as corrupt and the development of sophisticated instruments to eradicate them. Most contemporary definitions of corruption assume the existence of a rational-legal system of rule that clearly distinguishes public and private realms. Corruption can thus be understood as “the abuse of public office for private gain” (Tanzi 1997; Kaufman 1997; Rose-Ackerman 1999). Corruption is “the misuse of public power, office or authority for private benefit—through bribery, extortion, influence peddling, nepotism, fraud, speed money or embezzlement” (UNDP 2004); or “Behaviour which deviates from the formal duties of a public role (elective or appointive) because of privateregarding (personal, close family, private clique) wealth or status, gains, or (which) violates rules against the exercise of certain types of private-regarding influence” (Johnston 1986, 460). Although the wording varies, most formulas of corruption can be understood as a “twist” of something public into something private, as presented in Table 8.1. These definitions identify corruption as deviance from how things should be. It is a move away from the public (duties, office, interests) and toward the private (gain, profit, benefit). Three important assumptions underpin such definitions: the existence of the public/private distinction, the relevance of the principal-agent model of corruption, and a normative doctrine. Most definitions of corruption rely on the distinction between public and private, and they assume not only that the public and private spheres operate according to distinct sets of rules and norms, but also that it is wrong to mix them. Most definitions within this framework assume the involvement of at least three parties in an act of corruption. A corrupt exchange appears to take place between two actors—a client (a giver) and an agent (a taker)—but there is always a third actor in the background (the principal). The principal is usually conceptualized as a rule maker or an organization that embodies the public interest and authorizes the implementation of a set of rules (Klitgaard 1988). Even in the analyses of countries where corruption is pervasive and such deviant behavior is perceived as the norm (Varese 2000, 99–100), the analysis invariably stems from the principal-agent model of corruption with its tacit assumptions of the ideal type of relationships between the three parties. Such a normative view is implicit in each of the interchangeable formulas of corruption-as-deviance shown in Table 8.1.

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TA B L E

8.1. The Syntax of Corruption OF

FOR

Betrayal

Public

Office/duty

Private

Gain

Diversion

Common

Good/trust

Personal

Profit

Misuse/Abuse

Communal

Funds/resources

Individual

Benefit

Manipulation

Administrative Influence

Unauthorized

Advantage

Exploitation

Institutional

Power

Group

Interests/goals

Bending

Formal

Rules

Informal

Network

Corruption is often characterized as a “disease,” the causes, conditions, and effects of which must be diagnosed, studied, and cured (Alatas 1990). In more sophisticated analyses the normative perspective results in various typologies of corruption. Types are “observed” and articulated with reference to degree (petty, administrative, state capture); frequency (routine or extraordinary, exercised by many or by few); motivation (coercive or collusive); level (centralized or decentralized); or scale (predictable or arbitrary). All of these are variations on the theme of deviance and are described in terms that are unlikely to be used by “participants” in corrupt practices (Johnston 1986, 2006; Tanzi 1997; Karklins 2005). In a 2006 World Bank paper, which adopts the Transparency International definition of corruption as “the misuse of entrusted power for private gain,” economist Stephen Knack (2006, 5) organizes these variations into six dimensions of corruption: By level of political system (central government, provincial, municipal), roughly corresponding to the terms “petty” and “grand” corruption; By purpose of the improper actions: to influence the content of laws and rules (“state capture”) or to influence their implementation (“administrative corruption”); By the actors involved in the corrupt transaction: various combinations of firms, households, and public officials; By characteristics of a particular set of actors, for example bribes required for large versus small firms, or for rich versus poor households; By administrative agency or service: tax and customs, business licenses, inspections, utility connections, courts, or public education and health facilities;

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By incidence or magnitude of bribes, or by the uncertainty they create for businesses and households.

It is important to note that those involved in corrupt practices are more often than not conceptually silenced in the analytical frameworks employed to study them. Most anthropologists object to the exclusion of meanings the actors ascribe to their actions and reject the economists’ strategy of evaluating practices against an abstract model. Many have sought instead to describe and analyze the activities actually taking place. Some of their findings show that what appear as instances of corruption from the normative perspective are in fact new and interesting hybrids of communist and postcommunist forms of exchange that may not add up to “market democracy” or “capitalism,” but must be understood first and foremost on their own terms (Caldwell 2004; Grant 1995; Ledeneva 1998, 2006; Ries 1997; Rivkin-Fish 2005; Ekiert, Kubik, and Vachudova 2007). These bottom-up accounts are not the same as the views of “revisionists” who point out the possible benefits of corruption, as well as its “functionality” in coping with an overly rigid political or bureaucratic regime (Girling 1997). Rivkin-Fish, for example, analyzes practices that could be viewed as corruption in the health sector in terms of strategies to personalize “service.” Such practices are specific responses to postcommunist conditions that compensate for defects in health provision. Michael Johnston identifies practices that link people and groups into lasting networks of exchange through shared interests as “integrative” corrupt exchanges (1986, 460). Depending on one’s perspective, informal networks are either associated with trust-based relationships, mutual obligations and the power of informal norms (bottomup), or the betrayal of trust by agents who bend or break the formal rules set out by the principal (top-down). The discrepancy between formal rules and informal norms has become an important dimension in the neoinstitutionalist analyses since North (1990) (Helmke and Levitsky 2006; Lauth 2004; Krastev 2004, 2005). The empirical effort, however, concentrates on measuring corruption against a yardstick provided by the normative perspective outlined above. Measurement The idea that corruption can be measured is a core assumption of the corruption paradigm. Even though there is no universal measure of corruption,

A Critique of the Global Corruption “Paradigm” 301

attempts to quantify its various dimensions and compare diverse measurements are omnipresent. Knack divides existing indices according to the characteristics of their respondents and the way in which the assessment was conducted. I shall examine three of his categories of measurement here: (1) representative surveys of service users; (2) expert assessments; and (3) composite indices (see table 1 in Knack 2006, 49). Category 1: Representative Surveys of Service Users This category includes four indices: the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS); the Executive Opinion Survey conducted by the World Economic Forum (WEF); the World Values Survey; and the International Crime Victim Survey. While the first two measurements take their data from professionals working for commercial companies, the latter two are household surveys. BEEPS covers twenty-five countries3 and has been compiled every three years since 1999. It is sponsored by the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the World Bank. Its regional focus is on the “transitional” economies of Eastern Europe and Central Asia while the analytical element concentrates on the pressure entrepreneurs face to pay bribes as well as the impact of corruption on their businesses. BEEPS facilitates companylevel as well as country-level analysis because it includes detailed data on the firms it surveys. (In 2002, the survey included six thousand one hundred firms in more than thirty countries.) The WEF’s Executive Opinion Survey captures the perceptions of business leaders on corruption. Surveys were carried out in 2002, 2005, and 2007 in 80, 104, and 125 countries, respectively, including 14 in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.4 It asks questions similar to the BEEPS, but pays more attention to the respondents’ perceptions of corruption than to their companies’ direct experiences. The Executive Opinion Survey shows the average responses for a given country, which enables country-level but not business-level analysis. The World Values Survey has been carried out every five years since 1990 and is funded by various scientific foundations (for origins, see Inglehart 1977). Household surveys like the World Values Survey and the International Crime Victimisation Survey ask individuals and households about their experiences with or attitudes toward corruption. Knack points out that such household surveys are of limited use as they are only made public with a time delay and suffer from comparability problems (Knack 2006, 8). Indices based on business surveys help us understand the administrative corruption that occurs between commercial enterprises and public officials,

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but they say little about state capture. They might be used, for example, to test the hypothesis that increasing civil servants’ pay will lead to less bribeseeking in the process of policy making or to assess the effectiveness of policies. Category 2: Expert Assessments This category includes the data on corruption featured in the Nations in Transit reports (NIT) compiled by Freedom House; the International Country Risk Guide (ICRG); the World Bank’s Country Policy and Institutional Assessment (CPIA); and the Index published by the Economist Intelligence Unit. According to Knack, both the NIT and the ICRG are examples of centralized expert assessments of corruption, which means that while they gather information from a variety of sources, only a small number of people influence the final ranking. While the NIT focuses on the impact of corruption on businesses, the ICRG pays more attention to the frequency of corrupt transactions. Both indices provide only one measure for corruption, which does not allow for discrimination between various types of corruption. The NIT is freely available and publicizes more information about its sources, assessment criteria, and surveying methodology than the ICRG. The PRS Group offers paid subscription to the ICRG and targets an audience of multinational investors. The sources of funding behind the various corruption-assessment agencies result in different biases. While the NIT is more politically oriented, the ICRG takes its subscribers’ interests into account and is therefore likely to reflect the conditions faced by foreign investors rather than those with which domestic companies contend. The EIU indicators are similarly problematic. Their purpose is to produce risk assessment for overseas investors. The factors that contribute to the security of foreign investment may be quite different from risks faced by domestic entrepreneurs. Thus the picture of corruption created by these indicators might accord little with the actual practices within a particular country. Biases are intrinsic to expert assessments. The CPIA ratings determine the financial allocations of the International Development Association to the World Bank’s lower-income countries. Some observers allege that the country teams might thus have incentive to propose higher ratings, such as less “corrupt,” for their regions. Bias can be reduced, however, by combining the opinions of observers/experts with the views of professionals directly experiencing corruption. Like the NIT and the ICRG, the CPIA measures the different features of corruption in one broad rating. These composite indices, Knack’s next category, reduced measurement bias by synthesizing observers’

A Critique of the Global Corruption “Paradigm” 303

and participants’ perspectives in assessing corruption and by reducing measurement errors in specific surveys. Category 3: Composite Indices The best-known example in this category is the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) 5 that measures the degree to which corruption is perceived to exist by a country’s public officials and politicians. It is a composite index, drawing on seventeen surveys from thirteen independent institutions, which gathered the opinions of businesspeople and country analysts. Because they combine information from various data, these indices can include a larger number of countries than were in every particular data set. In Table 8.2, I illustrate the indices for the postcommunist countries. The ratings in columns 2 to 4 include the Nations in Transition (NIT) corruption index, the Transparency International corruption perception index (CPI), and the World Bank Good Governance indicator for control of corruption on their original scales. I adjusted the scales to make the indices comparable in columns 5 to 7. Thus, the NIT scale (which is 1 to 7, with 1 being the best grade) and the World Bank Good Governance indicators (which is scaled from -2.5 to +2.5) have been weighted to correspond to the 1 to 10 scale (with 10 being the best grade) used by the TI CPI index. The three adjusted indices are easy to compare and the calculated average of the three indices provides an aggregate indicator for each country on a scale from 1 to 10 (with 10 being the best). The countries are presented in descending order of the aggregate indicator (column 8). The ranking of countries on the basis of the aggregate scale is not dramatically different from the ordering of countries produced by the individual composite indices and the resultant groups of countries can be clearly defined: new members of the European Union are in the lead (with an exception of Romania), followed by those aspiring to EU membership, and the CIS countries, including Russia, at the bottom. The so-called pull factor of the European Union is not the only factor but certainly an influential one in accounting for the difference. Composite indices are considered beneficial because the combination of several sources is more likely to capture the different forms of corruption and therefore paint a more comprehensive picture of this complex phenomenon. By combining several measures, these composite indices also reduce the margin of error, which is a great advantage given the secretive nature of corruption and the associated difficulty in identifying accurate and reliable sources for its measurement. However, this also makes indices interdependent. The CPI

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TA B L E

8.2. Indices of Corruption, Compared and Averaged NIT 2006

CPI 2006

WB GG 2005

NIT 2006 chg

TI's CPI 2006

WB GG chg

Average

Slovenia

2.25

6.40

0.88

8.21

6.40

6.76

7.12

Estonia

2.50

6.70

0.88

7.86

6.70

6.76

7.11

Hungary

3.00

5.20

0.63

7.14

5.20

6.26

6.20

Slovakia

3.00

4.70

0.43

7.14

4.70

5.86

5.90

Latvia

3.25

4.70

0.33

6.79

4.70

5.66

5.72

Czech Republic

3.50

4.80

0.42

6.43

4.80

5.84

5.69

Lithuania

4.00

4.80

0.26

5.71

4.80

5.52

5.34

Poland

3.25

3.70

0.19

6.79

3.70

5.38

5.29

Bulgaria

3.75

4.00

-0.05

6.07

4.00

4.90

4.99

Croatia

4.50

3.40

0.07

5.00

3.40

5.14

4.51

Romania

4.25

3.10

-0.23

5.36

3.10

4.54

4.33

Bosnia and Herzegovina

4.25

2.90

-0.32

5.36

2.90

4.36

4.21

Serbia

4.75

3.00

-0.55

4.64

3.00

3.90

3.85

Macedonia

4.75

2.70

-0.50

4.64

2.70

4.00

3.78

Georgia

5.50

2.80

-0.57

3.57

2.80

3.86

3.41

Albania

5.25

2.60

-0.76

3.93

2.60

3.48

3.34

Armenia

5.75

2.90

-0.64

3.21

2.90

3.72

3.28

Ukraine

5.75

2.80

-0.63

3.21

2.80

3.74

3.25

Moldova

6.00

3.20

-0.76

2.86

3.20

3.48

3.18

Russia

6.00

2.50

-0.74

2.86

2.50

3.52

2.96

Kyrgyzstan

6.00

2.20

-1.06

2.86

2.20

2.88

2.65

Azerbaijan

6.25

2.40

-1.01

2.50

2.40

2.98

2.63

Kazakhstan

6.50

2.60

-0.94

2.14

2.60

3.12

2.62

Belarus

6.25

2.10

-0.90

2.50

2.10

3.20

2.60

Tajikistan

6.25

2.20

-1.08

2.50

2.20

2.84

2.51

Uzbekistan

6.50

2.10

-1.07

2.14

2.10

2.86

2.37

Turkmenistan

6.75

2.20

-1.30

1.79

2.20

2.40

2.13

A Critique of the Global Corruption “Paradigm” 305

weighs all its contributing indices—the WEF, EIU, IMD, and the WMRC indices—equally. The World Bank Institute’s Control of Corruption Index weighs its different sources according to their importance and includes some extra data such as that provided by the ICRG. The WBI’s Control of Corruption Index was created to improve on the CPI by providing a corruption ranking for every country for which at least one source of data was available and by calculating its margin of error more precisely. It also strives to weigh its sources objectively by attaching more importance to indices that correlate to one another. Despite these efforts, there are many faults in all these indices that undermine both the validity and relevance of the measurements. Knack warns that this problem is exacerbated further because these measurements were designed to create an awareness of the problem of corruption yet are subsequently being used for policy making without the requisite reevaluation that make them appropriate for this new role. Policy Making Related to the idea of the core importance of measurement is the third assumption of the corruption paradigm—the belief that the measurement of corruption, considered among other governance indicators,6 can be translated into policy. The relationship between measurement and policy formation can be viewed in stages: the measurements produce stimuli and inform policies internationally, national political leadership is thus persuaded to implement policies, and the institutional frameworks (the rules of the game) are reformed by these policies. The paradigm explicitly expects compliance with recommended policies to result in an improved record for these countries in the existing ranks, indices, and indicators of corruption. Rose-Ackerman (1999) and Kaufman (1997) outline governmental reforms that were driven by corruption indices, or were stimulated by the desire to reduce perceived corruption as a result of the increasingly high profile of such indices. Kaufman’s observations include the embrace through policy changes of fuller liberalization; macroeconomic deregulation; tax, government, and budget reform; institutional reform; legal reform; and civil service reform including an improved pay system with adequate salary incentives and enforceable penalties for malfeasance. Rose-Ackerman’s suggestions to reduce incentives and increase costs for corrupt behavior include elimination of anticorruption programs; privatization; reform of public programs; administrative reform; implementation of anticorruption laws and procurement systems.

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Corruption

Some of these have certainly worked. The Czech Republic and other leaders in the postcommunist transformation are examples of their effectiveness, but they have not produced favorable results in the majority of the CIS countries. One of the problems associated with policy reform driven by corruption measurement indices is the lack of customization of policy to context. Because the corruption measurement is undertaken by international organizations, the policies are devised (or at least strongly influenced) at the supranational level without specific attention to the country’s background and the culture of the society that will implement the policies (Stiglitz 2002). The policies further assume (perhaps erroneously) sufficient political will to at least initiate the process of reform in countries with systemic corruption. NGOs and international lending organizations consider pressure to target and eliminate corruption part and parcel of globalization with its prescribed norms of good governance. Countries are obliged to implement anticorruption programs in exchange for closer integration into the world community. Since the late 1990s, a shift in terminology from the “fight against corruption” to the discourse of “good governance” signifies an important trend in policy formation. Where corruption was once viewed as a disease to be treated, it is now increasingly diagnosed as one symptom of a struggling system of governance whose problems need to be addressed by a wider set of measures. Consequently, international organizations and NGOs have become more interested in understanding the cultural factors that facilitate or impede institutional reform. They have also begun to search for positive incentives for tackling the issues generated by corruption. Effective policy making should reduce the dependence of the system of governance on nontransparent practices. It must also complement reform from above with incentives and initiatives on the ground that foster responsible leadership and generate the political will to tackle corruption. Similarly, in academia scholars have recently shifted their emphasis from corruption to themes of honesty, integrity, and trust.7 While this shift in orientation to policy design is necessary, it is not sufficient, as governments also need concrete incentives to adopt the policies. Before discussing policy and policy implementation, we must consider the hegemonic status of the existing paradigm. The corruption paradigm was founded on the three assumptions outlined above, implemented by global institutions, and supported by global resources. Is it thus an artifact of neoliberal reforms and informed by tenets of the Washington consensus and market

A Critique of the Global Corruption “Paradigm” 307

fundamentalism? Are we at risk of a biased view of corruption if we subscribe to the global corruption paradigm? In theory, corruption dwells on power and is obscured by monopoly (Bliss and Di Tella 1997). Just as monopoly disguises corruption in industry or trade, the hegemonic view of corruption shared by all of the major players in corruption studies and policy making creates monopolistic tendencies that obscure important dimensions of the studied phenomenon. The following questions about the paradigm occur in this context: (1) Are the assumptions that inform the corruption paradigm relevant for postcommunist countries? (2) Should these assumptions be adjusted to accommodate postcommunist developments? (3) Are other adjustments necessary to include the perspectives and experiences of African, Asian, Middle Eastern, and Latin American countries; and (4) Might a regional perspective enrich rather than undermine the efforts of global institutions? In the next part, I undertake a critical examination of the assumptions of the prevalent corruption paradigm in general and then consider how the postcommunist experience modifies or reinforces the paradigm. In the final part I offer a complementary perspective that enables a more precise conceptualization of postcommunist corruption.

Beyond the Corruption Paradigm The following critique of these assumptions focuses on three problems: the cultural and historical neutrality of the corruption definition (assumption 1); measurement validity (assumption 2); and the implications of the global corruption paradigm for policy making (assumption 3). Problems with the Definition Corruption is a fairly recent concept and can only be defined as “misuse of public office for private gain” in a modern context—a context of well-defined bureaucratic order. It assumes clear distinctions between public and private domains and a contractual basis to the relationship between the principal/state and its agents/ bureaucrats, where bureaucrats are paid to follow procedures. Yet such a de-historicized notion of corruption is unusable in postcommunist societies. Weber’s definition of bureaucracy as an “ideal type” includes a hierarchical division of labor; direction by an explicit, impersonally applied set of rules; administration by full-time, career professionals who do not in any

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Corruption

sense own the “means of administration” or their jobs or the sources of their funds. The civil servants who run the bureaucracy are further assumed to live off of a salary rather than from income derived directly from the performance of their jobs. In a fully rationalized society, these features would be found in the public service, in the offices of private firms, in universities, and so on. Weber contrasted bureaucracy with “prebends” or “benefices,” meaning an “office” with some income-yielding property, such as tax-gathering rights from which the officeholder lives. The notion of corruption that prevails in a “modern” rational-legal bureaucratic system governed by norms of universality and a strong distinction between private inequality and public advantage would make little sense in a patrimonial system where jobs were given away in order to “feed” their holders. The “prebend” officially “owns” his job and expects tribute for performing it. The modern bureaucrat, by contrast, is paid a salary for reliably following official rules and is not allowed to charge fees for himself or accept gifts. The behavior that sustains a patrimonial system constitutes the “misuse of public office for private gain” in a bureaucracy.8 Not all postcommunist countries meet the standard of modernity set by Weber. The lack of a fundamental division between public and private in postcommunist countries generates forms of expediency and rationality that are not conducive to modernity and present an obstacle to the rationality of the “rule of law.” This tendency is more noticeable the longer the period of communist rule. In her effort to integrate the hazy distinction between the public and private in postcommunist societies into an analytical framework, Alina Pippidi (2006) distinguishes between sociopolitical systems based on universalism and those based on particularism. She characterizes a universalist state as one in which power is relatively evenly distributed between its different constituent groups. There is a clear distinction between the public and the private and correspondingly, social acceptance of corruption is very low. Incidences of corruption are therefore the exception rather than the rule. If corruption does occur there are procedures and institutions in place that offset its effects and punish those involved. In a particularistic state, however, power is concentrated in the hands of a numerically small elite. The distinction between public and private is blurred, and those in power consider it normal to use their positions for economic and private gain. Consequently, engagement in corrupt practices is widely accepted and develops into an informal norm. Federico Varese observes that in countries with pervasive corruption— where corruption is the norm—the very notion of corruption itself becomes

A Critique of the Global Corruption “Paradigm” 309

meaningless. Anticorruption campaigns are used manipulatively and perceived with suspicion, and the overall perception of corruption is likely to be distorted (Varese 2000, 99–100). In such a climate any anticorruption program is hard to implement. Pippidi observes that since the communist regimes were dismantled in Central and Eastern Europe, they have attempted to make the transition from a particularistic system to a universalistic one, but have so far only reached a stage that she calls “competitive particularism.” She argues that at this point most countries are hybrids, combining the elements of the two “ideal types,” while the distinction between public and private remains blurred. The level of corruption within the societies does not improve, while decreased public acceptance of corruption heightens dissatisfaction with the system and with democratization more generally.9 Kornai’s analysis of disappointment among postcommunist populations, even in successful transitional societies, illustrates not only a shifting frame of reference—new members of the European Union compare themselves to old members rather than to Russia or other former Soviet countries—but also points to people’s continued dissociation from the “system,” distrust of public institutions, and correspondingly low rates of participation in civil society (Kornai 2006). Given that no society operates without trust and the persistence of some degree of cohesion within these societies, this disappointment and lack of trust in “officialdom” highlights the presence of alternative sources of social trust. Informal networks and practices continue to operate or emerge to create and redistribute wealth within the European Union and globally, as well as to serve the so-called remittance economies (Tilly 2005). A more sociological, or indeed managerial, approach to determining the gap between universalist or particularist patterns of interaction in different parts of the world was undertaken by Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner (1998), in their study of business managers in thirty-five countries. They define cultural patterns of how people relate to each other on the basis of Talcott Parsons’ value orientations: universalism versus particularism (rules versus relationships); communitarianism versus individualism (the group versus the individual); neutral versus emotional (the range of feelings expressed); diffuseness versus specificity (the range of involvement); and achievement versus ascription (how status is accorded). Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner suggest that in universalist cultures rules rather than relationships govern transactions among people.

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Equality is the standard of fairness and it is best achieved through equal application of rules rather than accommodation of particular circumstances. Particularist cultures, by contrast, grant priority to the unique conditions that characterize a given transaction. Members of such societies are inclined to think, “This person is not ‘a citizen,’ but my friend, brother, husband, child or person of unique importance to me. . . . I must therefore sustain, protect or discount this person no matter what the rules say” (1998, 31; emphasis in original). The authors note that businesspeople from each type of society tend to regard those of the other as corrupt: “A universalist will say of particularists, ‘they cannot be trusted because they will always help their friends,’ while a particularist, conversely, will say of universalists, ‘you cannot trust them; they would not even help a friend’” (1998, 32).10 North American and most north European managers emerge as almost totally universalist in their choice between rule and relationship-based strategies (Switzerland 97 percent; USA and Canada 93 percent). The proportion falls to under 75 percent for the French (73 percent) and Japanese (68 percent), while in Russia (44 percent) and China (47 percent) more than half of respondents would lie to the police to protect their friend. Interestingly, the Central European countries such as Hungary (85 percent), the Czech Republic (83 percent), and Poland (73 percent) are very close to the North European universalist type. This observation somewhat undermines Pippidi’s earlier generalization about Central and East Europe as particularist and fits the thesis of differentiation of postcommunist regimes (Carothers 2002). In other tests for determining the predominance of universalist or particularist patterns of interaction between people, Poland and the Czech Republic appear somewhat nearer to Russia but overall Russia’s position is closer to China than any other former communist country in the survey. While China and Russia have both been identified as particularist cultures, the scores for individualism (a prime orientation to the self) and communitarianism (a prime orientation to common goals and objectives) show a significant gap. Forty-one percent of Chinese respondents opt for “individual freedom as an indicator of the quality of life.” It is thus in the same group as France (41 percent), Japan (39 percent), Brazil (40 percent), and India (37 percent). However, in Russia 60 percent favor individual freedom, which makes it similar to Sweden (60 percent), Poland (59 percent), Bulgaria (59 percent), and superseding of Hungary (56 percent), Norway (54 percent), and Germany (53 percent) (Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner 1998, 55).

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A similarly substantial difference occurs in assessing whether individual credit is given for achievement in the workplace. In China, 55 percent of respondents say that individual credit is received, while in Russia 86 percent consider individual recognition a common practice. Interestingly, Russian and East European managers also score highest (69 percent for Russia, closely followed by Hungary, Romania, Czech Republic, Poland, and Bulgaria) in ascribing individual responsibility for cases of negligence, which suggests that they are more individualistic in their orientation.11 It is likely that cleavages identified within the group of managers might not be the same in other social groups and, as shown above, differ significantly for different, albeit related, variables in the same country. The overall complexity of cleavages and counterintuitive groupings of countries illustrate just how misleading our generalizations about postcommunist countries can be. Next we will consider how these differences correspond to index-based measurements. Problems with Measurement Measurement problems fall into two basic categories: problems of validity (what we measure); and problems of reliability (how we measure). The two issues are related, yet they are very different problems. Most analysts accept that we do not measure the actual volume of corruption per se. Optimally we can achieve some quantifiable indicators of peoples’ perceptions of corruption and the policies implemented to curb it. Even if we leave the social construction of “perception” outside of this discussion, the assumption that such a complex and multifaceted phenomenon could be summed up in one figure by averaging different estimates of different peoples’ perceptions of different types of corruption should indeed be questioned. Firstly, the phenomenon of corruption is often too complex to be represented by a single figure. While a numerical value can be useful in some contexts, it is important to explain its specific referent, that is, whether it is indicating how often bribe seeking occurs, how large the actual bribes are, or both. The NIT, CPIA, and ICRG simply publish one number for all aspects, which is a very broad indication of corruption in a given country. Even more importantly, the corrupt practices included in the index may not be unrelated. Indeed, qualitative research findings indicate that some people’s corrupt practices are not only justified by “others doing the same” but even legitimized by attributing “corruption” to others. Thus, it is a commonplace for respondents

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in postcommunist countries to distrust public institutions and blame corruption on “others,” generally elites, whose actions legitimate their own engagement in petty corruption. It is tempting to follow this logic and conclude that corruption at the top breeds corruption at the bottom because the two go hand in hand. However, it is important to notice the contradictory nature of these practices. People’s engagement in informal practices could in fact be a compensatory response to the corruption at the top, a practice driven by forces that can only be understood in context. Arguably, grassroots forms of corruption are not only a consequence of the misuse of public office for private gain, but also an expression of entitlement associated with people’s expectations of social justice, sharing, and compensation for poverty or deprivation. In this respect “informal practices” should not only be seen as forms of compliance and complicity with the “corrupt system” but also as forms of everyday resistance to ineffective governance and as reactions to “corrupt practices” at the top. While such practices contribute to the spread of corruption, they also represent a form of mobilization against corruption. This duality presents a problem in terms of both perception of corruption and its measurement. Even if composite indices are disaggregated, we do not have the tools to empirically capture the contradictory nature of these practices—yet they have a crucial bearing on what we measure. In my analysis of the second group of problems—how we measure— I draw heavily on the important work of World Bank economist Stephen Knack, who criticized the existing indices and assessed their comparability.12 The first of these problems concerns the transparency of the methodology through which the indices are constructed, an essential aspect of their utility and interpretation. This means that the agencies involved in compiling the indices should clarify exactly how they define corruption, what their methodology is, which sources they have consulted, what their assessment criteria are, and how much weight they give to each index. The CPIA, for example, does not publish all its rankings nor does it publicly justify why it ranked certain countries the way it did. The CPIA as well as the NIT, the ICRG, and the EIU are not transparent about what their assessment criteria are, nor do they indicate how much weight they give to the different aspects of corruption when calculating their indices. This issue is exacerbated in the composite indices as they combine the results of several surveys, which is detrimental to both transparency and precision.

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Secondly, the sources used in the compilation of the indices are not always totally independent of each other. Knack mentions that the respondents in expert surveys might consult publicly available information about corruption before logging their own answers in order to provide “better” responses. Previous studies therefore have an impact on their answers, which reduces their neutrality. The CPIA even adjusts its final ratings to be more in line with other indices, and the WBI weights its component sources according to their agreement with others. This is based on the assumption that if one source differs substantially from the majority of others it is inaccurate. As Knack points out, this assumption makes sense only if the majority of indices are independent of each other, which they are not. To support his point, he highlights the probability that the EIU is based on the WEF and that the ICRG seems correlated to the TI. The problem is further complicated by the impossibility of determining the precise extent to which the different sources are interdependent. The WBI weighting of its constituent sources could be inadvertently distorted by this interdependence. One source might be weighted more heavily than it should be because of a lack of clarity about the nature of it correlation to another. Thirdly, it is sometimes difficult to compare even the same index for one country over time or for different countries in the same year (Galtung, 2005). This is due to the fact that the compilation methodologies change after a few years and also that it is not always feasible to use qualitatively similar sources in all countries. The CPIA’s criteria, for instance, are revised after a number of years, and the TI’s components also change with time. Knack believes, for example, that since the TI did not keep the 2004 sources for any of the ECA countries it evaluated in 2005 any changes in the CPI might be due to this switch. He also highlights that the WBI used twenty-three different combinations of sources for the ECA countries in 2004, but different combinations of sources were used in different countries. Not even three countries in this region were based on the same set of sources. Knack associates this inconsistency with differences in the final index, arguing that it compromises the index’s usefulness in cross-country comparison. While Knack generally welcomes the addition of new countries to an index, he also points out that this can cause problems, especially for institutions that publish a ranking of countries according to prevalence of corruption without revealing the actual corruption score. Adding new countries makes the index bigger and a country’s rank might deteriorate although its corruption did not worsen. As an example, Knack mentions that

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when the CPI started to include Luxembourg and Iceland in the late 1990s the rank for most countries went down because Luxemburg and Iceland fared rather well on the corruption scale. Interpreters of such data need to take these additions into account when making judgments based on this index. Norwegian researcher Tina Søreide (2006) further criticizes the CPI index for a lack of correlation between the rankings and the level of corruption in a particular country. She questions the meaning of the ranks and points out the misleading nature of their precision: What does it mean that China is ranked number 71 with a score of 3.4, while the UK is ranked number 11 with a score of 8.6? The lack of a standardized approach to estimating the level of corruption makes it difficult to know whether the rankings reflect the number of transactions affected by corruption, legal or illegal activities, the level of bribes or the cost to society. (Søreide 2006, 3)

Although the TI publishes its margins of error, these “error bands” are usually in an order of magnitude higher than the precision in the ranking. Søreide illustrates this point with the case of Malta. A score of 6.8 positions Malta 25th in the 2004 CPI. But given the study’s uncertainty band of 5.3 to 8.2, Malta could be either less corrupt than Canada, ranked 12th, or more corrupt than Suriname ranked 49th. But since these uncertainty bands are rarely communicated to the audience by the press, the current presentation with decimal accuracy is misleading to many readers (Søreide 2006). She recommends reformatting presentation of the TI CPI in a group form where countries are listed alphabetically and not tied to a specific number. In this form, however, the index loses its political influence and policy use, whereby countries are encouraged to climb up the ranking order and watch out for their neighbors and competitors while they do the same. Her proposed format might also render the position of each country less visible and more difficult to change, thus destroying the anticipation that accompanies the annual release of the index. Analysts have already addressed some of these critiques methodologically (see Frederic Galtung 2005) and practically. Freedom House and Transparency International, for example, have supplemented their indices with qualitative reports. Problems with Policy Making For both the scholarly and policy-making communities, the so-called no predisposition outlook has become the foundation of the “can-do” approach

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to anticorruption campaigns. Academic debates in particular shifted away from the premise that some cultures are more predisposed to corruption than others and that some countries are historically locked into dependence on corrupt practices as broad cultural typing came to be regarded as “politically incorrect.” For example, the focus on a country’s background, such as “Russians are corrupt” and “Russia has been a kleptocracy throughout its history” gives way to the argument that Russia is a normal country following a historically typical trajectory (Shleifer and Treisman 2004).13 Thomas Carothers (2002) questions the “can-do” approach in his critique of the “any country can become a democracy” attitude. He argues that a country’s background—economic level, political history, institutional legacies, ethnic makeup, sociocultural traditions, and other “structural” features—constitute important factors in the success of democratization (see Ekiert and Hanson 2003). Daniel Treisman (2000) looks closely at differences in historical and cultural traditions, levels of economic development, political institutions, and government policies in an effort to explain why corruption—the misuse of public office for private gain—is perceived to be more widespread in some countries than in others. He finds that index-based evidence supports the following conclusions: countries with Protestant traditions, histories of British rule, more developed economies, and (probably) higher imports were less “corrupt”; federal states were more “corrupt”; long exposure to democracy predicted lower corruption, while the current depth of democracy was not significant. The study also assumes that perception of corruption is correlated to corruption. If we take Treisman’s conclusions to indicate that particular historical and cultural factors impact corruption (rather than merely corruption perception) what options are open to countries that score low on all of these criteria? In her effort to explain why anticorruption reforms fail in the postcommunist environment, Pippidi suggests that in order to determine the developmental stage of a country and to design the anticorruption campaign accordingly, the following questions must be answered: (1) Are the power holders clearly identifiable, and do they give government contracts and access to the media mainly to themselves and their relatives? (2) Do the same social groups always lose out on lucrative opportunities associated with the state, and to what extent are these groups organized? (3) What are bribes given for, and what are the benefits for the bribe takers? Dissemination of universalist norms is one of the key policies that Pippidi suggests need to be implemented in order to reduce bribe taking and make

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semiparticularist countries more universalist and democratic. This requires displacing existing particularist norms. A policy directed toward such cultural reorganization requires knowledge of the particularist norms and the channels through which they are propagated. It must be designed with local expertise and implemented with cooperation at the grassroots level. Specific incentives that could motivate a particular society to become clean(er) must be identified (Nield 2002), particular actors (movements) must be made responsible for overcoming corruption (Pippidi 2006), and the authority to implement the policies must be clearly delegated to those actors (Schmidt 2007).

