15
2. The Resilience of History
Sten Berglund, Joakim Ekman, Terje Knutsen
and Frank Aarebrot*
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
The 19 countries included in this book are diverse but share a similar set of
historical experiences. They are all products of the great empires that
dominated European politics less than 100 years ago. They are all relative
latecomers to state and nation building, and, for that matter, to democracy.
They have a common heritage of communist rule and Soviet domination;
and after the collapse of communism in 1989–90, they all embarked on a
process of democratisation. More recently, they have gravitated towards the
West. Most of them are now fully integrated into the European Union and
those that are not are actively seeking closer cooperation with the EU.
The impact of the past is neither simple nor straightforward. The four
empires were all multi-ethnic and multi-cultural states. But they cultivated
different legal and administrative traditions. As a rule, the Austro–
Hungarian and German empires left a legacy of the rule of law, while the
Tsarist and Ottoman empires promoted deeply seated traditions of
patrimonialism and clientelism. But the empires were not homogeneous
and sometimes allowed for a great deal of regional variation. The clearcut
difference between the Habsburg and Hungarian crownlands within the
Austro–Hungarian Empire is a good case in point. The former were
governed from Vienna with only limited pressure on the ethnic minorities to
adapt to the predominantly German speaking political elite; the latter were
run from Budapest and subjected a wave of Magyarisation. In a similar
vein, it must be noted that communism did not always come in the same
shape and form. The communist regimes all had totalitarian ambitions, but
did not always live up to them. There were variations over time and by
region. As a rule, Central Europe proved more difficult for the communist
rulers to handle than the countries of Eastern and South Eastern Europe. It is
no coincidence that the uprising against communist rule originated in
Poland and Hungary in the very heartland of the former Austro–Hungarian
Empire. With the benefit of hindsight, however, the lasting impression of
16 Handbook of Political Change in Eastern Europe
communism in Eastern Europe is its role as a modernising force. It spelled
industrialisation, urbanisation and secularisation throughout the entire
region. The East Europeans who took to the streets in 1989–90 were
generally better off and better educated than ever before (Berglund et al.
2001).
This chapter sets out to provide an overview of social divisions and
political cleavages in Eastern Europe over time. We are particularly
interested in long-lasting and persistent conflicts, but we will also pay
attention to transient divides that fade out and go away as times change.
The Imperial Heritage
The German, Habsburg, Russian and Ottoman empires came out of the First
World War (1914–18) fatally weakened, and as the victorious Western
allies – the United States in particular – propagated the idea of national selfdetermination,
the ‘captive nations’ of these empires were able to break free
of their empires into independence, statehood and a first experiment in
democracy. Nation building became a top priority but also a bone of
contention throughout the region (Deutsch 1953; Gellner 1983; Hobsbawm
1990).
The political culture in the newly independent states was strongly marked
by the legacy of the past. The region, taken as a whole, had been an
interface between East and West since at least the 10th century, when it
became part of Christian European civilisation. But with the onset of protoindustrialisation
in the 15th and 16th centuries, the distance to the European
core again began to broaden. Since then, the bulk of the eastern part of
Europe has remained relegated to the periphery or at least the semiperiphery
of the European economic system; only some parts (in particular,
Bohemia) have occasionally been within the core (Wallerstein 1974, 99;
Knutsen 2009, 69). The entire region has been part of the broad pattern of
European civilisation and culture for at least a millennium, but ‘slightly
differently, less intensively, less fully’ than the West, ‘with the result that
East European participation in the European experience was only partial’
(Schöpflin 1993, 11). In political terms, the eastern part of Europe has been
a transitional zone between the Western tradition of division of power and
the Eastern tradition of concentration of power. This fault-line coincides
with that between Western and Eastern Christianity; the Eastern tradition is
at its strongest in territories once under Ottoman rule, and the Western
tradition is strongest in areas marked by Lutheranism (Figure 2.1).
This dichotomy between the German and Habsburg empires and their
Russian and Ottoman counterparts neatly coincides with the East/West
fault-line between Central and Eastern Europe. The Western group shares
traditions of Roman law, feudalism and relatively early national awakening;
The Resilience of History 17
the Eastern group has a Byzantine heritage and a lack of strong feudal
traditions, enabling ancient local authority relationships such as kinship and
clientelism to survive longer. This tendency is stronger in the South than in
the North. The North/South dichotomy is reinforced by the strength and
autonomy of political authority versus religious leadership. The North/
South dimension separates the Protestant and substantially secularised states
from the Counter-Reformation Catholic states, non-secularised Orthodox
states, and the Muslim states (Berglund and Aarebrot 1997).
