This account of historical politics in Ukraine, framed in a broader European context, shows how social, political, and cultural groups have used and misused the past from the final years of the ...Soviet Union to 2020. Georgiy Kasianov details practices relating to history and memory by a variety of actors, including state institutions, non-governmental organizations, political parties, historians, and local governments. He identifies the main political purposes of these practices in the construction of nation and identity, struggles for power, warfare, and international relations. Kasianov considers the Ukrainian case in the context of a global increase in the politics of history and memory, with particular emphasis on a distinctive East-European variety. He pays special attention to the use and abuse of history in relations between Ukraine, Russia, and Poland.
Over the last two decades, it has become clear that Russia insists on its great power status, even at considerable cost. Chasing Greatness provides an interpretive explanation of the tacit rules that ...shape Russia's great power identity today. Anatoly Reshetnikov argues that this never-ending chase for greatness is a result of how Russia and its predecessors—including the USSR, Russian Empire, Muscovy, and Kievan Rus’—historically interacted with its neighbors to the east, the south, and particularly the west. By analyzing an extensive amount of original source material, including primary sources that have not been previously translated into English, he is able to reconstruct a millennial history of the Russian concepts that express political greatness. He also traces numerous encounters between Russia and the West, as well as Russia’s troubled integration into the European society of states in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to show how these concepts have affected Russia’s interaction with international society. Despite its substantive historical depth, Chasing Greatness is not a book of history. Rather, it is a synthesizing social science work inspired by the continental tradition of the critical history of modernity. As such, the book is more about the present than about the past. Its main aim is to expose and explain the rich conceptual baggage behind Russia’s unceasing great power rhetoric (domestic and international) and how this rhetoric drives the current international crises involving Russia.
The twenty-five essays accompany, illustrate and underpin the conceptual framework elaborated in Post-Communist Mafia State, published in conjunction with this volume. Leading specialists analyze the ...manifestations of the current political regime in Hungary from twenty-five angles. Topics discussed include the ideology, constitutional issues, social policy, the judiciary, foreign relations, nationalism, media, memory politics, corruption, civil society, education, culture and so on. Beyond the basic features of the economy the domains of taxation, banking system, energy policies and the agriculture are treated in dedicated studies. The essays are based on detailed empirical investigation about conditions in today’s Hungary. They nevertheless contribute to the exploration of the characteristic features of post-communist authoritarian regimes, shared by an increasing number of countries in Europe and Central Asia.
Abstract The starting point of my study is represented by two works, Grădina de sticlă (Tatiana Țîbuleac) and Un singur cer deasupra tuturor (Ruxandra Cesereanu). These are two novels that organize ...their narrative discourse following the relation trauma-memory-identity. In fact, Tatiana Țîbuleac and Ruxandra Cesereanu emphasize in their proses how can a social identity be recreated, when everybody feels the terror enforced by the authority. In this case, when you lose everything, you become vulnerable and this feeling causes the alienation, the break. Therefore, in this paper, we will show how the memory reopens the dialogue with the past, more exactly with a traumatic past. We will illustrate also the fact that in the process of remembering the space changes the identitary their attributes.
How do the labels left and right take on meaning in new democracies? Existing explanations point to the universality of the left–right scheme or, reversely, emphasize regionally dominant social ...cleavages. We propose an alternative legacy-focused theory based on two observations: Dictatorships are not ideologically neutral and are negatively evaluated by most citizens and elites after democratization. These premises lead us to expect that when the authoritarian regime is associated with the left (right), the citizens of a new democracy will display an antileft (antiright) bias in their left–right self-identification. We test this hypothesis across Latin American and European new democracies. We find significant bias, which in the case of new democracies following left-wing regimes is concealed due to intercohort heterogeneity. Although older cohorts denote a positive bias, cohorts born after Stalin’s era denote negative bias against the left. Consistent with our expectations, repression exacerbates this bias whereas indoctrination mitigates it. Finally, we look at how these biases apply to party preferences. The findings have important implications for understanding authoritarian legacies and party system development in new democracies.
Regime change narratives in Hungarian literature gained a new type of consistency around 2010, after two decades of postcommunism. The article analyses narrative strategies of novels written about ...the regime change, showing their tendency towards a microhistorical approach. The discussed novels include works by such minority authors as Ádám Bodor, Andrea Tompa, Sándor Zsigmond Papp, Zsolt Láng, who represent in their novels the dramatic regime change that took place in Romania in 1989.
This article provides a detailed set of coding rules for disaggregating electoral volatility into two components: volatility caused by new party entry and old party exit, and volatility caused by ...vote switching across existing parties. After providing an overview of both types of volatility in post-communist countries, the causes of volatility are analysed using a larger dataset than those used in previous studies. The results are startling: most findings based on elections in post-communist countries included in previous studies disappear. Instead, entry and exit volatility is found to be largely a function of long-term economic recovery, and it becomes clear that very little is known about what causes ‘party switching’ volatility. As a robustness test of this latter result, the authors demonstrate that systematic explanations for party-switching volatility in Western Europe can indeed be found.
Decoupling—the creation of gaps between formal policies and actual practices—is ubiquitous in organizations. Yet little research has examined how decoupling unfolds over time. This qualitative case ...study of a post-Communist government agency develops process models of what precedes and what follows the decision to decouple. I show that the demography and ideology of powerful organization members influence whether decoupling occurs, how it unfolds, and whether it is sustainable. Further, I suggest decoupling may carry seeds of its own decay: under certain conditions, the decision to decouple can trigger demographic changes that eventually erode decoupling.
Thirty years after 1989 Europe is once again divided, despite 15 years of integration within the European Union. In contrast to the West's liberal conception of internationally constrained democracy ...rooted in the protection of individual human rights, Central Europe has developed an illiberal version centred on the popular sovereignty of the nation. I argue that these divergent understandings of democracy and the nation-state are rooted in collective memory. Whereas the West's historical imaginary is based on the traumas of Nazism associated with 1945, Central Europe's is dominated by the legacy of communism symbolically signified by 1989. These differing understandings of past teach strikingly different lessons for the present: one focused on the dangers of nationalism, the other on protecting national self-determination from external interference. The future of the EU depends on its ability create a broader historical narrative that can incorporate both the lessons of 1945 and 1989.
Having won a two-third majority in Parliament at the 2010 elections, the Hungarian political party Fidesz removed many of the institutional obstacles of exerting power. Just like the party, the state ...itself was placed under the control of a single individual, who since then has applied the techniques used within his party to enforce submission and obedience onto society as a whole. In a new approach the author characterizes the system as the ‘organized over-world’, the ‘state employing mafia methods’ and the ’adopted political family', applying these categories not as metaphors but elements of a coherent conceptual framework.The actions of the post-communist mafia state model are closely aligned with the interests of power and wealth concentrated in the hands of a small group of insiders. While the traditional mafia channeled wealth and economic players into its spheres of influence by means of direct coercion, the mafia state does the same by means of parliamentary legislation, legal prosecution, tax authority, police forces and secret service. The innovative conceptual framework of the book is important and timely not only for Hungary, but also for other post-communist countries subjected to autocratic rules.
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