Informal Practices as Indicators of Injustice and Distrust Having analyzed the assumptions of the global corruption paradigm, I now turn to the record of postcommunist experience. From a historical perspective, efforts to assess the progress of anticorruption measures in postcommunist countries two decades into the process of political and economic transformation can be seen as premature given how long it took mature democracies to clean up their governance—a process that itself is far from complete. With a few notable exceptions, good governance has not been an immediately achievable goal. Rather, it is a process transitional countries undertook simultaneous with their democratization projects. According to the 2006 World Bank governance indicators, Slovenia and Estonia succeeded in their anticorruption campaigns and scored higher than many developed countries. In some transitional countries, such as Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Belarus, despite initial political openings democratization efforts have clearly failed and authoritarian regimes have resolidified. Overall, Carothers (2002) estimated that of the nearly one hundred countries considered “transitional” at the beginning of the twenty-first century, only a relatively small number—probably fewer than twenty—were clearly en route to becoming well-functioning democracies. The leaders of these democratizing countries are primarily in Central Europe and the Baltic region—Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Estonia, and Slovenia—though there are a few in South America and East Asia, notably Chile, Uruguay, and Taiwan. Those that have made somewhat less progress, but still appear to be advancing, include Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Mexico, Brazil, Ghana, the Philippines, and South Korea. Yet the

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majority of third-wave countries are neither dictatorial nor clearly headed toward democracy. According to Carothers, they have entered a political gray zone. They have some attributes of democratic political life, including at least limited political space for opposition parties and independent civil society, as well as regular elections and democratic constitutions. Yet they suffer from serious democratic deficits, often including poor representation of citizens’ interests, low levels of political participation beyond voting, frequent abuse of the law by government officials and elections of uncertain legitimacy (Levitsky and Way 2002, 2010). New Assumptions Given that there is no single message coming from the postcommunist countries, it is essential to find a way to integrate local practices into the global corruption paradigm. Karklins (2005) identifies “the system made me do it” effect in her recent account of postcommunist corruption but includes it among other types of corruption. Her typology is an important step in disaggregating postcommunist corruption. Yet some further “disaggregation” is required to accommodate the critique of the assumptions of the global corruption paradigm and to embrace the bottom-up perspective on corrupt practices. For example, one should assume that grassroots forms of corruption are not only the outcome of the misuse of public office for private gain but also an expression of entitlement associated with people’s expectations regarding social (in)justice and compensation for poverty or deprivation. Informal practices can be a response to oppressive regulations and a form of collective whistle blowing. In this respect, they should be considered an indicator of administrative corruption rather than one of its elements. In certain contexts top-down anticorruption campaigns should be treated with suspicion, while informal practices should be viewed as driven by considerations of justice and as having an equalizing effect on the society. In other words, “local knowledge” is the key to understanding the contextual specificity of “informal practices” in relation to “corruption” rather than seeing the former as a species of the latter. As Steven Lovell put it: Informal practices—whether or not one chooses to condemn them as corrupt—exist not because people are trying to con one another but because they allow people to get things done in environments where formal rules and structures work imperfectly (if at all). By now, no special pleading is

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required for the study of informal practices. The time has come, rather, to ask more searching questions of them: above all, to find ways of assessing how important they really are, and how their importance changes over time. (Lovell 2008, 373–88)

Local framing is critical to interpreting informal practices and weighing their impact on the larger society. The local discourse justifying informal practices may differ from the hegemonic discourse of corruption, the existing “universal” framework for policy making, or the global corruption paradigm. “Informal practices” are not only forms of compliance and complicity with the “corrupt system”; they are also forms of everyday resistance to ineffective governance of state institutions and reactions to large-scale political corruption. Understanding informal practices as responses to the “injustice” and “unfairness” of the system helps us to reassess, from a bottom-up perspective, the correlation between corrupt practices at the grassroots (petty corruption) and those at the top (political corruption). In order to understand this relationship, it is essential to distinguish between legality, as the formal system of justice, and justice as a motive and frame of individual mobilization (a-contextual versus contextual). Different countries and regions have different formal “capacities for justice.” Defects in formal capacities create contexts in which alternative or “practical” understandings of justice operate. The ethnography of informal practices contributes to an understanding of their underlying incentives and logic, thus shedding more light on the workings of formal systems of justice. The available analyses of informal practices (Grødeland 2005; Kusznir 2006; Ledeneva 2006; Pippidi 2006) show that: Informal practices should not be seen merely as a detriment to a country’s economic transformation; some informal practices contribute to transformation success. Informal practices have a contradictory effect: they are both supportive and subversive of postcommunist institutions; Informal practices are not only a cause but also a consequence of the ineffectiveness of formal institutions. They can thus serve as indicators of institutional development—particularly given the fact that measurements of informal practices can be more precise than measurements of corruption; A new mode of informal practice is manipulative use of the law through adherence to the letter but not the spirit of the law. Thus, a fruitful new

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realm of inquiry is the uncharted waters of so-called legal corruption (legalized ways of extracting income from mediatory activities introduced through “state capture” by private interests); Postcommunist informal practices are closer to informal practices in developed countries than most analysts assume. Their existence indicates not just the “catching up” or “closing of a gap” between postcommunist and developed countries, but complex processes of convergence. The similarities across context can also be seen as a sign of a wider process of “informalization” in the world economy. (Sassen 2004)

Bottom-up conceptualization of informal practices requires an interdisciplinary approach as well as an understanding of the complexity of the shifting relationship between formal and informal. The informal practices in the 1990s, just after the collapse of communism, were not the same as they are today. The scale and function of informal practices change depending on a range of historical, cultural, social, economic, and political factors. An informal practice that plays a compensatory (and somewhat supportive) role in an oppressive regime can assume a more subversive role after regime change, as the example of blat demonstrates, and similar informal practices may perform different functions in different regimes (see comparison of blat and guanxi in Ledeneva 2008). Generally speaking, the reasons informal practices emerge are not the same as the reasons they reproduce. This distinction must be reflected in the analysis of informal practices and in designing policies to encourage them to change. Measurement What I propose in this chapter is by no means an alternative to existing ways of assessing corruption. It is rather a complementary approach: an anthropological perspective that does not rely on the universal definition of corruption. It proceeds by suspending judgment on practices seen as corrupt and by considering the meaning of a variety of informal practices embedded in concrete societies. Rather than following the top-down logic of corruption indices or governance indicators, it calls for a bottom-up perspective and disaggregated measurement. My approach shifts the focus of analysis from legal or moral proscription to a relational understanding of specific practices as “strategies of coping” with the larger system. This has the advantage of capturing a range of practices that are omitted or misinterpreted by the current conceptualization of corruption, such

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as manipulative use of the law or extralegal practices that attempt to redress systemic injustice, and thereby embody resistance or mobilization. Such practices are regulated by values and incentives that may not be perceived as corrupt by their protagonists, although they nourish corruption indirectly. I conceptualize such informal practices as “people’s regular strategies to manipulate (or exploit) formal rules by enforcing informal norms and creating personal obligations in formal contexts” (Ledeneva 2006, 2013), and I argue that informal practices constitute important indicators of the workings of formal institutions. They are important markers of the progress of administrative reforms in the state-sector and corporate-governance reforms in the private sector. The prospect of integrating informal practices into the corruption paradigm provokes two immediate questions. The first question is whether it is possible to quantify informal practices. Measurement of informal practices is clearly a complex issue given that they are elusive, but also context-bound, and culturally and historically shaped. Yet I would argue that there is no significant difference between measuring perceptions of corruption, which Galtung refers to as “measuring the immeasurable” (Galtung 2005), and measuring the perception of informal practices. In fact, the latter would be more accurate, if surveys referred to specific practices in the language of participants. Informal practices are part of the everyday lives of respondents in postcommunist countries and are often seen as survivalist adaptations rather than as morally reprehensible. Thus, asking participants about specific practices instead of, for example, “bribing in the last twelve months” is likely to improve the reliability of the data, even if it is harder for researchers to handle it. It will also provide a much more subtle picture of the gray areas, knowledge of which is arguably more beneficial to policy making.14 For example, the issue of the rule of law in Russia (one of the World Bank indicators) can be assessed by the spread of practices of “telephone justice.” “Telephone justice” originated in Soviet times. When a top official wanted a particular result in court, he would simply phone the judge and tell him what the party line was. The Communist Party long gone, pressure on courts continued to exist—President Medvedev’s priority was, in his own words, to eliminate “the practice of unfair decisions made through connections or for money” and “to make the judicial system genuinely independent of the executive and legislative branches of power.”15 How widespread is telephone justice in courts in Russia in general? In my 2007 all-Russia national survey, almost one-third of respondents seemed

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satisfied with the workings of the courts (12 percent replied that all court decisions are made by law, and 18 percent replied that only a few judges take bribes and are subject to pressure). More than half of the respondents, however, acknowledged the susceptibility of judges either to corrupt payments or other forms of pressure: 25 percent of respondents said that judges take bribes as a rule although there are also principled judges. A further 20 percent said that even these principled judges would react to pressure on particular cases. Seven percent said, “All court decisions are taken either for a bribe or under pressure ‘from above.’” The remaining 18 percent of respondents were “don’t knows.”16 The importance of informal practices can be overlooked if their analysis is purely quantitative. Legal experts whom I surveyed in Russia largely agree on the following formula: although it is ridiculous to suggest that every court case in Russia is decided according to directives from above, ways to influence a particular case can be found if needed. In other words, the pressure does not have to be pervasive to be fully effective. Moreover the form of influence can be chosen according to the personality of a judge. Court chairmen have a variety of ways to deal with judges known to be noncompliant or known for their personal integrity. Importantly, direct pressure might not even be necessary; in some cases judges’ dependence on court chairmen facilitates selfcensorship—the so-called chilling effect. Qualitative assessments are thus vital for understanding the measurements of informal practices. The second question is whether it is possible to compare informal practices. Again, the answer is “yes, where applicable,” and with better accuracy than comparisons of perceptions of corruption. Comparison of informal practices entails identifying similar patterns in people’s strategies and generating analysis of differences in the functions and implications of practices in their local contexts. Admittedly, informal practices are hard to study even within one country,17 without attempting to compare their functions in different formal frameworks that may themselves be noncomparable or changeable. The cultural specificity of informal practices, as well as respondents’ reticence about discussing them and researchers’ dependence on the ability of survey respondents to articulate the rules that govern them, make informal practices difficult to study. However such difficulties are not entirely different from the ones involved in studying corruption via more traditional methods. Furthermore, overcoming these challenges brings the researcher closer to targeting

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gray areas of corruption, which are otherwise inaccessible to policymakers. This appears to be a direction in which corruption studies can advance. With disaggregation, it is also possible to compare perceptions of different informal practices. I conducted another all-Russia national survey in 2007 to assess the spread of blat and to compare the perception of different informal practices. In that survey, the “hard to answer” prompts tend to be chosen less frequently (9 percent) than in the “telephone justice” survey (30 percent). When asked how widespread blat is in their locality an overwhelming majority of respondents (66 percent) said that it was widespread (28 percent) or rather widespread (38 percent). Only 13 percent said it was not widespread, and 4 percent said it was practically absent. In this case, 17 percent of respondents were “don’t knows.” The survey included further questions to ascertain whether particular sectors of the economy are disposed to informal solutions to problems, with emphasis on the health sector, labor markets, traffic police, and education (Ledeneva 2013). These types of practices may have different levels of legitimacy in different countries, but this can also be assessed through public surveys. An ethnographic approach makes use of and targets so-called local knowledge, however specific it may be. The data generated by such research is thus more likely to resonate with local perceptions. Given that many contemporary anticorruption policies are not very effective,18 global institutions will no doubt put local knowledge on their future agendas in a more systematic way (Rao and Walton 2004).19 Policy Making In theoretical terms, the global corruption paradigm that emerged in the 1990s has to be disaggregated in order to accommodate the reality of informal practices and to overcome the fundamental mismatch between the global framing of corruption and the postcommunist experience. I can imagine a similar mismatch in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America. Wherever my research has taken me, I have discovered that understanding local practices (such as use of guanxi in China) is essential for building anticorruption policies. It is this understanding that the “anthropological perspective” of informal practices can provide (Sissener 2001; Krastev 2004; Sampson 2005). In practical terms, little is known about bottom-up forms of mobilization or practices of everyday resistance in the global context. These “weapons of the weak” (Scott 1987) are driven by social inequality within the enlarged

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European Union or aimed at redistributing resources across the world. The most visible of them include the redistribution of the cost of medical operations to the patient, and similar practices at universities, schools, and kindergartens, where parents are forced to pick up the bill for what are supposed to be free public services. On a global level, redistributive practices include the workings of remittance economies—a phenomenon that has been both underreported and underestimated.20 At this stage it should be acknowledged that there is a shortage of data on informal practices, and as often happens in shortage situations, there are vested interests in keeping it that way (presumably studies on informal practices were “politically incorrect” during the EU accession period for the ten country-candidates, so it would be of additional value to assess the relevance of informal practices for any new EU members). Since most current anticorruption policies are “imported” through association with institutions of global governance and the adoption of externally prescribed norms of good governance, they are unsuccessful more often than not. As a result of the failure to make imported policies work in local contexts there has been a positive trend in rethinking such policies. The inductive logic “what would work in this particular local context?” should become central to future research. Identifying informal practices and working out measures to change them would be an important step in that direction. Focus on “informal practices” shaped by postcommunist experiences (and grasped in the postcommunist vernacular) is essential for the contextual sophistication of the global corruption paradigm and engagement with the region. But it applies to the rest of the world as well. In the final analysis, integrating alternative discourses of corruption and disaggregating the hegemonic global corruption paradigm will eventually benefit the anticorruption course and increase its soft power. Integrating informal practices into the global corruption paradigm on their own terms (rather than as a variant on the misuse of public resources for private gain) and measuring them in a disaggregated way will result in more effective policy making.

Notes 1.

These agencies were aided by the emergence of new measuring techniques, which facilitated an in-depth analysis of corruption. Indeed, in 2007 the independent Volcker Commission issued a report on the anticorruption investigative unit of the World Bank, also known by its acronym, INT. In its opening pages, the report

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notes the role of the World Bank Institute (WBI) in the work on anticorruption and called for resolute and concrete progress to implement an ambitious anticorruption program around the world. For access to the full Volcker Independent Panel Review, go to http://siteresources.worldbank.org/NEWS/Resources/Volcker_ Report_Sept._12,_for_website_FINAL.pdf. World Bank’s President Zoellick welcomed the findings and recommendations of the Report. For details, see http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/NEWS/0,,contentMDK:21469454~pagePK:64257043~piPK:437376~theSit ePK:4607,00.html. 2.

One reason for this is due to the role of corruption in undermining economic development and impeding investment.

3.

Number taken from http://info.worldbank.org/governance/beeps/countries.asp.

4.

See http://www.gcr.weforum.org.

5.

The scores range from ten (squeaky clean) to zero (highly corrupt). A score of five is the number TI considers the borderline figure distinguishing countries that do and do not have a serious corruption problem. TI CPI covered 163 countries in 2006. To access the CPI index, go to http://www.transparency.org/cpi/.

6.

World Bank governance indicators, now measured annually, include voice and accountability, political stability and lack of violence, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law, and control of corruption.

7.

See the volumes edited by Kornai, Rose-Ackerman, and Bo Rothstein (2004) and by Kornai and Rose-Ackerman (2004), which include contributions from the research project “Trust and Honesty in Post-Communist Societies,” supported by the World Bank and the Bank of Sweden. See also Markova 2004, especially Geoffrey Hosking’s chapter.

8.

Some governments have sold offices to raise money. This was true, for example, of judicial positions in eighteenth-century France and of commissions in the army and navy in most European countries in the nineteenth century. As the vested rights of officeholders were an obstacle to reorganization and an impediment to efficiency, they were bought out or expropriated with compensation.

9.

There is plenty of evidence that anticorruption campaigns are used manipulatively to prosecute political opposition, to gain advantage over business competitors, to achieve visibility and positive image in the international ratings, and to satisfy conditionalities of the funds that can be further embezzled and to pursue other tactic driven goals (Ledeneva 2003). Such policies do not necessarily enhance the governance pattern but may change position of the countries in the international rankings.

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10.

To measure cultures against the criteria of rules versus relationships, the authors use a selection of scenarios created by Stouffer and Toby (1951) and survey more than thirty nationalities (see Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner 1998).

11.

By contrast, the Chinese (37 percent) are in the bottom third, representing communitarian cultures together with the Philippines (37 percent), India (36 percent), Germany (36 percent), Brazil (33 percent), and Japan (32 percent) (Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner 1998, 57).

12.

This is sometimes referred to as internal consistency reliability (see http://www. socialresearchmethods.net/kb/reltypes.php.) For a critique of measurements of corruption within the World Bank, see Shah 2005, 2006, 2007.

13.

Steven Rosefielde (2005) challenges Andrei Shleifer and Daniel Treisman’s assessment (2004) that Russia has developed into a middle-income country through the West’s assistance, and that the trajectory of its development resembles that of countries with similar levels and distribution of wealth. He further rejects their prediction that Russia’s political and economic development would follow the path of other successful nations of its type. He argues, to the contrary, that Russia is an abnormal political economy that is unlikely to democratize, Westernize, or embrace free enterprise any time soon.

14.

I conducted a pilot study into the perception of informal practices in Russia. A Levada Centre all-Russia National Survey conducted in June 2005 has also shown popular perceptions of practices of informal pressure on the judicial systems (socalled telephone justice).

15.

Speech delivered at the V. Krasnoyarsk Economic Forum, February 15, 2008. Full text in English available at http://www.medvedev2008.ru/english_2008_02_15.htm.

16.

A. Ledeneva, “Medvedev’s Crackdown on Corruption in Courts,” RIA-Novosti, May 29, 2008; available at http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20080529/108803537.html.

17.

This is especially true if one attempts to go beyond the level of perceptions analysis.

18.

For a regional view of such policies, see Rucinschi. The Flourishing Anticorruption Industry (originally published in Jurnalul Naţional: http://www.jurnalul.ro/ articole/96022/industria-anticoruptie). She argues that “western societies” have turned the fight against corruption into a flourishing business. The article may be downloaded at http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat1663/anticorruption_good.doc.

19.

Similar to the logic of Kornai’s argument about disappointment with capitalism (2006), the central hypothesis to test here is if the authoritarian regimes that are viewed by people as fair are more likely to generate fewer informal practices than more democratic regimes that are viewed as unfair.

20.

See, for example, literature on hawala systems of underground banking (Ledeneva 2002).

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References Alatas, Syed H. 1990. Corruption: Its Nature, Causes, and Functions. Brookfield, VT: Avebury. Bliss, Christopher, and Rafael Di Tella. 1997. “Does Competition Kill Corruption?” Journal of Political Economy 105 (51): 1001–23. Caldwell, Melissa L. 2004. Not by Bread Alone: Social Support in the New Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Carothers, Thomas. 2002. “The End of the Transition Paradigm.” Journal of Democracy 13 (1): 5–21. Ekiert, Grzegorz, and Stephen E. Hanson, eds. 2003. Capitalism and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe: Assessing the Legacy of Communist Rule. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ekiert, Grzegorz, Jan Kubik, and Milada Anna Vachudova. 2007. “Democracy in the Postcommunist World: An Unending Quest? East European Politics and Societies 21 (1): 1–24. Galtung, Fredrik. 2005. “Measuring the Immeasurable: Boundaries and Functions of (Macro) Corruption Indices.” In Measuring Corruption, edited by Charles Sampford, Arthur Shacklock, Carmel Connors, and Fredrik Galtung, 101–32. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Girling, John. 1997. Corruption, Capitalism and Democracy. London: Routledge. Grant, Bruce. 1995. In the Soviet House of Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Helmke, Gretchen, and Steven Levitsky, eds. 2006. Informal Institutions and Democracy: Lessons from Latin America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Johnston, M. 1986. “The Political Consequences of Corruption: A Reassessment.” Comparative Politics 18 (4): 459–77. Inglehart, Ronald. 1977. The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles Among Western Publics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Karklins, Rasma. 2005. The System Made Me Do It: Corruption in Post-Communist Societies. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Kaufman, D. 1997. “Corruption: The Facts.” Foreign Policy 107 (summer): 114–31. Klitgaard, R. 1998. “International Cooperation Against Corruption.” In Finance and Development. Washington, DC: World Bank.

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Knack, Stephen. 2006. “Measuring Corruption in Eastern Europe and Central Asia: A Critique of Cross-country Indicators.” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper, no. 3968 (July). Available from http:// go.worldbank.org/Y1D5J89U40. Kornai, Janos. 2006. “The Great Transformation of Central Eastern Europe: Success and Disappointment.” The Economics of Transition 14 (2): 207–44. Kornai, Janos, and Susan Rose-Ackerman, eds. 2004. Building a Trustworthy State in Post-socialist Transition. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Kornai, Janos, Bo Rothstein, and Susan Rose-Ackerman, eds. 2004. Creating Social Trust in Post-socialist Transition. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Krastev, Ivan. 2004. Shifting Obsessions: Three Essays on the Politics of Anticorruption. Budapest: Central European University Press. ———. 2005.“Corruption,Anti-CorruptionSentiments,andtheRuleofLaw.”In Rethinking the Rule of Law After Communism, edited by Adam Czarnota, Martin Krygier, and Wojciech Sadurski, 323–40. Budapest, Hungary: Central European University Press. Lambsdorff, Johann G. 2004. “Background Paper to the 2004 Corruption Perceptions Index.” Framework Document, Transparency International and the University of Passau. Lauth, Hans-Joachim. 2004. “Formal and Informal Institutions: On Structuring Their Mutual Co-Existence.” Romanian Journal of Political Science 1 (1): 67–89. Ledeneva, Alena. 1998. Russia’s Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking and Informal Exchanges. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2002. “Underground Banking in Russia.” Journal of Money Laundering and Control 5 (4): 268–79. ———. 2003. “The Commonwealth of Independent States Regional Corruption Report.” In Transparency International Global Corruption Report, 2003, edited by R. Hodess, T. Inowlocki, and T. Wolfe, 165–76. London: Profile Books. Also available at www.transparency.org. ———. 2006. How Russia Really Works. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 2008. “Blat and Guanxi: Comparative Analysis of Informal Practices in Russia and China.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 50 (1): 118–41. ———. 2008. “Telephone Justice in Russia.” Post-Soviet Affairs 24 (4): 324–50. ———. 2013. Can Russia Modernize. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Levitsky, Steven, and Lucan A. Way. 2002. “The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism.” Journal of Democracy 13 (2): 51–65. ———. 2010. Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lovell, Stephen. 2008. “Power, Personalism, and Provisioning in Russian History.” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 9 (2): 373–88. Markova, I., ed. 2004. Trust and Democratic Transition in Post-Communist Europe. Proceedings of the British Academy, 123. Mungiu-Pippidi, A. 2006. “Corruption: Diagnosis and Treatment.” Journal of Democracy 17 (3): 86–99. Neild, R. 2002. Public Corruption: The Dark Side of Social Evolution. London: Anthem Press. North, Douglass, C. 1990. Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rao, Vijayendra, and Michael Walton, eds. 2004. Culture and Public Action. 1st ed. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Ries, Nancy. 1997. Russian Talk: Culture and Conversation During Perestroika. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Rivkin-Fish, Michelle. 2005. Women’s Health in Post-Soviet Russia: The Politics of Intervention. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Rose-Ackerman, Susan. 1999. Corruption and Government: Causes, Consequences and Reform. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2004. “Governance and Corruption.” In Global Crises, Global Solutions, edited by B. Lomborg, 301–44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rosefielde, S. 2005. “Russia: An Abnormal Country.” The European Journal of Comparative Economics 2 (1): 3–16. Sampson, Steven. 2005. “Integrity Warriors: Global Morality and the Anticorruption Movement in the Balkans.” In Corruption: Anthropological Perspectives, edited by Dieter Haller and Cris Shore, 103–30. London: Pluto Press. Schmidt, D. 2007. “Anti-corruption: What Do We Know? Research on Preventing Corruption in the Post-communist World.” Political Studies Review 5 (2): 202–32. Scott, James. 1987. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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Shah, A., and K. Iqbal. 2006. Truth in Advertisement: How Do Governance Measures Stack Up? Or, Critical Appraisal of Governance Indicators and Their Uses. Draft Report. Washington, DC: World Bank. ———. 2007. Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGIs): Do They Really Measure Governance? Draft Report. Washington, DC: Worldbank. Shah, A., and T. Thompson. 2005. Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index: Whose Perceptions Are They Anyway? Washington, DC: World Bank. Shleifer, Andrei, and Daniel Treisman. 2004. “A Normal Country: Rethinking Russia.” Foreign Affairs (March/April): 20–38. Sissener, Tone K. 2001. “Anthropological Perspectives on Corruption.” Working Paper, no. 5. Bergen: Chr. Michelsen Institute (www.cmi.no). Søreide, Tina. 2006. “Is it Wrong to Rank? A Critical Assessment of Corruption Indices.” Working Paper, no. 1. Bergen: Chr. Michelsen Institute. ———. 2006. “Corruption in International Business Transactions: The Perspective of Norwegian Firms.” In International Handbook on the Economics of Corruption, edited by Susan Rose-Ackerman, 381–417. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing. Stark, David. 1997. “Recombinant Property in East European Capitalism.” In Restructuring Networks in Post-Socialism: Legacies, Linkages, and Localities, edited by Gernot Grabher and David Stark. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stiglitz, Joseph. 2002. Globalization and its Discontents. New York: W. W. Norton. Stouffer, S. A., and J. Toby. 1951. “Role Conflict and Personality.” The American Journal of Sociology 56 (5): 395–406. Tanzi, Vito, and Hamid Davoodi. 1997. “Corruption, Public Investment, and Growth.” IMF Working Paper, no. 139. Treisman, Daniel. 2000. “Causes of Corruption: A Cross-National Study.” Journal of Public Economics 73 (3): 399–457. Trompenaars, Fons, and Charles Hampden-Turner. 1998. Riding the Waves of Culture: Understanding Diversity in Global Business. 2d ed. New York: McGraw-Hill. UNDP Practice Code: Anti-Corruption. February 2004. Available from: http://www.undp.org/governance/docs/AC_PN_English.pdf. Vaidya, Samarth. 2005. “Corruption in the Media’s Gaze.” European Journal of Political Economy 21 (3): 667–87.

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Varese, Federico. 2000. “Pervasive Corruption in Economic Crime in Russia.” In Economic Crime in Russia, edited by A. Ledeneva and M. Kurkchiyan, 99–111. London: Kluwer Law International. Zoellick, Robert B. 2007. World Bank President Robert B. Zoellick Welcomes Volcker Panel Review of the World Bank’s Institutional Integrity Department. Available from http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/ EXTERNAL/NEWS/0,,contentMDK:21469454~pagePK:64257043~pi PK:437376~theSitePK:4607,00.html.

Relevant Websites For access to the research writings on governance and anticorruption, see www.worldbank.org/wbi/governance (under Papers). For data and indicators on governance, see http://www.govindicators.org. Websites of Relevant Data Sets Freedom House, Nations in Transit Annual Study, 1997–2006: http://www. freedomhouse.org/report-types/nations-transit Transparency International, Corruption Perception Index 2005: http:// w w w.transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices /cpi/2006/ regional_highlights_factsheets Transparency International, Corruption Perception Index 2006: http:// w w w.transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices /cpi/2006/ regional_highlights_factsheets WBI Governance and Anticorruption, Governance Indicators 1996–2005: http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTWBIGOVANTCOR/Resources/ 1740479–1150732695457/2671879–1157740911484/2005kkzcharts_ppp.xls World Bank, The Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey 1999–2000: http://info.worldbank.org/governance/beeps/ World Economic Forum, GCR Indexes 2006: http://www.weforum.org/ pdf/Global_Competitiveness_Reports/Reports/gcr_2006/gcr2006_ rankings.pdf World Economic Forum, Global Competitive Index 2005–6: http://www. weforum.org/pdf/Global_Competitiveness_Reports/gcr2006_rankings.xls World Governance Assessment/Overseas Development Institute, World Governance Data Set 1996–2000: http://www.odi.org.uk/wga_governance/Docs/Pilot%20Data.xls

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World Resources Institute, Environmental Governance and Institutions– Politics and Freedom: Control of Corruption Index 1998–2002: http:// earthtrends.wri.org/searchable_db/index.php?theme=10&variable_ID= 647&action=select_countries World Values Survey, “How many of your compatriots cheat on paying taxes?” Data for 1999: http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/ World Values Survey, “How many of your compatriots pay cash to avoid taxes?” Data for 1999: http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/ World Values Survey, “Is it humiliating to receive money without having to work for it?” Data for 1999: http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/ World Values Survey, “Is it justifiable to cheat on paying taxes?” Data for 1999: http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/ World Values Survey, “Is it justifiable to pay cash to avoid taxes?” Data for 1999: http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/ World Values Survey, “Is it justifiable to take bribes?” Data for 1999: http:// www.worldvaluessurvey.org/

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chapter nine

Informal Payments to Doctors: Corruption or Social Protest? Rasma Karklins

Few social scientists have explored the significance of unofficial payments to medical personnel in postcommunist health-care systems, even though the practice is controversial and widespread. Public interpretations of the significance of informal payments differ considerably, as illustrated by the unexpected election of an orthopedic surgeon to the Latvian presidency in the summer of 2007. After being nominated to this august position, Valdis Zatlers revealed that for years he had taken “gratitude money” in his practice as a surgeon. He added that the practice is uncomfortable to patients and doctors alike and that it was high time to solve the issues involved. By fall 2008, despite numerous public discussions and the work of a task force at the Ministry of Health, the issue remained unresolved.1 This lack of policy reform is testament to the complexity of the issue. Informal payments to medical personnel are a legacy of the communist era. They occur in a context of poorly financed public health-care systems, scarce quality medical services, and an incentive structure that compels patients to pay under the table to access quality care. This chapter investigates the signification of this practice of informal payments: Does this particular informal approach to problem solving constitute a form of social protest, a helpful adjustment of an imperfect system, or a form of corruption? Analysis of this practice is significant because good health-care interests every individual in the countries involved, not just a particular social group. Everyone can get sick, and most people have relatives or friends who require medical services. People are concerned: when a survey in 2002 in Latvia asked about

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social threats, the most frequently expressed fears (83 percent of respondents) were the “inability to pay for medical care in the case of illness,” and “not receiving adequate medical care in the case of illness” (Sīmane 2003, 30). Quality health care and disease prevention are key public goods. Thus, how the practice of informal medical payments affects health-care accessibility and treatment equity—as well as notions of social fairness and justice— has consequences for democratic political development in the postcommunist region. On balance, does this practice promote or undermine access to good health care? The answer lies in differentiating between the individual and collective levels of analysis. At the individual level, making and receiving informal payments is a rational strategy for optimizing access to quality health care. However, at the collective level the practice is detrimental to the public good and the efficiency of health-care systems.

The Phenomenon Nearly two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, informal payment to health-care providers by patients remains a common practice in most formerly communist countries. Such payments are defined as the under-thetable remuneration of medical personnel in publicly financed health-care systems. In gaining access to health services, unofficial payments are most frequently made for hospital stays, especially for surgery or consultations with specialists. They are more common in urban centers. The informality of the practice is expressed in several ways: the patient or his relatives typically give the money surreptitiously, usually in an unmarked envelope, which is why such payments are often referred to as “envelope payments,” or plainly as “envelopes.” Janoš Kornai speaks of the phenomenon as “hidden in an envelope” (Kornai 2000). At times the money is hidden in a box of chocolates or a similar gift to suggest that it constitutes a gesture of gratitude rather than payment for professional services. Due to the informal nature of the interaction, information about what sums are given to whom, when, and how is vague. Medical personnel rarely specify the amount of an expected payment; more often they give broad hints or let the patient and his relatives scamper for information by asking other patients and their relatives.2 In public discussions of informal payments for medical care, patients and medical personnel alike describe the practice as awkward and stressful because people are uncertain of the legality of such remuneration and whether

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the sums they give are appropriate. In the words of one patient, “The most upsetting aspect is that there is no clarity [about] how much one has to pay to whom in order for things to go normally.”3 Many people refer to these payments as illegal or quasi legal, but there is considerable disagreement about their status. As the discussions in Latvia during the summer of 2007 demonstrate, some people refer to the payments as bribes, others call them unofficial income or honoraria, and still others characterize them as personal gifts or expressions of gratitude. Because of the informal nature of “envelope payments,” there is no official record of the monetary exchange. The practice thus constitutes tax evasion on the part of recipients, who neither declare the payments as income nor pay taxes on it. It also leaves patients without recourse to legitimate means of offsetting their medical expenses. Since they have no record of the transaction, patients are unable to declare the expenses to their insurance or deduct them from their income taxes.

Systemic Causes: Health-Care Provisions Inadequacies in existing public health-care systems are a core reason for the informal flow of money. Despite numerous reform efforts, the legacy of the communist-era health-care systems remains evident two decades after the demise of state socialism. The systems continue to be plagued by a vicious cycle of underfunding, hierarchical exercise of power by elite doctors, and informal practices. Postcommunist countries inherited a system characterized by a focus on in-patient care, an oversupply of hospital beds, and poor infrastructure. Access to care was supposedly free and universal under communism, but in reality there was a three-tiered system: (1) the formal public system for the general population; (2) the formal public system for the apparatchiks; and (3) the under-the-table health-care system within the public system. Transformation to a market-based economy further complicated the situation with the addition of private and partly private clinics (FuenzalidaPuelma 2003, 6). Voluntary health insurance developed slowly during the initial period of transformation from state socialism. However, the use of copayments and user fees increased after the early 1990s, with disastrous results for the poor. At the close of the second decade of postcommunism, patients often pay three times for a medical procedure: the first time through their taxes; the

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second time through official copayments; and the third time with envelope money. Due to the clandestine nature of the payments it is difficult to assess the amount of money that changes hands through envelope payments, but it is a significant sum. Anticorruption experts estimate that unofficial payments amount to 56 percent of total health expenditures in the Russian Federation and 30 percent in Poland (Allin, Davakai, and Mossialos 2006, 64). The largest informal payments occur in branches of medicine that enjoy monopolistic situations, either because treatment for a certain condition is available in only one facility, or because only a few elite specialists are available. As corruption scholar Robert Klitgaard notes, monopolies are a core structural problem because of the opportunities they provide for corrupt behavior (1988, 75). Long delays for most medical procedures and poor care are major motives for paying envelope money. People pay for quicker and better care.

