{"title":"Lustration: A Post-Communist Phenomenon","authors":"Andrzej Paczkowski","doi":"10.1177/08883254231163183","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08883254231163183","url":null,"abstract":"The phenomenon of transitional justice appears when authoritarian regimes transform into democracies—a topic that has been studied for many years. One main focus has been the question of the responsibility of the former ruling elite and their subordinates, and in particular, criminal responsibility. After the collapse of communism in Europe, secret police informers were perceived as sharing responsibility, alongside the regime’s functionaries. The first steps toward bringing them to justice were taken in March 1990 in Czechoslovakia. The process was called “lustration,” harking back to an ancient tradition of cleansing newborns of evil. In the jargon of the Czechoslovak security apparatus, “lustrace” meant checking an individual’s secret police records. The best known example of lustration took place in Germany, but the basic idea was carried out in all post-communist Central European countries. This kind of transitional justice was not associated with criminal responsibility, and—except in Poland—the courts were not involved in lustration, which was conceived of as a purely administrative procedure. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, only the Baltic states adopted lustration legislation; in other post-Soviet states, such initiatives failed. A similar situation emerged when Yugoslavia disintegrated, where the ethnic wars overshadowed society’s memories of communist wrongdoing. Lustration was unique to post-communist states and was not seen in any other transitional context.","PeriodicalId":47086,"journal":{"name":"East European Politics and Societies","volume":"7 1","pages":"1139 - 1179"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81897536","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Underestimated Ally: Ukraine during the Polish–Soviet War of 1920 in Polish Underground Publications (1976–1989)","authors":"Vitalii Borymskyi","doi":"10.1177/08883254231156554","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08883254231156554","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines Polish underground publications (samizdat) interpreting Ukraine’s role in the Polish–Soviet war of 1920. The research analyzes a large number of underground journals, newspape...","PeriodicalId":47086,"journal":{"name":"East European Politics and Societies","volume":"60 34","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50167192","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Secret Services Are Meant To Serve”: State Violence in the Autobiographic Memory of Secret Police Officers in Communist Poland","authors":"Piotr Osęka","doi":"10.1177/08883254231156553","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08883254231156553","url":null,"abstract":"The secret police, along with the political apparatus of a ruling party or administration, created the backbone of communist regimes and constituted the main tool of State violence. The state of the art within studies on the Polish security apparatus—albeit extremely rich—is entirely focused on archival documents. What is missing from the research on the secret police in Poland is an oral history approach. This article is a pioneer attempt at revealing the operative methods of the Służba Bezpieczeństwa (SB) through interviews with former officers. It aims at reconstructing the mechanism that led the officers to victimize dissidents and how they created moral justifications for their deeds. Asking about their career track, successes and failures, relationships with other officers, private life, and details of daily duty, I tried to glean what made the interviewees become perpetrators.","PeriodicalId":47086,"journal":{"name":"East European Politics and Societies","volume":"1 1","pages":"1227 - 1248"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90684277","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Corrigendum to Rethinking Theoretical Approaches to Civil Society in Central and Eastern Europe: Toward a Dynamic Approach","authors":"D. Pietrzyk-Reeves","doi":"10.1177/08883254221148444","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08883254221148444","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47086,"journal":{"name":"East European Politics and Societies","volume":"37 1","pages":"764 - 764"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42163055","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Party Nomination Strategies in Flexible-List PR: Which Candidate Characteristics Lead to Realistic Positions?","authors":"Petr Dvořák, Michal Pink","doi":"10.1177/08883254221147545","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08883254221147545","url":null,"abstract":"This article addresses the candidate selection process for realistic list positions with regard to multiple-office holding and personal characteristics in flexible-list proportional representation ...","PeriodicalId":47086,"journal":{"name":"East European Politics and Societies","volume":"60 21","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50167194","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Populist Juggling with Fear: The Case of Hungary","authors":"Domonkos Sik","doi":"10.1177/08883254231152614","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08883254231152614","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, the interrelatedness of contemporary populism and fear is analysed. It is argued that contemporary populism is burdened with the uncertainties and contingencies of late modernity. ...","PeriodicalId":47086,"journal":{"name":"East European Politics and Societies","volume":"65 12","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-03-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50167384","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“A Disease Like Any Other”: Awareness-Raising and Neuro-tivization of Depression in Poland","authors":"Beata Szulęcka","doi":"10.1177/08883254221147544","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08883254221147544","url":null,"abstract":"This article shows how Forum Against Depression, 1 an online platform devoted to depression, creates awareness