Global Trends in Eastern Europe

Nikolai Genov

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317127239
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Eastern Europe was once clearly defined by the centralized political and economic organization of the societies in the region. They shared the same official ideology and were members of the same alliances. After 1989, the region collapsed in an economic, political and cultural implosion. What were the moving forces of this profound change? What are its consequences? Could we try to reasonably foresee any future developments? In this thought-provoking book, Nikolai Genov presents a systematic description and explanation of Eastern European societal transformations after 1989. They are interpreted as adaptations to four global trends; upgrading the rationality of organizations; individualization; spreading of instrumental activism; and universalization of value-normative systems. Adaptations to these trends have generally been successful. However, Genov notes that the process is marked by many failures as well. They are mostly caused by path dependency in the societal development and by the varying quality of relevant decisions, other destructive developments are due to contradictions in the global trends themselves. Guided by the assumption that the societal and supranational integration mechanisms in Eastern Europe before 1989 could not resist the overwhelming power of global trends, Genov's controversial findings question visions about the end of history and simultaneously strengthen the confidence that most complex macro-social processes can be rationally managed. A timely book allowing for a much needed engagement in contemporary debates on the controversial processes in Eastern European transitions.

Chapter 1
Globalization and Regional Development: Social Reality and Social Science Concepts

The fall of the Berlin Wall was largely misunderstood as the end of the profound tensions and conflicts in the world. There were some reasons for this assumption. After the turbulent autumn of 1989 the polar division and the global balance of terror did not exist any more. It seemed that one could return to Max Weber’s diagnosis of the times after the First World War. Amidst the turmoil he warned that the small gods of everyday preferences had grasped the opportunity to wage their own wars. Small scale conflicts seemed to have become the norm. (Weber 1992 [1919]: 101)

This diagnosis corresponded to the situation during the nineties. There was the Kuwait Crisis and there was the war in Bosnia, the conflict in Chechnya and the Kosovo War. All these were conflicts of “small gods” although world powers were involved. In the Western advanced societies affluence and monotony dominated the agenda. Substantial parts of the labor force were involved in production and services which required a high level of education and vocational training. The challenging jobs were well paid. Millions of Western Europeans and North Americans could afford high quality housing, goods and services, entertainment and leisure time, travel and well-organized life-long learning. For them the freedom of speech, organization and communication posed no problems. State institutions worked smoothly, guaranteeing the security of mass well-being.

In Eastern Europe the dust from the political rallies settled fast. What followed was the fierce struggle for the benefits of the privatization of public property. Some individuals and groups managed to accumulate wealth, power and prestige fast. Others, and they were the vast majority, became the losers in the re-distribution. Mixed feelings accompanied the new experience. But there was no ideological or political alternative in sight.

The first signals of alarming instabilities came from the Asian financial crisis in 1997, the Russian financial crisis in 1998 and the economic crisis in Argentina between 1999 and 2002. However, the signals were understood as referring to isolated local or regional events. Their destructive effects could be managed quickly. In Eastern Europe some societies were approaching the economic parameters of the advanced parts of the world. Others struggled with economic, political and cultural problems typical for the less developed regions. The situation changed at the turn of the century. The time span between 2000 and 2008 was generally marked in Eastern Europe by high GDP growth and political stabilization. The eastward enlargement of the European Union and developments in the world markets gave reasons for an optimistic assessment of the prospects of the former socialist societies.

The global context changed abruptly in 2008. The worldwide economic crisis provided the evidence that the neo-liberal economic policies had dramatically failed. Markets had focused on the chase for speculative profits at the expense of national and global economic stability. What followed was the global financial and economic crisis of 2008–2009. It made clear that national political efforts cannot be sufficient in order to successfully cope with the challenge. It required global mechanisms of political management which are not available yet. (The Global Economic Crisis 2009: iii–iv) Against the background of this new experience the management of national transformations in Eastern Europe will have to be re-thought and possibly re-directed.