“The System Made Me Do It”: Why People Pay People have different motives for informal payments for medical care, including true gratitude if a doctor saves a patient’s life or shows special care and kindness. Some wealthier patients pay voluntarily because they recognize that most medical personnel are underpaid. Yet the lengthy public discussions of the issue in Latvia during the summer of 2007 showed that many people distinguish between a gesture of true gratitude, which usually involves flowers or a small gift, and envelope payments, which they see as necessary to receive adequate care. Popular sentiment with regard to the latter practice included both desperation and resentment (Gaal 2006, 73).4 Most patients pay medical staff “in the hope of receiving better prescriptions, securing attention, jumping a queue, obtaining a referral to a hospital to avoid paying for prescribed drugs, receiving sick leave, and having the privilege of being treated in a high-profile hospital or by a leading specialist” (Ovseiko 2003, 20). Individual patients pay because they do not trust that the official system will provide adequate care. Importantly, payments are most frequent and substantial when surgery or other major procedures are involved, such as cancer, heart failure, or a complicated birth. In such situations both the patient and his or her relatives are under major stress. Consequently, they will do everything possible to obtain good care, including volunteering money or complying with demands for it.

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Doctors who receive envelope money often argue that they did not ask for it, that patients offer it on their own, and that it would be unkind to refuse it. This self-serving argument ignores the context in which patients make decisions. Coercion, furthermore, can be very subtle. Medical staff may ignore a patient, lose records, or otherwise not take care of a patient’s needs as a way of signaling that quality care is not available without envelope money. Surveys show that most people in the postcommunist region believe that they need to make informal payments to secure good care, and there are no indications that medical personnel try to disabuse people of this perception. In a comparative study of Ukraine, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic an average of 81 percent of respondents reported that people must offer gifts to hospital doctors in order to obtain services to which they are legally entitled (Miller, Grødeland, and Koshechkina 2001, 73). In another comparative study undertaken in several postcommunist countries, two-thirds of respondents who reported having made informal payments stated that their payments were nonvoluntary, either because medical staff requested them, or because respondents knew that “this is the way it goes” (Anderson 2000, 16). The latter comment suggests an environment in which unofficial payments are the norm and people offer them fearing that otherwise they will not receive the services they require. These findings are corroborated by the results of surveys undertaken by William Miller and colleagues between 1997 and 1998. Their comparative study of several postcommunist countries reveals that officials at times specifically asked for bribes, but more often gave indirect signals that they expected monetary persuasion (Miller et al. 2001, 85). Nonetheless, doctors and staff do openly ask for payment in exchange for medical care in some cases. As one participant in a qualitative survey recounted, “They [the doctors] tell you right away that you will need that much for that, and that much for that, and that much for surgery.” Another respondent in the same interview sequence reported an even more explicit message: “Our mother was going to have surgery and the surgeon said that she had to give so much to him, so much to the neuropathologist, so much to the anesthesiologist, and so much to the assistant. He directly said how much” (Barstad 2003, 83). The researcher who conducted the study described another case in which the necessity of envelope money was presumed but never made explicit. Her account highlights both the discomfort the practice induced and its discriminatory effect on those without discretionary income.

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A patient with inflamed lymph nodes was unable to get treatment from a specialist, who supposedly had no time for her: “Of course, she understood that giving a bribe or a gift to that specialist would make her one of his patients. She said she felt like a loser because she did not know how to bribe. . . . [B]esides, she was not well off and was afraid that the little amount she could afford to give would make the situation even worse” (Barstad 2003, 151). Patients differ in regard to both their ability and willingness to pay. Some patients—and their relatives—acquire debt or sell assets in order to make informal payments, often impoverishing themselves. Many simply cannot pay and end up foregoing medical help or accepting poor services. A lucky few receive good care by conscientious personnel despite their inability to provide envelope money. Other patients pay willingly, either out of recognition that medical personnel are seriously underpaid, to get better care, or both. In some cases rich patients or their relatives will pay for unusual privileges; in one case a husband paid to have an entire birthing ward emptied of other patients so that his wife and newborn could be by themselves. Significantly, he showed not the least concern about the fate of the other new mothers and their babies.5

The Doctors’ Perspective There are significant differences in the practice of accepting envelope money across medical specializations. Not all doctors are offered envelope money, and not all of them take it. Some doctors refuse the practice on ethical grounds, while others have little opportunity to engage in it because they work in laboratories or other capacities that keep them behind the scenes. Select medical personnel, particularly surgeons, are the most common recipients of informal payments. The largest payments are given to elite doctors dealing with major medical problems, such as cardiologists, trauma surgeons, cancer specialists, and specialized gynecologists. Ironically, these doctors typically already enjoy higher salaries. Nevertheless, when the issue is discussed, these specialists express a sense of entitlement to higher pay due to their high qualifications, and blame “the system” for not providing it to them formally. The researcher whose interview responses were cited previously reported one surgeon’s explanation that he was originally shocked when patients gave him money under the table in Soviet times, but then became accustomed to

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the practice and felt that he needed it to continue. He explained, “For the 100 lats (Latvian currency), which the state officially pays me, I cannot survive. It is not the fault of the doctors that they take bribes or honorariums, however people may call it. ... [M]ostly people thank by money in an envelope. It is a standard now. It happens in my office when we are alone with the patient” (Barstad 2003, 149). Importantly, not all doctors have the same view of envelope money. At the height of the public discussion of the issue in Latvia during summer 2007, many doctors expressed anger that the entire profession was depicted as envelope takers. One prominent doctor made a point of declaring, “I neither ask nor take” envelope money.6 Yet excuse making was the prevailing response among physicians who contributed to the discussion. This approach is not unusual since most people tend to make excuses for their own behavior and the problems within their profession: “When hospital doctors were asked about hospital doctors, schoolteachers about schoolteachers, or customs officials about customs officials, and so on, the numbers of those who said presents or bribes were likely to be necessary went down from 70% to 51% on average” (Miller et al. 2001, 208).

What Is Corrupt? Views among the general public about whether the exchange of envelope money for medical care is corrupt diverge with respect to the specific type of “gift” as well as in regard to the broader question of informal compensation. Older people in particular view giving flowers or small gifts—including a little money—as an expression of gratitude and a way of ensuring that they receive good treatment. Many do not view this as corruption. By contrast, both the discourse surrounding informal payment and social science research demonstrate that a large segment of the public in postcommunist countries regard informal payments as bribes. In one representative survey undertaken in Latvia in 2005, 62.4 percent of respondents characterized unofficial payments to doctors as corruption.7 When surveys pose general questions about public corruption most local populations in the postcommunist region rank their health-care systems among the most corrupt, or even as the most corrupt (Anderson 2000, 8). However, the emphasis differs depending on the extent of health-sector reform. A 2007 Eurobarometer survey showed that in Romania 65 percent of respondents reported corruption in the public health

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system. In the same study, 60 percent of Lithuanians and 58 percent of Poles regarded their systems as corrupt, but only 8 percent of Estonians did so.8 There have been some cautious attempts to make informal medical payments illegal, but generally legal action has been taken only in outrageous individual cases such as gross extortion or patient death. Social activism on the part of patients has also been relatively rare. In 2004 a young Hungarian father set up a website where parents of newborns were invited to share their experiences with the medical services, including how much they paid unofficially. The doctors listed on the website successfully demanded that it be shut down, arguing that it violated the doctors’ right to privacy. The incident ignited intense debate about the legality of informal payments, but nothing was done to address the problem (Gaal 2006, 71). One analyst notes that it is difficult to distinguish between simple costcontributing payments and those that amount to abuse of power (Ensor 2004, 244). Understanding the practice in the context of systemic dysfunction is important to establishing the culpability of those who perpetuate it, but it is also crucial that the issue be framed in terms of its cost to the public good. A meaningful definition of corruption requires a concept of collective wellbeing, shared social goods, or a specified third party that represents the general interest of society (Karklins 2005). Informal payments must be examined in terms of their collective consequences, rather than merely in terms of their effectiveness in securing adequate care at the individual level. Does the benefit conferred by informal payments to an individual lead to a loss for other patients and thus compromise the public good? If a doctor just works harder by adding a few more operations to his schedule without delaying the operations of the patients waiting in line, one could argue that nobody is hurt. However, it appears that more often than not, the care given to other patients does suffer. Furthermore, the hidden and unregulated nature the entire practice of envelope money creates stress and anxiety for everyone concerned, including medical personnel. For many, the practice is an affront to their sense of fairness, social justice, and professionalism in public service.

Informal Payments and the Public Good Under-the-table payments to doctors constitute a classic collective-action problem. On the individual level, the sick person and those close to him or her have strong personal incentives to give money in order to get better care

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as quickly as possible. Yet on the collective level, informal payments undermine the interests of existing and potential patients as well as the quality of the health-care system more generally. If a person has acute appendicitis, or has broken a crucial bone, and the doctor will not operate until he receives $600 in an envelope,9 he or she has every possible incentive to find the money quickly regardless of the cost. At the same time, the doctor receiving the money has no incentive to work to reform the system, at least not from a monetary perspective. However, on the societal level, the community of patients and potential patients would be better off if the system of informal payments were eliminated. The community of doctors would also be better off because the practice creates ethical discomfort and only an elite group of doctors really profits significantly from it. As noted, many people forego medical help because they cannot afford envelope money or are intimidated by the practice. A 2002 study demonstrated that the burden of informal payments in Romania is regressively distributed, with poor households paying twice as much as medium-income households, and medium-income households paying twice as much (proportionately) as high-income households. The survey further indicated that informal payments reduce trust in government and health workers and foster feelings of hopelessness and alienation, particularly among the poor (Vian 2002). The practice of informal payments creates irrational incentives. A 2001 study of Hungarian hospitals found that patients were more likely to make envelope payments the longer they stayed in hospitals and particularly just before surgery. This tendency has led to a rise in the number of hospital patients—completely the opposite of the expressed desire of almost all national and regional reformers (Hayburst 2003, 15). Analysts of the postcommunist health-care systems describe them as “highly hierarchical and medicalized,” with insufficient emphasis on illness prevention and lifestyle changes to promote wellness (Kickbusch 2004, 126). Informal payments, they allege, “can undermine official payment systems, distort the priorities of the healthcare system, reduce access to health services and impede healthcare reforms” (Allin, Davakai, and Mossialos 2006, 63). Reform experts cite growing evidence that unofficial health-care fees distort health-care priorities and impede health-system reform (Ensor 2004).

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The Political Context In her contribution to this volume, Alena Ledeneva argues that informal practices can be both supportive and subversive of progress toward more democratic and just postcommunist institutions. She notes that while some informal practices compensate for systemic weaknesses, others weaken systems even more. This chapter has argued that unofficial payments for medical care within the public health-care systems of the postcommunist region are an example of an informal practice that is in the main detrimental to the public good and reform efforts. In most postcommunist countries at the end of 2009, health-care system reform is at a standstill. Typically, politicians make promises that change is imminent, but nothing really happens. As economist Bozena Leven remarked with respect to Poland, “Politically, no party has been willing to take even basic steps to diminish medical corruption or protect patient health by, for example, increasing formal medical earnings, diminishing incentives or opportunities for gratitude payments, and sanctioning unethical conduct” (Leven, 2005, 454). In most postcommunist countries, government officials accuse the medical profession of corruption. They blame medical doctors for the problems with health services in effort to deflect attention from the government’s responsibility to public health. However, elite doctors, who represent the profession politically, have little incentive to seek changes to the status quo. The current situation allows them to earn high incomes and preserve their top positions in the medical hierarchy, despite its negative effect on health-care workers as a whole. Such an equilibrium is suboptimal for society and the medical profession alike (Ovseiko 2003, 21). Institutional capture by elite networks of the medical establishment who fashion public policy to serve the exclusive interest of their group can be understood as a form of corruption in itself. Elite doctors with specialized medical skills are the ones who receive the largest informal payments and have no personal incentives to change the system. Typically, they dominate the rather hierarchical medical establishment and professional organizations. As Fuenzalida-Puelma observes, for the most part physicians associations are still professional clubs and have not developed the objectivity and fairness to properly self-regulate the medical profession (2003, 7). Another aspect of the clanlike structure of most medical establishments in the region is the tendency among members to cover up for each other out

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of fear of retribution and a misguided sense of solidarity. In 2005, Latvia’s health minister highlighted this problem when he declared that it was very difficult to find doctors willing to work in his ministry’s audit department because doctors have strong loyalties to members of their profession and tend to defend each other.10 But if doctors are an unlikely source of reform, civil society has also had little impact on the status quo. Since envelope money is an informal practice, patients’ rights organizations have had little formal material on which to base their activities. A significant part of the public also views the practice as “normal.” This attitude, too, is a barrier to change.

Notes 1.

Numerous media reports, Latvia, spring 2007 to fall 2008.

2.

Personal communication with a representative of Corruption Prevention and Com-

3.

Internet discussion, Latvian website www.delfi.lv, December 9, 2002.

4.

Numerous public media—including Internet—discussions, Latvia, summer 2007.

5.

Personal communication by the husband of the new mother who made the payment.

bating Bureau, June 4, 2007.

6.

Sestdiena, June 9, 2007. The same point was made by a doctor who became the speaker of Latvia’s Parliament in late September 2007.

7.

Social Correlative Data Survey, Attieksme pret korupciju Latvijā. Latvijas iedzīvotāju aptauja. January 2005. http://www.politika.lv/index.php?id=4378.

8.

The Attitudes of Europeans Towards Corruption (2008), Special Eurobarometer 291 (Brussels: The European Commission, April), 11.

9.

Reported in personal communication, Latvia, summer 2007.

10.

Interview with G. Bērziņš, LTV 1, February 12, 2005.

References Allin, Sara, Konstantina Davakai, and Elias Mossialos. 2006. “Paying for ‘Free’ Health Care: The Conundrum of Informal Payments in Postcommunist Europe.” Transparency International Global Corruption Report 2006. London: Pluto Press. Anderson, James H. 2000. Corruption in Slovakia: Results of Diagnostic Surveys. Washington, DC: The World Bank. Barstad, Agnese. 2003. “Culture of Corruption? Interpreting Corruption in Soviet and Post-soviet Contexts.” MA thesis, University of Bergen, Norway.

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Ensor, Tim. 2004. “Informal Payments for Health Care in Transition Economies.” Social Science and Medicine 58 (2): 237–46. Fuenzalida-Puelma, Herman L. 2003. “Middle of the Road Tetrality?” Local Government Brief (spring): 6–11. Gaal, Peter. 2006. “Gift, Fee, or Bribe? Informal Payments in Hungary.” Transparency International Global Corruption Report 2006. London: Pluto Press. Hayburst, David. 2003. “Holding Health Care Systems Accountable.” Local Government Brief (spring): 14–15. Karklins, Rasma. 2005. The System Made Me Do It: Corruption in the Postcommunist Region. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Kickbusch, Ilona. 2004. “Citizens’ Rights and Community Mobilization.” In Health Systems in Transition: Learning from Experience, edited by Josep Fugueras, Martin McKee, Jennifer Cain, and Suzy Lessof (European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies). Klitgaard, Robert. 1988. Controlling Corruption. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kornai, Janoš. 2000. “Hidden in an Envelope: Gratitude Payments to Medical Doctors in Hungary.” In The Paradoxes of Unintended Consequences, edited by Lord Dahrendorf et al., 195–214. Budapest: Central European University Press. Leven, Bozena. 2005. “Corruption and Reforms: A Case of Poland’s Medical Sector.” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 38: 447–55. Miller, William L., Åse B. Grødeland, and Tatyana Y. Koshechkina. 2001. A Culture of Corruption? Coping with Government in Post-Communist Europe. Budapest: Central European University Press. Ovseiko, Pavel. 2003. “Games the Medical Profession and Government Play.” Local Government Brief (spring): 20–23. Sīmane, Mā ra, ed. 2003. Latvia Human Development Report 2002/2003, Human Security. Riga: UNDP; Latvia: 30–31. Squire & Sanders. 2004. “Public Procurement (Czech Republic).” EU Accession Series. Issue 5 (March). Trandafir, Gelu. 2006. “Romania Prepares a Recipe for Fighting Corruption.” Southeast European Times, July 31. Trybus, Martin. 2005. “Improving the Efficiency of Public Procurement Systems in the Context of the European Union Enlargement Process.” Paper presented at the IV Global Forum on Fighting Corruption, Brasilia,

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Brazil, June 7–10, available at http://www.cgu.gov.br/ivforumglobal/pdf/ martintrybus-1.pdf. Verheijen, Tony. 1997. “The Civil Service of Bulgaria: In an Even Deeper Crisis?” Paper presented at the Civil Service Systems in Comparative Perspective Conference, School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, April 5–8. Vian, Taryn. 2002. “Corruption and the Health Sector.” Sectoral Perspectives on Corruption, MSI Working Paper, November, 1–39.

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chapter ten

Informal Relations in Public Procurement: The Case of East Central and South Eastern Europe Åse Berit Grødeland

In recent years corruption related to public procurement has become an important public issue both in Eastern and Western Europe.1 Procurement accounts for an estimated 15 percent of GDP in the OECD area, while among non-OECD states the figure is even higher.2 Transparency and fairness in the disbursal of these funds became salient in many postcommunist countries as a consequence of European Union candidacy or aspiration for membership.3 The European Union, meanwhile, upgraded its directives on public procurement in an effort to reduce procurement-related corruption within the expanding common European area.4 This study examines how, at what stage, and why corrupt behavior occurs in public procurement in postcommunist countries. It draws on survey and interview data collected for an international research project investigating informal practice5 and corruption in four postcommunist European Countries: the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Bulgaria, and Romania (2003–6).6 Specifically, it investigates the use of contacts and informal networks in public procurement.7 The research identifies the role of these practices in public procurement from the point of view of the officials who engage in them and assesses their consequences for public trust. It is assumed that corrupt behavior may or may not be unlawful. After a brief methodological introduction, the chapter provides an overview of informal practices in East Central and South Eastern Europe and discusses their relevance to public procurement. It presents survey data to demonstrate the perception of these practices among procurement officials

346

and members of the business community and concludes with an analysis of factors thought to affect informal practices in postcommunist public procurement. More specifically, the chapter tests two hypotheses: that informal social relations in public procurement are (1) more widespread in “second wave” than in “first wave” EU member states; and (2) more widespread in the Czech Republic than Slovenia (among the “first wave” EU member states) and in Bulgaria than in Romania (“second wave” EU member states).

Methodology Most attitudinal research on corruption in public procurement in East-Central and South Eastern Europe to date focuses on business. Tools such as BEEPS (Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey) 8 and the World Values Survey 9 assess the attitudes and personal experiences of business representatives (BEEPS) and the values of government officials and business representatives (WWS). By contrast, this study surveys both the business representatives and low-level government officials, asking them more or less the same questions. By interviewing and surveying both business representatives and public procurement officials we are able to contrast the perceptions of the two groups and shed light on the groups’ interactions. Additionally, we include representatives of both local and foreign businesses in our sample in order to investigate whether their companies behave differently when trying to secure public tender contracts. Given our interest in the ways informality is manifested in public procurement and how common informal practices are relative to formal practices, we employ a mix of qualitative and quantitative surveys. In contrast to the casestudy approach commonly employed to research informality, this method of data collection allows for observation of various informal practices in multiple sectors of society.10 In order to observe informal practices in various work environments, most questions were tailored to the specific context in which they were administered. However, we asked all respondents whether they trusted public procurement officials and whether they agreed or disagreed with certain statements about public procurement officials. We defined a public procurement official as a person whose work involved public tenders, either as a government official or as a member of an appointed tender committee. Respondents representing the domestic business

Informal Relations in Public Procurement 347

community were recruited from locally owned businesses—that is, private and nonstock, state-owned, or joint stock companies with more than 50 percent of the shares in local hands. Respondents representing foreign business were employees of private and nonstock, or joint stock companies with more than 50 percent of the shares owned by foreigners. Respondents represented an equal mix of small (10–50 employees), medium-sized (51–150 employees), and large (more than 150 employees) companies. The qualitative survey was conducted in late 2003 to early 2004 in the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Bulgaria, and Romania. It entailed interviews with 360 people (90 per country) representing nine categories of elites. Within each elite category, five interviews were conducted at the national level and five at the capital level. Interviews were structured and open-ended. Data from the in-depth interviews informed the content of the questionnaire used for our quantitative surveys. The quantitative component of the study, undertaken in 2005 in the same four countries, involved a questionnaire with 318 close-ended questions. It occurred the year after the Czech Republic and Slovenia were admitted to the EU and a year and a half before the Bulgarian and Romanian accession. In all countries except Slovenia, the survey was administered in the biggest city or town in each NUTS II region.11 Slovenia, which has only two NUTS II regions, was further divided regionally.12 The structure of both the qualitative and quantitative surveys is described in the Appendix following this chapter. This chapter presents the findings from 120 in-depth interviews and 900 questionnaires with business representatives and government officials dealing with public procurement (for details see the Appendix). The former include 40 interviews with local business representatives, 40 interviews with foreign business representatives, and 40 interviews with public procurement officials drawn evenly from the four countries. The quantitative surveys include responses from 300 local business representatives, 300 foreign business representatives, and 300 public procurement officials. Qualitative findings13 are used to elaborate quantitative findings.14

Informal Practices in East Central and South Eastern Europe: Public Procurement A recent OECD study gave Bulgaria a higher score than Romania for investment promotion, but a lower score for anticorruption and business integrity.

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Corruption

An EBRD report on economies in transition published in 2005 indicated that public procurement corruption was the only type of corruption that worsened in Bulgaria from 2002 to 2005.15 A CSD poll conducted in 2007 suggests that there has not been much improvement: some 60 percent of Bulgarian companies claim that corrupt practices in public procurement are “widespread,” and audit reports show that more than 50 percent of all Bulgarian tender procedures are in one way or another discredited (Pashev et al. 2006, 24, 25). There are indications that corruption in public procurement has become institutionalized in recent years and that the size of bribes seems to have increased. Not surprisingly, therefore, the Bulgarian National Strategy for Transparent Governance, Prevention and Countering of Corruption for 2006–8 identified public procurement as the “sphere with the highest corruption pressure” (Pashev et al. 2006, 23, 17). Romania, by contrast, significantly reduced corruption in public procurement after 2002.16 A survey conducted by the EBRD and the World Bank shows that commissions offered by foreign companies for contracts decreased from 2.5 percent of the contract value in 2002 to 0.7 percent in 2006. In comparison, the average for EU member states prior to the admission of Bulgaria and Romania was 0.5 percent.17 Former Romanian minister of justice (2004– 7), Monica Macovei, is largely credited with the country’s success in reducing corruption.18 While in office she also actively opposed “laws with special destination,” that is, those exempting companies from adhering to current legislation or awarding large contracts without a tender. The Czech Republic and Slovenia were less plagued by procurement scandals at the time of our research. The Czech Republic had only two convictions for tender machinations between 1996 and 2002, although tenders were often not issued properly. The lower public salience of procurement violations may be due to the difficulty of proving whether commission members had a relationship to any of the bidders. Furthermore, most state organizations used the same group of people for all tenders, and there was considerable room for discretion regarding procurement weighting criteria. From 1998 to 2002 the Czech government made excessive use of the right to grant exemptions from tender duty (Open Society 2002, 133). Serious violations of public procurement procedures continued to be a problem in the Czech Republic after 2002. Slovenia, for its part, had weak oversight structures and collusion in public procurement was said to be widespread—especially in construction. Slovenia also has a long tradition of overlap between the public and private sectors and

Informal Relations in Public Procurement 349

Figure 10.1. Public Procurement in (COUNTRY) Is Honest and Uncorrupted

the Ministry of Economy and the Ministry of Education have both violated tender procedures (Open Society 2002, 569). These circumstances are reflected in our findings. Bulgarian respondents assessed public procurement officials as dishonest and corrupt to a considerably larger extent than respondents in Slovenia, the Czech Republic, and Romania. Some 59 percent of Bulgarian respondents but only 40 percent of Czech respondents considered public procurement to be rarely honest and uncorrupted (see Figure 10.1). In Slovenia and Romania a greater percentage of respondents regarded public procurement as usually honest and uncorrupted than those who considered it usually dishonest and corrupted. In Romania, Bulgaria, and the Czech Republic, foreign business representatives perceived public procurement as usually honest and uncorrupted at a higher rate than local business affiliates. The difference between the two groups was 14 percent in Bulgaria, 10 percent in the Czech Republic, and 4 percent in Romania. By contrast, 45 percent of respondents representing local business in Slovenia regarded public procurement as usually honest and uncorrupted, while only 32 percent of those representing foreign business shared this view. These findings suggest that people representing foreign business receive better treatment from public procurement officials than local business representatives do. The difference between Slovenia and the other three

350

Corruption

countries might be attributable to the longer-standing relations between foreign and local business in that country. Foreign businesses started operating in the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, and Romania only after the collapse of communism, while in Slovenia foreign-local business collaborations existed prior to the collapse of Yugoslavia. Studies indicate that foreign businesses adapt to the local business culture within which they operate (Søreide 2005). Foreign companies active in Slovenia might have developed a culture of bribe giving, exposing them more to extortion in public procurement. Findings from our qualitative survey indicate that informal behavior is common in public procurement and occurs at all stages of the procurement process. At the preparatory stage, informal approaches are used to influence the call for tenders and favor certain companies by setting very tight deadlines. As our respondents described, “The influences occur where people are involved: in defining the terms of the bid, the specifications, the selection criteria and so on. If the offer is made public today and the applications are due tomorrow, it’s obvious that only those who knew about it will be able to apply” (Ib-1–Ro);19 “informal activities are evident in ranging the criteria . . . to reconfirm known local companies, which have won the (tender) before. . . . [I]n a recent public tender for some production equipment, the tender requirements were set in such a way . . . as to tip the scales in favor of a local company, which in the end won the tender, but which was offering a low-quality product and a high price” (Ib-4, Bu); “you need various agreements, (to) obtain permissions, you need (them) fast, so you have to know where and to whom to turn, whom to call” (Nb-1, CR). Once a call for contract bids is published, the selection process may be influenced by unofficial payments. Some respondents describe such payments as initiated by business representatives: “I have witnessed informal attempts by friends and acquaintances for awarding the public procurement to a definite company. I have turned down requests (to participate) . . . because I felt obliged to (other) participants in the tender” (Nb-5, Bu); “I know people who tour the mayoral offices throughout the country and set up such networks—when an order comes . . . everyone in the mayoral office knows how much money he/she would get if he/she assigns the order. So those people set up networks of civil servants and feed them with money and gifts” (Nb-8– Bu); “so much public procurement means payment underneath the counter and brings a price hike, which is to the advantage of a certain group of

Informal Relations in Public Procurement 351

people . . . 10 percent—most often it is (even) more . . . —is a common practice in most companies” (Ib-5–Bu). In some cases the selection process is facilitated by go-betweens. Several companies interviewed for our qualitative survey reported that they had been approached by people who offer to act as intermediaries to ensure that their companies win tender bids. While some respondents were very dismissive of such potential facilitators, others expressed a willingness to pay, provided that the facilitator could guarantee success: He reminds me that he is influential and reaches contacts. For example he says he has a good contact in the ministry where we apply for public procurement and if we give some money to his foundation, he will help us to get this procurement through his contact. I can say that he was not successful. (Ib-9, CR) I was asked to pay 5,000 DEM in order to win the tender. The selected candidate was awarded an 80,000 DEM contract. So I asked if I had to give the money to the committee in charge of considering the offers. They told me I had to give the money to a deputy minister. I refused to give the money to a person who was not in the committee, who was “only” influencing the committee, because if I had to give the money to the committee, it was clearly a tender requirement. So I didn’t pay the money, I filed a bid, but did not win the tender . . . (but) if a mayor tells me . . . “do the deforestation of the town square and . . . of my house, but put the second service on the same account,” then I will do it, because he calls the tune and sets the conditions. (Nb-8, Bu)

In other cases the officials themselves initiate informal payments. Having reached an informal agreement with a company, the officials then ensure that other companies are either “bought off ” to withdraw their tender bid or refrain from submitting one, or that they are disqualified on formal grounds: “I know cases of public procurements which were conditioned by a half-million or million crowns bribe” (Nb-7, CR); “they [that is, the officials] are the active part looking for this type of contacts. . . . [I]t is very common” (Nb-7– Bu); “even if enough offers are submitted, then the committee disqualifies competitors of the previously selected winner, so that at last the network’s favorite wins the contest” (Nb-9–Bu). Both corrupt business representatives and public procurement officials made an effort to ensure that potential competitors for bids were rewarded for

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Figure 10.2. Public Procurement in (COUNTRY) Is Easy to Influence

not taking part in tenders: “contacts are used so that the company of someone who has offered money [to win the tender] can win the tender” (Ib-5, Bu); “a typical practice involves nominal tenders where things have been arranged in advance. . . . [I]t is common for a company that has won a tender to be told what kind of materials it has to work with and not to let it choose from what is available in the market” (Ib-8, Bu). Given these findings, it is no surprise that the large majority of procurement officials and affiliates of foreign and local business in Bulgaria and Romania, as well as a fair share of the respondents in the Czech Republic and Slovenia think public procurement is easy to influence (see Figure 10.2). There was no difference in perceptions between local and foreign business representatives in the Czech Republic and Bulgaria, but in Slovenia international business representatives were somewhat more inclined to consider public procurement easy to influence. In Romania, local business representatives were more likely to hold this view.

Business Trust in Public Procurement Only a small minority of the respondents representing the business communities in all countries expressed high trust in public procurement officials. However, in Slovenia, Romania, and the Czech Republic between 30 and 50 percent

Informal Relations in Public Procurement 353

Figure 10.3. Public Procurement in (COUNTRY) Is Fair and Impartial

of the respondents thought public procurement was usually fair and impartial. By contrast, less than 10 percent of Bulgarian respondents held this view. Slovenians regarded their public procurement officials as fair and impartial to a larger extent than Czech and Romanian respondents (see Figure 10.3). More surprisingly, Romanian respondents had higher regard for the integrity of their public procurement officials than the Czech respondents did for theirs. To ascertain the reasons for business trust or distrust of public procurement, our quantitative survey asked respondents whether they thought public procurement is fair and impartial, whether it is honest and uncorrupted, whether it is easy to access, and whether it is easy to influence—questions identical to those in the BEEPS survey. When combined with data from our qualitative surveys, the answers to these questions provide a good overview of the reasons why business representatives in East Central and South Eastern Europe either trust or distrust public procurement officials. Questions regarding whether an institution is fair and impartial or not are tricky in the sense that respondents may conflate favorable treatment and fair treatment. Conversely, treatment perceived as unfavorable by a business representative may be fair and impartial in the sense of complying with the law. Asking whether public procurement officials are honest and uncorrupted allows us to explore the “fair and impartial” versus “unfair and partial” dimension from a different angle, though opinions as to what exactly constitutes corruption and dishonesty may differ across countries.

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Figure 10.4. Business Representatives’ Level of Trust in Public Procurement Officials

Trust in institutions is also a complex matter. Business representatives may trust their “own” people within an institution, but distrust the institution as such. In this sense, an important reason for institutional distrust might be that other people are also likely to have their “own” people in the same institution—people who are thought to promote other people’s vested interests. Bulgarian business representatives were less trusting of public procurement officials than business representatives elsewhere (see Figure 10.4).20 Some 56 percent of the Bulgarian business representatives expressed low trust, and only 1 percent expressed high trust in public procurement officials. There was not much difference in trust levels among the Czech Republic, Slovenia, and Romania. Business representatives from Slovenia (8 percent) and Romania (5 percent) were slightly more likely to express high trust in public procurement officials than their counterparts in the Czech Republic (1 percent) and Bulgaria (1 percent).21

Informal Practices in Public Procurement: The Procurement Officials’ Perspective Figure 10.5 shows that public procurement officials in all countries assess business more favorably than business representatives assess procurement officials. The percentage of procurement officials holding the view that business is honest and uncorrupted exceeds the percentage of business representatives Informal Relations in Public Procurement 355

Figure 10.5. Business Is Honest and Uncorrupted (as Perceived by Public Procurement Officials)

who think public procurement officials are honest and uncorrupted. Procurement officials consider business most honest and uncorrupted in the Czech Republic, somewhat less honest and uncorrupted in Romania and Slovenia, and the least honest and uncorrupted in Bulgaria. These observations may suggest that bribes are extorted by public procurement officials rather than offered by business representatives. However, it is also possible that business representatives tend to exaggerate the problem of corruption in public procurement and assume that competing companies bribe public procurement officials without evidence to this effect. None of the business representatives we interviewed admitted that their own companies had used bribes to win a public tender—though they provided us with detailed stories of how other companies had either tried or successfully done so. It is possible, however, that public procurement officials are not entirely honest in their assessment of business representatives—either because of sensitivity to accusations of corruption in public procurement (Bulgaria and Romania) or for other reasons. It is also possible that some public procurement officials simply do not perceive facilitation payments as bribes but rather as friendly gestures by personal friends. This is a particularly plausible explanation for the results in Bulgaria, where instrumental friendship is very much a part of the local business culture.

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Corruption

Types of Informal Requests Received by Procurement Officials Table 10.1. provides an overview of the types of requests reported by procurement officials and the difference between requests received and requests rendered. The requests are grouped into three broad categories: legitimate; (potentially) illegitimate; and illegal requests. Legitimate requests include requests for public information that is difficult or time-consuming to obtain, as well as requests for advice about procedures. (Potentially) illegitimate requests include requests that can be perceived either as legitimate or illegitimate, depending on the circumstances, such as requests for jobs, for access to other institutions, or for access to influential people. Illegal requests are determined independent of the context. Access to funds or other resources would most likely qualify as illegitimate requests, whereas requests for nonpublic information or something illegal are clearly illegal. Requests for access to funds or resources might be perfectly legitimate in some parts of government administration—for instance in social services departments where people are trying to get access to funds to which they are entitled such as pensions or unemployment benefits—but such requests are not legitimate in public procurement, where allocation of funds should be made by merit only. Legitimate requests were common in all countries. More than 50 percent of the respondents said they had received requests for publicly available information and between 85 and 90 percent had been approached for advice. While respondents sometimes turned down requests for publicly available information, they were happy to accept requests for advice. Our qualitative data suggest that public procurement officials are frequently asked for information about procedures. Although such information is publicly available, it can be very difficult to access. Given the lack of trust expressed in public procurement by business representatives, some businesses contacted procurement officials for guarantees that procurement procedures would be fair.22 Legitimate/illegitimate requests: A business representative wishing to submit a bid for a public tender with a very tight deadline might contact government officials in other institutions and pay them informally to speed up the processing of various official documents required to take part in the tender. Our previous research (Miller, Grødeland, and Koshechkina 2001) suggests that government officials consider such informal payments perfectly legitimate; in their view clients are simply paying for extra service. However, people who speed up their own bids with informal payments ultimately delay the Informal Relations in Public Procurement 357

10.1. The Frequency with Which Public Procurement Officials Receive and Accept Informal Requestsi

TA B L E

Czech Rep Req.

