Cultural legacies in post-socialist Europe: the role of the various pasts in the current transformation process

There are many different ways of studying the transformation of the former socialist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, but underlying most of them is a basic decision to use either cultural or actor-based approaches. Usually, authors underlining the relevance of cultural factors argue that deeply embedded norms and traditions tend to constrain the transformation process. Authors who stress the relevance of actors attribute to these actors, while acknowledging some constraint by certain context factors, the capability to employ or create institutions in order to complete liberal market based democracies (Crawford and Lijphart 1997; Pickel and Wiesenthal 1997). Those positions that could be labelled "cultural pessimism" and "creative optimism" are, however, not completely in line with the empirical findings in post-socialist Europe. On the one hand, countries with a relatively strong "Leninist legacy" (Jowitt 1992) like the Czech Republic or the Baltic states seem to have established stable democratic regimes. On the other hand, in at least two country groups different actor strategies have yielded similar results: (a) Russia and some slowly reforming neighbouring CIS-states combine electoral democracy with corporatist capitalism, and (b) the semi-consolidated democracies of Central Europe combine a wide range of modes of regime change and institutional sets. Since these country groups strongly reflect historical divides which ran across all of Europe (Ash 1999/2000), such as state, national or religious boundaries, it is highly plausible to assume the relevance of cultural variables influencing the transformation process.

This raises questions about dominant assumptions in the "legacies of the past ap-proach" (Crawford and Lijphart 1997), one of the most prominent approaches linking past experiences and transformation results of post-socialist countries. This approach maintains that to a large extent cultural factors disturb or hinder the transformation to liberal democratic regimes. The development of comparatively stable democracies in Central Europe implies that some regions of the former socialist empire seem to contain certain cultural prerequisites that actually favour democracy. At Europa-Universität Viadrina, a group of scholars who are currently applying as a research group (Forschergruppe) at the Deutsche Forschungsgemein-schaft are examining the relevance of these cultural factors for the transformation processes (Pollack, Bönker et al. 2001). The workshop in Frankfurt (Oder) in June 2002 discussed just these issues, in particular the methodological consequences of cultural approaches and the implications of diverse cultural settings in post-socialist Europe for this approach.

Participants in the workshop looked at the range of possible cultural impact factors affecting the transformation processes. Religion (Pollack 1998) and certain economic traditions (Wagener 1997) vary greatly across the region and are thought to push transformation results into different directions. Nationalism was a great source of liberalization and democratization in an earlier stage but later yielded the potential of turning into a danger during the consolidation phase (Minkenberg 2001). Trust is a cultural category greatly influencing the develop-ment of non-hierarchical power. The workshop provided more empirically grounded knowledge of the relationship between cultural legacies and context factors immediately restricting actors' choices during the transformation process. Actor constellations, party systems and in-stitutional settings seem to be relevant in a limited number of consolidating democracies only. Much of the sociocultural change takes place on the micro-level, thus sometimes evading the categories of the macro-level transformation theories. In short, the workshop treated cultural legacies in post-socialist societies not as homogenous, coherent and persistent phenomena of the communist past but as a dynamic dimension of social reality the influence of which on the transformation process can only be understood by closely taking into consideration the variations of cultural patterns within post-socialist Europe.

Participants from UC Berkeley:
Andrew Janos, University of California, Berkeley
Gerald D. Feldman, University of California, Berkeley
Edward Walker, University of California, Berkeley
John Connelley, University of California, Berkeley
Gesine Schwann, Michael Minkenberg & Timm Beichelt, Europa-Universität Viadrina

Conference Agenda

Monday, June 3

• 10:00—Welcome by Gesine Schwan
  Short Introduction by Timm Beichelt/Michael Minkenberg
• 11:00—Andrew Janos: "American PS and Post-Communist studies"
  Detlef Pollack: "Culture: thick and thin - theoretische Konsequenzen in der Anwendung des politische Kultur-Konzepts auf die Transformation in Ostdeutschland und Mittel-und Osteuropa."
• 13:00—Lunch break
• 14:30—Helga Schultz/Uwe Müller "Agrarismus in Ostmitteleuropa während des 20. Jahrhunderts"
  Ned Walker: "The Fall of the Soviet Union, Perestroika, and the difficulties of Russian transition."
• 17:00—Hans-Jürgen Wagener: "The virtual economy as intermediate stage in Russian transition"
  Gerry Feldman: "The role of the past in post-Communist restitution questions."

Tuesday, June 4

• 9:30—Beverly Crawford "Leninist Legacies and Liberal Institutions in Post-Communist Transition"
  John Conelly: "'Geschichtsbilder' and Historiography"
  Minkenberg/Beichelt "Nationalism and the Radical Right in CEE"
• 12:30—Concluding Remarks and End of Workshop