East European Politics and Societies

Solidarity and citizenship are intertwined in a very complex manner, where the former usually operates as the “social glue” for the latter, holding together its formal components such as rights, duties, and membership criteria. The “we” that sets the parameters for membership and equality is not only legally defined but also discursively produced and maintained. Here, the rhetoric of solidarity plays an important yet ambiguous role, as it can advocate for interdependence and full inclusion while at the same time solidifying the exclusionary “we.” The aim of this article is to show how solidarity reasoning—the question of with whom we should be solidary and why—plays a functional role in maintaining citizenship agendas, and how this reasoning changes to support and enable shifts in these agendas. The dominant solidarity narratives that have supported prevailing citizenship agendas in Serbia (and across the post-Yugoslav space) over the last couple of decades will be discussed, as will counter-narratives that have served to destabilize hegemonic agendas by envisioning citizenship communities differently. Today, the ambiguous role solidarity can play within a citizenship agenda becomes especially obvious in neoliberal regimes, where, as I will show in the case of contemporary Serbia, calls for solidarity can be deployed to foster very distinct, arguably mutually opposing, kinds of political subjectivities and citizen activism.

This article studies the involvement of Western diaspora communities of Transylvanian Saxons in the humanitarian campaign for Romania during the flood disaster in 1970. It shows how the Saxons’ private relief campaigns established new forms of connectivity and exchange across the Iron Curtain through a transnational regime of care, ethnic solidarity, and charitable work. The article argues that the contingent and precarious situation of such spatially divided ethnic communities refashioned a generation of World War II refugees and migrants from “speechless” objects of humanitarian intervention into passionate advocates, effective mediators, and surprising champions of private aid giving in postwar Europe.

This article addresses the persistence of anti-Semitism in Romania, placed in the context of some recent debates concerning the memory of the Holocaust in the country, as well as in the area of Central and Eastern Europe more broadly. It argues that, despite significant improvements in terms of legislation, the memory of the Holocaust remains a highly contested issue in contemporary Romania, torn between the attempts to join in the European memory of the Holocaust and local legacies that on the one hand focus primarily on the suffering of Romanians under the communist regime, and on the other perform a symbolic “denationalisation” of the Jewish minority in the country, whose own suffering is thus excised from national memory. It does so by focusing in particular on the debates surrounding the adoption of Law 217/2015, meant to clarify earlier legislation on Holocaust denial, and comparing them with those prompted by the Ukrainian “memory laws” passed in the same year. Taking into account both the national and international reactions to these very different pieces of legislation, the article shows the still-persisting discrepancy between a (mostly Western) “European” memory of the legacy of the twentieth century and local memory topoi characteristic of the countries that were part of the former socialist bloc.

During the long nineteenth century, Poland was divided among the Russian, Habsburg, and Prussian empires. The partition produced regional diversity in political culture and in institutional and economic development. We examine how the cultural legacies of the empires have influenced the propensity of Poles to cast a ballot in parliamentary elections since 1989. Polish National Election Study individual-level data are used to assess whether higher levels of electoral turnout in Galicia are indeed a legacy of the Habsburg rule. Our results confirm that, even after controlling for socio-demographic factors, there is a positive, substantive, and significant effect on turnout of living in the ex-Habsburg part of Poland. This effect can be explained by the frequency of religious service attendance and by ideology. Inhabitants of Galicia not only attend religious services more frequently and are more conservative than their counterparts in the rest of Poland, but also the more frequently they attend church and the closer to the radical right they place themselves, the more mobilized they are to vote. The impact of the legacies of the empires on political behavior in Poland seems persistent.

Through the lens of modernization theories, the process of European integration can be perceived as Poland’s second modernization, following the systemic transformation in the nineties. In this article, we analyze the divergent perceptions of the European Union, and attitudes toward European integration, as they coexist within contemporary Polish society. We introduce the notion of European integration as a triple modernization, encompassing economic, institutional, and cultural changes. Using a mixed methods approach based on qualitative and quantitative data from the European Values Study 2017, we demonstrate that Poles generally accept the peripheral status of Poland in the economic context and expect financial support from the core of the EU. Simultaneously, within the cultural context, there exists a marginal but salient attitude that is based on opposition toward cultural pressures and on a claim to an active role in the shaping of the European axiological agenda. Distinguishing the three aspects of this general process of European integration allows for the identification of the source of tensions that are described in literature as cross-European populist tendencies to question the very idea of European integration in member societies of the EU.

