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Kneeling at the Altar of (Il)-Liberalism: The Politics of Ideas, Job Loss, and Union Weakness in East Central Europe

Review products

Reviewed in this essay: BaxandallPhineas, Constructing Unemployment: The Politics of Joblessness in East and West. London: Ashgate, 2004.
OstDavid, The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunism. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2005.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 May 2008

Pieter Vanhuysse
Pieter Vanhuysse
Affiliation:
University of Haifa
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Extract

As East Central Europe is fast approaching the end of its second decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, new studies of postcommunist politics and society can increasingly benefit from a longer historical perspective. We can now replace the “history of the present” lens that was typical of much research in the highly volatile 1990s with accounts that more extensively compare the most fundamental trends emerging from the decades before and after 1989–1990. In this spirit, both books under review make substantive and historically well-informed contributions to our understanding of the politics of work and workers in Central and Eastern Europe. In The Defeat of Solidarity, David Ost develops a gripping account of the progressive and interlinked defeats of labor interests and liberal democratic politics in Poland from the 1980s up to the present day. In Constructing Unemployment, Phineas Baxandall offers a theory of the political meaning of unemployment, applied mainly to the case of Hungary from the late 1940s until the end of the 1990s.

Type
Solidarity with the Gloves Off: Labor and Politics in Central and Eastern Europe: Review Essay
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 73 , Issue 1 , Spring 2008 , pp. 137 - 151
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working Class History, Inc 2008

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References

NOTES

1. I am grateful to the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies at Cologne for providing an excellent research environment during the writing of this paper.

2. See, for instance, Nancy Bermeo, ed., Unemployment in the New Europe (Cambridge, 2001); Miriam Golden, Michael Wallerstein, and Peter Lange, “Postwar Trade-Union Organization and Industrial Relations in Twelve Countries” in Herbert Kitschelt et al., eds., Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism (Cambridge, 1999), 194–230; David Rueda, “Insider-Outsider Politics in Industrialized Democracies: The Challenge to Social Democratic Parties,” American Political Science Review 99.1 (2005): 61–74; Kathleen Thelen, “Varieties of Labor Politics in the Developed Democracies,” in Peter Hall and David Soskice, eds., Varieties of Capitalism (Oxford, 2001), 71–103. On Eastern European labor politics, see Pieter Vanhuysse, “Workers without Power: Agency, Legacies, and Labor Decline in East European Varieties of Capitalism,” Czech Sociological Review 43.3 (2007): 495–522.

3. Peter Hall, “The Role of Interests, Institutions and Ideas in the Comparative Political Economy of the Industrialized Nations,” in Mark Irving Lichbach and Alan S. Zuckerman, eds., Comparative Politics (Cambridge, 1997); Sheri Berman, “Ideas, Norms, and Culture in Political Analysis,” Comparative Politics 33.2 (2001): 231–50.

4. For a short review, see Pieter Vanhuysse, “Review of David Ost, The Defeat of Solidarity,” West European Politics 30.5 (2007): 1214–15.

5. See Gregory M. Luebbert, Liberalism, Fascism, or Social Democracy (Oxford, 2001).

6. See David Collier and Ruth Berins Collier, Shaping the Political Arena (Princeton, 2001).

7. Berman, “Ideas, Norms and Culture,” 237.

8. Ibid.,” 241.

9. See Vanhuysse, “Review of Ost.”

10. See Adam Michnik, “The Polish Witch-Hunt,” New York Review of Books 54.11 (2007); Timothy Garton Ash, “The Twins' New Poland,” New York Review of Books 53.2 (2006).

11. See Garton Ash, “The Twins' New Poland.”

12. See Vanhuysse, “Workers without Power;” Bela Greskovits “Labor History Symposium,” Labor History, 48.1 (2007): 81–118. The Journal of Democracy recently summarized this state of affairs with a special section devoted to the question: “Is East-Central Europe Backsliding?” See Journal of Democracy 18.4 (2007): 5–63. Contrast this, for instance, with Ira Katznelson's early optimism about the prospects for liberalism, in his award-winning book Liberalism's Crooked Circle: Letters to Adam Michnik (Princeton, 1994).

13. See B. Fowler, “Nation, State, Europe and National Revival in Hungarian Party Politics: The Case of the Millennial Commemorations,” Europe-Asia Studies 56.1 (2004): 57–83.

