Masthead * Contact * Submissions * Conference series
Endangered Scholars Worldwide * Journal Donation Project * New School for Social Research
It gives me great personal pleasure to introduce this, the sixth in a remarkable series of special issues of Social Research devoted to Central and Eastern Europe. When I wrote an introduction to the first issue in the series, back in 1988, the Czechoslovak contributions came from samizdat, and the East German contribution had only been published in West Germany. How much has changed: no more samizdat, no more Czechoslovakia, no more East Germany! But clearly there have been losses as well as gains-some would certainly count the end of Czechoslovakia itself as a loss-and that is what, eight years on, this special issue is about.
It is not simply about the "costs of transition." That phrase contains such large assumptions, already implicit in the teleological paradigm of "transition": the implication being that, however high the costs, there is clearly a final benefit to justify them, and that the costs are indeed transitional. This is reassuring, but is it true? Are there not losses that are simply that: absolute losses, not merely transitional costs?
The authors point to what some of those losses may be. Jirina Siklová gives a touching anecdotal example at the beginning of her article. In 1989, before the velvet revolution, a group of friends gather to hear someone's account of a trip to Vienna. They drink in all the details of the West, but do not stop to reflect on the fact that they have the time, the felt need, and the communal spirit to meet in this way for an intense exchange of experiences. Even if these lost qualities were in large measure the "uses of adversity," their loss is nonetheless real.
What about the legacy of the 1989 revolution, or "revolution" itself? Aleksander Smolar makes a fascinating attempt to apply the three traditional categories of revolutionary actor,'moderates," "radicals," and counter-revolutionaries, or, as he rephrases it, "old timer-new comers" -to post-1989 Polish politics. In so doing, he shows how crucial in determining the different camps have been differences about the single Issue of how to deal with the communist past: a polarization the more acute because there is so much basic agreement on so many issues about the present and future. Jeffrey Isaac reflects interestingly on "the meanings of 1989." With the passage of time it becomes increasingly clear that what was most novel about 1989 was not any new goals or ideas, but simply the way in which the change was made: that unique, unprecedented combination of social self-organization, peaceful civil disobedience, and elite negotiation (with, but also within, what András Kovács calls the "conversion elite"). This revolution's new idea was the non-revolutionary revolution.
Isaac is surely right to point up the importance in this process of "new forms of democratic agency and new forms of opposition to oppressive power." However, I am rather more sceptical about their survival into the present. While, as Kovács points out, party alignments and voting patterns are still volatile, and non-party parties like Democratic Charter have at moments played a significant role, they still look very much like transitional phenomena within the larger "transition." To put it another way: can we really see anything in the developing "civil society" in postcommunist Europe that is both qualitatively and durably different from that in western, southern, or northern Europe? Except, as Daniel Nelson suggests, that it is still underdeveloped, embattled, and partly artificial -inasmuch, for example, as it is a "civil society" of largely foreign-funded NGOs.
To my eye, however, what is most remarkable about these societies is the extent to which they are very rapidly reproducing, for good or ill, so many familiar features of Western consumer societies. Indeed, in many ways postcommunist Europe is a kind of mirror in which we can see our own societies more clearly: and we may not always like what we see. Archie Brown rightly emphasizes the differences between the transition in Russia, on the one hand, and Central Europe on the other. But among the experiences they have in common is the very rapid transformation of what was an intelligentsia into what will be a middle class. Liah Greenfeld has interesting reflections on this process in Russia, and Jirina Siklová would certainly find familiar her description of what might be called the "end of the kitchen." The end of the kitchen, that is, as a central focus of the Russian intelligentsia's social and intellectual life.