Acc.

Slovenia

Bulgaria

Req.

Acc.

Req.

Acc.

Romania Req.

Acc.

Public Information

78

-6

66

0

63

-10

51

-8

Advice

85

+2

90

0

89

-2

85

0

Speed up Procedures

59

+2

86

-6

63

-5

71

-20

A Job for Someone

40

-13

30

-21

27

-7

26

-8

Access to Colleagues/ Superiors

49

+8

54

+2

53

-7

47

-9

Access to Institutions

43

+9

41

+5

31

+3

36

-8

Access to Powerful and Influential People

36

-6

26

-3

25

-11

24

-12

Access to Funds and Other Resources

36

-1

22

-7

18

-8

27

-21

Nonpublic Information

49

-20

13

-10

21

-8

29

-27

Something Illegal

42

-23

11

-6

7

-4

10

-9

(75)

(75)

(75)

(75)

(75)

(75)

(75)

(75)

N=

i. The number of respondents is weighted down to seventy-five per country. The figures in the left column for each country represent the percentage of respondents who had very often, often, or sometimes received the given type of request. The figures in the right column for each country indicate the net difference between the percentage of respondents who said they had very often, often, or sometimes received the given type of request and the percentage of respondents who said they had very often, often, or sometimes accepted the request. The percentage of respondents who had rarely or never received such requests is not included in this table. Unknown or missing values were not included when calculating the percentages of respondents who had or had not received a given type of request. The large majority of our respondents, however, answered all questions.

bids of others, potentially triggering those displaced in the queue to make informal payments so that they can remain competitive. Requests for public procurement officials to facilitate contact with other people or institutions may be legitimate if such people have access to information or are able to offer (potential) participants of public tenders advice to which they are entitled that is beyond the capacity of public procurement officials to provide. If tender participants seek access to various institutions and/or people in order to obtain advantages over their competitors, then such requests are clearly illegitimate. Requests for jobs might be legitimate if public procurement officials are simply asked to consider somebody for a job when new recruitments will take place in their institution. However, if officials are asked to violate formal recruitment procedures by giving 358

Corruption

preferential treatment to a particular candidate then such requests are obviously illegitimate. Illegal requests for access to nonpublic information were common in all countries except Slovenia. Close to half of the Czech respondents and approximately one-quarter of those in Romania and Bulgaria had received such requests. Illegal requests generally were common in the Czech Republic, but considerably less widespread in Slovenia, Bulgaria, and Romania. Access to funds or other resources were also considerably more common in the Czech Republic than elsewhere— though roughly one-quarter of respondents in the three other countries had received similar requests. Data from our qualitative survey indicate that requests for access to inside information were frequent, as were requests for direct intervention in the tender process to promote the interests of some bidders over others.23 Refusal rates for our quantitative survey were much higher in the Czech Republic than elsewhere. This might explain the differences between the Czech Republic and the other countries with respect to legitimate/illegitimate and illegal requests. The pressures on public procurement officials in the Czech Republic may be greater because the country is wealthier than the other three countries and consequently issues larger tenders with higher stakes for vested interests. Furthermore, a fairly high percentage of Czech public procurement officials have current or former business affiliations. These relationships may make it easier for the business community to approach procurement officials with various requests. Slovenia, by contrast, is a small country with a high degree of internal networking. Slovenians often say that in their country everybody knows each other. Consequently, it might be more difficult for Slovenian businesspeople to make illegitimate or illegal requests from procurement officials without public exposure. However, such incidents may simply be underreported. Underreporting is also likely in Bulgaria and Romania, given the focus on corruption in South Eastern Europe during the run-up to EU accession. Figure 10.6 shows the combined percentages of respondents who satisfied different types of requests at different rates of frequency. Not surprisingly, legitimate requests were satisfied most often. Among requests classified as (potentially) illegitimate, respondents most often accepted requests to speed up procedures and least often accepted requests for jobs. Requests for access to colleagues were accepted more often than requests for access to institutions, which in turn were accepted more often than requests for access to powerful and influential people. Access to funds, nonpublic information, or something illegal was rarely provided.

Informal Relations in Public Procurement 359

Figure 10.6. Granting of Requests by Public Procurement Officials

Types of Influence Business representatives or their intermediaries employ a wide range of strategies to influence officials and thus increase the likelihood that their requests will be satisfied. These strategies, like the petitions to procurement officials they support, can be classified as legitimate, (potentially) illegitimate, or illegal. Legitimate influence includes personal appeal, friendly behavior, persistence, and argument. Pressure or threats, by contrast, can be legitimate, illegitimate, or illegal. For instance, threats by clients to report public procurement officials who are clearly not doing their jobs properly would be legitimate, though unpleasant for the officials. Threats to a public procurement official’s family for refusing requests would be clearly illegal. Offers of reciprocity, small presents, expensive presents, or money in exchange for a certain outcome are clearly corrupt and illegal. As indicated in Figure 10.7, efforts to influence procurement procedures that were illegitimate or illegal were most common in Romania (pressure) and Bulgaria (threats). Corrupt influences, such as offers of reciprocity, small presents, expensive presents or money, were less common than legitimate influence and more widespread in the Czech Republic than elsewhere.

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Figure 10.7. Efforts to Influence Public Procurement Officials

Network Influence Our qualitative surveys indicate that informal requests in public procurement are frequently conveyed through a third party and that informal networks are generally considered to be more harmful than contacts (Grødeland 2005). Consequently, we asked the respondents of our quantitative survey whether informal networks are successfully used in public procurement and also how influential they are. Figure 10.8 shows that informal networks are commonly—and successfully—used in public procurement in the four countries covered by our study, especially in Bulgaria and the Czech Republic. Some of the respondents who took part in our qualitative survey simply noted that contacts and informal networks were used in public procurement, without providing any further detail. Others talked about specific types of informal networks. Among the informal networks respondents identified were political and economic networks (Czech Republic, Slovenia, Bulgaria) and various mixed networks (Czech Republic, Bulgaria) uniting political and economic interests. Common responses included: “networks of political parties” (Pr-2–CR); “politicians press subtly, they do not call directly, they ask why

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Figure 10.8. Public Procurement Officials on the Use of Informal Networks in Public Procurement

did you do this or that. There is no difference between position and opposition. That is why chiefs [of departments] must be strong people [in order] to defend themselves from pressures” (Pr-3–Sl); “there are political influences of more networks. . . . [T]hey are not economic networks, they are mainly political networks” (Pr-4–Sl); “interconnection of political party and entrepreneurs” (Pr-10–CR); “the connection between political and economic life makes the political parties being sustained by different firms which gain contracts from public money through public procurement offices” (NGO-3, Ro); “the municipal counsellors are appointed, they belong to the respective parties. This party quota principle allows certain groups gravitating around the municipal councillors to try and use privileges, preferences, especially in some delicate areas, and despite the normative regulations for public procurement” (Pr-6–Bu). Some business representatives were so keen to win tenders that they changed their political allegiances if and as necessary. As a Bulgarian procurement official conveyed, “This party quota principle allows certain groups gravitating around the municipal counselors to try to use privileges, preferences, especially in some delicate areas despite the normative regulations for public procurement. There are plenty of ways in which this can be done. I know quite a few cases of people who, motivated by economic interests, have more than once changed their political affiliation” (Pr-6, Bu). Informal networks linking people who had previously gone to school or studied at university together were also active in public procurement, as were networks of former and current colleagues and networks of acquaintances and 362

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Figure 10.9. The Influence of Informal Networks in Public Procurement

friends (Czech Republic, Bulgaria, and Romania). Characterization of informal networks by procurement officials include, for example, “former (fellow) students . . . former colleagues and current colleagues, friends from various clubs” (Pr-6–CR); “there are people, for instance, who are graduates from one and the same year” (Pr-4–Bu); “they act on the basis of friendship ties and on party alliance. They operate for occupying positions and doing favors and the kinds of activities that I mentioned previously” (Pr-8–Bu); “yes, informal networks are active including in my working area: these consist mostly of ex-faculty colleagues or even acquaintances that one makes during everyday work” (Pr-7–Ro). Figure 10.9 shows that informal networks are perceived as influential in public procurement—particularly in Bulgaria and the Czech Republic.

What Influences Informal Practices in Public Procurement: Testing Standard Independent Variables Figure 10.10 suggests that it is fairly common for “outsiders” to pursue public procurement contracts through informal channels, particularly in Bulgaria and Romania, and to a lesser degree in the Czech Republic and Slovenia. Figure 10.11 shows that the majority of the respondents in all countries had received informal requests with modest differences between countries. Such requests are not necessarily corrupt however. As discussed above, they may be legitimate, (possibly) illegitimate, and/or illegal.

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Figure 10.10. Public Procurement Officials on How Common It Is for People to Seek Informal Outcomes in Public Procurement

A robust international literature on corruption suggests that there is considerable within-group variation with respect to corrupt behavior. We therefore tested the correlation impact of gender, age, education, living standard, tenure, discretionary powers, job security, and business organization membership on the frequency with which respondents were approached informally. While gender, education, and membership in business organizations were significant, other background variables appeared to have a more limited impact. Discretionary powers had an impact in three countries (the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, and Romania). Tenure and job security affected the number of informal requests in the Czech Republic and Slovenia, whereas factors such as age and perceived living standard each made a difference in only two countries (Romania and Slovenia, respectively).

Informality in Public Procurement in East Central and South Eastern Europe: Explanations In the previous sections we argue that informal practices are widespread in postcommunist Europe. Such practices—according to many observers—are rooted in the past and are potential sources of corruption. For reasons of space it is not possible to provide a detailed account of all the internal and external factors that might negatively influence public procurement. Instead, we briefly discuss five factors that make public procurement susceptible to informal influence: (1) 364

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Figure 10.11. Public Procurement Officials on How Often They Are Approached with Informal Requests

legal instability; (2) administrative weaknesses; (3) administrative culture; (4) business culture; and (5) inadequate control and enforcement mechanisms. Legal Instability Western-style procurement did not exist during communism, and postcommunist states in East Central and South Eastern Europe therefore had to build the procurement sector from scratch. Some postcommunist states created their own public procurement legislation in the 1990s, later harmonizing it with the European treaties and secondary EU legislation in order to qualify for EU membership.24 However, most postcommunist states simply copied or introduced their own versions of EU procurement directives.25 In doing so they ensured that the rules regulating public procurement were up-to-date, appropriate for the postcommunist context, and in line with EU requirements. The latter was particularly important to qualify for EU membership. Although EU membership is officially voluntary, in reality the postcommunist EU member states had little choice but to apply for membership. Political and economic elites, both domestically and internationally, perceived EU membership as a key to faster economic recovery for countries in transition. Many countries, particularly the Baltic States, also considered the EU a guarantee of regional stability and a tool against Russian domination. However, legislation “exported” from Brussels to the postcommunist applicant states to qualify them for EU membership is not necessarily suitable for the postcommunist context. Informal Relations in Public Procurement 365

Extensive revision of EU directives required postcommunist member states to adjust their procurement legislation several times to ensure compatibility with the EU standards. Additionally, the revised directives required postcommunist countries to introduce legislation regulating tenders below the thresholds given in the EU directives because of their comparatively smaller GDPs.26 Consequently, these countries have experienced several years of continuous legal change in public procurement. The 1993 Governance Ordinance regulating public procurement in Romania, for example, was changed some six hundred times before being replaced in 1999!27 The 1994 Czech Act on Public Contracts was amended in 1996, 1998, and 2000,28 2002, 2004, and 2006.29 Experience suggests that legal transplants—that is, the introduction of a set of laws in a country other than the one for which it was developed—are more likely to succeed if their adoption is initiated locally (that is, “imported”), rather than enforced on a country by an external actor (that is, “exported”). However, legislation developed within and for one political and/or economic system rarely functions in exactly the same manner when introduced in countries whose legal, political, economic, and cultural systems significantly differ.30 An EU representative based in Prague in 2004 admitted that the EU accession process did not necessarily produce perfect procurement legislation in postcommunist states: “The change of the public procurement act [in the Czech Republic] was . . . finalized thanks to the EU accession process. It is true that the amendment of this act is not perfect and we are thinking about what to do in this respect” (EU-2, CR). Former World Bank economist and anticorruption expert Bryane Michael (2007) has criticized the continuous amendments of legislation that have taken place in postcommunist states in recent years. In his view, “better” laws “will . . . not fight corruption. Throughout Eastern Europe, policymakers have focused heavily on rewriting laws . . . and despite rewritten anti-corruption laws in almost every single new EU member country, corruption has not decreased. . . . (L)aws are not magic talismans.”31 There are several reasons for the grim prospects of defeating corruption through legal reform. First, “imported” laws are not always properly understood by the people in charge of implementing them. A Romanian lawyer noted, “As a jurist, I have to confess that I feel totally helpless in front of this avalanche of laws, especially when it is about adapting to a completely new system that is foreign to every one of us” (CoE-2, Ro). The respondent’s hopelessness is likely to be shared by public administration officials in other postcommunist states—albeit to different extents.

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Second, incorrect interpretation of the law—whether deliberate or inadvertent32—is a major problem in public administration generally33 and in public procurement, in particular. In its 2006 report, the Czech Office for the Protection of Competition, which is responsible for monitoring public procurement, reported the persistence of defects identified in earlier years. In some cases, “the contracting authorities completely disregard the Public Procurement Act.” The Zlin townhall, for example, violated procurement procedures numerous times and was heavily fined; the city of Prostĕjov awarded a construction contract worth more than CZK 200 million without a tender.34 Bulgarian procurement legislation, at least initially, provided procurement officials with multiple opportunities to circumvent its requirements. As a Bulgarian media representative reported: Bulgarian laws leave a great many loopholes. . . . [I]t is possible not to apply the law on public procurement if the respective commission is split into several smaller amounts. This should be controlled by the State Financial Control or the National Audit Office. Control is only exercised years later when there is hardly any point and the penalties are relatively small. Likewise, road repair is being carried out under emergency road repair projects, which do not necessitate issuing a public tender. . . . [S]everal stories have appeared in the media on how the law on public procurement is circumvented because of alleged national security considerations. (Me-9, Bu)

A representative of the judiciary echoes this view: “[In public procurement] things are scary. The public procurement is a most unscrupulous thing [here] right now. The law is imperfect and allows for thousands of misinterpretations and various refined ways [of using contacts]” (Le-2, Bu). The level of corruption caused by informal practices appears to be linked to the number of “transitions” in public procurement policy in East Central and South Eastern Europe. “Legal instability,” that is, frequent changes in laws and rules regulating public procurement, increases the likelihood of corruption in public procurement, if it does not directly facilitate it.

Administrative Weaknesses Under state socialism, government administration was primarily responsible for implementing the dictates of the Communist Party (Mihai 2005, 2). Cadres belonging to the nomenklatura received high-quality training in elite

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institutions in preparation for jobs in the state administration. Such positions were considered fairly prestigious and their security was tied to party loyalty. Transformation from communist rule at least formally altered the relationship between political parties and state administration and significantly altered state administration as such. Public sector reform is economically very demanding however. Understaffing, nontransparent recruitment procedures and the contradictory requirements of various international organizations, leave government administration in many postcommunist states ill equipped to implement reform (Mihai 2005, 6).35 Furthermore, introducing reform is not in itself a guarantee of change. Some 50 percent of the mayors surveyed by the European Institute of Romania in 2005 considered administrative reform to have had no particular impact. The mayors were of the opinion that political messages failed to translate into proper information and/or training for the government officials in charge of implementing reform, and only moderately contributed to reducing corruption (Marius et al. 2005, 5–6, 24). In some postcommunist countries modern institutions that govern public procurement had to be built from scratch. In most cases public procurement suffers from the same staffing shortages, poorly educated personnel, and inadequate technical equipment that plague other parts of public administration. These factors complicated the implementation of frequently changing public procurement procedures in the postcommunist EU member states. An additional administrative challenge is posed by the fact that postcommunist states wary of criticisms of corruption in public procurement often opt for open rather than closed bids. Such bids are administratively far more demanding than closed bids. This produces inefficiency, which in turn renders the procurement sector more vulnerable to informal behavior—legitimate, illegitimate, and/or corrupt. As a Czech government official working in the sphere of anticorruption pointed out, “The act of public procurement causes lots of delays and is demanding on . . . the administrative apparatus” (Go-2, Cz). Administrative Culture Although public administration in postcommunist states was thoroughly overhauled, “most rules and practices in the bureaucracies . . . still have their origins in the communist era, chiefly because legislative reform has not penetrated deeply into the micromanagement of state agencies” (Mungiu-Pippidi 2003, 83). Furthermore, “many contemporary officials who were socialized in [the] administrative tradition [of communism] brought these skills to their current jobs” (Karklins

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2005, 120). This problem is compounded by absent or inadequate training for government officials. A large number of government officials appointed after 1991 had to “learn on the job.” Verheijen therefore concludes, “The absence of training programs to change the attitude of civil servants towards citizens and politicians . . . have led to a situation in which there is continuity rather than change in the way in which civil servants perceive their role and position” (1997, 10). There is also evidence that government administration of postcommunist states in East Central and South Eastern Europe remains highly politicized. Political connections are often required to get a job in public administration and as jobs (with the exception of the Czech Republic) are poorly paid and considered low-status, it is difficult to recruit high-qualified personnel. The aforementioned survey of government officials and mayors conducted by the European Institute of Romania, for instance, indicates that “there is chronic political influence in local administration.” Mayors in particular are under heavy pressure from various economic interests (Marius et al. 2005, 10, 20). Political influence in public administration is also a problem in Bulgaria (Verheijen 1997, 10). Communist Party members, Komsomol officials, directors of state enterprises, and government officials were well positioned to use the opportunities brought about by decentralization and privatization for personal gain (Karklins 2005, 84–85). Kaminski claims that the formal state was effectively privatized by individuals who “regard [their official positions] as private endowments rather than as official functions” (1989, 87). Public procurement in Romania at the beginning of the twenty-first century fit this description well. An assessment of Romanian public procurement conducted by the Open Society Institute in 2002, disclosed widespread collusion between public procurement officials and business representatives. Public officials were often shareholders in companies bidding for tenders, and some first appeared to be protected by corrupt local officials and/or politicians (2002, 502–4). Karklins observes that social behavior that was prevalent under state socialism persists mostly among the older generation (2005, 87). If this is the case, then younger businesspeople and officials educated after the collapse of state socialism might, at least initially, resist the “culture of informality” inherent in local business and in government structures. By contrast, political and business elites who came of age after the collapse of state socialism may enter business or public procurement with no preconceived notions of acceptable behavior and simply adapt to the existing culture. An analysis of informal behavior and corruption in public procurement must therefore include an assessment of institutional and

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personal factors likely to affect the behavior of the public procurement officials. Institutional factors include the clarity and feasibility of the officials’ job description, (lack of) discretionary powers, training, remuneration,36 and job security. Personal factors refer to gender, age, and level of education. Business Culture In all postcommunist states, former high-ranking party and government officials successfully transformed themselves into private businessmen—some just before communism collapsed, some after its demise. The Communist Party in Gomel (Belarus), for instance, quickly turned the local party school into a business school in the beginning of the 1990s—but forgot to remove the list of all high-ranking party officials from the adjacent party hotel! 37 In East Central and South Eastern Europe, a larger number of former highranking officials were forced out of their jobs as a result of lustration. For some of these, private business offered alternative career possibilities. Many of Bulgaria’s most successful businesspeople are former government officials who took part in training programs organized for higher- and middle-level state officials (Verheijen 1997, 4). Similarly, in Romania, former government officials, party officials, and members of the Securitate have entered business. While private enterprise was more or less nonexistent in the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, and Romania before the collapse of communism, private enterprise did exist in Slovenia—though heavily influenced by the local political elite. In a previous article on informal relations in politics, we quoted Slovenian respondents who claimed that business in their country is composed of two distinct but mutually dependent groups. One group consists of former members of the nomenklatura, such as politicians and directors of state enterprises. These people abandoned politics to establish themselves as influential businessmen. They conduct business with their counterparts in other former Yugoslav republics. The second group is composed of younger people who are educated in modern business and have extensive knowledge of the stock market. While the former group is in possession of useful business contacts, the latter possesses skills necessary for success (Grødeland 2007). In Romania the collapse of communism was very violent, but new elites did not replace the old. However, just as in Slovenia and Bulgaria, politicians, government officials and the former Securitate staff switched to private business. Another element of business culture that needs to be considered is the dominant model of friendship. While “functional friendship” (Karklins 2005,

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79) was a typical feature of communism, “instrumental friendship” is an inherent part of postcommunist Balkan business culture. Chavdarova claims that “relations to . . . formal organizations, which represent the necessary business environment, are sought to be informalized through creating and maintaining personal contacts with people who embody organizations,” and “business relations are trustworthy if they are relations with a specific physical person because this provides the opportunity to appeal not only to professional standards, but to rely on his/her morality and goodwill; the impersonal business relations expected in any corporative organization sounds too abstract in Bulgaria . . . having friendship relations with a counterpart means sharing the same norms and value orientations which can ensure stable, sustainable, and long-lasting business relationships” (2007, 296–97). Business relations in Slovenia are similar, and important decisions tend to be made in local coffee shops rather than in more formal settings. Besides, Slovenia is a very small country in terms of both geography and population. The Czech Republic, by contrast, is said to have a fairly impersonal business culture. However, Czech business does not exist in a vacuum. Informal relations in the Czech state administration are therefore also likely to affect business. Inadequate Control and Law Enforcement Karklins points out that “an independent and effective judiciary is crucial . . . to ensure the accountability of public officials” (2005, 105). However, judicial reform in postcommunist states to date has only been partially successful. Efforts to enhance the independence of the judiciary have been opposed by Parliament in some countries, notably the Czech Republic. Lack of funds, lack of (qualified) staff, and inadequate staff training have further slowed the pace of reform and undermined its efficiency. Partly as a result of these factors, the judiciary is vulnerable to external informal influences (Grødeland 2005b). In 2005, appeals of decisions made by public procurement officials delayed tenders for up to a year (Karklins 2005, 121). Such delays are costly for business; thus, accepting unlawful or partial decisions is preferable to some firms. Control procedures in postcommunist government administration are generally weak (Karklins 2005, 136). A high-ranking official in Slovenia working in the area of anticorruption stated, “The main problem in Slovenia, where at the moment we have a fairly good level of democracy, is to control the government at the horizontal level. Most of the institutions operating at this level failed. They were not built in these last 10 or 12 years” (Go- 2,

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Sl). Wide discretionary powers also complicate control, and the “culture of mutually covering up learned during the communist era persists,” creating problems for whistle blowers (Karklins 2005, 122). Slow control procedures also represent a considerable problem in postcommunist states.

Conclusion This study demonstrates that informal relations are widespread in postcommunist states and that they are used in response to transition, but rooted in pretransition culture. It explored various factors thought to affect the extent and impact of informal social relations in public procurement. These included the number of legal reforms and weaknesses inherent in public procurement legislation, administrative weaknesses, administrative culture, business culture, and the quality of control and law enforcement. Based on our previous research and our assessment of these factors, we put forward two main hypotheses: informal social relations in public procurement are (1) more widespread in “second wave” than in “first wave” EU member states; and (2) more widespread in the Czech Republic than Slovenia (among the “first wave” EU member states) and in Bulgaria than in Romania (“second wave” EU member states). We also suggested that local and foreign businesses may have different opinions of public procurement officials; that older and younger officials may have different values so far as informal social relations are concerned; and that other factors such as gender, education, perceived living standards, membership in business organizations, job security, and discretionary powers may affect their behavior. Our country-specific hypotheses were confirmed for some variables. Our expectations were borne out regarding the extent to which public procurement may be influenced, the commonality of informal requests, and the frequency with which public procurement officials are approached with informal requests. For others, such as business trust in public procurement, the fairness and impartiality of public procurement, the honesty and noncorruptness of public procurement, business honesty and noncorruptness, the use of informal networks in public procurement, and the influence of informal networks in public procurement, findings for Bulgaria were more similar to findings from Slovenia or the Czech Republic. In most instances, however, Slovenia comes out on top and Bulgaria comes out worse than the other countries— that is in line with our main hypotheses.

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Although the confirmation of these country hypotheses is likely to be in part due to the impact of objective factors (the actual levels and types of corruption), we cannot exclude the possibility that heavy pressure from the EU to reduce levels of corruption—coupled with a series of anticorruption campaigns—might have affected findings in Romania. Extensive corruption in Bulgaria—and related widespread media coverage—may have made respondents more willing to talk openly about corruption. Conversely, high-level political corruption scandals in the Czech Republic and subsequent condemnation on the part of the EU may have affected findings for the Czech Republic—though Czech respondents more willingly admitted that they had provided illegitimate or illegal requests than respondents in the other countries. Finally, country differences may, in part, be ascribed to very high refusal rates in the Czech Republic and fairly high refusal rates in Romania. The respondents who agreed to be interviewed may therefore not be entirely representative of public procurement officials as such. The relatively small size of our sample may also have some impact on the findings. In any case, our data does show that informal approaches are common in public procurement, that requests are often illegal and/or corrupt, that they are often conveyed through a contact or an informal network, and that they are frequently accompanied by incentives or pressure. Public procurement officials and business representatives have considerable bargaining powers in their dealings with each other. Estimated losses in public procurement in the Czech Republic and Bulgaria due to inefficiency and lack of transparency (Czech Republic) and corruption (Bulgaria) are considerable.38 There is widespread agreement that corruption in public procurement requires complex solutions and that such corruption must be fought on a number of different fronts.39 To be effective, however, such efforts must be accompanied by political will. Such will is frequently declared by the ruling elites of Europe’s postcommunist states. However, it usually fails to translate into political action—in part because the ruling elites benefit from the status quo. Besides, to quote Roth (2007), “people don’t want to change their own culture. They want less corruption, but at the same time they also want to retain the advantages that contacts and informal networks bring.” Our findings suggest that people rely on informal practices more out of habit than out of need.40 As suggested by some of the respondents who took part in our qualitative survey (especially Bulgarian respondents), old habits die hard: “The mentality of Bulgarians is such that they seek contacts. . . . [T]he citizens [use contacts] by habit” (Pr-6, Bu). “People are inclined to think that if you work

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at the ministry, all you have to do is call someone else. ... [M]aybe this was the way things used to be in the communist society, i.e., when an official with the Council of Ministers called another official, regardles of whether they knew each other, the latter was prone to help him with or without reason” (Pr-2, Bu). Additional measures to address the context and the social norms regulating certain behavior within that context are thus prerequisite for effective reform. Reforming cultural contexts and context-specific behavior is complicated and cannot easily be initiated from the outside.41 (Potentially) corrupt informal behavior may, to some extent, be contained by improved law enforcement. However, unless accompanied by local commitment, the impact of reform is likely to be limited.

Appendix: Project Design Qualitative Survey: Samples Czech Republic

Slovenia

Bulgaria

Romania

National level Prague—45

National level Ljubljana—45

National level Sofia—45

National level Buchureşti—45

Capital level Prague—45

Capital level Ljubljana—45

Capital level Sofia—45

Capital level Buchureşti—45

Note: The qualitative survey was conducted in the form of structured, open-ended, in-depth interviews. A total of forty-five interviews were conducted at both national and capital levels: 9 categories of elites x 5 interviews (national level); and 9 categories of elites x 5 interviews (capital level). Interviews were conducted with the following categories of elites: (1) elected representatives; (2) nonelected political party representatives; (3) representatives of the judiciary (two-thirds were judges; one-third prosecutors); (4) local business representatives; (5) foreign business representatives; (6) public procurement officials; (7) NGO representatives; (8) media representatives; and (9) EU officials/Council of Europe representatives (five) and high-ranking government officials working in the area of anticorruption (five). The qualitative surveys were carried out in 2003–4 by local interviewers under the direction of Pavol Fric, Centre for Socio-Economic Strategies, Charles University, Prague (Czech Republic), Bojan Dobovsek, Faculty of Criminal Justice, University of Maribor (Slovenia), Vitosha Research under the direction of Alexander Stoyanov, and by the Romanian Academic Society under the direction of Alina Mungiu-Pippidi (Romania). Respondents were recruited primarily by position and not by age or gender.

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Quota-Based Quantitative Survey: Samples Czech Republic

Slovenia

Bulgaria

Romania

National/capital level

National/capital level

National/capital level

National/capital level

Ljubljana—200

Prague—200 Regional level Regional level Mladá Boleslav—57 (Central Bohemia) Plzeň—57 (Southwest) Ústí nad Labem—58 (Northwest) Hradec Králové—57 (Northeast) Brno—57 (Southeast)

Buchureşti—200

Sofia—200 Maribor—67 (Pomurska & Podravska) Celje—67 (Koroska & Savijska)

Regional level Regional level Pernik—50 (Sofia region) Bourgas—50 (Bourgas)

Novo Mesto—67 Varna—50 (Dolenjska & Posavje) (Varna) Kranj—66 (Gorenjska)

Pleven—50 (Lovech)

Koper—67 (Primorska & Notranjska)

Vratsa—50 (Montana)

Nova Gorica—66 (Goriska)

Plovdiv—50 (Plovdiv)

Olomouc—57 (Central Moravia)

Rousse—50 (Rousse)

Ostrava—57 (Moravskoslezsko)

Haskovo—50 (Haskovo)

Iaşi—57 (Northeast) Constanţa—57 (Southeast) Ploieşti—57 (South) Craiova—57 (Southwest) Timişoara—57 (West) Cluj Napoca—58 (Northwest) Braşov—57 (Center)

Note: In each capital we conducted 120 interviews at national and 80 interviews at capital level. Surveys were carried out in 2005 by GfK-Prague under the direction of Klára Trávničková, by CATI in Slovenia under the direction of Tomaž Hohkraut and Renata Rakusa, by Vitosha Research in Sofia under the direction of Alexander Stoyanov, and by Gallup Romania under the direction of Alexandru Toth. To ensure cross-national comparability, we specified eight quota samples x 75 respondents in each country. For each quota, we specified the number of respondents to be interviewed at national (15), capital (10), and regional (50) level. As the number of regions varied slightly by country, the 50 respondents to be interviewed for each quota within each country were evenly spread between the regions. This allowed us to compare (1) equally sized samples by country; (2) equally sized national, capital, and regional samples by country; and (3) equally sized regional samples within each country. Interviews in the regions were conducted at the NUTS II level, more specifically in a big city or town within each NUTS II region in each country. As Slovenia only has two NUTS II regions—that is, (1) Ljubljana, and (2) the rest of the country—the regional interviews were conducted in a limited number of NUTS III regions and in the biggest town within each of them. As the number of potential respondents in some of the regions was limited, and as we were primarily interested in interviewing people in leadership positions, we did not specifically request that the quotas be spread widely across ages and gender.

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Notes 1. 2.

See, for instance, OECD 2007; Rose-Ackerman 1999; Søreide 2002. Public Procurement: Spotting the Bribe, OECD Observer, April 2007, at www.oecdobserver.org/news/printpage.php/aid/2170/Public_procurement.

3.

On May 1, 2004, eight postcommunist states were admitted into the EU: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Hungary. Another two—Bulgaria and Romania—were admitted on January 1, 2007.

4. 5.

For an overview, see Arrowsmith 2006. Informal practice may be defined as behavior not in line with formal procedures stipulated for the solution of a given problem and/or behavior aimed at solving problems for which there are no formal procedures.

6.

The project was funded by the Research Council of Norway (grant no. 156856/730) and carried out by NIBR in collaboration with Charles University/GfK-Prague (Czech Republic), University of Maribor/CATI (Slovenia), Vitosha Research (Bulgaria), and Romanian Academic Society/Gallup (Romania). Dr. Alena Ledeneva (SSEES, University College London) and Dr. Heiko Pleines (Forschungsstelle Osteuropa, Universität Bremen) acted as project advisors. The project focuses on informal relations and corruption in public procurement, party funding, lobbying, and the judiciary in the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Bulgaria, and Romania. For an overview of the project structure, see Grødeland (OECD 2005).

7.

There are numerous definitions of “contacts” and “informal networks.” Because our focus is primarily on the influence that contacts and informal networks exert in politics, public procurement, and the judiciary—that is, on the end result of their actions— we define a “contact” as a person who is able and willing to help someone. An “informal network” is defined as an informal circle of people able and willing to help each other. For a more detailed discussion of these definitions, see Grødeland (2007).

8.

The survey was jointly developed by the World Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. For details, see info.worldbank.org/governance/ beeps.

9.

The World Values Survey is administered by the World Values Survey Organization. The organization is the coordinating body of a network of social scientists. For details, see www.worldvaluessurvey.org.

10.

For an analysis of the pros and cons of collecting data on informal networks by means of quantitative surveys, see Grødeland 2007, 222–23.

11.

NUTS (Nomenclature of Territorial Units) II is the main analytical level used in EU regional policy analysis.

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12.

There are obvious advantages to composing a “nationally representative” sample for elite surveys with a relatively small N both in terms of recruitment (easier) and geographical spread. However, as this would greatly limit the total number of interviews conducted in each location, the possibility of investigating elite interaction in these locations would be limited. By selecting a limited number of locations for interviewing one gets a better overview of elite perceptions, elite behavior, and elite interaction in these specific locations. The disadvantage, however, is that recruitment tends to be more complicated because the pool of potential respondents is limited. If the selected locations are too small, potential respondents might be reluctant to take part in the interviews for fear that their identity may become known. Potential respondents were provided with written guarantees of anonymity from both the project lead institution (NIBR) and the local pollsters commissioned to conduct the polls—all of which uphold ESOMAR standards.

13.

A limited number of quotes from in-depth interviews with elites that do not work in business or public procurement but that refer to public procurement appear in the text for illustrative purposes.

14.

We previously conducted an in-depth analysis of informal relations in public pro-

15.

European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Transition Report 2005

curement based on qualitative findings alone. See Grødeland 2005, 2006. (London: European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, 2005), referred to in Pashev, Dyulgerov, and Kaschiev 2006, 27. 16.

In its assessment of the EU accession process published in 2002, the Open Society Institute concluded that some 50 percent of Romanian procurement decisions were being challenged. The sector was characterized by endemic corruption, and according to officials at the Court of Auditors some 99 percent of tenders were arranged or fixed. The drafting of tender documents was identified as particularly vulnerable to corruption. By making a commission equivalent to 10 percent of the procurement value—companies were able to design tender announcements to their own needs. Open Society Institute 2002, 502–4.