14. Akos Róna-Tas, personal communication.

15. Akos Róna-Tas, The Great Surprise of the Small Transformation (Ann Arbor, 1997).

16. See Richard Rose, “Toward a Civil Economy,” Journal of Democracy 3.1 (1992), 18.

17. See UNICEF, Women in Transition: Economies in Transition Regional Monitoring Report 6. (Florence, 1999), 141.

18. See Pieter Vanhuysse, Divide and Pacify: Strategic Social Policies and Political Protests in Post-Communist Democracies (Budapest, 2006), which shows how governments in Hungary and Poland successfully reconfigured the material incentives and the social networks of exposed workers by shifting hundreds of thousands of such workers onto welfare programs. These policies were pursued precisely because unemployment was highly salient—and in order to prevent it from erupting in large-scale strikes and protests.

19. See Duncan Gallie, D. Kostova, and P. Kuchar, “Social Consequences of Unemployment: An East-West Comparison,” Journal of European Social Policy 11.1 (2001): 39–54.

20. See, for instance, Jan Fidrmuc, “Political Support for Reforms: Economics of Voting in Transition Countries,” European Economic Review 44.8 (2000), 1491–1513; Janice Bell, “Unemployment Matters: Voting Patterns during the Economic Transition in Poland, 1990–1995,” Europe-Asia Studies 49.7 (1997): 1263–91.

21. See Christine Lipsmeyer, “Welfare and the Discriminating Public: Evaluating Entitlement Attitudes in Post-Communist Europe,”Policy Studies Journal 31.4 (2003): 558.

22. See Agnyeska Packzynska, “Inequality, Political Participation, and Democratic Deepening in Poland,” East European Politics and Societies 19.4 (2005): 573–613.

23. See C.L. Choguill and Robert Manchin, “A Further Reconsideration of the Human Aspects of Economic Readjustment in Hungary,” Social Indicators Research, (1994): 79–80.

24. See, for example, Stephen Crowley, and David Ost eds., Workers after Workers' States, (Lanham, MD, 2001); Stephen Crowley, “Explaining Labor Weakness in Post-Communist Europe: Historical Legacies and Comparative Perspective,” East European Politics and Societies 18.3 (2004): 394–429. For a critique, see Vanhuysse, “Workers without Power.”

25. See for example Gil Eyal, Iván Szelényi, and Eleanor Townsley, Making Capitalism Without Capitalists (London, 1998); Eva Fodor, Edmund Wnuk-Lipinski, and Natascha Yershova, “The New Political and Cultural Elite,” Theory and Society 24.5 (1995): 783–800.

26. See John D. McCarthy and Meyer Zald, “Resource Mobilization in Social Movements: A Partial Theory,” American Journal of Sociology 82 (1977): 1212–34.

27. Ira Katznelson, “Periodization and Preferences: Reflections on Purposive Action in Comparative Historical Social Science,” in John Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, eds., Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences (Cambridge, 2003), 270–303.

28. Katznelson, “Periodization and Preferences,” 274.

29. Ost, Defeat of Solidarity, 58; see also Ost, “Labor History Symposium,” 115.

30. See Guiglielmo Meardi, “Trade Union Consciousness, East and West: A Comparison of Fiat Factories in Poland and Italy,” European Journal of Industrial Relations 2.3 (1996): 275–302.

31. Ost in “Labor History Symposium,” 117, original emphasis.

32. See Thelen, “Varieties of Labor Politics.”

33. See Golden, Wallerstein, and Lange, “Post-War Trade Union Organization.”

34. Seidman in “Labor History Symposium,” 97.

35. Vanhuysse, Divide and Pacify.

36. Ibid.; Greskovits in “Labor History Symposium.”

37. See J. Chambers and Jeffrey Kopstein, “Bad Civil Society,” Political Theory 29.6 (2001): 837–65.

38. Computed from Janos Kornai, “The Great Transformation of Central Eastern Europe: Success and Disappointment,” Economics of Transition 14.2 (2006): 216. On democratic disappointment and illiberal politics, see furthermore Journal of Democracy, “Is East-Central Europe Backsliding?;” Greskovits in “Labor History Symposium;” Paczynska, “Inequality, Participation, Deepening;” and Vanhuysse, Divide and Pacify.