Institutional Legacies of Communism

Change and Continuities in Minority Protection

Karl Cordell, Timofey Agarin, Alexander Osipov

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415638739
• eBook ISBN: 9781135036652
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Twenty years after the demise of communist policy, this book evaluates the continuing communist legacies in the current minority protection systems and legislations across a number of states in post-communist Europe.

The fall of communism and the process of democratisation across post-communist Europe led to considerable change in minority protection with new systems and national political institutions either developed or copied. In general, the new institutions reflected the practices and experiences of (western) European states and were installed upon advice from European security organisations. Yet many ideas, legislative frameworks, policies and practices remained open to interpretation on the ground. With case studies on a diverse set of post-communist polities including Slovakia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Ukraine, Estonia, Croatia, the Baltic States and Russia, expert contributors consider how the institutional legacies of the communist past impact on policies designed to support minority communities in the new European democracies.

Providing unique empirical material and comparative analyses of ethnocultural diversity management during and after communism, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, European politics, political geography, post-communism, ethnic politics, nationalism and national identity.

Part I

Identifying the nature of legacy

1 Introduction

Establishing the context

Karl Cordell and Timofey Agarin

There is a large corpus of research on communist nationalities policy and its impact on post-communist nation-building. Yet little has been written on the legacies of these policies on contemporary Central European legal and political systems and their impact on (post-communist) European minority rights regimes. Much academic and policy-oriented research has been undertaken into the impact of European norms and institutions on post-communist democratisation, yet none on reverse influence. Our contribution fills this gap. This volume investigates post-communist institutional dynamics in the area of ethnic diversity management with a particular focus upon the ideological backdrop and policies and practices of communist minority protection as key factors in determining the contemporary dynamics of European minority rights regimes across post-communist Europe.

Recent research increasingly converges around the view that the communist regimes pursued individual policies of diversity management, allegedly largely unrelated to trends in democratic states. If we take the Soviet Union as our benchmark, we find that a ‘pyramid of national soviets’ extended all the way from the union republic at the top to national districts, eventually merging with ‘personal nationality’ at the lowest end. Each ethnonational territory was endowed with its established titular nation(ality), codified language, established elites, a set of invented traditions and could boast its own institutions. At the individual level, national identity as a category fixed in citizens' internal passports provided citizens with ready-to-use tools which they could use in order to claim state support or to promote their political interests. Nationality was a crucial category with which to navigate social world, perceive inequalities attached to group memberships and thus as the principle means of public mobilisation.

Within the parameters laid down by Soviet practice, individual communist regimes developed their own minority-related instruments, which resembled policies of non-discrimination and multiculturalism. While Western democracies developed shared norms in order to ensure political participation, Marxist-Leninist ideology reiterated the principle of ‘democratic centralism’ envisaging top-down coordination by the centralised Communist Party. Ethnicity-based subnational statehoods and acknowledgment of ethnonational pluralism in other ways set centrifugal communist nationality policy on a collision course with the centralising communist regimes. Despite the shibboleth of Marxist-Leninist nationalities policy that such arrangements were only national in form with no national content, ethnoterritorial proliferation inevitably resulted in groups residing in the ‘wrong’ national territory and existing outside the envisaged communist context.

The emergence of national movements in various of the ethnoterritorial units of the Soviet Union and the fragmentation of other communist federations along internal republican lines make clear that Marxist-Leninist nationalities policy was in fact engaged in building, not destroying nations. Centrifugal ethnic mobilisation in communist federations – the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia – suggests that communist nationalities policy was built on shaky foundations: ethnoterritorial units were established to correspond with the supposed settlement patterns of ethnic groups and envisaged as a homeland territory of a particular nationality. On the other hand, individual ethnonational identity played an important role throughout the communist era, ultimately resulting in ethnonational mobilisation and inter-group agitation during the last decade of communism. The communist elites, however, did not turn a blind eye to the dangers of ethnopolitical mobilisation and devised a range of policies, narratives and institutions, which albeit tokenistic, provided tools with which to manage multi-ethnic federations.