In their stimulating if elliptical article, wonderfully entitled "Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome in Social Science in Eastern Europe," György Csepeli, Antal Örkény, and Kim Lane Scheppele explore another aspect of this sea-change in the circumstances of the intelligentsia: the way in which Central and East European scholars have adopted, or at least adapted to, Western modes of analyzing their own reality. Beside some nice humorous touches, there is a note of warning, even of bitterness, in this essay, which we shall ignore at our peril. For example: "Eastern researchers . . . do not always understand the prestige and hierarchy signals of the Western researchers, for whom where you teach (is it a major research university?) and where you publish (refereed journals?) are more important than what you say." There is an important and underexplored subject here: the sociology of social research itself-and the transitology of transitology.
Yet for all the new dominance of Western modes and paradigms, this issue nonetheless demonstrates the continuing vigour, diversity, and idiosyncrasy of the ways in which Central and East European social researchers analyze their own reality. Long may it remain so. Timothy Garton Ash
Timothy Garton Ash is a fellow at St Antony's College, Oxford. He is the author of In Europe's Name: Germany and the Divided Continent (1993).
Archie Brown is professor of politics at the University of Oxford and Sub-Warden of St Antony's College, Oxford. His most recent book is The Gorbachev Factor (1996).
Miguel Angel Centeno is assistant professor of sociology at Princeton University. He recently wrote Democracy within Reason: Technocratic Revolution in Mexico (1994) and co-edited Toward a New Cuba? with Mauricio Font (1996).
György Csepeli is professor of social psychology at the Institute of Sociology, ELTE University, Budapest. He recently contributed "The Role of Fear in Ethnic and National Conflicts in Eastern Europe" to Grappling with Democracy: Deliberations on Post-Communist Societies (1996). Professor Csepeli was a contributor to the issue of Social Research on "Nationalism Reexamined" (Spring 1996).
Mauricio A. Font is associate professor at Queens College and Graduate School, CUNY. He is the co-editor (with M. A. Centeno) of Toward a New Cuba? (1996).
Liah Greenfeld is University Professor and professor of sociology at Boston University. She is the author of "Nationalism and Modernity," which appeared in the issue of Social Research on "Nationalism Reexamined (Spring 1996).
Jeffrey C. Isaac is professor of political science at Indiana University. He is the author of Arendt, Camus and Modem Rebellion (1992).
Rumyana Petrova Kolarova is a research fellow at Sofia University and a lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the Laboratory for Political Behaviour. She contributed "The Roundtable Talks in Bulgaria" to The Roundtable Talks and the Breakdown of Communism (1996).
András Kovács is a senior researcher at the Institute and Graduate School of Sociology and Social Policy at ELTE University, Budapest. He recently wrote Anti-Semitism and the Young Elite in Post-Communist Hungary (1996).
Daniel N. Nelson is professor of international studies at Old Dominion University. He is the editor of After Authoritarianism (1995) and is currently working on "Germany and the Balance Between Threats and Capacities" (forthcoming).
Antal Örkény is professor of sociology at ELTE University, Budapest. He is the author of" Accounting for Rich and Poor: Existential justice in Comparative Perspective in Social Justice and Political Change (1995). Professor Orkeny was a contributor to the issue of Social Research written on "Nationalism Revisited" (Spring 1996).
Andrei Plesu is professor in the Department of Philosophy of Religion at the University of Bucharest, Rector of New Europe College, Bucharest, and Director of the weekly "Dilemma," Bucharest. He is the author of The Language of Birds (1995). Plesu was the Minister of Culture in the first government after the Romanian Revolution (1989-1991).
Tania Rands is a third year graduate student in sociology at Princeton University.
Andrzej Rychard is professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. He is the author of "Two societies? Poland in and beyond transformation" (1996).
Kim Lane Scheppele is professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania.
Jirina Siklová is head of the Department of Social Work, Faculty of Arts, Charles University. She is the author of "Backlash," a contribution to the issue of Social Research on "The East Faces West; The West Faces East" (Winter 1993).
Aleksander Smolar is Chairman of the Stefan Batory Foundation in Warsaw and senior research fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. He has recently written "From Opposition to atomization: civil society after communism" (1996) and "Kwasniewski's Polen" (1996).