This article discusses the history of the so-called book program—a joint effort by the US government, the East European diaspora, and readers of prohibited books behind the Iron Curtain. Between 1956 and 1989, the program purchased some ten million copies of publications and delivered them to people in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe in order to undermine communist rule. The article gives nuanced explanations of the motivations and practices of book-takers, placing Cold War books in the context of consumer goods trades. Using the historical materials of the Polonia Book Fund, a US-sponsored publishing project for Poland, this article contributes new insights on the transatlantic perspective of the cultural Cold War. This article focuses on the program’s early stages, and describes various elements of the transnational smuggling network. The program’s state–private partnership was a workable solution that helped to foster a diversity of opinions in post-Stalinist Poland.

The present article offers a new framework for understanding the early East European post-war that introduces and conceptualizes the idea of “Void Communities.” The core of the argument is that the disappearance of various groups of Others—ethnic, religious, and class—was one of the most important consequences of the Second World War for Central and Eastern Europe, and particularly for Poland and Ukraine. The Void left by those who had disappeared could be described on several levels, such as physical absence, social and economical dysfunctionality, transformation of the social structure and stratification, property transfer, decline of moral values and norms, and changes in local culture and traditions. Based on an extensive oral history research (of more than 150 interviews) and in-depth reading of ego documents, the article prioritizes the first-hand perspective of witnesses and centres on those who remained in the post-war Void Communities after their neighbours had been murdered, deported, resettled, or encouraged to leave semi-voluntarily. While the paper primarily focuses on the historical region of Galicia, now divided between Poland and Ukraine, the source material used to analyze the framework for Void Communities includes documents associated with the entire pre-war Polish Second Republic.

This article identifies patronage networks in three Ukrainian regions and develops some ideas on the relation between these networks, economic and political openness, and the provision of public goods. The research represents a rich empirical study linking business and politics in three regions (Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, and Ivano-Frankivsk) with different levels of openness and democratic reform. Formal and informal ties between politics and business are identified using primary (interview) and secondary data. By focusing on the local rather than national level in Ukraine, the article provides a comparison between different levels of patronage and type of networks. This study relates the empirical exploration of patronage networks in post-communist setting to a broader theoretical framework of limited access orders. Our findings show that although a multiplicity of networks might be a necessary condition for the opening of access to political and economic resources, it is not a sufficient one. We find that a single dominant network achieves a relatively high level of citizen satisfaction with public service provision, while the presence of multiple networks is not necessarily associated with citizen satisfaction with public goods provision.

This article looks at the structural and institutional changes that occur within the Security Services of Ukraine (SBU) between the Orange Revolution and Euromaidan. Why did a security service that was hailed as a protector of democracy when it stood against the national police, under the command of the Interior Ministry (MVS) who were attempting to quash the Orange Revolution protests in 2004 become a leading suspect in the anti-democratic shootings that occurred in the Euromaidan protests in 2014? One potential explanation is the pervasive patronage political shifts that result in personnel changes atop the hierarchy of the SBU. Another is that the bifurcated political structure (presidential powers vs. those of the legislature) of Ukraine shifted creating a realignment of political loyalties. A third potential explanation is institutional change that altered the entire Ukrainian political system between 2004 and 2014. This article uses archival data, content analysis of media publications, and semistructured interviews with experts in the field of Ukrainian security to examine the changes occurring within the SBU that lead to a violent reaction towards protesters in 2014.

The 2016 migrant quota referendum and the preceding anti-migrant and anti-EU campaign in Hungary led to a milestone in manipulating public fear of societal change by new East-Central European populism. This article maps and analyzes sentiments toward the referendum in Hungarian-language online media, using software-supported sentiment analysis of mentions of the quota referendum published online between 1 September and 31 October 2016. Results show a preponderance of negative sentiments over positive ones in both pro-government and independent media and the dominance of independent media in the coverage of the event. Coverage of the referendum received more weight in pro-government media compared to their lesser online presence, but this was fueled by astroturfed online discussion communities and content disseminated from at least one Russian state propaganda source.