17.

Romanian Information Centre in Brussels. “Romanian Justice Minister Monica Macovei, on Achievements during the first Year in Office and Objectives for 2006,” at http://crib.mae.ro/index.php?lang=en&id=5402.

18.

Trandafir 2006; “Romania to Slow Anti-corruption Fight, Minister Warns,” Euroobserver.com, January 9, 2007; “The New Kids on the Block,” The Economist, January 4, 2007.

19.

Survey and interview responses are identified with in-text citations that indicate the type of respondent, where the survey was conducted, and the survey record.

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For example, (Ib-1–Ro) indicates that the respondent represents a foreign business, is respondent number 1 from this respondent category, and is located in Romania. Representatives of foreign businesses are referred to as Ib, representatives of local businesses as Nb, public procurement officials as Pr, elected representative as El-r, political party representatives as PP, prosecutors and judges as Le, media representatives as Me, NGO representatives as NGO, Council of Europe representatives as CoE, and government officials working in the field of anticorruption as Go. CR indicates that the survey was conducted in the Czech Republic, Sl that it was conducted in Slovenia, Bu in Bulgaria, and Ro in Romania. 20.

Respondents were asked to indicate their level of trust in public procurement officials on a scale from 1 (very low trust) to 7 (very high trust). Answers were recoded as high trust (answer categories 6 and 7), low trust (answer categories 1 and 2), and intermediate trust (answer categories 3, 4, and 5).

21.

Differences between local and foreign business were small (less than 10 percent) in all countries except for the Czech Republic where local business had 12 percent more low trust in public procurement officials than foreign business.

22.

For example, “[People ask me for] information about rules, how the tender procedure will proceed, which local campaign is planned” (Pr-1–CR); “you get information faster . . . better information. That is not bad” (Pr-7–Sl); “obtaining such information is not unlawful; it’s the kind of information that everyone ought to be able to get” (Pr-7–Bu); “if they go through official channels they will waste a lot of time” (Pr-1–Bu); “most often they ask me to guarantee . . . that no applicant will get an unlawful advantage by using influential friends and interventions” (Pr-1–CR).

23.

“They try to gain information, which is closed [that is, internal] or to gain information in advance” (Pr-10–CR); “[They ask me] to ignore the shortages in offers, to give them preferential treatment. . . . People who make such requests are entrepreneurs and members of political parties” (Pr-10–CR); “they generally demand that I do my best to [ensure] that they are winners in public tender procedures or [they] ask me to help them to transmit their application to the exact [appropriate] person who can decide [the] . . . procedure for their benefit. . . . Private entrepreneurs contact me in this way” (Pr-6–CR); “[I have been asked to] intervene” (Pr-1–Sl); “usually it’s for . . . winning a competition” (Pr-6–Bu).

24.

For overviews of public procurement legislation in the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Bulgaria, and Romania, see Open Society Institute 2002; “The Continued Overhaul of Romania’s Public Procurement System,” The Romanian Digest XI, no. 1, January 2006; “Romania’s New Public Procurement Law,” The Romanian Digest IX, no. 7, July 2006; Novotny 2006a, 2006b; Krutak 2006; Ježek 2006; Penazova 2007.

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25.

This was, for instance, the case in Romania, whose public procurement law is “largely based on the text of the EC Directives (prior to the approval of Directives 17/2004 and 18/2004) and many provisions of the public procurement law have been taken directly from the relevant EC Directives.” SIGMA/OECD. “Romania. Public Procurement System. Assessment June 2005,” at www.oecd.org/dataoecd/56/24/35851221.pdf. For an overview of EU Acquis on Public Procurement, see Trybus 2005, 2–4.

26.

The gross domestic product (GDP) of the first-wave admissions to the EU in 2004 was considerably smaller than that of EU’s established member states, though larger than that of Bulgaria and Romania, which joined the EU in 2007: in 2005, Bulgaria’s GDP per capita was $3,480 and Romania’s was $4,490—compared to $9,240 for the eight 2004 entrants and the EU-wide average of $29,330. As the size of GDP in the postcommunist EU member states is considerably lower than the EU-wide average, most public procurement contracts in the former countries are small and below the thresholds of the EU Public Procurement Directives. National rules regulating procurements below the EU standard thresholds have therefore been introduced. Such procurements are frequently conducted as closed bids. For details, see “The New Kids on the Block,” Economist, January 4, 2007; Squire & Sanders 2004, 2.

27.

Earlier (1991) and later (2001) Romanian Procurement Acts contained a number of unclear rules, leaving officials with considerable discretion. Open Society Institute 2002, 451–516.

28.

Open Society Institute 2002, 33–88.

29.

SIGMA/OECD 2003; Jucik 2004; Kruták 2006; Ježek 2006.

30.

Gillespie 2006, 1–6; van Olden 2002, 5–6; Horn 1991, 725–46.

31.

Bryane Michael, former World Bank economist, referred to in Rucinschi 2007. For an overview of anticorruption efforts in postcommunist states in recent years, see Schmidt 2007.

32.

According to North (1990, 4), informal rules have considerable influence on how formal rules are interpreted.

33.

A survey of government officials conducted by the European Institute of Romania suggested that poor pay and the current legal framework facilitate corruption in government administration. Profiroiu, Tudorel, Carp, and Dragos 2005, 19.

34.

Office for the Protection of Competition of the Czech Republic. “The Office Imposed Record Fine on Zlin Town Hall,” April 20, 2007.

35.

While the EU has been promoting more professional public administration in Romania, the IMF has pushed Romania to reduce administrative staff. Mihai 2005, 6.

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36.

The European Institute of Romania’s survey among mayors and government officials suggests that low salaries are the main reason for corruption in government administration. Inadequate legal frameworks and low morality among government officials were also seen as fairly important, compared to pressure from the economic environment and political system, which was said to have moderate impact, and citizens’ behavior, which was said to have an insignificant impact on corruption in public procurement. Marius, Tudorel, Carp, and Dragos 2005, 31.

37.

Personal observation made by the author in early August 1991 on an official visit to Gomel organized by the leader of the Chernobyl committee of the Belarussian Parliament and former first secretary of the Communist Party in Gomel.

38.

Anticorruption experts in some countries in East Central and South Eastern Europe have tried to estimate losses due to inefficiency and lack of transparency in contract awards. The Czech chapter of Transparency International has estimated losses due to inefficiency and lack of transparency in contract awards to CZK 32.4 billion (US$ 1.4 billion) in 2004 alone. A report on public procurement in Bulgaria, prepared by the Centre for the Study of Democracy, estimated fiscal losses from corruption in public procurement to some 25–25 percent of the size of the market, equal to 2.4 percent of GDP. Ondracka 2007, 349–51; Pashev, Dyulgerov, and Kaschiev 2006, 29.

39.

Measures proposed include the promotion of competition and transparency, e-tenders, legal remedies, control, implementation of contracts, monitoring, effective sanctions against abuse, the strengthening of administrative capacity, the regulation of party funding, lobbying, and public-private partnerships. See Pashev, Dyulgerov, and Kaschiev 2006.

40.

When asked what the main reason is for solving problems in their country in an informal rather than a formal manner, 27 percent of the Czech respondents, 19 percent of the Slovenian respondents, 27 percent of the Bulgarian respondents, and 37 percent of the Romanian respondents opted for “solving problems informally has become a habit” (N=600 elite representatives x 4 countries). Grødeland and Aasland 2006.

41.

We gave respondents of our quantitative surveys a list of reform measures and asked them to choose the most, second-most, and third-most effective measures for reducing the influence of informal networks in their countries. Public procurement officials in all countries chose “strengthening the rule of law” as the most effective measure (29 percent in Romania, 27 percent in Bulgaria and Slovenia, and 14 percent in the Czech Republic). However, “changing people’s mentality through education” came a close second in Romania and Bulgaria (28 percent and 23 percent, respectively) and was also chosen by a fair number of the Slovenian (15 percent) and Czech (11 percent) respondents.

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References Arrowsmith, Sue. 2006. “The Past and Future Evolution of EC Procurement Law: From Framework to Common Code?” Public Contract Law Journal 35 (3): 337–84. Chavdarova, Tanya. 2007. “Business Relations as Trusting Relations: The Case of Bulgarian Small Business.” In Soziale Netzwerke und soziales Vertrauen in den Transformationsländern [Social networks and social trust in the transformation countries], edited by Klaus Roth, 277–302. Zűrich: Lit Verlag GmbH & Co. KG Wien. European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. 2005. Transition Report 2005. London: EBRD. Gillespie, John Stanley. 2006. Transplanting Commercial Law Reform: Developing the “Rule of Law” in Vietnam. Hampshire, UK: Ashgate. Grødeland, Åse Berit. 2005a. “Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Romania, and Slovenia: The Use of Contacts and Informal Networks in Public Procurement.” In Fighting Corruption and Promoting Integrity in Public Procurement, 59–76. Paris: OECD. ———. 2005b. “Informal Networks and Corruption in the Judiciary: Elite Interview Findings from the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Romania.” Paper presented at the “New Frontiers of Social Policy” conference, World Bank, Arusha, December 12–15. Paper available at http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTRANETSOCIALDEVELOPMENT/ Resources/informalnetworks.pdf. ———. 2006. “Informality, Corruption and Public Procurement in the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Romania.” In Koszalin: KICES (Koszalin Institute of Comparative European Studies) Working Papers, no. 6: 25–36. ———. 2007. “‘Red Mobs,’ ‘Yuppies,’ and ‘Lamb Heads’: Informal Networks and Politics in the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Romania.” Europe-Asia Studies 59 (2): 217–52. Grødeland, Åse Berit, and Aadne Aasland. 2006. “Uformell praksis i ØstEuropa og Sørøst-Europa.” Nordisk Øst-Forum 20 (4): 365–88. Horn, Norbert. 1991. “The Lawful German Revolution: Privatization and Market Economy in a Re-Unified Germany.” The American Journal of Comparative Law 39 (4): 725–46. Ježek, Mojmir. 2006. “Procurement Law Ups Bureaucracy.” Czech Business Weekly, March 13.

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Jucik, Radek. 2004. “Legal Regulation and Proposed Changes in the Field of Public Procurement in the Czech Republic.” Public Procurement Law Review 13: 87–95. Kaminski, Antoni Z. 1989. “Coercion, Corruption and Reform: State and Society in the Soviet-type Socialist Regime.” Journal of Theoretical Politics 1 (1): 77–102. Karklins, Rasma. 2005. The System Made Me Do It: Corruption in Post-Communist Societies. Armonk, NY; London, UK: M. E. Sharpe. Kruták, Tomaš. 2006. “Fixes Pending for Procurement Law.” Czech Business Weekly, March 13. Mihai, Alexandra. 2005. “Romanian Central Public Administration and the Challenges of Europeanisation.” Berlin: SWP, Working Paper, no. FG2. Miller, William L., Åse B. Grødeland, and Tatyana Y. Koshechkina. 2001. A Culture of Corruption? Coping with Government in Postcommunist Europe. Budapest: Central European University Press. North, Douglas C. 1990. Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Novotny, Petr. 2006a. “New Features in Public Procurement.” Prague: Ambruz and Dark Law Firm, March 6. ———. 2006b. “New Features in Public Procurement.” Czech Business Weekly, March 6. OECD. 2007. Bribery in Public Procurement: Methods, Actors, and CounterMeasures. Paris: OECD. Office for the Protection of Competition of the Czech Republic. 2007. “The Office Imposed Record Fine on Zlin Town Hall.” April 20. Olden, Jan van. 2002. “Legal Development Cooperation: Transplanting or Transforming Legal Systems?” In Center for Legal Cooperation. Legal Development and Corruption: CILC Seminar in Tribute to Jan van Olden. The Hague: Center for Legal Cooperation. Ondracka, David. 2007. “Quantifying Public Procurement Losses in the Czech Republic.” In Transparency International Global Corruption Report 2007, 349–51. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Open Society Institute. 2002. EU Accession Monitoring Program: Monitoring the EU Accession Progress: Corruption and Anti-Corruption Policy. Budapest: Open Society Institute.

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Pashev, Konstantin, Assen Dyulgerov, and Georgi Kaschiev. 2006. Corruption in Public Procurement: Risks and Reform Policies. Sofia: Center for the Study of Democracy. Penazova, Marketa. 2007. “Public Procurement.” Price Waterhouse Coopers, June 1. Profiroiu, Marius, Andrei Tudorel, Radu Carp, and Dinca Dragos. 2005. “Public Administration Reform in the Perspective of Romania’s Accession to the European Union.” Study no. 3. Bucharest: European Institute for Romania. Pre-Accession Impact Studies III. Romanian Information Centre in Brussels. 2006. “Romanian Justice Minister Monica Macovei on Achievements During the first Year in Office and Objectives for 2006.” http://crib.mae.ro/index.php?lang=en&id=5402. Rose-Ackerman, Susan. 1999. Corruption and Government: Causes, Consequences and Reform. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Roth, Klaus. 2007. Soziale Netzwerke und soziales Vertrauen in den Transformationsländern [Social networks and social trust in the transformation countries], 7–20. Zürich: Lit Verlag GmbH & Co. KG Wien. Rucinschi, Diana. 2007. “The Flourishing Anticorruption Industry.” Jurnalul Naţional. June 29. English translation available at users.ox.ac. uk/~scat1663/anticorruption_good.doc. Schmidt, Diana. 2007. “Anti-Corruption: What Do We Know? Research on Preventing Corruption in the Post-Communist World.” Public Studies Review 5 (2): 202–32. SIGMA/OECD. 2003. Public Procurement Review: Acceding Countries in Central and Eastern Europe. Consolidated Report. Paris: OECD. ———. 2005. Romania. Public Procurement System. Assessment June 2005. www.oecd.org/dataoecd/56/24/35851221.pdf. Søreide, Tina. 2002. Corruption in Public Procurement. Causes, Consequences and Cures. Bergen: CMI R, 1. Squire & Sanders. 2004. “Public Procurement (Czech Republic).” EU Accession Series. Issue 5 (March).

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afterword

Mobilizing Justice Across Hegemonies in Place: Critical Postcommunist Vernaculars Michael D. Kennedy

Place matters.1 World regions differ in the ways they shape global cultural political frameworks that guide scholarship, policy, and practice. A region’s more immediate history and culture is critical to its social dynamics of course, but different regions’ articulation through global technologies of power and culture vary in consequential ways. And the accumulated regional inflections of those global formations shape the ways in which hegemonies work, movements respond, and justice is defined. I write these words in the immediate reflection of the public mobilizations in Egypt. Shiva Balaghi and I discuss such general propositions about regional influences frequently, but they have come home most powerfully in these last days. She expresses that regional difference succinctly here: “The difference in our world regions, I often tell him, is in your part of the world, the US supports protest movements; in my part of the world, the US stands in their way” (Balaghi 2011). She is right. The United States and the European Union’s various incarnations supported the Polish Solidarity movement of 1980–81, the end to communism in 1989, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and the abiding struggle to end dictatorship in Belarus. They appeared to many before Mubarak’s resignation to support dictatorship in Egypt over peaceful and democratic struggle. Egypt, it appears, at the end of January 2011, was a place in the particular Middle East, while the European communist world and its survivals are places whose past had to be transcended for global futures to be fulfilled.2 To contrast the most recent Middle Eastern mobilizations with East European/Eurasian mobilizations on the basis of their relationship to US 385

and EU power could appear dissonant with a major methodological thrust of this volume, and it would be if we were to focus on movements alone. Those mobilizations must always be understood in context first. Notions of justice, however, are implicated in various historicities and scales of hegemony that invoke powers beyond the nation and region. Thus, the objects of this volume’s work present a dual challenge: on the one hand, disentangling how powers on various scales work on the ground, while at the same time avoiding being seduced by the narcissisms of any one of them—from celebrations of localizing authenticities to unreflexive extensions of globally hegemonic, or counterhegemonic, discourses. East/Central Europe and Eurasia offer exceptional opportunities to explore this complex articulation of hegemony, justice, and movements across scales of power precisely because of the ways in which transition has worked. Across the places of East/Central Europe and Eurasia, histories before communist rule and experiences since communism’s collapse vary consequentially. Diversity is a given, but the common thread of communist rule shaped their articulation of local, national, and global change meaningfully. Among other things, it is hard to understand any local postcommunist history without recognizing the ways in which the mantra of transition culture—from plan to market, from dictatorship to democracy, from dependency to subjectivity—works.3 But it is not only East Central Europe and Eurasia where communism’s legacy and sequel matter. What so many call “global neoliberalism” found historical assurance with socialism’s putative end in East/Central Europe and Eurasia.4 At the same time, however, we should recognize that this decisive postcommunist presence in global neoliberalism is more ideological than it is historical, empirical, or even theoretical. This volume demonstrates why it is critical not only to stake East/Central Europe and Eurasia through the ideological heart of neoliberalism but also to embed it more rigorously in the scholarly heart of our global imagination.

Hegemony, Postcommunism, Civil Society The postcommunist world was critical for neoliberalism’s advance because of the wishes of postcommunism’s subjects rather than because of their past achievements. For example, how communism ended mattered less than aspiring to join the European Union or the World Trade Organization.

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Postcommunism’s pathologies were also critical. For example, the continuation of telephone justice in Russia after communism’s end is taken as one more data point confirming the superiority of neoliberalism’s originary Western institutions.5 Neoliberalism could draw on many postcommunist subjects’ aspirations and strategic representations of the problems they face to reinforce its own hegemony. And those same subjects could draw on neoliberal prescriptions to advance their own policy and practice. Transition culture thus reflected neoliberal policies and the cultures and histories surrounding those policies and did so even when neoliberalism produced new problems. Increasing inequalities and poverty were obviously part of postcommunist historical change, but their place in transition culture’s hegemonic narrative could be diminished. When acknowledged, they could be explained as an effect of incomplete transition. Problems and limitations could be ascribed to the contagions of the past. Successes even more obviously reinforced neoliberalism’s hegemony. By the middle of the 1990s, those countries whose economic policies resonated more clearly with neoliberal prescription could demonstrate better growth rates, more foreign investment, and the creation of a new more pluralistic power structure. In the post-Soviet world, Estonia became the exemplar, Ukraine the reminder of why hesitation in neoliberal change was disastrous.6 Transition culture relied on successful transformations of economic and political institutions in exemplary countries, culminating in their disciplined accessions to the European Union. Joining the European Union was, however, more than neoliberalism’s triumph, just as transition culture was more than neoliberal ideology. Looking forward from 1989, who could have anticipated the growing unification of Europe and the entry of so many countries formerly ruled by communists into an unprecedented experiment in political, economic, and cultural articulation across sovereign peoples? And looking from 1989, if there were such a vision, who would not have celebrated it? While many today are critical of European integration, there is still reason for celebration, perhaps less for actually existing integration than for the promise the European Union continues to represent. That promise, that potential and optimism, are part of the European Union’s own hegemony. Its power is due to projection more than to tradition; it is based on what can be realized through negotiation rather than on what has been made, or imposed by legislation. The enlargement of the European Union itself testified to the polity’s imagination of what could be, and what

Mobilizing Justice Across Hegemonies in Place 387

ought to be. It managed this aspiration with powerful normative frameworks that extend beyond the limits of neoliberalism. Studying the last twenty-five years in East/Central Europe and Eurasia through the lens of neoliberalism, either by working within the framework its proponents advocate and its policies assume or by unwittingly reproducing its hegemony in the effort to displace it by focusing primarily on its critique, can lead us away from how change has happened, and still might happen. If, instead, we consider the historical transformations of East/Central Europe and Eurasia as the accumulation of unexpected events, strategic elite maneuvers, institutional innovation, and public response to particular issues and problems, we might in fact discover a different story of transformation. A positive assessment of existing historical changes might rely on promises of fairness more than experiences of justice, of hegemonies extended more than pluralities recognized and equalities realized. But at the same time, that actuality does not exhaust potentiality; by articulating those mobilizations in relation to one another, one might help to extend justice itself. Indeed, civil society provided precisely such a vision in the struggle against communist dictatorship.7 Civil society was transition culture’s foundation. Civil society’s embrace of legality, publicity, and plurality, made famous in Cohen and Arato’s (1994) formulation, was a formidable counterhegemonic response to communist rule. Within transition culture, civil society was expressed as a subject of history. It was conceived as the agent of political transformation and a normative prescription for the trajectory of reform, as well as a set of empirical social relationships. The apparent reality of its existence in actual democracies substantiated the array of roles attributed to civil society in academic analysis and policy circles. Its remarkably flexible disposition, able to incorporate any form of resistance to communist monopoly even if they were themselves contesting one another, aided that counterhegemonic hegemony: business associations and trade unions, nationalists and multiculturalists, intellectuals and those less attuned to ideas could be in common cause around the quest for the rule of law, the value of difference, and an open public sphere.8 Communist utopia was a gift to civil society’s revival, therefore, not only in East Europe but also to neoliberalism across the world, for neoliberalism could claim markets as well as legality, publicity, and plurality as its social-legal-intellectual foundations. Scholarship moved across these lines, policies were enacted to promote markets, democracy, and civil society as a package, and practices were

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enacted in those reflections. But in the disappointments that followed, the enchantment of transition culture and civil society declined so much that instead of recognizing their emancipatory qualities, in many places, civil society along with the European Union and liberalism more generally came to be associated with a hegemony that was distant from justice rather than its vehicles or expressions.9 The cultural systems associated with neoliberalism and even the European Union grew weaker, inviting scholars, political actors, and publics to challenge their legitimacy with increasing variety and efficacy. But in the end, focusing on these larger ideological contests can distract from the real transformations underway. This volume offers a critical way forward, not only by recognizing the variety of such contests but also by inviting us to consider the very different ways in which they are implicated in the reproduction and transformation of broader hegemonies and notions of justice.

Mobilizing for Justice Around Class and Gender Rather than reproduce easy ideological contests in which hegemony and counterhegemony are readily mapped, this volume demonstrates the significance of theory, evidence, and practice in place. Instead of allowing the reproduction of transition culture’s ideological oppositions, it highlights the multiplicity of postsocialist transformations’ “currents, eddies, and intertwined streams,” in the words of Thomas Wolfe and John Pickles. There are different names for this methodological disposition— “subtracting” or “contextual holism” are two in this volume—but they all move toward understanding the specificity of place while at the same time moving theory, evidence, and practice beyond their particular inspirations. In fact, it is more than place: it is place and problem combined, as Amy Linch argues in this volume: By beginning with social problems, we are able to observe local (perhaps competing) strategies of political action and the resources employed to pursue them. Placing this dynamic at the center of research recognizes people in postcommunist societies as active creators and interpreters of the various aspects of collective life. It shifts the concern from how adequate or wellprepared people are to respond to political and economic transformations engineered at the top, to how people enact their vernacular visions of life, politics, and justice by responding to daily challenges.

Mobilizing Justice Across Hegemonies in Place 389

Jan Kubik’s contextual holism inspires, as does his interest in the range of institutional conditions shaping problem formulation. But what I especially admire in his approach is its cultural political edge: “Researchers need to investigate whether ‘problems’ are identified as such by the actors themselves, how they are articulated within (locally) available interpretive frameworks (ideologies), and whether and how they are used as foci of mobilization.” By making vernacular knowledge the foundation for theory, evidence, and practice, Kubik and his colleagues elevate vernacular knowledge in scholarship. No longer is it to be understood in terms of its distance from any proper interpretative framework (based on Marxism, modernization, neoliberalism, or any other generalizing theory). It is, rather, the foundation for understanding theory, evidence, and practice. This methodological move is significant well beyond East/Central Europe and Eurasia. Grounding scholarship in the vernacular is critical to understanding people’s challenges and their resources for dealing with them in all parts of the world. Our concern, however, is the particular challenges faced by people in this region. Joanna Regulska and Magdalena Grabowska argue that broad swaths of critical scholarship overlook “the so-called Second World.” They speculate that the source of this neglect could be that global capitalism does not function so readily as the object of critical scholarship when other forms of exploitation or oppression are far more immediately apparent. Beyond that, it might be because borderlands between imperial powers wind up being too easily assimilated into the cultural political presumptions of one side or the other. Finally, it could be that the diaspora from these semiperipheral or peripheral regions can acquire a certain racial privilege within capitalism’s core that is typically not available to most other postcolonial regions. There are likely more reasons why these regions resist the embrace of postcolonial theorists. Precisely because of these complications, those interested in justice and hegemony should consider this region much more carefully, not only for the parallels it suggests but also for the challenges it offers to notions of justice and hegemony made with stable cores of domination in mind. It might, however, be best to begin with the parallels, especially around class mobilizations with respect to political economic contest. As Ivan Szelenyi and Katarzyna Wilk demonstrate, the postcommunist world may have anticipated contests in richer world regions with the former’s changes in both productive and distributive economies. Why, Szelenyi

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and Wilk ask, were policies resulting in privation so readily accepted in the first decade of transition, while the second generation of such policies was staunchly resisted? The answer requires better specification of the impact of privation. Some regimes were able to introduce changes in socialism’s great scheme of welfare distribution remarkably well, but principally because these regimes oppressed, or repressed, their democratic publics. Where there were legacies of civil society, of democratic public empowerment, increasing fees for higher education and health care were resisted rather successfully. Szelenyi and Wilk argue that while neoliberalism changed Central European economic institutions, their redistributive systems remained rather patrimonial. But resistance to transforming redistributive systems does not only occur in the postcommunist world. One can already see forms of public resistance to such changes among the EU rich following their postcommunist trailblazers. Were these common responses, or did the freedom of travel within the EU spread resistance repertoires? That is also a good social movement question, but this volume directs our attention to the articulation of mobilizations with hegemony and justice. Postcommunist places help to unpack this trinity precisely because mobilizations in that region do not map easily onto counterhegemonies’ axes. Had we only considered the first decade of postcommunist transformations, we could have concluded that public quiescence despite the loss of jobs stemmed not only from socialism’s ideological exhaustion and popular embrace of neoliberal hope but also from the failure of intellectuals to offer a compelling alternative. In fact, that very absence led many to lament the loss of intellectual power and vision in political life and to wonder when intellectuals might again do more than adjust to change.10 But here is the critical insight from the second wave: intellectuals did not have a compelling counterhegemonic frame then either. Professors, teachers, students, doctors, and nurses offered no profound ideology to move resistance, but people mobilized in resistance nonetheless. Hegemony was challenged by a common sense of justice. From a popular perspective, changes that made universal public goods apparently harder for people to get were just not fair; they were just not just. While people embraced “market economies” as a means of decentralizing state power and expanding access to consumer goods, they were much less willing to surrender health care, education, and other public-good sectors to

Mobilizing Justice Across Hegemonies in Place 391

the same logic. A well-articulated vision of alternatives was not a necessary condition of mobilization in response to these changes. Rather, the circulation of a gut confidence that, in some spheres, neoliberal policies are wrong was sufficient. As the rest of the world is beginning to see, a shared sense of injustice is enough to motivate people to resist change. Socialism’s active utopia is not necessary.11 One might summarize postcommunism’s political economic implication for the larger global economy: in more democratic postcommunist states, neoliberal changes in economic institutions were easier to introduce, arguably because patrimonial practices remain in the public-goods sectors; where authoritarianism rests, the tough political economic transformations in public-goods institutions many neoliberals believe necessary are easier to impose, even while neoliberal transformations in economic institutions falter. But, as Egypt’s recent history demonstrates, this apparent stability does not mean authoritarianism is sustainable; it is a reminder of the eventfulness of change and the limits of probabilistic reasoning.12 The sources of democracy’s stability are very different, as the global financial crisis will no doubt test. Changes in systems of production and distribution are possible when hegemonies are capable of explaining why the changes are necessary. However, these neoliberalisms fall before democratic publics who think education and health care should not be submitted to neoliberal fiscal calculation. That is a story that may indeed travel. But the dynamic is nothing that we won’t find elsewhere, nor is it one we have to rely on postcommunist histories and vernaculars to understand. Gender is different. As Regulska and Grabowska suggest, understanding the mobilization of women in postcommunism requires one to move beyond the conventions of women’s studies in the West. First and foremost, one can’t look for “mass” movements in the region, partly because resistance continues to be expressed in reaction to the forced group identities of the communist era. Instead, one must attend to the “fragmented, scattered, and often (but not always) localized social actions” of women figuring out ways to cope with abiding—and increasingly challenging—conditions. But here is the particular challenge of the Second World. While women have successfully mobilized in different domains with various resources, gender equality movements frequently rely on extranational symbolic and material resources. Western foundations channel women’s movements in ways that can appear alien to the champions of the “nation,”

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especially when mobilizations challenge patriarchs and their supporters who claim to speak for that nation. But even those who support gender equality in postcommunist places may not be the best allies. Gender equality often functions less as a goal of struggle than as part of a larger package, very often a sign of being European. A particular policy and practice supporting women’s rights winds up being subordinated again, this time to larger geopolitical identifications rather than to communist ideology (Gerber 2011). Here, then, this volume’s essays on gender struggles come together, for we are invited to understand the specificity of women’s struggles themselves, rather than their fit within a globalizing feminist framework, which is itself part of a larger geopolitical hegemonic ambition. The story of the Polish “8 March Women’s Agreement” inspires particularly, not only with its decade of growth in size and geographical dispersal, but with the way in which each year it engages topics related to gender equality, with various expressions from speeches to theater. We may wish to take this particular example of successful mobilization around gender equality issues and analyze how it was translated across various contexts and consider how it might yet travel beyond its current routes.13 With such research, we would better understand not only the dynamics of social movements but also the ways in which various hegemonies channel different kinds of resistances and mobilizations. Specific case studies of particularly complex articulations of hegemony and mobilization are important. Their comparisons are additionally significant. Comparing gender and class politics around various postcommunist injustices14 suggests that hegemony works at two levels: compelling alternative visions are hard to elaborate, and resistance appears most easily mobilized in relatively specific terms, particular to groups and problems. Resistance comes to be more generalized in two fashions: when the problem strikes broad and deep chords of injustice, or when it can be translated in leitmotif across various groups without much insistence on coherence. Class and gender mobilizations deserve more comparison. On the one hand, they are similar in that they appear to work most effectively by fixing on particular forms of injustice that can be made apparent without much ideological work. This in turn suggests that intellectuals as such are less important for mobilization around these concerns because counterhegemonic ideologies need not be elaborated. Class and gender apparently differ, however, in their ability to generate mass mobilizations. Class politics against austerity

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has traveled in mass mobilizations across Europe in ways that the fight for gender equality has not, although there are European-wide political movements that could support both. The difference in the mobilizing capacity of the two issues, I believe, rests in the prominence of the nation in any modern, or even postmodern, hegemony.

Hegemonic Nationalism, Racism, and Corruption Nationalism trumps all ideologies in the modern world (Calhoun 1998). At least nationalism finds its place within every ideology. Or it may be that for any ideology to become hegemonic, it must find its place within the nation as neoliberalism and transition culture did in Central and East Europe. Becoming European can appear to the uninitiated to be the antithesis of nationalism, but of course for many in 1989, returning to Europe was the fulfillment of national destiny. Public concern with the sufficiency of influence or the degree of respect their nation receives within the European Union indicates once more how nationalism remains critical. Of course this is not the nationalism of chauvinism, but the ideology that says peoples are divided naturally into nations and that their identity is expressed through their language and culture. The European Union celebrates this nationalism through linguistic and cultural diversity, even as it works to integrate institutionally, especially in economic terms. Nationalism may have retreated before the introduction of the Euro, and for many, the loss of their nation’s currency was a blow to nationalist sentiment. But just as joining the European Union could be seen as a way to assure the security and integrity of the nation, the commercial arguments on the Euro’s behalf cited the advantage of a common currency to national economies. Obviously this position is far more complicated today, especially as saving the euro requires ever more European regulation of national economic policies. The more general point to be made about nationalism in regard to hegemony, justice, and mobilization in this volume is that while nationalism might be a major ideological formation, it is not particularly important for those who wish to theorize alternative futures. Yet for those who wish to make alternative futures, it must be understood because without the articulation of the nation, justice is hard to find (Suny and Kennedy 1999). The nation, intrinsically, is neither a problem nor a solution. Nationalism’s lability, durability, and variation mean that the nation is always already

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implicated in modernity.15 It becomes specifically a problem, however, when it is linked to racism. Hegemonies around race operate in very different ways than class and gender, especially in Europe. Questions of justice pertaining to class involve finding the most effective way to manage political economies in a globalized economy and a contest over how the redistribution of costs and benefits will be managed. That’s a problem across Europe, maybe varying from Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Spain to Germany, Austria, and France, or from Latvia and Romania to Estonia and Poland, but it’s a problem that varies in degree. Gender injustice exists all across Europe too. Different approaches to the issue produce different gender egalitarian hierarchies of nations, but it is a common problem that can be confronted more and less openly across national boundaries. Racism, like gender inequality, runs deep. But it also runs insidiously through the core contradictions of each nation and of the European Union itself. The European Union may not sufficiently support gender equality policy and practice, but charges of hypocrisy are rarely leveled against the EU for its gender policies in the ways they have been with respect to race. For while the European Union explicitly opposes discrimination on the basis of national origins or religion, racialized identity constructions have become increasingly powerful in European discourse. President Sarkozy’s 2010 expulsion of Roma from France is emblematic of a larger problem. In this respect, the situation described by Alina Vamanu and Iulian Vamanu around naming Roma in Romania does not startle. Of course France does not enjoy the support of European and US commissions in implementing antinationalist education programs that include school lessons on their nation’s role in the Holocaust as Romania does (Kelso 2010). But racism in European authority is hardly settled, especially when we continue to see the integrity of the nation invoked to justify it. Through a lens of nationalism, Romania and France look rather alike, and they offer an all-too-common picture of European racism. Racism also morphs. Much as multicultural political nations are said to have an ethnic core (Smith 1986), so Europe struggles to identify its core beyond universalizing European values. Christianity’s place is especially vexing to consider and an important schema some use to deny Turkey’s place in the European Union. Poland’s compromise on the place of Catholicism in its own constitution informed EU debates (Zubrzycki 2006). The Second World, in some ways and for some postcommunist subjects, could become

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the European space that most strongly advocates keeping Europe in certain racial/religious hues. Alina Vamanu and Iulian Vamanu’s essay is of course critical for Romania, but this racism travels well beyond the Roma. The postcommunist world from East/Central Europe through Eurasia is more than the relic of a Cold War borderland. It encapsulates and can stimulate a new racism where the anxious reception of some East Europeans in West European circumstances—the Polish plumber comes to mind (Sciliano 2005)—can mobilize racism to move the boundaries farther east, farther south, on religious lines, on racial lines. This volume does not focus as much on racism as it might, in part because we would like to think of racism as the province of the extremist, a tactic of the Right. But it might go deeper, and it might deserve more unpacking at the hegemonic level. How, in the end, does the concern for European identity fit with a certain politics around gender, a certain politics around class, and a certain question of membership or denial in broad geopolitical terms? And how does it work with the articulation of justice? Much as transition culture enables postcommunism’s pathologies to be ascribed to the contagions of socialism’s past, European hegemonic formulations can ascribe racism’s evocations to another deficit: incomplete multicultural integration. The immigrants’ values are characterized by European hegemony as insufficiently aligned with liberalism, equality, and the nation’s virtue. Justice might be elaborated in such a formulation, but only in hegemonic terms. There is too little space for wrestling with justice beyond these hegemonies, and this is where serious intellectual work remains to be done.16 Intellectual innovation and courage are, in fact, increasingly associated with those who wish to identify multiculturalism as the hegemony that needs to be made profane.17 Corruption occupies an oddly similar place in this story of hegemonies. Like racism, it is much more broadly distributed than typically acknowledged, and it is used in subtle ways to establish hierarchies of power and privilege in global cultural politics. As Alena Ledeneva notes, a paradigm for understanding corruption was consolidated in the 1990s. The postcommunist condition was critical to that work. Much was done to explain why, in social-scientific terms, corruption was almost natural to postcommunist economies and societies: contaminations of the past pathological system were made apparent as democracy’s extension and multilateral assistance demanded new transparencies. But this

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was not just neutral social-scientific observation. As Ledeneva describes, it was attached to a broader cultural political effort to establish certain forms of rule as normal and others as pathologies to be transcended.18 Ledeneva’s work is critical here, for instead of merely representing a new effort by social science to complement policy work, the analysis of corruption became a new way to regulate by focusing policy and practice in certain ways. Indeed, with this intervention we might imagine not only the field of transitology, but with an ironic gesture, its close sibling, corruptionology. By arguing that one can define corruption in general, measure it for the sake of comparison, and with that scientific foundation design policies and practices to diminish or eliminate it, one carries forward the mindset associated with transition culture: that context and vernacular knowledge pales before the wisdom of generalizing knowledge and global instruments of change with judicious application of best practices from elsewhere. Indeed, as Ledeneva notes, vernacular knowledge about corruption is typically “conceptually silenced.” Ledeneva opens up corruptionology’s biases by asking whether the assumptions that inform its study are appropriate for the postcommunist world or for other contexts, and whether, in light of those comparative, historical, and ethnographic results, the general paradigm itself might be changed. After all, one of the biggest assumptions of corruptionology is that its abuse of public office for private gain is a source of privilege. But what if, as Ledeneva proposes, this “correction” of systemic conditions through informal practices is itself “an expression of entitlement associated with people’s expectations of social justice, sharing, and compensation for poverty or deprivation”? If this is corruption, its demise is an attempt not only to rationalize systems but also to extend injustice. Of course not all such informal practices are weapons of the weak. Grødeland properly notes that while everyone in the postcommunist world opposes corruption, including ruling elites, the latter typically fail to take action because they don’t want to undermine their own privilege. Karklins too finds little virtue in the informal relations shaping postcommunism’s health-care systems. She clearly identifies corruption in health care as having deleterious effects on the public good, reflecting the divergence between individual and systemic rationality. Health care does not appear to be the place where one challenges corruptionology’s problematic assumptions. But that is, after all, how hegemony works.