Moving on, we find that the accession of post-communist states to the European Union (EU) in 2004 and 2007 were crucial steps in the evolution of European minority protection regimes and in institutional alignment across the EU member-states. Whilst EU conditionality and the capacity of individual nation-states have played a crucial role in the emergence of the European framework for diversity management and non-discrimination, this volume concentrates on the lock-in effects of the institutional communist minority protection exercise today. The burgeoning scholarship on minority protection in Europe sees the evolution of the European institutional framework of diversity management as a result of exogenous influence both from top-down in terms of Europeanisation, as well as bottom-up in terms of European integration perspectives. Yet, in policy areas where the fit between the EU and the institutions and practices of post-communist states was scant – and minority protection is one of those – national political institutions have maintained a considerable capacity to avert change, whether by undermining norm transposition or truncating policy implementation. How nationality policies worked under socialism has been studied in detail, yet the continuity of institutional dynamics after the collapse of communism remains understudied. The contributions to this volume analyse post-communist states' minority protection in the light of communism's institutional legacies in order to explain the dynamics of contemporary minority rights protection in post-communist Europe, and their impact on the European minority rights regime more generally. The literature to date has focused on many of these issues, but no volume tackles the issue of communism's institutional legacy in contemporary minority protection in Europe systematically.

Legacies of communism and minority protection

Contributors to the latter parts of this collection examine the institutional impact of communism on the emergent post-communist European minority protection framework throughout the phases of communism's demise, the period of European integration and in the wake of EU accession. The volume sets out a methodologically coherent framework that will be used to identify the institutions, policies and practices that have contributed to the creation of post-communist European minority rights regimes. The norms and practices embraced by the post-communist EU member-states are compared and contrasted with one another and with potential candidate countries. As a consequence our contributions track institutional legacies of communism's ethnocultural diversity management through the period of domestic democratic change, policy adjustment during the EU accession negotiations and the impact communist legacies have on European level institutions post-enlargement.

Since the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe, considerable attention had been granted to allegedly unique policies of diversity management pursued by such regimes, mostly by means of comparative history analyses. Since the early 2000s historical research has queried the ideological background, institutional design and policy effectiveness of Soviet and other communist states' nationalities policies; however, no parallels were drawn as to their impact on the post-communist minority protection mechanisms. Prominent examples dedicated to this topic include Suny and Martin's (2001) A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin, Martin's (2001) The Affirmative Action Empire and Barkey and von Hagen's (1997) edited collection, After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building. All these volumes focus primarily on policies of ethnocultural diversity management with regard to their impact on inter-group relations under communism, and only secondly analyse performance of institutions installed to oversee policy implementation. Similarly, the by now classic volumes Smith's (1996) The Nationalities Question in the Post-Soviet States, Tishkov's (1997) Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Conflict in and after the Soviet Union and Suny's (1998) The Soviet Experiment) all deal with policies of the day discarding policy continuities and institutional legacies of the past regime in the post-communist states.

Other authors (e.g. in Barany and Moser's (2005) collection Ethnic Politics after Communism) address ethnic policies in the post-communist era. Yet they not engage with the institutional design under communism as a factor constraining choices of post-communist elites with regard to policies and practices. Further, some literature that deals with issues of continuity simply focuses upon ideological parallels. Many volumes assume that the end of communism also meant the end of institutions and institutional practice and thus do not query continuities in practices and policies under communism resulting from institutional lock-in effects. Slater and Wilson's (2004) edited volume The Legacy of the Soviet Union contains four chapters on current trends in the ideology of nation-building and three chapters on ethnonationalist issues therein, yet it does not discuss continuities of the past, focusing instead on ideological trends of the day. In her (1996) What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? Verdery assesses discourses on collective identities and their transformations since the collapse of communism. However, the volume does not address the management of diversity from a policy perspective and disregards institutional frameworks tasked with policy implementation and thus reproducing the discourse on nationalities.