about depression in Poland. This qualitative study uses critical discourse analysis to interpret texts published by the Forum and a short film, Disappearing Children, devoted to “teenage depression.” In this discourse, depression is presented as an object, the meaning of which is stable and dispersed. The article shows how the creation of this double semiosis of depression provides an invitation for auto-diagnosis and blurs the identity of the sender: the pharmaceutical company running the campaign, which is the subject of this article. Neuro-tivization of depression conceals the social context of distress and helps maximize drug sales. Ultimately, this article tracks the merging of complex psychiatrization and depsychiatrization processes. The article enhances discussion about issues related to biomedical framings of mental health, diagnostic reification of mental health diagnoses, and debate about conditions in which mental health knowledge is produced in Poland and globally.","PeriodicalId":47086,"journal":{"name":"East European Politics and Societies","volume":"27 1","pages":"1249 - 1268"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80103923","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Balkan Neofunctional Success Story or the Curious Case of Bosnia’s Central Bank","authors":"Eoin Lazaridis Power, John Branch","doi":"10.1177/08883254221147542","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08883254221147542","url":null,"abstract":"Bosnians show little faith in their state-level institutions, and with good reason, as the country ranks poorly on measures of corruption, regulatory quality, and government efficacy. However, the ...","PeriodicalId":47086,"journal":{"name":"East European Politics and Societies","volume":"65 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-02-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50167387","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"How Right-Wing Populists Influence Citizenship Education—Evidence from Poland","authors":"Łukasz Zamęcki, Piotr Załęski","doi":"10.1177/08883254221144710","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08883254221144710","url":null,"abstract":"As the importance of right-wing populist parties (RPPs) has grown significantly in Europe, with some even forming governments, the attendant political and policy programs are attracting greater attention. However, to date most of the relevant research has been focused on the core slogan policies of RPPs, relating to immigration and the economy. This has left the parties’ educational policies understudied. In seeking to address this situation, we analyse changes in the citizenship-education curricula that Poland’s schools pursued during the years 2017 to 2022, with the country’s ruling party (Law and Justice—PiS), thus offering a case study of a typical RPP. This article scrutinizes citizenship-education curricular changes pursued by PiS—with an approach that regards this as the field that best allows the desire to reconstruct the model of citizenship to be discerned. We also explore a process of “civic de-socialization,” and the new system of values being put in place in the curricula, by the Polish government. We examine whether the new provisions this entails fit into the ideological system of right-wing populists, and we conclude by developing hypotheses, and seeking to conclude theoretically, that ideological radicalization in education is being observed, in the wake of years of rule by an RPP. Interesting in this regard is the finding that more profound changes were not put into effect until a second stage to the reforms was reached. Overall, the case of the curriculum pursued in Poland by PiS points to a new ontology of citizenship, more nativism, and an anti-progressive agenda.","PeriodicalId":47086,"journal":{"name":"East European Politics and Societies","volume":"74 1","pages":"1314 - 1336"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82436316","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Between Ideological Loyalty and Political Adaptation: The “Agrarian Question” in the Development of Bulgarian Social Democracy, 1891–1912","authors":"Kristian Stefanov","doi":"10.1177/08883254221148652","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08883254221148652","url":null,"abstract":"At the end of the nineteenth century, European social democracy found acceptance among some circles of the Bulgarian intelligentsia. However, the social base of this new ideology, including industrialization and urbanization, was almost missing. This contradiction confronted the young party with the challenge of adapting to local social reality, not only leading it to a chain of internal ideological dilemmas questioning its social democratic identity, but also stimulating various political interactions with the public environment, culminating in a change of national politics. The present article lays out the problem of social democracy’s political adaptation by focusing first on the “Agrarian Question” debates among the party elite through investigation of the public discussions in the congresses, newspapers, and letters, and second, on political practice in the field of electoral politics through analyses of electoral statistics and mobilization discourses. The article’s main conclusions are that (1) dialectics between the intensive transfer of modern ideas and the complex process of their adaptation to national conditions is one of the “moving contradictions” of Bulgarian social democracy’s development in the Balkan peripheral context, (2) the Bulgarian Workers’ Social Democratic Party’s (BWSDP) experience confirms the more general tendency in Second International social democracy of a strong interdependence between electoral politics and ideological debates, and (3) the efforts for political mobilization of the petty peasants and artisans through Marxist language led to its evolution into a socialist-populist discourse that stimulated massification of political participation and encouraged but also opposed the early Agrarian movement.","PeriodicalId":47086,"journal":{"name":"East European Politics and Societies","volume":"46 1","pages":"1472 - 1494"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85992242","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}