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Hegemonies of power and privilege do not function unless their scripts accord with somebody’s sense of justice and rationality. Embracing the virtues of neoliberalism and civil society not only helped some acquire incredible power and privilege, but it also helped to move many states into the European Union, and with that to create new realms of action, possible mobilizations for justice. Corruption is clearly part of the problem, but recognizing how corruptionology functions in the reproduction of various hegemonies is crucial to what good critical scholarship is about and why intellectuals are, sometimes, useful.

Critical Intellectualities The originality of thinkers such as Slavoj Zizek, Julia Kristeva, Tzvetan Todorov, Jan Patočka, Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran, or Leszek Kolakowski, who have at different times made a significant contribution to the shaping of the Western intellectual discourse, is somehow taken for granted, and the character of the world they have come from is passed over in silence. It is as though these people come from nowhere—out of nothing. No significant attention is being paid to their complex backgrounds, to the specificity of their cultural origins, to the unique blend of intellectual challenges and ethical concerns that shaped their thinking, strengthened their personalities, and in the end, made them who they are. Wolfe and Pickles are quite right about the ignorance of origins in these original thinkers, but these are also intellectuals who don’t mark place clearly. While their intellectual contributions might help us understand their homelands and their contributions might be understood better by understanding their biographical/historical foundations, none of them have quite occupied the space that Partha Chatterjee (1993a, 1993b) and his colleagues have offered in imagining the postcolonial problem. That may be because no postcommunist place can inspire identifications in the same ways that India managed in the post–capitalist-colonial world, and because there is no commonly imagined first oppression like imperialism that enables counterhegemonic recognition across so many other differences after communism. There is, however, something more than this lack of common foe that rather resides in the diversity of issues mobilizing opposition in this region. We can constitute places by axes of contention—there are those spaces informed by contests over flows of capital, over articulations of gender, over indices of corruption. There are places in the world known for violence

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against women and resistance to gender equality—remarkably not correlated with those places known for their liberalism in polity and economy. Communities of democracy might not be communities of gender equality, but they do tend to be communities of limited corruption, at least according to the indices global policy organizations establish. Beyond the technologies that enable this correlation, one can find in this association not only the power of democracy for producing good business, but the power of those with capital to invest to establish who looks good. We should consider how any of these places or spaces—the contexts or the issues—travel to constitute normatively superior hegemonies. Within transition culture, those who “led” change in movement from plan to market and dictatorship to democracy were taken as exemplars for others. We see these hegemonies at work also in a Europe racked with financial crisis, where Germans chastise Mediterranean places, figuring acronyms to do the cultural political work to enable us to see the responsible and irresponsible (with Ireland and Italy nicely sharing the vowel’s location alongside Portugal, Greece, and Spain in PIGS). But each of the contributions to this volume challenge, in a variety of ways, the easy translation of more and less progressive policies and practices. That translation is, one might argue, the abiding function of intellectual work. Zygmunt Bauman (1987) suggested this even before communism’s collapse in proposing that the legislative work of intellectuals is surpassed by the less prominent, but more consequential, work of translation and interpretation. Bauman’s volume articulates powerfully with how we think of movements in this moment. We might not only compare how resources are mobilized, how political opportunities are shaped, and how cultural frames resonate across place and space; we might also consider how various hegemonies themselves combine and how protagonists use various kinds of resistance to apparently distant ends, in the articulation of specific grievances whose relationship to broader powers winds up being hidden in the very operation of hegemony itself. By considering class and gender dynamics together in this postcommunist world, we may appreciate far more than before that hegemony works in two fashions: first, by undermining significant counterhegemonic positions; and second, by making resistance ultimately local. Of course such observations about hegemony are not new. Laclau and Mouffe (1985) anticipate this focus on articulation in their work. But here, rather than thinking with

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radical democratic labels, both activists and analysts might be better served if less elaborate resemblances across problems are sought: translations across instances of mobilization rather than visions integrating them finally could be more effective both for activists seeking justice and analysts recognizing counterhegemonic mobilizations. Perhaps nothing more than what’s fair and what’s just is enough for movements around class and perhaps gender. But that is not enough in other circumstances, as corruption and racism make very clear, and why critical intellectual engagement remains central. Crude racisms appear to be the province of the boorish Far Right, but then racism’s power seems to ooze beyond mob justice and celebrations of biological purities. It is the conceit of those enjoying racial privilege to imagine racism’s historical supercession. It might be more appropriate to recognize its mutation, and the challenge of interpreting how it fits with the other hegemonies more readily identified. Blatant corruption occupies a similar space. When we hear stories of how commercial transactions require political grease supplied by monies funneled beyond public purview, we can decry the system that allows this. But if that corruption occurs between North African dictators and European government leaders,19 we can imagine that to be the exception, an injustice that, once revealed, demonstrates the superiority of certain polities’ institutions over others. In both cases, the distribution of racism and corruption can be used not only to mark the inferiority of certain world regions before places privileged by neoliberal hegemony and the ideology’s descendents. Those within the affronted regions can also use this discourse to mark their superiorities before infected locals. One might recall, here, Maria Todorova’s account of how being Balkan could be used locally: Despite the fact that some accept, although reluctantly, their Balkanness while others actively renounce any connection with it, what is common for all Balkan nations is the clear consensus that the Balkans exist, that there is something that can be defined as Balkan, although it may be an undesired predicament and region. What they would like to prove is that they do not belong to the repellent image that has been constructed of it. (1997, 57)

Balkanness combines racism and corruption in the same cultural formation, and shows the ways in which this combination reproduces the superiority of Western institutions and its hegemonies. In this, critical intellectuality is not

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only a matter of translating injustices across space. It is also a matter of recognizing the problem with the diagnosis from places of geopolitical and cultural power and privilege, which leads to my final comparative comment.

Comparing Mobilizations and Hegemonies Across Injustices in Place This volume, as the editors indicate, was conceived originally as a way to move beyond civil society. And it has done so, specifically by considering how particular injustices relate to the hegemonies that contain them and the mobilizations that challenge them. But it has also shown just how these articulations of justice, hegemony, and mobilization can be clarified through comparison. As is a sociologist’s wont, I believe a two-by-two table can help (see Table A.1). Roughly speaking, critical intellectual work in the articulation of hegemony, justice, and mobilizations works along two axes. On the one hand, organic public intellectuals work to translate injustice in vernaculars; sometimes, this translation is not necessary as the injustice is evident and one needs only the spark to ignite broad mobilizations against injustice. Sometimes greater work in translation within vernaculars is necessary, for while the injustice might be conceptually and empirically clear, its articulation with other cultural elements might deny simple mobilizations. Critical intellectual work is important as well in defining injustice, a project different than translation. In some cases, that work has already been done, and challenges to hegemony depend mainly on better mobilizations and translations. In other cases, however, the articulations of injustice are so deeply embedded in existing hegemonies that commonsense vernaculars can reproduce injustice and critical intellectual work needs to elaborate the implication of those vernaculars in injustice. This volume not only inspires these distinctions, but its studies amplify the importance of recognizing such variations as well. The injustices of impoverishment and the class conflicts that accompany them travel most easily across space for two reasons. On the one hand, privation is relatively clear conceptually, and vernaculars of fairness, while perhaps not simply translatable, are more readily recognizable across contexts. At one time, we might have imagined that elaborate counterhegemonies might be necessary to fight neoliberalism, but the politics of austerity appears to make claims about fairness more recognizable and vernaculars easier to translate.

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TA B L E A.1.

Ease of Translating Injustice Across Vernaculars

Definition of Injustice

Greater

Conceptual Hegemony

Lesser

Class

Gender

Conceptual Contest

Racism

Corruption

East/Central Europe might not be distinctive in these class mobilizations— in fact, its resemblance to Madison, Wisconsin, in this moment is startling.20 But the region’s gender politics certainly don’t look like those of Midwestern USA. Although gender inequalities and injustices might be objectively common, as feminist social science and humanities scholars demonstrate by unpacking the ways in which gender injustices proliferate, vernacular accounts of their effects, especially in East/Central Europe and Eurasia, diverge dramatically. At least hegemonic practices in gender inequalities diverge, as evidenced by the ease with which one can demean gender mobilizations in postcommunist Europe and Eurasia by declaring their nationally foreign origins. To recognize resistance and support emancipatory practice with respect to gender appears to require a much greater facility with the vernacular than to figure the dynamics of class mobilizations. Racism, like poverty, looks relatively recognizable across regions. Violence against those with different national or racial identifications can mobilize transnational coalitions for justice. At the same time, these transnational coalitions can also reflect a certain presumption of geopolitical superiority. The European Union offers terrific support to help East/Central Europe struggle against racism, but many in the European Union also agonize over Turkey’s accession, and not only because of the size of its labor market. An unsympathetic reader’s response to such a comparison only underscores further the conceptual challenge in this identification of practices along a racialist axis of contest. Gender inequality might be hard to recognize within East/ Central Europe and Eurasia because of its identification with past and present empire, but experts can identify it relatively easily. The problem with racism, especially when one moves beyond its hegemonic liberal articulation to include and address its other forms, is that racist practices can go under too many other names, many of which appear just to the powerful and their racialized kin. Part of the challenge, then, lies in identifying not just skinhead violence against Roma as racism, but how Roma deportations from France, anxieties

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over multiculturalism in Germany, and resistance to Turkey’s accession to the European Union are, or are not, part of the same racialized hegemony. Corruption is even more challenging to identify than racism, but like racism, its hegemonic practice more commonly locates the problem in poor regions than in the rich. The greater challenge in unpacking corruption’s articulation with justice and hegemony may rest in the fact that some kinds of corruption are not themselves pathological, but in fact, a symptom of a larger problem hegemonic practices hide. While some might legitimate racism and gender oppression in such terms, there are much more substantial epistemic communities at work identifying how racism and gender oppression articulate with hegemonies than there are working on corruption in such terms. Consequently, corruption does not enjoy such intellectual clarity, much less consensus. Corruption needs far more sophisticated engagement, especially in terms that don’t simply reproduce the privilege of those who come from the regions and countries that claim to have established corruption as the exception rather than the prevailing pattern of political economic practice. That is why corruption may be the most difficult of all the problems this volume engages, for its translation across contexts depends on a blatantly hegemonic formulation. Corruption needs to be challenged in the search for justice, but that search for justice should recognize not only the billions appropriated from public tills for private gains by Mubarak and his ilk but also how that money was made through previously legitimate international regimes, and how that money reproduced Mubarak’s status in the world order.

After Civil Society It’s impossible for me to embrace such a phrase. Of course civil society is part of a hegemonic liberalism where publicity, pluralism, and legality are celebrated as foundations for justice. If one compares experiences across East/ Central Europe and Eurasia, it certainly is. Without vital public spheres whose rational critical discussion is not only protected but encouraged, justice is hard to find. But civil societies and open public spheres are not enough, as this volume suggests. It is easy, with the disappointments of transformations now nearly a quarter-century old, to lose sight of civil societies’ place in change. But at the same time, rethinking just how civil society as norm, subject, and form of social organization facilitated change over these last twenty-five years invites

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us anew to consider the kind of critical intellectuality that is civil society’s appropriate complement in these times. I find it in this volume. This collection’s engagement of poverty, racism, gender inequality, and corruption is a vital invitation to that next stage in East/Central European and Eurasian studies. But it is also far more, for it has suggested a new methodology for comparative studies focused on the ways in which hegemony works, injustices abide, and mobilizations triumph. Contextual holism deserves replication and elaboration in other world regions. And a new transnational discourse needs to be found to recognize hegemonies’ work and the value of elevating vernacular innovations in the struggles against it. In the end, I return to Tahrir, not with conclusions, but with anticipations of another conversation. Might the combination of contextual holism and critical social theory evident in this volume invite not only a new comparison, but a new set of practices around civil society’s place in the Middle East and the postcommunist world?

Notes 1.

I am indebted to all those who organized this Social Science Research Council initiative, most notably Jan Kubik and Seteney Shami, not only for their imagination in assembling the fine scholars who are present in this volume and in the conferences preceding and for conceiving the project in such powerful ways, but for including me in the beginning, middle, and very end of this critical venture. I additionally appreciate Jan Kubik’s and Amy Linch’s very helpful readings of this piece and the fine work they have done to assemble Postcommunism from Within. Shiva Balaghi’s commentaries on hegemonies, mobilizations, and justice, whether in print or in our household, inspire in abiding fashion in ways to which debt’s metaphor could never do justice.

2.

I qualify the communist with European because Central Asian spaces are apparently conceived with the same pseudo-realpolitik as Middle East places have been historically. For a contemporary commentary, see Swerdlow 2011.

3.

See Kennedy 2002. In that volume, I did not refer to hegemony for cultural political reasons. For an elaboration on why, and with what implications, see Kennedy 2008.

4.

Although there are many treatments of neoliberalism, I find the attention given to ideas and ideological work in Sewell 2009 and Evans and Sewell 2013 especially helpful analytically.

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5.

The trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky resurrects this narrative, indicating just how far Russia is from an independent judiciary without specific geographical reference, but implied to exist elsewhere, and without saying, in the West. See http://www. eu-russiacentre.org/eu-russiacentre-news/show-trials-telephone-justice-continuehallmarks-russian-judicial-system.html.

6.

For elaboration, see Kennedy 2002, chapters 4 and 5.

7.

And it provides something new in the Middle East—see Bahrain’s developments: http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/688/statement-of-civil-societyorganizations-in-bahrain-regarding-the-brutal-attack-on-protesters-in-the-pearlroundabout.

8. 9.

For elaboration, see Kennedy 2002, 50–58. In many places, but not all. Jan Kubik properly cautioned in his reading of this paper against such broad generalizations, which are, in fact, part of the problem in assessing civil society in ideological terms.

10. 11.

See Verdery et al. 2005. I refer here to a volume that has long inspired—Bauman 1976. It is now revived, republished in 2009.

12.

Theoretical foundations for this eventful approach to social transformations can be found in Sewell 2005.

13.

A particularly good illustration of this kind of work can be found in Baiocchi 2010.

14.

One important theoretically and empirically rich starting point is Weiner 2007.

15.

For nationalism’s lability, see Harsanyi and Kennedy 1994.

16.

Miller-Idriss 2009 is especially helpful analytically.

17.

Sarrazin 2010 exemplifies this challenge.

18.

Stukuls Eglitis 2005 elaborates this in important ways. She notes the spatial dimension of this argument with her reference to European normalities, as well as a temporal one that invokes the interwar period of Latvian independence.

19.

In the tumult of revolution, Europeans learn that the French prime minister enjoyed President Mubarak’s plane and hospitality for Christmas 2010, much as the foreign minister enjoyed the hospitality of the Tunisian dictator’s family earlier in the year. See “French Prime Minister Says Mubarak Lent Him Plane for the Holiday,” in http://news. yahoo.com/s/afp/20110208/ts_afp/egyptpoliticsunrestfrancetunisia_20110208160729.

20.

Beyond the Middle East, the Midwestern United States is heating up in class conflict. See, for example, “Wisconsin Protests: Tens of Thousands Turn out in Madison Against Anti Union Proposal,” Huffington Post, February 16, 2011. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/18/wisconsin-protests-madison-scott-walker_n_825080.html.

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References Baiocchi, Gianpaolo. 2010. “But Who Will Speak for the People? The Travel and Translations of Participatory Budgeting.” Paper presented at the November 2010 CommGAP and the World Bank Development Research Group conference on “Deliberation for Development.” Balaghi, Shiva. 2011. “Preparing Tomorrow’s History Lessons.” Jadaliyya, February 1. http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/564/preparing-tomorrowshistory-lessons. Bauman, Zygmunt. 1976. Socialism: The Active Utopia. London: Allen and Unwin. ———. 1987. Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post-Modernity, and Intellectuals. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Calhoun, Craig. 1998. Nationalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Chatterjee, Partha. 1993a. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1993b. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cohen, Jean, and Andrew Arato. 1994. Civil Society and Political Theory. Boston: MIT Press. Evans, Peter, and William H. Sewell Jr. 2013. “Neoliberalism: Policy Regimes, International Regimes, and Social Effects.” In Social Resilience in the Neoliberal Era, edited by Peter Hall and Michèle Lamont, 35–68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gerber, Alexandra. 2011. “Being Polish/Becoming European: Gender and Knowledge in the Process of European Integration.” PhD diss., University of Michigan. Harsanyi, Nicolae, and Michael D. Kennedy. 1994. “Between Utopia and Dystopia: The Labilities of Nationalism in Eastern Europe.” In Envisioning Eastern Europe: Postcommunist Cultural Studies, edited by Michael D. Kennedy, 149–79. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Kelso, Michelle. 2010. “Recognizing the Roma: A Study of the Holocaust as Viewed in Romania.” PhD diss., University of Michigan. Kennedy, Michael, D. 2002. Cultural Formations of Postcommunism: Emancipation, Transition, Nation and War. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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———. 2008. “From Transition to Hegemony: Extending the Cultural Politics of Military Alliances and Energy Security.” In Transnational Actors in Central and East European Transitions, edited by Mitchell Orenstein, Steven Bloom, and Nicole Lindstrom, 188–212. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso. Miller-Idriss, Cynthia. 2009. Blood and Culture: Youth, Right Wing Culture and National Belonging in Contemporary Germany. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sarrazin, Thilo. 2010. Deutschland Schafft Sich Ab: Wie wir unser Land aufs Spiel setzen [Germany abolishes itself: How we are putting our country at risk]. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt. Sciliano, Elaine. 2005. “Unlikely Hero in Europe’s Spat: the Polish Plumber.” New York Times, June 26. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/26/international/europe/26poland.html?pagewanted=all. Sewell, William H., Jr. 2005. Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation. Chicago: University of Chicago. ———. 2009. “From State-Centrism to Neoliberalism: Macro Historical Contexts of Population Health Since World War II.” In Successful Societies: How Institutions and Cultures Affect Health, edited by Peter Hall and Michèle Lamont, 254–87. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, Anthony. 1986. The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Oxford: Blackwell. Stukuls Eglitis, Daina. 2005. Imagining the Nation: History, Modernity, and Revolution in Latvia. College Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Suny, Ronald Grigor, and Michael D. Kennedy, eds. 1999. Intellectuals and the Articulation of the Nation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Swerdlow, Steve. 2011. “What Will the Uzbeks Say About Us in Their Tahrir Square”? European Observer, February 12. http://euobserver. com/9/31796. Todorova, Maria. 1997. Imagining the Balkans. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Verdery, Katherine, Michael Bernhard, Jeffrey Kopstein, Gale Stokes, and Michael D. Kennedy. 2005. “Rereading the Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power.” Theory and Society 34: 1–36. Weiner, Elaine. 2007. Market Dreams: Gender, Class and Capitalism in the Czech Republic. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Zubrzycki, Genevieve. 2006. The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in Postcommunist Poland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Contributors

medea badashvili has been a faculty member of the Gender Studies Program administered by the Center for Social Science in Georgia since 2006. Her research focuses on gender relations in the family in multicultural societies and on human geography. From 2005 to 2007, she participated in the Faculty Development Fellowship Program at Rutgers University, where she was a visiting scholar in the Women’s and Gender Studies and Human Geography Departments and worked on the development of gender courses under the supervision of Professor Joanna Regulska. In 2005–6 she participated in the Critical Sociology Network Caucasus Academic project. She also was an expert with the United Nations Development Assistant Framework Gender Review (UNDAF). In 2007–8 she worked with Save the Children as an officer of the Small Grants Program. She served as project associate with the UNDP project “Gender and Politics in the Southern Caucasus.” Since 2006 she has been a Center for Social Sciences grantee of the Academic Fellowship Program and has been working on developing gender courses for an interdisciplinary master’s program in gender studies at Tbilisi State University. magdalena grabowska is an assistant professor at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at Warsaw University and a fellow of the European Commission’s Marie Curie Reintegration Program. She completed her PhD in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University in October 2009. Her current project, Bits of Freedom: Gender Equality and Women’s Agency in State Socialist Poland and Georgia, focuses on

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the complex ways in which women exercised freedom in limited public spaces provided by socialist states. She has been involved in several international projects, including Constructing Supranational Political Spaces: The European Union, Eastern Enlargement and Women’s Agency in Poland and the Czech Republic, which focused on contradictory effects of EU’s eastward expansion on women’s activism; and Forced Migrants Living in Post-Conflict Situations: Social Networks and Livelihood Strategies, which explored the impact of displacement and the circulation of international gender-development discourses on local gender regimes in postconflict Georgia. Dr. Grabowska is a coauthor, with Małgorzata Fuszara, Joanna Regulska, and Joanna Mizielińska, of the book Cooperation or Conflict?: The State, the European Union and Women (2009). Her other publications include “Redefining Well-being Through Actions: Women’s Activism and the Polish State,” coauthored with Joanna Regulska, in Transforming Gendered Well-Being: The Impact of Social Movements, edited by Jean-Michel Bonvin, Merce Ren, and Alison E. Woodward (2011); and “Bringing Second World In: Conservative Revolution(s), Socialist Legacies, and Transnational Silences in the Trajectories of Polish Feminism,” in a special issue of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society on unfinished revolutions (2012). In Warsaw she collaborates with a number of nongovernmental organizations, including Feminoteka Foundation, Heinrich Böll Foundation, and the Polish Association of Antidiscrimination Law. åse berit grødeland works as senior researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute in Bergen, Norway. She has previously held positions at University of Glasgow, International Crisis Group, and the Norwegian Institute for Urban and Regional Research. Currently she is directing projects on informal practice and corruption and on European legal cultures in transition. Recent publications include “Networks and Informal Power Structures in South East Europe,” in Handbook of Doing Business in South East Europe, edited by Thomas Döring and Dietmar Sternad (2011); “Elite Perceptions of Anti-Corruption Efforts in Ukraine,” Global Crime 11 (2) (2010); and “Culture, Corruption and Anti-Corruption Strategies in Post-Communist Europe,” in Anti-Corruption Regimes in Europe, edited by Sebastian Wolf and Diana Schmidt-Pfister (Nomos Verlag, 2010). rasma karklins (rasma k ĀrkliŅa) is professor emerita of political science at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a member of the Parliament

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Contributors

of Latvia. She currently directs an interdisciplinary research project at the University of Latvia. Professor Karklins has published widely on comparative political corruption, transitions to democracy, civil society, and ethnopolitics. Her most recent book, The System Made Me Do It: Corruption in Post-Communist Societies (2005), has been translated into Latvian, Russian, Polish, Serbian, and Bulgarian. Her first book, Ethnic Relations in the USSR (1986), won the Ralph E. Bunche Award of the American Political Science Association for the “best book in political science on cultural pluralism.” She received her MA and PhD in political science from the University of Chicago. michael d. kennedy is professor of sociology and international studies at Brown University, where he engages the relationship between knowledge practices and global transformations. Beginning with studies of intellectuals and professionals in East European social movements and systemic change (for example, Professionals, Power, and Solidarity [1991], and Cultural Formations of Postcommunism [2002]), Kennedy now works on how transformations in the communicative capacities of intellectuals and their institutions articulate alternative general futures around the extensions of democracy, peace, and sustainability with particular places in mind. His most recent publications have addressed the public university, area studies, and energy security in these terms. jan kubik received his MA in sociology from Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland (1977), and his PhD with distinction in anthropology from Columbia University (1989). Professor Kubik teaches political science at Rutgers University. He is also a recurring visiting professor of sociology at the Centre for Social Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw. His work focuses mostly on the postcommunist transformations in Eastern Europe and revolves around two themes: the relationship between culture and politics, and contentious politics. He is the author of Anthropology and Political Science: A Convergent Approach, with Myron J. Aronoff (2013); The Power of Symbols Against the Symbols of Power: The Rise of Solidarity and the Fall of State Socialism in Poland (1994); and with Grzegorz Ekiert, Rebellious Civil Society: Popular Protest and Democratic Consolidation in Poland, 1989–1993 (1999). Recent shorter publications include “Ethnography of Politics: Foundations, Applications, Prospects,” in Political Ethnography: What Immersion Contributes to the Study of Power, edited by E. Schatz (2009); and with G. Ekiert and Milada

Contributors 411

A. Vachudova, “Democracy in the Post Communist World: An Unending Quest?” East European Politics and Societies 27 (2007). alena v. ledeneva is professor of politics and society at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. She studied economics at the Novosibirsk State University (1986) and social and political theory at the University of Cambridge (Newnham College, MPhil 1992; PhD 1996). She was a postdoctoral research fellow at New Hall College at Cambridge in 1996–99; a senior fellow at the Davis Center, Harvard University (2005); a Simon Professor at the University of Manchester (2006); and a visiting professor at Sciences Po, Paris (2010). She authored a number of books, including How Russia Really Works (Cornell University Press, 2006) and Russia’s Economy of Favours (Cambridge University Press, 1998), as well as numerous articles. Her expertise is on Russia and global affairs, global governance and corruption, informal economy, economic crime, informal practices in corporate governance, role of networks, and patron-client relationships. amy linch teaches political theory at Pennsylvania State University. She completed a PhD in political science at Rutgers University in 2009. Her dissertation focuses on the role of religious conflict in state consolidation in early modern England. She was section editor for Central and Eastern Europe and a member of the editorial board for The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest 1500–Present (2009). Other publications include “The Original Sin of Poland’s Third Republic: Discounting ‘Solidarity’ and its Consequences for Political Reconciliation,” coauthored with Jan Kubik, in The Polish Solidarity Movement in Retrospect: A Story of Failure or Success? edited by D. Aleksandrowicz, S. Sonntag, and J. Wielgohs (2009). c. laura lovin completed her MA degrees in cultural studies and gender studies at the University of Bucharest and the Central European University in Budapest. She is completing a PhD in women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University. Her dissertation examines how the visual arts create new affective experiences and encounters that augment the political potential of bodies and spaces. In her investigation of the production of new forms of subjectivity in these she also considers how various models of capitalist multiculturalism produce commodified subjectivities, while also vacating urban space for

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Contributors

touristic consumption and financial corporate occupation. Informed by visual methodologies, this is an interdisciplinary project that engages scholarship in feminist theory, Marxist political economy, queer theory, geography, and cultural studies. john pickles is an economic geographer with interests in postsocialism, the political economy of global apparel, and Europe. He is the Earl N. Phillips Distinguished Professor of International Studies and chair of the Department of Geography at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His current research projects deal with the effects of global sourcing on regional development and working conditions and the geoeconomics and geopolitics of border management in Euro-Med. His books include Globalization and Regionalization in Post-socialist Economies: The Common Economic Spaces of Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); State and Society in Post-Socialist and Post-Soviet Economies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping, and the Geo-Coded World (Routledge, 2004); with Petr Pavlinek, Environmental Transitions: Post-Communist Transformations and Ecological Defense in Central and Eastern Europe (Routledge, 2002); and with Adrian Smith, Theorising Transition: The Political Economy of Post-Communist Transformations (Routledge, 1998). joanna regulska is a professor of geography and women’s and gender studies and the dean of International Programs, School for Arts and Sciences, Rutgers University. She is the founder and director, since 1989, of the Local Democracy Partnership (formerly Local Democracy in Poland) Program. Most of her current research and teaching concentrates on women’s agency, political activism, grassroots mobilization, and construction of women’s political spaces. She also continues her work on the impacts of post-1989 political and economic transformations on the processes of democratization, citizens’ participation, and decentralization in Central and Eastern Europe. Her research and policy work has been extensively supported (receiving more than $9 million in funding) by public institutions and private foundations including the National Science Foundation, Ford Foundation, the German Marshall Fund, the Rockefeller Fund, the Mellon Foundation, and the Pew Charitable Trusts, among others. She is an author and coauthor of more than ninety articles and reports and of five books, most recently Women and Gender in Postwar Europe: From Cold War to European Union, with B. Smith (2012); Cooperation

Contributors 413

or Conflict: The State, the European Union and Women, with M. Grabowska, M. Fuszara, and J. Mizielinska (in Polish, 2008); and Women and Citizenship in Central and East Europe, with Jasmina Lukic and Darja Zavirsek (2006). For her contributions to the development of local democracy, local government reforms, and empowerment of women in public life, the president of Poland awarded her in 2004 the Knight Cross of the Order of Restitution of the Republic of Poland and in 1996 the Cavalier Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland. In 1996, she received also Presidential Award for the Distinguished Public Service from the president of the Rutgers University. seteney shami has been with the Social Science Research Council since July 1999 and is director of the Middle East and North Africa Program as well as the InterAsia Initiative. She is also currently serving as founding director of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS), a regional nonprofit organization headquartered in Beirut, Lebanon. She received her doctorate in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley. Shami’s most recent publication is an edited volume, Publics, Politics and Participation: Locating the Public Sphere in the Middle East and North Africa (SSRC Books, 2010), and her most recent article (coauthored with Nefissa Naguib) is titled “Occluding Difference: Ethnic Identity and the Shifting Zones of Theory on the Middle East and North Africa,” which will appear in Anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa: The State of the Art (Indiana University Press, 2012). Shami has served on several editorial boards, including for Central Asian Survey, The Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures, Cultural Anthropology, Ethnos, and International Migration Review. ivan szelenyi is William Graham Sumner Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Political Science at Yale University and the Foundation Dean of Social Sciences at NYU Abu Dhabi. He is a fellow of American Academy of Arts and Sciences and an ordinary member of the Hungarian National Academy of Sciences. He holds honorary degrees from Corvinus University, Budapest; Flinders University of South Australia; and Friedrich-Alexander Universitaet, Erlangen-Nürnberg. He is former president of the Hungarian Sociological Association and former vice president of the American Sociological Association. He is the recipient of the Luckmann Distinguished Teaching award from UCLA and the Széchenyi Prize, granted by the president of the Hungarian Republic. He is author/coauthor of The Intellectuals on the Road

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Contributors

the Class Power (1979); Urban Inequalities Under State Socialism (1983); Socialist Entrepreneurs (1988); Making Capitalism Without Capitalists (1998); and Patterns of Exclusion (2006). alina vamanu is a PhD candidate in political science at Rutgers University. She is interested in the politics of ethnic and racial minority integration into local communities and nation-states. In particular, she has studied stereotypical representations of the Roma minority in the Romanian media and is currently researching understandings and practices of civic and political engagement among immigrants coming to North America from (post) authoritarian backgrounds. iulian vamanu is a PhD candidate in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University. He has a background in philosophy and has published in European journals of philosophy. He is interested in the study of cultural heritage and is currently researching the institutional production and circulation of indigenous knowledge in North America. katarzyna wilk received a PhD in sociology from Yale University. She also holds an MA in economics from the Warsaw School of Economics and an MA in sociology from Warsaw University. From 2007 to 2010, Katarzyna worked at the European Commission, Bureau of European Policy Advisers (BEPA), as a policy adviser. Prior to joining the commission, she was a researcher at the Polish Academy of Science where she specialized in comparative social inequality and cross-national survey design. Katarzyna’s publications embrace topics concerning political attitudes and behaviors among Europeans including attitudes toward the EU, welfare reforms, and statistics. thomas c. wolfe is an associate professor of history at the University of Minnesota and holds adjunct positions in the Department of Anthropology, the Institute for Global Studies, and the School of Journalism and Mass Communications. In 2005 he published a book about the transformation of Soviet and Russian media, and he is currently at work on a project about the European Union. He teaches courses on twentieth-century Europe, the practice of interpretive social science, and the practice of liberal arts education.

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Index

Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations or tables.

