Postcommunism from Within

Social Justice, Mobilization, and Hegemony

Jan Kubik, Amy Linch

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780814708347
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

While the decline of communism in the late twentieth century brought democracy, political freedom, and better economic prospects for many people, it also produced massive social dislocation and engendered social problems that were far less pronounced under the old regimes. The fall of state socialism led to enormously complex political, economic, social, and cultural transformations, and while political liberalization was a lofty goal, it was neither uniform in its effects nor unqualified in its benefits. Postcommunism from Within foregrounds the diversity of the historical experiences and current realities of people in the postcommunist region in examining how they are responding to these monumental changes at home. The original essays in this volume lay out a bold new approach to research on the postcommunist region, and to democratization studies more broadly, that focuses on the social and cultural microprocesses behind political and economic transformation. Thematic essays by eminent scholars of postcommunism from across the social sciences are supported by case studies to demonstrate the limitations of current democratization paradigms and suggest ways of building categories of research that more closely capture the role of vernacular knowledge in demanding, creating, and adapting to institutional change. A novel approach to understanding one of the greatest political and social transformations in recent history, Postcommunism from Within explores not just how citizens respond to political and economic restructuring engineered at the top but also how people enact their own visions of life, politics, and justice by responding to daily challenges.

PART ONE

General Approaches
to Postcommunism

How might research on the postcommunist region incorporate people as agents actively shaping their own political reality, on the one hand, and accurately assess the impact of transformation, on the other? In this section, Jan Kubik approaches this problem from the point of view of interpretive social science, emphasizing the importance of emic knowledge in understanding how political change occurs within a given place and time. Tom Wolfe and John Pickles consider the problem through a critical lens that interrogates the influence of global institutions and interests on the way research problems are formulated in the first place. Both chapters are concerned with how concepts obscure the complex dynamics of political change. In particular they seek to identify the ways in which complexity is a critical dimension of explanation and where it might be sacrificed in order to render generalizable patterns in bold relief.

Kubik derives an approach to empirical inquiry that he calls contextual holism from the best literature on the region in the twenty years since the collapse of state socialism. He advocates studying postcommunism from the inside out, beginning with the localized processes on which political and economic development rely. People’s experiences across the postcommunist space varied tremendously under state socialism. Differences in the extension of power and the possibilities for counterhegemonic organization were often critical dimensions of how reforms imposed from the top were manifest in people’s daily lives and the tools people had to respond to such changes. Contextual holism accounts for these differences by approaching research through five basic criteria: relationalism, historicism, constructivism, informality, and localism. Relationalism and historicism mediate the extremes of individualism and structure, emphasizing the situated nature of human action and perception. In the postcommunist region they highlight the material and ideological impact of neoliberalism and state socialism as aspects of the field within which people understood the challenges they faced and strategies for addressing them, rather than as determinative of the trajectory of transformation. Constructivism emphasizes the semiotic dimension of action and the importance of vernacular perspectives in analyzing the effects of postcommunist transformations. Informality and localism point respectively to the relations of exchange within postcommunist societies and the social networks that form the immediate context of signifying practices.

Wolfe and Pickles take scholarship in and about the region as its own object of inquiry in order to highlight the impact of hegemony on the concepts and methods employed in research. They consider, on the one hand, how the meaning of the postcommunist region constructed through research by American and Western European scholars is marked by the legacy of communism and the Cold War. Views of neoliberalism that either celebrate the collapse of authoritarian impediments to economic progress or condemn it as economically predatory reproduce a bipolar frame of analysis that obviates understanding of how collective life is being redefined in the context of the failed project of state socialism. Neoliberalism, they argue, should be understood as having provided a space for action against the claims of utopian collectivism. It was an effective challenge to the logics that sustained state socialism and facilitated the emergence of new imaginary horizons in post-socialist societies. On the other hand, the mechanisms of knowledge production in postcommunist countries are influenced simultaneously by the legacy of politicization of knowledge under communism and the impulse to quantify to meet the demands of a different hegemonic order. Overcoming both of these legacies requires genealogical deconstruction of the categories and frames of analysis through which the postcommunist region is studied. The critical social science Wolfe and Pickles advocate must recognize the multiple factors that shape political engagement and subjectivity, including such things as response to media, skills of visual production and consumption, as well as factors that shape reception of certain signs and consequences of intersecting realms of signification at the subnational, national, and regional levels.

These chapters converge around an interest in foregrounding the lived experiences of people in the postcommunist region in assessing the political and economic transformations. They approach the problem through different disciplinary paradigms, but both attempt to mediate the poststructuralist impulse to attend to the small and specific and the positivist impulse toward parsimony. They also challenge the assumption that the former has a monopoly over normative concerns. The principles each endorse may help to bring the range of cases within this region to bear on analysis of phenomena such as democratization, social movement studies, welfare state/unionization, party politics, and development, toward which the experiences in their diversity could contribute a great deal.

Amy Linch

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 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 twenty-seven 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 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 (Gans-Morse 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.

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 (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 transi...