The interest of more recent scholarship has moved into querying the role of political elites, ethnopolitical entrepreneurs and minority groups as actors in the process of ethnopolitical bargaining resulting largely in much neglect of institutions framing the discourses, policies and legitimising minority accommodation. Hale's (2008) The Foundations of Ethnic Politics, O'Dwyer's (2006) Runaway State-building, Saideman and Ayres' (2008) For Kin or Country, as well as Gorenburg's (2003) Minority Ethnic Mobilization in the Russian Federation and Giuliano's (2011) Constructing Grievance work on a case-to-case basis focusing almost exclusively on the current ethnopolitical developments, touching briefly on historic-institutional background of policies of diversity management.

Of late, academic research on the European enlargement and particularly the subfield of enlargement studies has moved on to treat states as actors in the process of policy-making and implementation, particularly with regard to effects of conditionality in minority protection and non-discrimination. Sadurski, Czarnota and Krygier take legal analyses as a start for debates on issues of governance but omit minority policies entirely from their (2006) edited volume Spreading Democracy and the Rule of Law?. A recent (2010) volume edited by Rechel, Minority Rights in Central and Eastern Europe, explores the changes in domestic policies on minority protection, yet sees these as externally shaped when analysing components of this process in ten selected states. The transformations are described as one-way traffic with little attention to the pre-existing institutional background, which was in existence before post-communist states started the accession process. The recent (2011) McEvoy and Galbreath The European Minority Rights Regime investigates cooperation between three major European international organisations on minority rights in Europe. The book tracks the formation and transformation of the new international regime in securing minority rights by linking two key research areas – international regimes and EU integration – to determine the reasons for ethnic politics remaining contentious for the European project. However, the volume omits addressing the enlargement's institutional background in the recipient countries and the impact their existing institutions have on European institutional design.

Overall, in the 20 years since the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe transformations have resulted in different outcomes. Although ‘legacies of communism’ provide a point of access for comparative studies of the region, the scholarship provides a minute detail of political, economic and social transformations with little evidence that it is any specific ‘legacy’ which could be made responsible for outcomes observed. Much of the literature on post-communist societies mentions structural constraints, patterns of behaviour or policies as factors that explain practices, values, concepts and assumptions found in policies across post-communist societies, but that is as far as agreement goes: the origins of such ‘legacies’ remain largely under-theorised, their implications agreed upon albeit intuitively, and their evolution traced on a case-by-case basis with little attempt at generalisation. This is particularly surprising given the very fact that legacies' survival is the challenging issue to analyse in itself: why some legacies persist, while others have not endured despite nearly 20-year-long transition from communism is a point of entry for the chapters in this book.

Structure of the book

The contributors to our volume take the institutional capacity to avert change extremely seriously and most are wary of treating post-communist minority protection and non-discrimination as entirely new phenomena. No doubt, during the collapse of communism and in the course of democratic transition across post-communist Europe the communist-style tools of minority protection underwent considerable change. New systems of minority protection were either developed domestically or borrowed from other polities. By and large, the new institutions reflected the practices and experiences of the (West) European states and were installed upon advice from supranational European organisations. Yet on the ground many ideas, legislative frameworks, policies and practices remained open to interpretation and have been considerably refashioned during the implementation process. Our volume asks a general question about the impact of communism on institutions, policies and practices in post-communist societies, but also peers beneath the surface of apparent dissimilarity between the past and present. Ever aware of the need not to mistake form for content, the volume asks, for example, how minority protection is being implemented in the new European democracies and what are the obstacles to more effective minority protection.

Taken as a whole, the chapters in this volume assess the impact of communist institutions on practices of minority protection in today's Europe, query their potential impact on the emergent minority rights regimes and essentially question the incompat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge advances in European politics
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Identifying the nature of legacy
• Part II Contemporary institutional frameworks
• Part III Past legacies and contemporary policies
• Index