1.1 The Heritage of the Twentieth Century and the Global Challenges

The recent developments question the view that the new institutions and value-normative systems have already been stabilized in the post-socialist societies. Analysts have to continue adjusting their concepts and methodology to a reality in flux. Most societies in the region are still plagued by substantial disparities between aspirations and need satisfaction, between knowledge and practical action, between change and order. A large variety of situations in the region still can be best described by referring to the concept of risk society. The situation is particularly difficult since most Eastern European societies do not posses the resources needed to manage the national consequences of the global economic crisis single-handedly.

One may metaphorically describe the situation as “a crisis foretold”. Symptoms of the coming global troubles have been identified well ahead. (Hamm 2006: 53f.; Pieterse 2008) But nobody could have foreseen the magnitude of the upcoming turbulences. Even less could one have predicted the magnitude of the organizational and financial efforts needed in order to stabilize production, exchange and consumption. This should not be surprising. Alarming signals came from the inefficient Eastern European economies and from the stagnating political and cultural life in the region before 1989 too. But even the best informed analysts (Brzezinski 1989) could not predict the timing or the amplitude of the changes which shattered Eastern European societies at the end of the 1980s although the processes were deeply rooted in the longue durée of the modern history. (Wallerstein 2004)

Two decades after the end of the Cold War, a series of open questions still concern the recent past of Eastern European societies, their present day puzzles and their future prospects in the world system. Another set of open questions concerns the capacity of the social sciences to develop and apply concepts which could effectively guide descriptions and explanations of the ongoing processes in the former global region of Eastern Europe. The questions have their deep roots in controversial global developments during the twentieth century. It was marked by tremendous achievements in creativity and productivity in all action spheres. However, it will also be remembered for terrible human suffering, loss of life and annihilation of productive assets. No other period in human history has heightened the opposition between the constructive and the destructive potentials of humankind more impressively.

On the surface, this is most visible in the development, use and abuse of science and technology. Research and technological development became the fastest growing sector within the national economies of advanced societies. The century was marked by scientific achievements and new technologies which changed the world profoundly. One may immediately notice the ensuing changes in organization and quality of life by looking at the tremendous improvements in transportation and communication. These have compressed time and space immensely. Due to the advancement of economic and social sciences, socio-economic systems are much better manageable nowadays than was the case before the Great Depression. In the same time, the First and the Second World Wars marked enormous leaps forward in the rationalization of warfare due to the development of science and technology. The hot wars together with the Cold War consumed resources which could have helped to radically resolve the burning issues of hunger and illiteracy worldwide.

The history of the twentieth century offers impressive examples of both the use and abuse of nature by humankind. The involvement of larger and larger quantities of natural resources in the production process and the careless pollution of the natural environment with industrial and household waste has put the planet’s environment under existential pressure. To make the complexity of the puzzle even more confusing, the economic and social consequences of genetic engineering are still unclear. In the long run, they will most probably make human life longer, more comfortable and secure. But they also bring about effects which raise deep legal and moral concerns. (Eastham 2009)

Together with the very substantial increase in the intellectual, organizational and technological capacities to manage economic and social processes, the twentieth century has been also marked by tremendous abuse and destruction of human capital. Dictatorial regimes, disparities in the distribution of wealth and income, in the access to information and in the participation in decision-making prevented the development of millions of individuals, of societies and regions. Even today more than one billion people suffer from perennial malnutrition despite the decisions on the eradication of extreme poverty. In no way could this be regarded as a life full of choices, accomplishments and dignity. Pandemics show that the capacities of the present day civilization to cope with life threatening diseases are still rather limited. The global progress in education is very encouraging but the number of illiterate people has remained constant for decades.

East Europeans were massively involved in these encouraging and disappointing developments. On the territory of the former global region of Eastern Europe a social-technological attempt was made to develop patterns of economic and political organization as well as patterns of culture and behavior which would make economic crises and wars, inequality and injustice obsolete. This happened in a highly controversial context. The rapid Eastern European industrialization by using outdated technologies contributed to the global environmental pollution. The polar division of the world and the ensuing political and military confrontation consumed tremendous resources. The confrontation undermined the universalism of global culture.