“abandoned citizen’s syndrome,” 260n19 abortion issue: mobilizations on, 160–66; in Poland, 154, 177n8, 180n23, 182n39, 182n40; public debate on, 145; in Romania, 195 absolute poverty line, 237; determinants of, 242–44, 243, 260n14 academia: under state socialism, 107–11. See also social sciences academia Academies of Sciences, 235 ACCEPT Romania, 201, 206n18 accountability in democracies, 36 Acemoglu, Daron, 49 ACT (Slovenia), 181n30 “advanced liberalism,” 101 agency, concept of: foregrounding in research, 17, 23, 28–29, 32, 49; importance of, 50–51; localism and, 61–63, 66; structure’s relationship to, 50; varying capacities for, 74n49 Albania, women’s NGOs in, 155 Alexander, Jacqui, 149 Allina-Pisano, Jessica, 53, 60 Alter-Globalists, 165–66 Alvarez, Sonia, 146–47 Amsterdam Treaty, 176n7

AnA (Romania), 204, 207n31 Anderson, Richard D., 55 Antic, Milica: Women–Politics–Equal Opportunities (with Jalusic), 161 anticonsumerism, 166 antifascism, 166 antineoliberalism, 165–66, 183n45 anti-Semitism, 173–74, 198, 280, 281–82 antistructuralism in transitology, 31 antitrafficking initiatives, 158, 170, 202, 219 Anti-Violence Network of Georgia (AVNG), 219 Antonescu, Ion, 275–76, 279 ApoWer (Romania), 181n27 Appadurai, Arjun, 77n71 Arbore, Ecaterina, 206n12 Armenia: competitive authoritarianism in, 64; economic growth in, 246; women’s NGOs in, 154–55; Women’s Rights Center, 158, 178n13 Artemis, 201 Association of Women with Large Families (Georgia), 215–16 ASTRA, 168–69 asynchrony of change, 54, 63, 74n53, 102–3, 105–6, 110, 115–16, 227, 399

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Atinati (Georgia), 216 authoritarianism: ethnocentrism and xenophobia as forces in, 44; fairness perception of, 326n19; in former Soviet Union countries, 3; populist rhetoric and, 7; post-World War I appeal of, 104; presidential system and, 42–43; in Russia, 2, 326n13; socialism’s turn toward, 105; stability perception of, 392; West linkage as restraint on, 43 Azerbaijan, economic growth in, 246 B.a.B.e. (Croatia), 158 Bahrain, 405n6 Bajnai, Gordon, 253 Balaghi, Shiva, 385 Balkan region: business culture and informal practices in, 370; ethnonationalism in, 126, 400–401. See also specific countries Baltic states: democratization in, 33, 317; economic reforms in, 235–36; European Union viewed by, 365. See also specific countries Bauman, Zygmunt, 128n4, 399 Baxandall, Phineas, 55 Beijing Platform of Action, 176–77nn7–8 Beijing Women’s Conference (1995), 152, 166–68, 175n2, 176n7, 214–15 Belarus: authoritarian regime in, 34; business culture and informal practices, 370; communist-era approach to gender equality, 179n17; economic growth in, 246; EU’s negligible impact in, 44; KARAT Coalition participants from, 167; nonexistence of public sphere in, 125; social justice in, 110; struggles against dictatorship in, 385; women’s political parties, 154 Benda, Julien, 255–56 Berman, Sheri, 68n5 Bernhard, Michael, 42, 52, 74n51 Bertelsmann Foundation reports, 69n15

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Index

Black Book of Equal Opportunities, 194–95 blat practice, 320, 323 Böll Foundation, 151 Bönker, Frank, 51 boomerang effect, 160 Bosnia and Herzegovina, women’s postwar initiatives in, 159 botulism cases, 122 Bradatan, Costica, 113 Braumoeller, Bear F., 68n3 bribery: criminalization of, 298; informal health-care payments and, 334–35, 336; for public procurement in Bulgaria, 349, 351–53. See also corruption in postcommunist countries; informality Brooks, R. C., 298 Bruszt, Laszlo, 48–49, 77n74 Bucur, Maria, 195, 196, 198–99 Bulgaria: administrative culture in, 368– 70; anticorruption measures in, 348–49, 372–73; business culture and informal practices, 370; business integrity in, 348–49; business trust in public procurement, 353–55; democratization in, 43, 111, 317; economic reforms in, 227, 229, 235–36, 246; extent and measurement of poverty in, 236–37; factors influencing corrupt behavior, 364; foreign businesses’ operations in, 351; informal payments for healthcare in, 337; informal relations in public procurement, 346–74; investment promotion in, 348–49; neopatrimonialism in, 245; network influence in public procurement, 360– 63; perception of corruption in public procurement, 350–53; poverty and inequality increase in postcommunist, 229, 239, 240, 242, 244, 247; poverty rates, 248, 248; procurement legislation, 367; procurement officials’ perspective on informal practices, 355–56; public procurement corruption scandals,

348–49; public sphere in, 125; rates and social determinant of poverty, 2000, 240–46, 241; Roma women in, 159; social inequality rates, 248–49, 249; social justice in, 110; social sciences academia in, 107, 108–9, 112; types of influence employed for procurement officials, 359–60; types of informal requests received by procurement officials, 357–59 Bulgarian National Strategy for Transparent Governance, Prevention and Countering of Corruption, 349 Bunce, Valerie, 31, 32, 42, 51–52, 72n34 Burawoy, Michael, 48, 63, 109 bureaucracy as “ideal type,” 308–9 Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS), 302, 347, 354 Byelorussia. See Belarus Capoccia, Giovanni, 52–53, 74n53, 77n73 Carothers, Thomas, 316, 317–18 Catholic Church in Poland, 38, 165, 179–80n21, 395 Caucasus: corruption in, 304; peacebuilding projects, 217; Soviet Union viewed as colonizing force, 172–73. See also Armenia; Azerbaijan; Georgia Ceau escu, Nicolae and Elena, 287n49 Center for Equality Advancement (Lithuania), 181n27 Center for Partnership and Equality, 204 Central Asian states: authoritarian regimes in, 33, 34, 63; corruption in, 304. See also specific countries Central European states: corruption in, 304; democratization in, 33, 34, 105–14, 317; economic expansion, 234–35; foreign direction investment in, 258; “great distributive system” in, 250; particularist vs. universalist interaction patterns in, 311–12; poverty and

inequality increase in postcommunist, 229–31, 232, 239, 259n8, 260n14, 387; Soviet Union viewed as colonizing force, 172–73. See also specific countries Chatterjee, Partha, 398 Chavdarova, Tanya, 371 child care in postcommunist societies, 135, 136, 196, 212 China, as particularist culture, 311, 312 Cioran, Emil, 113, 398 civic minimalism in postcommunist countries, 196 civilizational incompetence, concept of, 64–65, 77–78nn75–77 civil society: concept of, 2; core concepts in, 6–9; “democracy gap” and, 3; dissident movements in, 71n27; as domain in democracy, 35–36, 37; as foundation of transition culture, 388–89; hegemonic assumptions of, 5–6, 403–4; hegemony notion in, 6, 8–9, 401–3; justice notion in, 6–7; lack of in totalitarianism, 36; mobilization notion in, 6, 7–8, 34, 50, 401–3; modernity and, 119, 309; post-1956 emergence of, 38; in postcommunist countries, 2–3, 28–29; reframing concept of, 3; social justice and, 125–27, 391–92 class in postcommunist countries: mobilizations around, 389–93, 396, 399–402, 405–19; poverty and, 243–44; women’s equality and, 148, 149–50, 158–59, 163, 171, 203 Coalition of Women’s NGOs, 216–17 Cohen, Anthony P., 76n70 colored revolutions, 33 commodity fetish, 123 Comparative Political Studies, 51–52 compartmentalization: of economic analysis, 46–47; in transitology, 31 competitive authoritarianism, 2, 33–34, 63–64 consolidated authoritarian regimes, 33, 34

Index 419

consolidated democracies, 33 constructivism: as contextual holistic approach criterion, 24, 45, 54–57, 67, 74–75n54; signifying process in, 54 contextual holism: avoidance of overgeneralization in, 65–66; concept of, 23–24, 27–28, 389–90, 404; constructivism in, 24, 45, 54–57, 67; criteria in, 24, 49–63, 67; ethnographic sensibility in, 63–66; hinterland concept and, 120–22; historicism in, 24, 40–41, 45, 51–54, 66, 67, 135; informality in, 24, 45, 57–61, 66, 67, 293, 365; localism in, 24, 45, 61–63, 66, 67; places by axes of contentions, 398–99; points of departure for, 39–40; relationism in, 24, 27, 45, 49–51, 67; steps toward, 45; transitology compared with, 35, 36, 45, 67 contextualism, concept of, 48, 51 contingent modernities, concept of, 119–20 Control of Corruption Index, 306 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), 214, 215, 216, 220, 224 corruption in postcommunist countries: administrative culture and, 368–70; administrative weaknesses and, 367–68; anticorruption campaigns used as political persecution, 325n9; business culture and, 370–71; as compensatory response, 313, 318–20, 323–24, 342; complexity of solutions for, 373–74, 380nn40–41; composite indices, 304, 305, 306; contextual studies of, 10, 11, 293–95, 308–9, 313, 316; costs of, 380n38; definitions of, 397; democratization’s inverse relationship to, 399; entitlement and, 6, 313, 318, 338, 397; “envelope payments,” 334–35, 336, 339, 343; European Union membership and, 304; European Union membership

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Index

date correlated with, 372, 379n26; expert assessments, 303–4; factors influencing, 297, 363–64, 396–98; governmental reforms, 306; hinterland of research on, 121; inadequate control and law enforcement, 371; informality and, 59–60, 293–94, 309–11, 317–24; informal relations and practices in public procurement, 346–74; institutional independence and, 42–43; measurement alternative approach, 320–21; measurement margins of error, 315; measurement problems, 312–15, 326n12; measurement techniques, 324– 25n1; new assumptions about, 318–20; paradigm critiqued, 297–324, 396–97; particularistic vs. universalist states, 309–11, 316–17; policy-making problems, 315–17; policy-making suggestions, 323–24; poverty’s relation to, 403; predisposition debates, 316; publicprivate division and, 299, 308–9, 369, 397; racist assumptions about, 400–401, 405n18; social justice and, 111, 118–19, 391–92; subtraction concept applied to study of, 123–25; surveys and indices on, 302–3; as term, 120; translating across vernaculars, 401–2; trust levels and, 294, 310, 317–24; varying views on what is corrupt, 294, 312–13, 339–40, 343 corruption paradigm: assumptions of, 298–308; bottom-up view, 301, 320; consolidation of, 297–98; critique of, 297–324, 308–17; definition problems, 308–12; definitions of, 298–301; disaggregation of, 323; disease analogy, 300; hegemonic status of, 307–8; lack of customization in reform policies, 307; measurement of, 301–6; normative view, 299, 300; policy making, 306–8; prevalence of, 297; shift in, 307 Corruption Perception Index (CPI), 304, 305, 306, 314–15

Costache, Mircea, 267 Council of Europe, steps to address antiRoma discrimination, 266 Crăciun, Constanta, 206n12 Crawford, Beverly, 51–52 Croatia: B.a.B.e., 158; democratization in, 44; fascist regime in, 104; public sphere in, 125 Crowley, Stephen, 233 Csurka, István, 246 culture: administrative, 365, 368–70, 372; business, 351, 356, 365, 370–71, 372; political, 41, 54–55, 72n30, 222; transition, 29, 57, 70n21, 106–7, 120, 386, 387, 388–89, 394, 395–96, 397, 399. See also patriarchal culture; transitional culture Czechoslovakia: destruction of liberal opposition in, 105; post-1956 systemic changes, 37; social sciences academia in, 107, 112; Women’s Union, 162 Czech Republic: administrative culture in, 368–70; administrative weaknesses in, 368; anticorruption reforms in, 307, 372–73; business culture and informal practices, 370, 371; business trust in public procurement, 353–55; car production in, 258; democratization in, 317; economic reforms in, 235–36, 250; factors influencing corrupt behavior, 364; foreign businesses’ operations in, 351; “gender equality” initiatives in, 156–57, 180n22; “great distributive system” in, 246–47, 250; informal payments for healthcare in, 337; informal relations in public procurement, 346–74; KARAT Coalition participants from, 167; La Strada network in, 158; motherhood rights issues, 165; network influence in public procurement, 360–63; particularist vs. universalist interaction patterns in, 311; perception

of corruption in public procurement, 350–53; procurement legislation, 366– 67; procurement officials’ perspective on informal practices, 355–56; public procurement corruption scandals, 349; public sphere in, 125; regime of, 120; types of influence employed for procurement officials, 359–60; types of informal requests received by procurement officials, 357–59; women’s NGOs in, 154–55, 156–57, 180n27 Czech-Slovak Gender Studies MiniSchool, 159 decontextualized privatization, 31 Deleuze, Gilles, 119, 123 “democracy gap,” 3 democratic architecture, model of, 35–36, 37, 39, 70–71n23, 72n30 democratization: agency and, 50; as chain of linked episodes, 77n73; checks and balances in, 36; citizenship virtues and, 44; citizens’ participation in, 7; civilizational incompetence concept and, 64–65, 77–78nn75–77; civil society and, 2, 3; comparative studies, 3–4, 17–18; corruption’s inverse relationship to, 399; economic reforms and, 28–29, 47, 294, 371; European Union’s role in, 105–14; expectations of, 9; factors critical for, 40–44; gender justice and, 126, 135–37, 399; geographical proximity to West as factor, 41; governance and, 99–105; “great distributive system” and, 227, 230, 234–35, 246–47, 391; hegemonic view of, 4, 8–9; hinterland of research on, 121–22; historical legacies and, 40–41, 51–54; historical views of, 68n5; informality and, 111; institutional choices in new democracies and, 42–43, 77n74; mobilization’s importance for, 7–8, 18n5, 34, 50; mode of power transfer as factor, 42; modernity and,

Index 421

119; outsider values and, 110, 119–20, 365–67; paths to, 33, 120; “plan to clan” elite strategy, 59–60, 294; politicocultural formation in, 54–57; postWorld War I loss of interest in, 104; proper historicization of, 52–53; as proxy for justice in postcommunist countries, 6–7; regime type and ease of, 72n31, 72n33, 72n35; reversal processes, 42–43, 63–64; Russia’s “managed democracy,” 255; scholarly assumptions, 69n9; shock tactics in, 110; socio-economic conditions as factor, 41–42; stability and, 392; transnational institutions’ involvement in, 9; underlying premise as social good, 3; women’s rights violations under, 143 Desai, Manisha, 145 designer capitalism, 31, 77n74 disembedded economy concept, 31 Djilas, Milovan: The New Class, 128n10 domestic society: as domain in democracy, 35–36, 37, 70–71n23; as domain in totalitarianism, 36, 38 Drahokoupil, Jan, 120 Dunn, Elizabeth, 109, 122 Dzurinda, Mikuláš, 250 Eastern European states: corruption in, 304; democratization in, 105–14; economic expansion, 234–35; particularist vs. universalist interaction patterns in, 311–12; poverty and inequality increase in postcommunist, 229, 232, 260n14, 387; Roma people in, 268; Soviet Union viewed as colonizing force, 172–73. See also specific countries Ebert Foundation, 151 Economist Intelligence Unit Index (EIU), 303, 306, 313–14 economy: compartmentalization of, 46; democratization and, 227, 259n4; as domain in democracy, 35–36, 37, 69n10,

422

Index

73n42, 75n57; European Union pressures on new member states, 235–36, 257–58, 310; global fiscal crisis, 257–59; “great distributive system” reforms and, 230, 234–35, 246–47, 391; hinterland of research on, 121–22; Hungary’s problems, 251–53; impoverishment data, 1988–2000, 238–40; informal forms of exchange, 293–94, 301, 310–11; materialism in, 46; political scaffold for reforms of, 47; remittance economies, 310, 324; Russia’s export dependence, 258; Russia’s neopatrimonial path, 239, 244, 245–46; shadow, development of, 38, 58, 71nn27–28, 72n36, 75n63, 126; social costs of economic reforms, 233– 36; social costs of market transition, 1988–2000, 237–46, 391; social costs of market transition, post-2000, 246–51; socio-economic conditions as democratization factor, 41–42; uneven reform efforts, 232–33; women’s rights violations under economic change, 143, 167; women’s suffering in reforming economies, 232 education level as poverty determinant, 243 education system in postcommunist countries, reform efforts in, 235, 252 effectiveness in democracies, 36 Eglitis, Stukuls, 405n17 Egypt, 385, 404 “8 March Women’s Agreement” (Poland), 163–64, 393 Einhorn, Barbara, 139, 169, 175n1 Ekiert, Grzegorz, 52, 53–54, 231, 232 Eliade, Mircea, 113, 398 Elster, Jon, 70n23 embeddedness, 48, 51, 66, 70n23, 73n44 emic knowledge, importance of, 23, 44, 54–57 entitlement, concept of, 6, 313, 318, 338, 397 Estonia: anticorruption campaigns in, 317;

corruption perceptions for health-care sector, 339–40; democratization in, 317, 387; women’s NGOs in, 180n27 ethnic cleansing, 173–74 ethnographic sensibility, 63–66, 67 ethnography: analysis and, 34; of corruption, 14, 293, 319, 397; of postcommunist transformations, 60, 63, 65–67, 76n64, 76n69, 78n77; in social sciences research, 97, 108, 115, 135, 323 ethnonationalism: as alternative to neoliberalism, 228, 245–46; authoritarian regimes’ exploitation of, 44; European Union and, 394; gender justice and, 143, 144, 170, 173–74; hegemony of, 394–95; identity construction and, 55, 228; “othering” of Roma people and, 228, 267, 268, 273–83; “victimized” racism, 275–83 European Bank of Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), 302, 349 European Court of Human Rights: gender justice cases, 160–61, 182n39 European Institute of Romania, 380n36 European Network Against Trafficking in Women for Sexual Exploitation, 202 European Union: antienlargement protests, 165–66; anti-Roma discrimination in, 266–67; candidacy requirements for membership in, 9, 34, 43–44, 155, 175n2, 220, 304, 346, 348, 365–67, 368, 386; committee on Women’s rights and Gender Equality, 153; conspiracy theories about, 282; democratization influenced by, 40, 43–44; democratization process and, 43; economic pressures on new member countries, 235–36, 257–58, 310; enlargement of, 171, 376n3, 379n26, 387, 394; “gender mainstreaming” goals of, 152–53, 155–56, 176–77nn7–8, 395; hegemony of, 387–88; identity construction of, 106–7; immigration

policy, 174, 184n47, 396; impact on ethnic and gender-related questions, 174, 179–80n21, 196–97; mobilization against distributive system reforms, 391; public procurement directives, 346, 372–73, 377n16, 379n25; racism within, 126, 394, 395–96, 402–3; Romania’s accession to, 266–67, 268–69, 272, 283, 379n26; Romania’s feelings of marginality, 272–74, 283; social and gender justice initiatives, 139, 144, 156, 168, 170, 171, 174, 179–80nn19–21; support of protest movements, 385–86 European Women’s Lobby (EWL), 168 Evans, Geoffrey, 61 Executive Opinion Survey (WEF), 302, 314 experience of poverty measurement, 237, 238, 239–40 Eyal, Gil, 77n74 Fairclough, Norman, 191–92 Federation for Women and Family Planning (FWFP; Poland), 160–61, 180n23 Feige, Edgar L., 71n28 feminism, 117; antineoliberalism and, 166, 183n45; challenges to hegemony of, 141, 149–51, 152, 154, 155–56, 161, 166–69; genealogical links, 197–98; internal contention within, 145; liberal, 197–98; NGOization of movement, 146, 154–57, 175n2, 206n17; resistance to label of, 216; in Romania, 136, 191–204; third-wave strategies and tools, 161–62, 183n42, 202–4; undervaluing of women’s work, 142; wave model of, 199; Western paradigm of, 143–44, 148, 171 Feminoteka Foundation, 179n20 Feyerabend, Paul, 117 FIDESZ party (Hungary), 251, 252 Filipescu-Filipovic, Elena, 206n12 food regulation systems, 122

Index 423

Ford Foundation, 151 Fosztó, László, 287n49 Foucault, Michel, 99–101, 102, 116 Foucault Effect, The, 99 France, Roma people’s expulsion from, 395, 402 Franklin, Benjamin: Autobiography, 100 Freedom House reports, 34, 69n15, 121, 303, 315 free expression, racism and, 126 Freemasons, 281–82 Friedman, Milton, 109, 110 Fuenzalida-Puelma, Herman L., 342 Funar, Gheorghe, 267 Gainati (Georgia), 216 Galtung, Fredrik, 321 game theory, 49–50, 73n42 Gândul (Romanian journal), 271 Gans-Morse, Jordan, 68–69n7, 69n12 Gardianul (Romanian journal), 271 Gender Alliance for Development Center (GADC; Albania), 155 “Gender and Governance” project (Georgia), 222–23 gender as poverty determinant, 243, 244 Gender Equality Advisory Council (Georgia), 217–18 “gender equality” discourses, 139, 140; Beijing Women’s Conference and, 152, 166–68, 175n2, 176n7, 214–15; Catholic Church involvement in Poland, 179– 80n21; communist-era approach, 179n17, 195–96, 211–14, 259n6; difference-blind, 148; displacement of other goals with, 144, 147, 148; European Union and, 152– 53, 156, 174, 175n2, 191, 196–97, 395; in Georgia, 211–24; inadequate attention to, 143; in labor market, 161, 164, 167, 183n43, 196, 212, 213–14, 232, 234, 259n6; language of, 194–97; liberal vs. socialist views, 152, 172; NGOs’ push toward, 154–57; Poland Equality Parades, 159,

424

Index

181–82n35; in postcommunist countries’ political parties, 177n9, 178nn15–16; regional contextual differences, 166–69; in Romania, 191–204; undervaluing of women’s work, 142; Western paradigm of, 144, 147, 157, 166–67, 168, 171, 175n2, 212–13 Gender Equality Strategy of Georgia (GES), 218 Gender Index, 179n20 gender justice in postcommunist countries: antiviolence and antitrafficking initiatives, 158, 170, 202, 219; Beijing Women’s Conference and, 152, 166–68, 175n2, 176n7, 214–15; contextual studies of, 10, 11, 135–37, 144; decentering of mobilization, 135–36, 146–48; democratization and, 126, 399; ethnic initiatives, 158–59; Georgian women’s mobilization activities, 136, 211–24; global and transnational interactions, 139–40, 144, 145–47, 151–57; goals of, 144; hinterland of research on, 121; men’s involvement in mobilizations, 140, 183n42; mobilizing around, 389– 94; paradigm of, 141, 166; patriarchal attitudes and, 135, 143; Romanian women’s mobilization activities, 136; sexual orientation issues, 140, 159, 201; as social justice terrain, 118–19; subtraction concept applied to study of, 123–25; translating across vernaculars, 401–2; undervaluing of women’s work, 142; “victim” paradigm in, 142, 149–50, 171, 196, 205n2; women’s mobilizations, 139–74; women’s political parties, 154; younger women’s priorities, 161–66, 167, 170–71, 193. See also women’s mobilizations “gender mainstreaming” discourses, 139, 147; Beijing Women’s Conference and, 152, 166–68, 175n2, 176n7, 214–15; European Union and, 152–53, 175n2;

in Georgia, 220–21, 223; goals of, 176– 77n7; NGOs’ push toward, 154–57 Gender Romania, 202, 206n19 General Health Insurance Act (1999), 253 Georgia: botulism and agribusiness in, 122; communist-era approach to gender equality, 211–14; democratization in, 34; economic growth in, 246; “gender equality” initiatives, 211–12, 220–21; KARAT Coalition participants from, 167; Parliamentary Women’s Club, 214–15; participation in Beijing Women’s Conference, 214–15; postcommunist context of women’s issues, 214–23; women’s mobilization in, 136, 211–24; women’s NGOs in, 215–17; women’s political parties, 222; women’s underrepresentation in political and economic decision making, 220–23 Georgian Women for Elections, 215 Gerber, Theodore P., 256 German Democratic Republic (East Germany): education system reform, 235; post-1956 systemic changes, 37 German Marshall Fund, 151 Germany, fascist regime in, 104 global capitalism: compartmentalization in, 31; criticism of, 4, 5; democratization and, 28–29; fear and desire in, 101, 386–87; feminization of global labor, 150, 176n5; impact of fiscal crisis, 257– 59; knowledge industries and, 111–12; neoliberalism and, 4–5, 8–9, 175n1, 175–76n5; privatization and, 31–32; protests against, 165–66, 171; second economies in, 72n36, 75n63; social sciences research, 125; stability and, 392; triumphalist narrative, 70n20 globalization: traditional conceptualizations of, 149; women’s activism affected by, 149–51, 152, 176n5 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 127

Governmental Commission for Gender Equality (Georgia), 218 governmentality, concept of, 99–105 Grabowska, Magdalena, 179n18, 193–94, 197, 201, 203, 390 Graff, Agnieszka, 162 “great distributive system,” 227; agerelated impact, 260n19; Hungary’s attempted reform of, 251–53; Poland’s attempted reform of, 253–54; popular mobilization against reform of, 251–57, 391; post-2000 strain on, 246–47; postcommunist increase in costs of, 234; public’s defense of, 255–57; Russia’s reform of, 249–50; socialist basis of, 230 Greater Romania Party, 276 Greece, authoritarian regime in, 104 Greskovits, Bela, 120, 233, 255 Grewal, Inderpal, 149, 150 Grødeland, Åse Berit, 319, 397 Grunberg, Laura, 199, 200, 206n17 Gryzmala-Busse, Anna M., 53 guanxi practice, 320, 323 Guatarri, Felix, 119, 123 Gudeman, Stephen, 73n43 Gypsies. See Roma people Gyurcsány, Ferenc, 250, 251–53 Haahr, Jens Henrik, 153 Haggard, Stephan, 53 Hall, Peter, 78n80 Hampden-Turner, Charles, 310–11 Hanson, Stephen E., 52, 53–54 Hapsburg empire, tensions within, 103 Hašková, Hana, 179n18 hawala banking systems, 326n20 Hawkesworth, Mary, 175n5 Hayek, Friedrich, 109 health-care system in postcommunist countries: clanlike structure of, 342–43; doctor and staff payment expectations, 337, 338–39; elite and, 336, 338–39, 342; informal payments, 294,

Index 425

301, 333–43, 397; informal payments and public good, 340–41; informal payments in political context, 342–43; lack of reforms to, 235; mobilization against Hungarian reforms, 251–53; mobilization against Polish reforms, 253–54; patients’ views on, 338; reasons for informal payments, 336–38; systemic causes of informal payments, 335–36 Health Insurance Organization (HIO; Poland), 253 hegemony: comparing across injustices in places, 401–3; of corruption paradigm, 307–8, 396–97; cultural formation and, 57; of European Union, 387–88; of feminism, 141, 143–44; in global financial crisis, 399; of mass mobilization, 136, 391; of memory regimes, 54, 113–14; multilevel functioning of, 393; of nationstate, 141, 394–95; of neoliberalism, 4, 5, 8, 29, 110, 162–66, 170–71, 245–46, 256, 386–89; notion of in civil society, 6, 8–9; outsider values in democratization, 110, 365–67; of paradigms in democratization studies, 135; of race, 395–96, 399–400; “scattered hegemonies” concept, 149–51, 392–93; of transition culture, 57; of the West, 28–29; women’s challenges to, 141, 145, 149–51, 204 Hemment, Julie, 169 Herrera, Yoshiko, 55 hinterland concept, 116–17, 119, 120–22, 125–27, 128n11 historical institutionalism, 74n50 historical memory, politics of, 53–54 historicism: as contextual holistic approach criterion, 24, 40–41, 45, 51–54, 66, 67; proper depth of, 52–53; recommendations for research, 53–54 historiography: democratization studies and, 3–4, 51–52, 68n5; of governance, 99–105; state socialism and, 113–14 HIV/AIDS-related work, 202

426

Index

holism, 27, 48 Homo Sovieticus, 64–65 Hopf, Ted, 55 Hout, Michael, 256 Hsu, Carolyn L., 110–11 Hulland, Annette, 195 humanization, selective, 37, 39, 71nn27–28 Hungary: car production in, 258; “constructive no-confidence vote,” 253, 260n18; corruption perceptions for health-care sector, 339–40; democratization in, 39–40, 43, 111, 317; designer capitalism in, 31; economic reforms in, 227, 234, 235–36, 246; extent and measurement of poverty in, 236–37; fascist regime in, 104; “great distributive system” in, 246–47; identity-driven protests in, 256–57; informal payments for healthcare in, 341; mobilization against health-care reforms, 251–53; NANE, 158; national debt, 257; neoliberalism in, 245; popular mobilizations in, 236; post1956 systemic changes, 37; poverty and inequality increase in postcommunist, 230, 240, 242, 243–44, 245, 247; poverty rates, 248, 248; public sphere in, 125; rates and social determinant of poverty, 2000, 240–46, 241; social inequality rates, 248–49, 249; social sciences academia in, 107–8, 112; table of economic indicators, 247; taxi blockade in, 244; voter turnout and protest events, 255 Huntington, Samuel P., 42 Husserl, Edmund, 128n11 Iapornicu, Robert Lauren iu, 274 Iceland, 315 identity construction: in Hungary, 256–57; localism in, 61–62, 76n68; nations and, 102–5; politics and semiotics in, 55, 75n56; in Romania, 228, 268–70, 272–73,

275–83; success of Veliky Novgorod and, 56–57, 75n59; usable pasts and, 56, 75n56, 75n59 Iliescu, Ion, 279 Ilsen, Tiina, 216–17 immigration rights, 166, 184n47, 396 India, 398 individualism: social activism and, 141–42; social justice and, 97, 111, 144, 147, 152 individual responsibility, concept of, 109 Indymedia Romania, 184n48 inequality: capitalism and, 104; gender, 34, 176–77n7, 197, 395, 402, 404; geographical patterns, 95; poverty and, 229–32, 239, 242, 256, 259n3, 259n8, 260n14; private, 309; social, 248, 323–24 informality: as contextual holistic approach criterion, 24, 45, 57–61, 66, 67; corruption’s relationship to, 59–60, 293, 309–10, 312–13; definition of, 376n5; explanations of practices in public procurement, 364–72; food safety and, 122; hawala banking systems, 326n20; health-care payments and, 294, 301, 333–43, 397; as human impulse, 60–61; as indicators of injustice and distrust, 317–24, 397; letter vs. spirit of the law, 319–20; local knowledge about, 318–20, 323–24; networks and, 360–63, 376n7; “plan to clan” elite strategy, 59–60, 294, 342–43; power constellations, 66, 75n62; public good and, 340–41; in public procurement, 346–74; remittance economies and, 310, 324; significance of, 71n28; social justice and, 111 Inglot, Tomasz, 53 instant institutional engineering, 31 institutional adjustment, 64, 77n74 “institutional conversion,” 71n26, 110 institutional design scholarship, 31, 71–72n29 institutionalism in transitology, 31, 32, 42–43, 73n43, 73n47, 74n50, 78n80

institutionalization: governance, 101, 106–7 “institutional mushrooming,” 197 “institutional pluralism,” 70n23 International Association of Georgian Widows, 216 International Centre of Civic Culture (ICCC), 215 International Country Risk Guide (ICRG), 303, 306, 313, 314 International Crime Victim Survey, 302 International Monetary Fund, 297 International Roma Women’s network, 202 International Women’s Media Foundation, 202 Irony of Fate, The (film), 76n65 Isărescu, Mugur, 266, 280 Italy, fascist regime in, 104 Jackson, Patrick Thaddeus, 68n3 Jalusic, Vlasta: Women–Politics–Equal Opportunities (with Antic), 161 Jaruga-Nowacka, Izabella, 178n16 Jasiewicz, Krzysztof, 70n22 Johnston, Michael, 301 jumping scale, 160 Jurnalul Naţional (Romanian journal): anti-Roma legislative initiative, 265–66, 267, 274; anti-Roma people articles in, 270, 274–75 justice: competing visions of, 8; democratization and, 6–7; notion of in civil society, 6–7; as term, 96, 125–26. See also social justice Kaczyński, Jaroslaw, 253 Kaczyński, Lech, 143, 178n16, 254 Kádar, János, 245 Kalyvas, Stathis N., 76n67 Kaminski, Antoni Z., 369 Kaplan, Caren, 149, 150 KARAT Coalition, 167–68, 177n8, 201, 202

Index

427

Karklins, Rasma, 318, 369, 371, 397 Karl, Terry Lynn, 32, 50, 51–52, 73n46 Kaufman, D., 306 Kaufman, Robert R., 53 Kennedy, Michael D., 55, 57, 109 Kervalishvili, Rusudan, 220 Khodorkovsky, Mikhail, 404–5n4 Khrushchev, Nikita, thaw under, 36–37 Klaus, Vaclav, 250 Klein, Naomi, 109–10 Klitgaard, Robert, 336 Knack, Stephen, 300–301, 302, 306, 313–15 knowledge industries, concept of, 111–12, 115 “knowledge regimes,” 4 Kolakowski, Leszek, 113, 398 Konrad, George: Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power (with Szelényi), 128n10 Kopstein, Jeffrey S., 41 Kornai, Janos, 31, 47–48, 51, 259n8, 326n19, 334 Kosovo, Rural Women’s Activists in, 160 Kovacs, Bori, 203 Kristeva, Julia, 113, 398 Kubik, Jan, 232, 405n8 Kuhn, Thomas, 117 Kusznir, Julia, 319 Laclau, Ernesto, 399–400 Ladyfest (Romania), 184n48, 202–4, 207n26 Lakatos, Imre, 117 Langenort, 182n40 La Strada network, 158 Latour, Bruno, 116–17 Latvia: clanlike structure of health-care system in, 343; informal payments for medical services, 294, 333–43 Laudan, Larry, 68n1 Law, John, 117–18, 119, 125, 128n11 Law and Justice party (Poland), 253 League of Polish Families, 165 League of Polish Women, 162

428 Index

Ledeneva, Alena, 121, 319, 342, 396–97 Lesbians Alliance (Poland), 159, 163 Letki, Natalia, 61 Leven, Bozena, 342 Levi, Margaret, 73n42 LGBT groups, 159, 194, 201, 206n18 Libertatea (Romanian journal), 270–71 “liberty” as term, 102 Lijphart, Arend, 51–52 Linch, Amy, 389 linkages, 63 Linz, Juan, 35, 72n31 Lithuania: corruption perceptions for health-care sector, 339–40; “gender equality” initiatives in, 157, 180n22; labor migrations from, 62; women’s NGOs in, 156, 181n27; women’s political parties, 178n11 localism: as contextual holistic approach criterion, 24, 45, 61–63, 66, 67; as framing for informality, 318–20, 324, 365–67; identity construction and, 56–57, 75n58; locality distinguished from, 62, 76n68; scapes concept, 77n71; transnational migration and, 62; trust communities and, 61, 66, 76n67, 76n69 locality, localism distinguished from, 62, 76n68 long causal chains, 53–54 Lovell, Steven, 318–19 Lowe, Lisa, 149 Lukacs, János, 128n10 Luxembourg, 315 Macedonia: democratization in, 44; La Strada network in, 158; Roma women in, 159; women’s NGOs in, 181n27 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 73n46 Macovei, Monica, 349 Magradze, Guguli, 221–22 Magyari-Vincze, Enikö, 156, 197, 200 Mahmood, Saba, 74n49 Mailat, Nicolae Romulus, case of, 271–72

