East European Politics

Reflecting on European colonialism in 1950 - at a time when discussions about what we now know as the European Union emerged in western Europe, Aimé Césaire wrote, . . . Europe is morally, spiritually indefensible. This idea is fairly commonplace in much of the post-colonial world and it has some purchase within certain academic and intellectual circles elsewhere. And yet, in the process of denouncing the widely noted presence of racism in Hungary, thirty-six leading Hungarian intellectuals have, in a recent public document, felt compelled to thank France, and through France, a generic, trans-historical notion of Europe, for what they saw as the latter's profound, longue-durée goodness. It is partly my concern for the economic hardship, political marginality, cultural discrimination, and social exclusion faced by the Romanies of eastern Europe and partly the precision with which the Letter articulates the topos of west European moral superiority - a central pattern of European identity discourse - that prompts me to raise the following initial questions: How is it possible to denounce racism by referring to Europe, especially western Europe, the main historic source and promoter of racism as we know it today? What purpose does the genre of the open letter serve and how does it function? How does the signatories' implicit project of geopolitical self-positioning relate to the theme of the West as an object to be emulated, long dominant in the modern history of east-central European ideas of emancipation?

Party system institutionalisation has traditionally been viewed as a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the healthy functioning of democracy; yet the question of why some of these competitive party systems managed to institutionalise at the end of the second decade of party politics while others have not has not received the necessary attention. In order to begin to fill this gap, this article tackles the above-cited issue by trying to discover what have been the ‘causal mechanisms’ explaining the different levels of institutionalisation observed in East Central European party systems. In order to do so, and contrary to the predominant literature, it constitutes a serious attempt to bring together both institutional and sociological approaches.

Accessions of post-communist countries to the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) represent puzzles. While many such countries were granted a membership or a prospect of membership in these organizations, other European post-communist countries were not offered an accession or prospects of membership in the EU and NATO. The question is which factors account for such significant variation in the accession to the EU and NATO among European post-communist countries. This article uses statistical analysis to determine which factors affect the EU and NATO accession of 25 European post-communist states in 1997-2010. The study shows that the level of democracy is positively associated with NATO and EU accession, while conflicts have a negative impact on the NATO enlargement. The level of economic development has a positive effect on EU enlargement. Being a post-Soviet country has a negative effect on both NATO and EU accession.

This interview of Àngel Ferrero with sociologist József Böröcz (Rutgers University) was carried out for the newspaper El Salto and first appeared there in Spanish on the 7th of April 2018. LeftEast reprints the English original with the kind permission of the author. For the Spanish version, click here: https://www.academia.edu/36351803/Las_pol%C3%ADticas_de_Orb%C3%A1n_ya_se_han_extendido_m%C3%A1s_all%C3%A1_de_las_fronteras_de_Hungr%C3%ADa

This study analyzes the television coverage of post-communist countries in Canada. It is one of the first academic studies of this issue which has policy-relevance since media coverage affects foreign policy agendas and public attitudes towards other countries. The research question is whether there are significant differences in the extent and the content of coverage of post-communist countries on television news programs in Canada. The hypothesis is that post-Soviet countries, with the exception of Russia, receive a smaller amount of coverage than comparable post-communist countries in East Central Europe. Another question is whether political factors affect the coverage of these countries. The hypothesis is that Canadian allies are likely to receive more positive coverage than its adversaries and non-allies not only in the areas of relations between these countries and Canada, but also on non-political issues. The final question is whether there are significant differences in the content of the coverage of post-communist countries by American and Canadian television. The hypothesis states that Canadian television offers more balanced reporting concerning, respectively, Canadian allies and non-allies and post-Soviet and East Central European nations, and that political topics occupy a greater proportion of Canadian television reports concerning post-communist countries compared to American television reports. A keyword search of transcripts in the Lexis-Nexis database was employed to identify specific evening news programs that dealt with post-communist countries and were broadcast by leading private television networks in Canada (CTV) and the US (ABC, CBS, and NBC) from 1998-2009. This paper uses comparative and content analyses of these programs. The analysis shows importance of political factors in the representation of post-communist countries by Canadian television and differences and similarities in the television coverage of these countries in Canada and the United States.

This book examines the origins and evolution of world communism and explores how its legacies have shaped the post-Cold War world order. The lessons of Leninism continue to exert a strong influence in contemporary foreign affairs - most visibly in Poland and other post-communist states of the former Soviet Union, but also in China and other newly industrialized states balancing authoritarian impulses against the pressures of globalization, free markets, and democratic possibilities. "World Order after Leninism" began as a conversation among former students of Ken Jowitt, professor of political science at the University of California at Berkeley from 1970-2002 and whose monumental career transformed the fields of political science, Russian studies, and post-communist studies. Using divergent case studies, the essays in this volume document the ways in which Jowitt's exceptionally original work on Leninism's evolution and consolidation remains highly relevant in analyzing contemporary post-communist and post-authoritarian political transformations.

PRAISE:
"The book has a high degree of coherence and makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of European communist systems and successor regimes."  --- Richard Sakwa (book review in The Russian Review).