This was the global situation reflected in the famous small book on the system of modern societies published by Talcott Parsons at the beginning of the seventies. Casting a closer look at it from the vantage point of present-day debates on globalization and regional development, one may notice how underdeveloped his conceptual framework was at that time. He hardly made any mention of the relevance of supranational integration schemes or of any global processes. His research interest had a different focus. It was society defined as “the type of social system characterized by the highest level of self-sufficiency relative to its environments, including other social systems”. (Parsons 1971: 8) In his interpretation the major integrating and innovating factor in social life was the maintenance of value-based patterns and value generalization in societal systems. (Parsons 1971: 13) This is probably the best elaborated theoretical system based on methodological nationalism, or, more precisely, on methodological societalism. This is the key for understanding Parsons’ interpretation of the achievements and deficiencies of both parties in the polar confrontation of the Cold War.

Parsons defined the leading position of American society in the system of modern societies through its successful accomplishment of the industrial, democratic and educational revolutions. In his conceptual framework this meant a successful adaptive upgrading achieved by the national economy and effective differentiation of decision-making, implementing and controlling in politics. The success was also characterized by the full inclusion of citizens in the normative societal community and by the efficient value generalization. These achievements had to be regarded as typical for the accomplished modernization of advanced societies or as future tasks of modernizing societies.

Parsons recognized the achievements of the Soviet Union in the rapid industrialization and in the fast increase of the educational level of the population. But he also identified a crucial problem in this variant of modernization since it did not produce or reproduce the cultural legitimacy of the political leadership: “we suggest, then, that the process of the democratic revolution has not yet reached the equilibrium in the Soviet Union and that further developments may well run broadly in the direction of Western types of democratic government, with responsibility to an electorate rather than to a self-appointed party”. (Parsons 1971: 127) The prognostic implications of Parsons’ analysis for the further development of Eastern Europe were strong. Nevertheless, his analysis invites for elaborations.

The modernization strategy of the Soviet Union and of Eastern Europe was not an isolated regional phenomenon. The state socialist modernization had its roots in the common European tradition of class divisions, enlightenment, revolutions, dictatorships and democratic developments. The Russian Revolution of 1917 was intellectually prepared not by the Russian historical experience alone. The Soviet social-technological experiment was prepared by the rationalistic believe of the European Enlightenment that man and society can be purposefully improved. Another inspiration of the Russian revolutionaries was the reaction of the Western European social democrats to the grievances caused by industrialization. The political programs of the Russian social democrats were local adaptations of programs of Western European social democratic parties. Later, the geopolitical shape of the Eastern European region after the Second World War was determined by decisions taken with the active participation of Western powers in Yalta and in Potsdam.

The accelerated industrialization carried out all over the Eastern European region under the guidance of party-states was no local ideological and political invention. During the whole twentieth century industrialization was the core of all programs for modernization in the world. The forced industrialization in the Soviet Union was implemented with very high social costs during the thirties. But without this effort the survival of the Soviet Union during the Second World War would not be possible. Given the large hidden unemployment in the agriculture of the other Eastern European societies, their accelerated industrialization after the war was the only solution of the deep structural problems of their national economies. The over-centralization of the planned economy and the political authoritarianism were not simply due to local Eastern European traditions, utopian thinking or political extremism. Non-communist or anti-communist efforts to catch up on technological, economic, political and cultural modernization (in Singapore, South Korea and in other countries) were also implemented by means of political authoritarianism and by the use of massive state intervention in the economy.