Mama Foundation (Warsaw), 183n45 “managed democracy,” 255 Manifa demonstrations (Poland), 163–64 Mansbridge, Jane, 176n6 Marxist critical theory, 117, 128n10 Marxist-Leninist ideology, 50; post-1989 decline of, 109; prior hegemony of in postcommunist countries, 5 mass media: importance of, 123–25; Romanian readers’ comments on Roma people, 276–83; Romania’s negative representations of Roma people in, 265–83 materialism in economic analysis, 46 maternity leave in postcommunist societies, 135, 164, 165, 196, 212, 213, 259n6 McFaul, Michael, 33–34, 50, 70n18 McNay, Lois, 142 mechanisms of reaggregation, 63 Me iar, Vladimir, 250 Medgyessy, Péter, 251 Medica Zenica Women’s Association (Bosnia and Herzegovina), 159 Medvedev, Dmitri, 321 Mele canu, Teodor, 266 memory regimes, coexistence of, 53, 54 Merkel, Wolfgang, 70n23 Meurs, Mieke, 109 Michael, Bryane, 366, 379n31 Michlic, Joanna B., 268 migration, labor, 62, 126, 272, 283 Mihăilescu, Stefania, 198 Mihalache, Isabela, 199 military conflict, role in formulation of gender discourses, 144 Miller, William, 337 Miroiu, Mihaela, 192, 196, 205n2 Mitchell, Timothy, 73n42 mobilization: class and gender modes compared, 393–94; comparing across injustices in places, 401–3; corruption as form of resistance, 313, 318–20, 321, 323–

24, 342; costs of transition and intensity of, 231–33; decentering of, 135–36; elites’ role in, 255–56; free expression and, 231; of Georgian women, 136, 211–24; “great distributive system” reforms and, 227, 230, 234–35, 246–47, 251–57, 391; of hate speech against Roma people in Romania, 269–70; in Hungary, 251–53; increase during second-wave economic reforms, 236, 242–43, 254–57; in Middle East, 385–86; new forms of, 127; notion of in civil society, 6, 7–8, 18n5, 34, 50; poverty and, 229–58; of Romanian women, 136; Western support of protest movements, 385–86; women’s movements in postcommunist countries, 139–74. See also women’s mobilizations modernization theory, 29, 31 Mohanty, Chandra, 148, 149 Moldova: democratization in, 34; KARAT Coalition participants from, 167; labor migrations from, 62; La Strada network in, 158 motherhood issues: communist-era approach, 195–96, 212; mobilizations on, 170; in NGO agendas, 161; NGOs’ neglect of, 164–65; in Poland, 182– 83n42, 183n45; in Romania, 193 MOTRAT QIRIAZI (Kosovo), 160 Mouffe, Chantal, 399–400 Mudure, Mihaela, 198 Mueller, Carol: “Organization Bases of the Conflict in Contemporary Feminism,” 145–46 Müller, Klaus, 51 multilevel governance, 63 Nachkebia, Manana, 221 NANE (Hungary), 158 Naples, Nancy, 141 Năstase, Adrian, 279 National Gender Equality Action Plan (Georgia), 218

Index 429

National Health Fund (NHF; Poland), 253 National Labor Union of Nurses and Midwives, 254 National Report on the Millennium Development Goals (Georgia), 217 nation-building and governance, 101–5, 198 Nations in Transit reports (NIT), 303, 304, 305, 312, 313 nation-state, hegemony of, women’s challenges to, 141, 151–57, 160–61, 174 naturalism in transitology, 31–32 Nazi ideology, anti-Roma rhetoric and, 275–76, 279 negative paradigm, concept of, 142 Nelson, Joan M.: Transforming PostCommunist Political Economies (with Tilly and Walker), 47 neoliberalism: Central European states and economic reforms, 239, 245, 391; civil society as part of, 403–4; critiques of, 98, 175–76n5, 227–28, 256; in Eastern European social sciences, 109; economic growth and, 248–49; ethnonationalism as alternative to, 228, 245–46; fear and desire in, 101; gender justice and, 143–44; hegemonic view of, 4, 5, 8, 29, 110, 245–46, 256, 386–89; Homo Sovieticus concept and, 64; ideological impact in postcommunist countries, 24, 98, 170; ideological nature of, 386–89; justice notions and, 8, 97–98; negative effects of, 175n1, 196–97, 244; patriarchal attitude pitted against, 151; in Russia, 249–50; Russia’s retreat from, 239; social sciences and, 96, 113; Southeastern European states and economic reforms, 246; transnational institutions and, 4; women’s challenges to hegemony of, 141, 162–66, 170–71, 204

430

Index

neopatrimonial regimes: economic growth and, 246, 248–49; inequality and, 239, 244, 245–46 Network of East-West Women (NEWW), 167, 201, 202 NGOs: democratization and, 43; effectiveness critiqued, 156–57, 166–67, 169, 171–72, 197; for Georgian women, 215–17; growing role of, 297; informal groups contrasted with, 163; restructuring and focus shifting in, 156; for Romanian women, 154–55, 156, 181n27, 184n48, 192–94, 199–202; for Roma women in Romania, 158–59; shadow reports by, 177n8, 216; as sites for women’s mobilizations, 146; social and gender justice initiatives, 139, 154–57; states’ relations with, 153; for women’s issues, 145–46, 151–57, 170, 175n2, 177n8, 177–78n10, 192–94, 393; younger women’s challenges to, 161–66, 170–71. See also specific groups Nordstrom, Timothy, 42, 52 North, Douglass C., 47, 51 ODIHR/OSCE, 216–17 O’Donnell, Guillermo, 6 Offe, Claus, 68n5, 70n23 Open Society Institute, 281–82, 369, 377n16 Oproiu, Ecaterina, 206n13 Orange Revolution (Ukraine), 385 Orăştie Girls’ Society (Romania), 192–93 organicism, 48, 51 Organization for European Cooperation and Development, 297 Ost, David, 233 Ottoman empire, tensions within, 103 parachutists, 35, 70n22, 110 Parade Ponosa, 159 parliamentary system in new democracies, 42–43

Parliamentary Women’s Club (Georgian Parliament), 214–15 Parsons, Talcott, 310 “partial reform trap,” 34, 58, 63–64, 70n23 passivity, problems of, 44, 61, 64–65, 233, 391 Patočka, Jan, 113, 398 patriarchal culture: in Georgia, 136–37; mobilizations against, 157–61, 170, 392– 93; neoliberalism pitted against, 151; in postcommunist societies, 135, 141, 143 patrimonial power structures, corruption and, 298, 309 peace-building NGOs, 217 pensions in postcommunist countries, 232–33, 234–35, 260n19 Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia, 298 Petro, Nicolai: Crafting Democracy, 56–57, 62 phenomenology, 117, 128n11 Pickel, Andreas, 51 Pickles, John, 97–98, 389, 398 ping-pong effect, 160 Pippidi, Alina, 309, 311, 316, 319 “plan to clan” elite strategy, 59–60, 294, 342–43 Poland: botulism and agribusiness in, 122; car production in, 258; Catholicism in, 395; conservative women’s mobilizations in, 165, 179–80n21, 180n23, 183n45; corruption perceptions for health-care sector, 339–40; democratization in, 39–40, 43, 70n22, 111, 128n7, 317; designer capitalism in, 31; destruction of liberal opposition in, 105; economic reforms in, 227, 229, 234, 235–36, 246, 250–51; “8 March Women’s Agreement,” 163–64, 393; extent and measurement of poverty in, 236–37; “gender equality” debate in, 178n16, 179–80n21; “gender equality” mobilizations, 140, 183n43; gender justice in, 143; geopolitical

experience, 173; “great distributive system” in, 246–47, 253–54; Homo Sovieticus concept and, 64; identity construction in, 103; informal payments for healthcare in, 336, 342; KARAT Coalition participants from, 167; La Strada network in, 158; League of Polish Women, 162; Lesbians Alliance, 159, 163; particularist vs. universalist interaction patterns in, 311; post-1956 emergence of civil society, 38; post1956 systemic changes, 37; postsocialist social justice in, 122; poverty and inequality increase in postcommunist, 229, 230, 240, 242, 243–45, 247; poverty rates, 248, 248; public sphere in, 125; rates and social determinant of poverty, 2000, 240–46, 241; Rural Women’s Circles, 160, 182n37; social inequality rates, 248–49, 249; social sciences academia in, 107–8, 112, 115, 128n10; Solidarity movement, 38, 245, 385; strikes and protests in, 233, 244–45, 259n7; table of economic indicators, 247; transnational women’s initiatives, 160–61; women’s NGOs in, 154–55, 156– 57, 177n8, 179n20, 182n40, 182–83n42, 183n45; women’s political parties, 154, 160–61, 177–78n10 Polanyi, Karl: The Great Transformation, 46–47, 73n44, 128n3 Polish Sejm party, 128n7 political parties in postcommunist countries, women in, 153–54, 160–61, 177–78nn9–11, 194, 214–15, 220–23 political society as domain in democracy, 35–36, 37 Pop-Eleches, Grigore, 40, 41, 52, 72n33, 72n35 Popescu, Liliana, 192, 196 Popper, Karl, 117 positivism, 117, 128n10 postcommunism: constructivism research

Index

431

approach, 54–57; contextual holism study approach, 23–24; emergence from posttotalitarian structure, 58; informality as fixture of, 61; neoliberalism’s advance and, 386–89; problem-driven approach to study of, 1–18, 23–25; scholarly analysis focuses, 1–2, 28–30, 68nn3–5 postcommunist countries: administrative culture in, 368–70; administrative weaknesses in, 367–68; agency of people in, 17, 28–29, 32, 49; anticorruption reforms in, 307; business culture in, 370–71; civil society notions in, 6–9; civil society’s place in, 404; class structure reemergence of, 175n1; colonial view of, 172–73, 398; comparisons with West, 4; complexities of, 24, 27, 34–35, 174; context differences from Third World locations, 147; contextual holism approach to studying, 23–24; corruption factors in, 297; critical vernaculars, 385–404; democracy realization as problem in, 7–8; democratization factors for, 40–44; disappointment in, 310; European Union candidacy requirements for, 9, 34, 43–44, 155; extent and measurement of poverty in, 236–37; foreign businesses’ operations in, 351; friendship models in, 370–71; gender justice in, 135–37, 166–69; heterogeneous view of, 33, 35–36, 40–44, 105–6; homogeneous view of, 29, 119, 172; impact of global fiscal crisis, 257–59; informal economic networks in, 58, 293–94, 310–11, 376n7; informal health-care payments in, 334–35, 397; informal relations in public procurement, 346–74; integration of case studies, 17–18; lack of protest culture in, 233; lack of trust and citizen passivity as problems in, 44, 61, 64–65, 75n58, 294, 310, 317–24, 391;

432

Index

legal instability in, 365–67, 380n36; modernity in, 102–3, 309; neoliberalism in context of, 5, 24; new hegemonies in, 149; noncompetitive industries and unemployment in, 234; outsider views of, 30–31, 35, 44, 64–65, 110, 365–67; partial reform traps in, 34; particularistic vs. universalist states, 309–11, 316–17; politico-cultural formation in, 54–57; poverty in, 237–51; public-private division in, 299, 308–9, 369, 397; reform exhaustion in, 255; regime types in, 33–34, 70n18, 70–71n23, 72nn30–31; regionalist revival in, 62–63; reindustrialization of, 258; rejection of collective action in, 141–42, 147; “scattered hegemonies” concept for, 150–51, 392–93; scholarly neglect of, 390; social costs of economic reforms in, 232, 233–36; social justice concept in CEE, 95–99, 118–20, 391–92; transitology and, 29–45; Western-style democracy and market economy viewed as goals for, 28–29, 197–99; Western support of protest movements, 385–86; women in political parties and state institutions, 153–54, 214–15; women’s organizations in, 140–41, 145–46; women’s status in, 142–43, 172–73, 232, 259n6 postsocialism: deregulated economy and, 126; diversity of, 120; meta-hinterland for study of, 125; social science and government of, 114–18; trope of, 113–14 poststructuralism, 117 posttotalitarian architecture, model of, 37–39, 39, 41, 71n26 posttotalitarian system, informality in, 58, 59 poverty in postcommunist countries, 241; contextual studies of, 10, 11, 227–28; corruption’s relation to, 403; determinants of absolute poverty, 242–

44; differences in levels, 240; extent and measurement, 236–37; hinterland of research on, 121–22; hunger and, 239–40, 242; impoverishment data, 1988–2000, 238–40; increase in, 229–31; mobilization and, 229–58, 389–94; neoliberalism’s effect on, 175n1; rates and social determinant of, 2000, 240–46; rates of, 248; Russia’s self-provisioning of food, 239–40, 242; social costs of economic reforms, 233–51; social costs of market transition, 1988–2000, 237–46, 391; social costs of market transition, post-2000, 246–51; as social justice terrain, 118–19; subjective vs. objective measures of, 236–37; subtraction concept applied to study of, 123–25; as term, 120; translating across vernaculars, 401–2; “uncivil” behavior and, 78n77 Praxis school, 128n10 presentism in transitology, 31 presidential system in new democracies, 42–43 Preuss, Ulrich K., 70n23 privatization strategy, 31, 59–60; corruption and, 297, 299, 306, 369; of health-care system, 253–54, 255–56; neoliberalism and, 175–76n5; neopatrimonialism and, 239; property rights and, 234; U.S. debates on, 255 procurement, public: administrative culture and informal practices, 368–70; administrative weaknesses and informal practices, 367–68; business culture and informal practices, 370–71; business trust in, 353–55; complexity of anticorruption solutions for, 373–74, 380nn40–41; explanations of informal practices, 364–72; factors influencing, 363–64; inadequate control and law enforcement, 371; informality in preparatory stage, 351–52;

informal relations in, 346–74; legal instability and informal practices, 365–67, 380n36; network influence in public procurement, 360–63; as percent of GDP, 346; perceptions of corruption, 350–53; procurement officials’ perspective on informal practices, 355–56; research methodology for corruption in, 347–48; types of influence employed for procurement officials, 359–60; types of informal requests received by officials, 357–59; unofficial payments, 351–52 property rights: neoliberalism and, 175–76n5; “plan to clan” elite strategy, 59–60; privatization in postcommunist countries and, 234, 245, 369 Pro Women Foundation (Romania), 200–201 “public sphere” concept, 125, 171 Putin, Vladimir, 245, 249–50, 255 Qiriazi sisters, 160 racism: corruption assumptions and, 400– 401; European Union and, 174, 394, 395–96, 402–3; free expression and, 126; gender justice and, 173–74; hate speech disguised as legitimate self-defense, 275–83; hegemony of, 395–96, 399–400; Roma people and, 270–83; translating across vernaculars, 402–3 Radio Maryja (Poland), 165 Radziszewska, Elżbieta, 178n16 rape, 170 recombination concept, 48–49 Reggiani, Giovanna, 271 regime type as poverty determinant, 243–44 Regional Initiatives for Women’s Promotion, 201, 202 Regulska, Joanna, 121, 179n18, 193–94, 197, 201, 203, 390

Index

433

Reilly, David A., 41 relationism: concept of, 49–50; as contextual holistic approach criterion, 24, 27, 45, 49–51, 67; game theory and, 49–50, 73n42 relative poverty line, 237 religion: in Poland, 38, 179–80n21; racism and, 395; role in formulation of gender discourses, 144; role in women’s mobilizations, 165. See also Catholic Church in Poland risk assessment for overseas investors, 303 Rivkin-Fish, Michelle, 301 Robinson, James A., 49 Roman, Denise, 192, 195, 198 Roman, Petre, 266, 267, 279, 280 Romania: accession to European Union, 266–67, 268–69, 272, 283, 377n16, 379n25, 379n26; administrative culture in, 368–70; administrative weaknesses in, 368, 380n36; anticorruption measures in, 348–49, 372–73; antiHungarian sentiment, 281–82; business culture and informal practices, 370; business integrity in, 348–49; business trust in public procurement, 353–55; Chinese women laborers in, 204; civic minimalism in, 196; communist-era approach to gender equality, 195–96; conspiracy theories, 279–82; corruption perceptions for health-care sector, 339–40; democratization in, 43, 317; disappointments in postcommunist treatment of women, 192–94, 206n17; economic reforms in, 227, 229, 235–36, 246; extent and measurement of poverty in, 236–37; factors influencing corrupt behavior, 364; fascist regime in, 104; foreign businesses’ operations in, 351; “gender equality” language, 194–97; gender justice concerns, 156; identity construction in, 228; implementation of EU directives

434

Index

in, 179n19; informal payments for healthcare in, 339–40, 341; informal relations in public procurement, 346–74; investment promotion in, 348–49; Jurnalul Na ional ’s anti-Roma legislative initiative, 265–66, 267, 274; KARAT Coalition participants from, 167; labor migrations from, 272–74, 283; neopatrimonialism in, 245; network influence in public procurement, 360–63; perception of corruption in public procurement, 350–53; post-1956 systemic changes, 37; post-2007 mass media hate rhetoric against Roma people, 270–83; poverty and inequality increase in postcommunist, 229, 239, 240, 242, 244, 247; poverty rates, 248, 248; procurement legislation, 366, 379n25; procurement officials’ perspective on informal practices, 355–56; property transformations in, 59–60; public procurement corruption scandals, 348–49; public sphere in, 125; rates and social determinant of poverty, 2000, 240–46, 241; Roma people’s negative images in, 228, 265–83, 395; Roma women’s NGOs, 158–59, 181n28; social inequality rates, 248–49, 249; social justice in, 110; social sciences academia in, 108–9, 112; street mobilizations in, 202–4; strikes in, 244; table of economic indicators, 247; types of influence employed for procurement officials, 359–60; types of informal requests received by procurement officials, 357–59; virulent hate speech in, 275–83; women’s mobilization in, 136, 191–204; women’s NGOs in, 154–55, 156, 181n27, 184n48, 192–94, 199–202; women’s political parties, 154; women’s sections in political parties, 154, 194 România Liberă (Romanian journal), 271

Romanian National Council for the Elimination of Discrimination, 274 Romani Baxt, 181n28 Romanov dynasty, 103 Roma people: characterized as scandalous or shameless, 270–75; conspiracy theories about, 279–82; in Czech Republic and Slovakia, 159; European Union and, 174; expulsion from France, 395, 402; Mailat case and, 271–72; NGOs for women in Romania, 158–59, 181n28; prejudice against, 126, 173–74; prejudice against in Romania, 228, 265– 83, 395; stereotypes about, 285n9; use of word “Ţigan” for, 265–66, 267, 268, 284n1 Roma’s Life Organization, 181n28 ROSA (Czech Republic), 180n27 Rose, Nikolas, 100, 101 Rose, Richard, 60 Rose-Ackerman, Susan, 306 Rosefielde, Steven, 326n13 Roth, Klaus, 373 rule of law: corruption and, 298–99, 309, 380n41; informal practices and, 319–20; legal instability and, 365–67, 380n36; neoliberalism and, 175–76n5; “telephone justice” and, 321–22, 387, 404–5n4 Rural Women’s Activists (Kosovo), 160 Rural Women’s Circles (Poland), 160, 182n37 Rus, Ioan Aurel, 267 Russia: authoritarianism in, 2, 34; competitive authoritarianism in, 2, 64; corruption in, 304, 305; economic reforms in, 227–28, 229, 326n13; extent and measurement of poverty in, 236–37; global financial crisis and, 258; “great distributive system” reforms, 249–50; informal economic networks in, 58; informal economy in, 75n63; informal payments for healthcare in, 336; “managed democracy” in, 255; neopatrimonialism in, 239, 244, 245–46;

as particularist culture, 311, 312; Peter the Great’s modernization campaign, 298; post-Soviet regionalism in, 55; poverty and inequality increase in postcommunist, 229, 232, 239, 242, 244, 247; poverty rates, 248, 248; privatization of collective farms in, 60; rates and social determinant of poverty, 2000, 240–46, 241; self-provisioning of food in, 239–40, 242; social inequality rates, 248–49, 249; strikes in, 244; table of economic indicators, 247; “telephone justice” in, 321–22, 387, 404–5n4; Veliky Novgorod, 56–57, 75n59 Russian empire, tensions within, 103 Russo-Japanese war, 103 Rustaveli, Shota: “The Knight in the Tiger’s Skin,” 212 Sahlins, Marshall, 46 Said, Edward, 141 Sakhli (Georgia shelter), 219 Sandoval, Chela, 145 Saphari (Georgia shelter), 219 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 395 Sassen, Saskia, 319–20 “scandalous ethnicity,” notion of, 270–75 “scattered hegemonies” concept, 149–51, 392–93 Schmitter, Philippe C., 32, 50, 51–52, 73n46 Second World, concept of, 136, 141, 151, 171–74, 175n3, 390, 392, 395–96 Seddon, D., 231 Seleny, Anna, 53, 71n28 semiauthoritarian hybrid regimes, 33, 34 Serbia-Montenegro: democratization in, 44; fascist regime in, 104; “gender equality” initiatives in, 177n9; social justice in, 110 Serbian Forum for Gender Equality, 177n9 service organizations: for Georgian women, 215–16; in local communities,

Index 435

159–60; for Romanian women, 192–93, 201; as sites for women’s mobilizations, 146, 157–61, 163 sexism in the media, 161, 196 sexual harassment, 161, 170 sexual health issues, 202 sexual orientation issues, 140, 159, 194, 201–2, 206n18 shadow economies: development of, 38, 71nn27–28, 72n36, 75n63, 126; informality and, 58 Shavlakadze, Nato, 220 Shevardnadze, Nanuli, 216 Shleifer, Andrei, 326n13 shock capitalism, 110 Single Mothers Association (Romania), 193 Siostrzana (Poland), 182–83n42 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence, 202 Slovakia: democratization in, 43, 317; designer capitalism in, 31; economic reforms in, 235–36, 250; “great distributive system” in, 250; heavy industry in, 258; informal payments for healthcare in, 337 Slovenia: administrative culture in, 368–70; anticorruption campaigns in, 317, 372–73; business culture and informal practices, 370, 371; business trust in public procurement, 353–55; democratization in, 317; economic reforms in, 235–36; factors influencing corrupt behavior, 363–64; foreign businesses’ operations in, 351; “gender equality” initiatives in, 155, 177n9, 178n15; identity construction in, 103; inadequate control and law enforcement in, 371–72; informal relations in public procurement, 346–74; LGBT groups in, 159; network influence in public procurement, 360–63; perception of corruption in public procurement, 350–

436

Index

53; procurement officials’ perspective on informal practices, 355–56; public procurement corruption scandals, 349– 50; public sphere in, 125; Roma women in, 159, 181n30; types of influence employed for procurement officials, 359–60; types of informal requests received by procurement officials, 357–59 Slovenian Committee for Equality Opportunities, 177n9 Smith, Adam: The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 73n42 social adjustment, 64 “social” as term, 96, 100, 102, 125–26 social justice: capitalism and, 104, 111–12; coalition-building and, 99–105; contingent modernities and, 119–20; creation of new regimes, 107; delay of, 110; emergent areas of research, 125–27; evolution of meaning, 121; feminist and ethnographic ideas of, 97; food regulation systems and, 122; generalizations about, 99; inequality and, 104–5, 391–92, 399; making sense of concept in CEE, 95–99, 114–18; neoliberalism and, 97–98, 110–11; paradigm of, 141; political integration and, 126; rise of concept, 100–102; terrains of, 118–19 Social Science Research Council (SSRC), 2, 10 social sciences academia: areas of research in Eastern Europe, 117, 128n10; areas of research in Western Europe and U.S., 117–18; capitalism’s effect on, 112; government of postsocialism and, 114–18; hinterland concept and, 116–17, 120–22; knowledge industries and, 111–12, 115; national libraries and, 112; neoliberalism and, 113; originality of Eastern European thinkers, 113,

398–401; policy indicators and surveys, 121; in post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe, 109–14, 126–27; in post-World War II Central and Eastern Europe, 107–9, 113, 115–17; repoliticization of knowledge in, 114; scholars’ selfreinvention, 112; self-interrogation of, 117–18; subtraction concept in, 123–25; survey research, 111; Western, 116 Soldiers’ Memory Foundation (Georgia), 215 Solidarity movement (Poland), 38, 140, 245, 385 Søreide, Tina, 315 Soros, George, 281–82 Soros Foundation, 151 Southworth, Caleb, 260n15 sovietology, 119 Soviet Union: colonial view of, 172–73; European Union seen as antithesis to, 106; glasnost in, 127; homogenization in, 61, 76n65, 213; post-1956 system reconstruction, 37–39; “thaw” in, 36–37; women’s issues in, 211–12, 213–14. See also Russia Spain, authoritarian regime in, 104 Środa, Magda, 178n16 Stalin, Joseph, death of, 36 Standing, Guy, 120 Stark, David, 48–49, 77n74 state: as domain in democracy, 35–36, 37; as domain in totalitarianism, 36, 38; as focus in transitology, 31 State Commission on Elaboration of the State Policy for Women’s Advancement (Georgia), 218–19 state socialism, 71n25; administration under, 367–68; child care and maternity leave under, 135; collective action in, 141–42, 147; food regulation systems under, 122; Georgian women under, 136–37; governance and, 104–5; healthcare system under, 335; homogenizing

effect of, 61, 76n65, 195, 213; ideological impact in postcommunist countries, 24; informal health-care payments under, 333, 334–35; informal networks in, 58; institutionalization of, 105; lack of mass women’s movement in 1960s, 162; post-1989 scripting of, 109, 113–14; social behavior under, 369; social sciences academia under, 107–11, 115–17; struggles against, 99; women’s reproductive choices under, 135; women’s status under, 136–37, 142–43, 172, 195–96, 259n6 Stepan, Alfred, 35, 72n31 STER (Poland), 182n40 Stiglitz, Joseph, 18n3 strategy adjustment, 66 street mobilizations, 146, 162–66, 176n6, 202–4 strikes: in democracies vs. dictatorships, 231; in postcommunist countries, 233, 244, 259n7 systemic analysis, 68n3 “systemism,” 27 Szelényi, Iván, 77n74, 121, 390–91; Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power (with Konrad), 128n10 Sztompka, Piotr, 33, 64–65 Tabukashvili, Marina, 221 Tamar, Queen of Georgia, 212 Tanzi, Vito, 297 Tăriceanu, Călin Popescu, 267, 279, 281–82, 284–85n8 Tatoiu, Monica, 206n14 Tbilisi Women’s Council (Georgia), 215 Teampău, Petruţa, 191, 193, 195 “telephone justice,” 321–22, 387, 404–5n4 Ţepeş, Vlad, 275–76 Thatcherism, 109 “thaw” in Soviet Union, 36–37, 71n27 Thuycidides, 46 Tilly, Charles, 68n3; Transforming Post-

Index

437

Communist Political Economies (with Nelson and Walker), 47 Todorov, Tzvetan, 113, 398 Todorova, Maria, 400 Topolánek, Mirek, 250 totalitarian architecture, model of, 36, 38, 71n26 Townsley, Eleanor, 77n74 transition culture: asynchrony of change, 399; civil society as foundation of, 388– 89; critique of term, 70n21; hegemony of, 29, 57; mantras of, 386; mindset associated with, 397; multiplicity of, 120; post-1989 institutions and, 106–7; racism and, 395–96; success in, 387 transitology: antistructuralism assumption, 31; challenges to notion as dominant study approach, 69n12; compartmentalization assumption, 31; contextual holism compared with, 35, 36, 45; contingent modernities and, 119– 20; critiques of, 29–30; democratization studies and, 3–4, 28–29, 67; economic analyses, 46–47; explanatory logics of, 64; formal institutions assumption, 31, 32; genealogies of government and, 99; general theoretical pitch, 46–49; historical aspects in, 51–52, 74n53, 74nn50–51; Machiavelli and, 73n46; meanings of, 68–69n7; naturalism assumption, 31–32; nuances ignored in, 32–33; patterns of change, 71n29, 72n31, 72n33, 72n35; points of departure for, 39–40; popular mobilization increases, 231–33; presentism assumption, 31; problems with, 32–45; relationism and, 50; simplistic reductionism in, 48; universalist assumptions of, 30–33, 35; whole states assumption, 31, 32 transnational institutions: democratization and, 4, 9, 40, 43; negative effects on women’s activism, 146–47, 166–69, 171–72, 197, 201–2, 393;

438

Index

postcommunist expansion of, 164, 297; as sites for women’s mobilizations, 146, 149, 392–93; social and gender justice initiatives, 139, 143–44, 151–57; WestEast dialogue, 167–68, 172–73, 184n48; women’s mobilization facilitated by, 182n38, 201–2 Transparency International, 297, 300, 314, 315 Treisman, Daniel, 316, 326n13 TRIALOG, 201 Trompenaars, Fons, 310–11 trust, problems of, 44, 61, 75n58, 294, 310, 317–24, 353–55 Tudor, Corneliu Vadim, 271–72, 275–76 Turkey, European Union and, 395, 402, 403 Turkmenistan: anticorruption campaigns in, 317; economic growth in, 246 Turks, prejudice against, 126 Tusk, Donald, 250–51, 253 Tysiąc, Alicja, 160–61, 182n39 Ukraine: competitive authoritarianism in, 64; democratization in, 387; “gender equality” legislation, 155, 179n17; informal payments for healthcare in, 337; KARAT Coalition participants from, 167; La Strada network in, 158; Orange Revolution, 385; privatization of collective farms in, 60; public sphere in, 125; social justice in, 110; women’s NGOs in, 155; women’s political parties, 154, 177–78n10 UNDP Poverty report, 121 unemployment in postcommunist countries, increase in, 231, 232, 233, 234–35, 244, 257–58, 259n2 UNIFEM, 217 United Nations: Committee on the Status of Women, 153; conspiracy theories about, 282; gender justice initiatives, 144, 149, 152, 153, 171, 176n7

United States: attempted reforms to welfare system, 255; conspiracy theories about, 282; democratization influenced by, 40, 43–44; support of protest movements, 385–86; women’s mobilization compared with postcommunist countries, 145–46 Unity of Women and Peace (Georgia), 217 “universal insurance schemes,” 247 Uzbekistan, anticorruption campaigns in, 317 Vamanu, Alina, 395, 396 Vamanu, Iulian, 395, 396 Vanhuysse, Peter, 232–33 Varese, Federico, 309–10 Várhalmi, Zoltán, 255 Veliky Novgorod, success of, 56–57, 75n59 Verdery, Katherine, 47, 48, 59–60, 63 Verheijen, Tony, 369 vernacular knowledge, 61–62, 389–90, 397 violence against women, mobilizations against, 158, 170, 180–81n27, 194, 202, 219–20 Voicu, Mădălin, 277 Volcker Commission, 324–25n1 Walker, Lee: Transforming PostCommunist Political Economies (with Nelson and Tilly), 47 Walters, William, 153 Walton, J., 231 Warning, Marilyn: If Only Women Counted, 142 “Washington Consensus,” 8, 29. See also neoliberalism weak structuralism, 50, 74n48 Weber, Max, 298, 308–9 “welfare” as term, 102 West, the: democratization process and involvement of, 43; geographical proximity to as democratization factor, 40, 41; historical view of democracy in,

68n5; normative assumptions of, 44, 64–65, 148, 168, 171–72, 175n2, 197–99; post-World War II differentiation from East, 105; viewed as desired model for postcommunist countries, 28–29, 147, 386–87. See also European Union; United States White Scarf (Georgia), 215 Wilk, Katarzyna, 390–91 Winiecki, Jan, 64 Wolfe, Thomas C., 124, 389, 398 “Women for Conflict Prevention and Peace-Building in the South Caucasus” project, 217 Women for Peace and Life (Georgia), 215, 216 Women in Development Europe (WIDE), 168 Women’s Association (Romania), 193 Women’s Coalition of Georgia, 222 Women’s Council of Georgia, 215 women’s mobilizations: 1980s transnational facilitation of, 182n38; antineoliberal groups, 165–66, 183n45; class mobilizations compared with, 393–94; conservative and/or religious groups, 165, 179–80n21, 180n23, 196– 97; discourses of resistance, 139–40; features of, 146; “gender equality” as vehicle for, 140–41; generational shifts in, 161–66; in Georgia, 136, 211–24; horizontal conceptualization of, 145, 150–51, 161, 193–94; indigenous, 140; innovative nature of, 169–70; locating, 141–48, 392–94; modes of activism, 145; against patriarchal culture, 157–61; within political parties and state institutions, 153–54, 214–15; in Romania, 136, 191–204; for Roma women, 158–59, 181n30; scaleshift process, 160–61; sites of, 146, 149–51, 176n5; social justice as vehicle for, 140–41; street mobilizations, 146,

Index 439

162–66, 176n6, 202–4; us vs. them dichotomy, 148; Western modes of, 143–44 women’s reproductive rights: mobilizations on, 170; in NGO agendas, 161, 168–69; in Poland, 164, 179–80n21, 180n23, 182n40; in postcommunist societies, 135, 166; in Romania, 195 Women’s Rights Center (Armenia), 158, 178n13 Women’s Rights Center Shelter (Macedonia), 181n27 Women’s Union (Czechoslovakia), 162 Woodcock, Shannon, 268, 269 Woodruff, David M., 58, 260n15 World Bank Institute (WBI), 297, 300–301, 302, 306, 314, 317, 324–25n1, 349; Country Policy and Institutional Assessment (CPIA), 303, 313–15; data on poverty, 236, 237, 260n14; Good Governance indicators, 304, 305, 321,

440

Index

325n6; World Bank Doing Business index, 121 World Development Report, 18n3 World Economic Forum (WEF), 302 World Trade Organization, 40, 386 World Values Survey, 302, 347 World Vision Georgia, 222 World War I, impact of, 104 xenophobia, 170; authoritarian regimes’ exploitation of, 44, 245–46; nationbuilding and, 198 Yugoslavia, social sciences academia in, 107–8 Zatlers, Valdis, 333 Zene Zenama (Women to Women Center for Women Returnees; Bosnia and Herzegovina), 159 Ziblatt, Daniel, 52–53, 74n53, 77n73 Zizek, Slavoj, 113, 398