ABSTRACT This article focuses on anti-communist activism in the post-communist context. It follows political process theory in order to analyse the basic characteristics and trend of anti-communist protests in the Czech Republic between 1990 and 2011 and attempts to propose various paths through which the frequency of these protests has increased. First, it differentiates between the dynamics of anti-communism in the transition and post-transition periods and shows that anti-communism has become a stable political phenomenon in Czech politics. Second, it defines two modes of anti-communist activism and describes their basic characteristics: while anti-communist claim-making is mostly driven by political parties, anti-communist framing has become a more widespread tool of political activism. Finally, it combines the concepts of political space and political threats to identify conditions supportive of heightened anti-communist protest. It concludes that political elites and their strategies play a key role in promoting anti-communist mobilizations as a tool against communist but also other left political actors.

This article is to review the development of the LGBT+ movement in Czechia after 1989. The analytical section introduces three distinctive phases: (1) the movement’s establishment and development during the 1990s, (2) the period culminating (and declining) with the adoption of the Registered Partnership in 2006, and (3) the period characterised as a restructuring of the movement towards the goal of equal parental and marriage rights. The article analyses the development and changes in the organisational structure of the movement (according to [Císař, Ondřej. 2013. “A Typology of Extra-Parliamentary Political Activism in Post-Communist Settings: The Case of the Czech Republic.” In Jacobsson and Saxonberg, 139–168]). It uncovers heterogeneity, mostly concentrated around short transitory moments in each phase which allow the establishment of short term, often informal, self-organised organisations oriented lesson transactional activism, typical for NGOs of the region and time period.

The article addresses current trends in European transformation and compares the structure which is being built to ancient and medieval empires. The imperial order appears to be productive for the EU due to it easily embraces the heterogeneity existing within the Union, as well as contributes to the strengthening of the EU institutional legitimacy and efficiency in global governance. The ongoing EU transformations, promoted by the German-French lobby and supported by the authorities in Brussels, are indirectly leading to the emergence of an imperial structure, which is secured by a soft power, instead of a rule of sword. Taking all this into account, an attempt is made to define the role of Poland, the largest post-2004 enlargement state, in the new structure. To make this attempt sufficient a brief analysis of current Polish foreign policy and economic growth is provided.

The communist secret police services of Central and Eastern Europe kept detailed records not only of their victims but also of the vast networks of informants and collaborators upon whom their totalitarian systems depended. These records, now open to the public in many former Eastern Bloc countries, reflect a textually mediated reality that has defined and shaped the lives of former victims and informers, creating a tension between official records and personal memories. Exploring this tension between a textually and technically mediated past and the subject/victim's reclaiming and retrospective interpretation of that past in biography is the goal of this volume. While victims' secret police files have often been examined as a type of unauthorized archival life writing, the contributors to this volume are among the first to analyze the fragmentary and sometimes remedial nature of these biographies and to examine the subject/victims' rewriting and remediation of them in v...

The research: (1) embraces peculiarities of the current EU foreign policy towards Ukraine; (2) enumerates and analyzes documents, agreements and treaties which establish the frameworks for this policy; (3) discovers the impact of human rights issues on shaping and conducting this policy. Based on the criminal trials against opposition leaders, the analysis is provided to establish to what extent the human rights violation in Ukraine can worsen the relations between Kyiv and Brussels in the current context. As a result, several key factors which can alter the EU foreign policy towards Ukraine are pointed out.

In spite of its official title, the so-called “Ukraine Crisis” has been, for the last four months, driven by Russian rather than Ukrainian domestic politics. Not all, but some of the most critical roots of both the secession of Crimea from Ukraine and the armed uprising in Eastern Ukraine are to be found in Moscow and not in Kyiv. The Kremlin’s increasing involvement in Ukraine, to be sure, is not a proper aggression. It was also not a sufficient condition for the “Ukraine Crisis,” to emerge and escalate.

ABSTRACT Face-to-face encounters are well embedded in reconciliation processes and are meant to break down stereotypes and misconceptions and to “re-humanize the Other”, facilitating a transformation that would have a “healing” effect for entire communities. Based on “face-to-face encounters” in Israel/Palestine and in the Western Balkans (Serbia, Bosnia–Herzegovina and Croatia), I demonstrate that what happens is quite the opposite. Instead of blurring ethnic/religious identities, these structured encounters ossify historical narratives that serve to ethnically homogenise, polarise and essentialize the participants’ understanding of selfhood, stratifying them according to their ethnic belonging. As a result, these encounters result in enforcing ethnic identities.

Focusing on six populist radical right parties from four Central and Eastern European countries, we show that the factors that account for the vote for these parties in Western Europe do not travel well to Central and Eastern Europe. Euroscepticism boosts populist radical right party voting almost without exception, while nativism, regarded as the most important factor in the West, is only relevant in about half of the cases. Moreover, economic deprivation has no impact in Central and Eastern Europe, and political mistrust works in the opposite way to the West.