However, the particularly high degree of penetration of states into the economy and culture was a regional specificity of Eastern Europe’s “catching-up” modernization. This organizational strategy made possible the concentration of rather limited resources into strategic industrial projects. They shortened the region’s technological and economic lag behind the most advanced countries. Due to the policy of centrally imposed rapid industrialization Eastern Europe was regarded as a serious competitor to the West during the fifties and the sixties. This held true not for the military confrontation alone but for all walks of social life – from research to high-tech development and from mass education to sports. However, the strong state intervention in the economy and culture started to reveal its long-term inefficiency as early as the sixties. The over-centralized economy and the hierarchical politics of state socialism became less and less able to meet the organizational needs of the growing complexity of Eastern European societies.

The Prague Spring in 1968 gave the signal for the urgent necessity to introduce mechanisms fostering the individual initiative and responsibility in the Eastern European economy and politics. The crush of this reform movement made obvious the lack of innovation capacities in the Eastern European region. It was already about to lose the global competition of the Cold War. This became particularly visible in the rapidly increasing distance between Western and Eastern Europe in the development and use of information and communication technologies. State socialism was getting less and less innovative and organizationally efficient as compared to the market economy and democratic politics of the West. The implosion of the state socialist system in the late eighties was just the end of the long agony. Was the implosion the only possible outcome of the processes? The developments in China and Vietnam show that other developmental paths “after administrative socialism” were basically possible. But neither the elites nor the people in Eastern Europe were able and willing to move in the direction of new socialist experiments.

The outcome of the Eastern European implosion could be so described in a simplified way: “ours is a world of regions, embedded deeply in an American imperium”. (Katzenstein 2005: 1) Another general assumption might read that currently territories matter less than in the times of the predominance of nation states. Although states are still marked by a strong concentration of economic, political and military power, the traditional type of hierarchical domination in and by nation-states is over. Multiple channels of exchange foster flexible coordination and multi-polarity. Thus, regions have changing geographical, economic, political and cultural parameters. They might powerfully appear like the region of Eastern Europe after the Second World War or disappear just as this same region did at the end of the Cold War.

Being the legacy of the turbulent twentieth century, the present day human civilization is far from harmonious and stable. The assumption that the end of the Cold War and the spread of neo-liberal ideology together with market mechanisms would put an end to the conflicts in the history of humankind (Fukuyama 2006) soon turned out to be utterly utopian. It is common knowledge nowadays that the seeds of future disparities, confrontations and conflicts are in-built in the very social and economic organization inherited from the twentieth century. They are due to technological and informational divides, economic and political inequality, and traditions of cultural intolerance. We witness the end of the dreams and the return of history full of conflicts as it has always been. (Kagan 2007)

The controversies of the global development exploded at the very beginning of the new century with the events of 11 September 2001 and the war in Afghanistan thereafter. Currently we are facing the tremendous challenges of the all-embracing global economic crisis. It was caused by the financial speculations of global economic actors whose headquarters are in North America and in Western Europe. However, the worst suffering hits the less developed societies of the global and continental periphery. The Eastern European societies immediately manifested their low capacity to manage the local consequences of the global economic tsunami. (Ehrke 2009)

What should be the theoretical lessons from this development? What should be the practical reactions? Given the controversial legacy of the twentieth century and the current global crisis, the conclusion is evident: the human civilization is facing tremendous challenges. Most of them are continuation of the twentieth century’s notorious tensions and conflicts. But there are very substantial new nuances in the global picture. The emerging knowledge-based societies (Castels 1999) need to have their cognitive and technological potential better organized than in the most advanced present day societies. Another implication is the increasing dependence of all activities on technological systems. Industrial disasters signaled their destructive potentials. The worst imaginable scenario continues to be large-scale high-tech war. Its implications could be comparable to the collision of large objects in the outer space. This warning remains a deterring factor as it was in the times of the Cold War. Unfortunately, the level of deterrence declined together with the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Aside from large-scale wars, a major challenge is the need to cope with the uneven growth of the world population. The growth comes about only in the poorest countries and regions. After the “green revolution” of the fifties and the sixties, grain production has registered a rather slow increase worldwide. There is a looming global shortage of fresh wa...