Figure 2.1: The main historical religious cleavage lines in Eastern Europe
If the peace settlements and establishment of new states were intended to
ease communal tension, defuse national conflicts and, in general, set the
18 Handbook of Political Change in Eastern Europe
successor states on a path towards democracy and prosperity, this failed
miserably. Even though national self-determination was straightforward
enough as a concept, its practical application to the eastern part of Europe as
of 1919 created an abundance of new intra-state and inter-state conflict
dimensions. The nation states created were far from perfect, with borders
designed to accommodate the victors and their protégés, and very little
protection for the minorities, whose calls for cultural autonomy were
considered seditious by the new ruling ethnic groups. Germans and Magyars
in Czechoslovakia, Ukrainians, Germans and Jews in Poland, and Magyars,
Jews and Ukrainians in Romania were among those who experienced
harassment or even persecution (Tism neanu 1993, 6).
In newly-independent Poland, Marshal Józef Pi sudski and the moderate
left championed a multi-ethnic Polish state, but were not prepared to grant
any significant amount of autonomy to the minorities, particularly not to
some 5 million ethnic Ukrainians and 1.5–2 million Belorusians who lived
in the Eastern borderlands, which nationalist Poles perceived as the bastion
of Western Christianity. The failure to create a political state led to the
eventual victory of Roman Dmowski’s vision of a state founded on national
kinship. President Beneš envisaged that Czechoslovakia would develop into
an ‘Eastern Switzerland’, but others saw only a mini-replica of the
Habsburg concoction – the difference being that Czechoslovakia, like the
other successor states, lacked the Habsburg supra-national ideology which
helped national minorities to feel included. And even for the ethnic groups
that had not been content with that prospect; the imperial policy of ethnic
favouritism had at least been more reversible than that of the successor
states constructed around nation-building ethnic majorities.
The imperfect application of the nationality principle guaranteed that
nationalism would remain the dominant issue in interwar Central and
Eastern Europe. The widespread irredentism encouraged neighbouring kin
states to intervene in defence of their kin across the border, and host states
to attempt forceful integration of their minorities, or even to deny their very
existence (Brubaker 1996, 5). Social policies were strongly influenced by
attempts at ethnic assimilation, economic policies drifted towards economic
nationalism and competitive striving for autarky, and attempts at land
reform were primarily motivated by the glory of expropriating ‘alien’
landlords. Moreover, resilient irredentist tension pre-empted the
development of regional political and economic cooperation, and enabled
Germany and the USSR, the revisionist great powers, to exploit the situation
to their own advantage.
Ethnic cleavages often coincided with religious ones. Multi-ethnic and
multi-denominational Poland was, despite its secular constitution, to all
intents and purposes a state of and for Roman Catholics, just as Romania
and Bulgaria were states of and for Orthodox believers. In Yugoslavia, an
Eastern Orthodox dynasty ruled over not only Catholic Croatia and Slovenia
The Resilience of History 19
but also over predominantly Muslim areas in Bosnia, Herzegovina and
Southern Serbia. In Czechoslovakia, Slovak dissatisfaction was fuelled by
the strong Catholic heritage, as opposed to the Protestant or secular outlook
of the politically dominant Prague and Bohemian elites. Latvia was an
amalgamation of three historical regions of which Livonia and Courland
were mainly Protestant and Latgale mainly Catholic.
Party formation in immediate post-independence Central and Eastern
Europe was co-determined by ethnicity, class, ideology and religion, but
ethnicity was the defining cleavage, to which other cleavages – including
left/right – were subordinated. Typical in interwar Central and Eastern
Europe was the existence of parallel party systems for each ethnic group, a
tendency which was reinforced by constitutional arrangements which had
paved the way for extreme multi-partyism, particularly in the northern half
of the region. As Derek Urwin has noted: ‘[w]e find in these imperfectly
integrated European states with substantial minorities that either the ethnic
cleavage coincided with other cleavages, especially religion, or that the
linguistic groups generated complete party systems of their own. This is
generally the case in Eastern Europe, examples being the Germans and
Magyars in Czechoslovakia, and the Jews and Ukrainians in Poland. These
sub-cultural party systems often included an agrarian party’ (Urwin 1980,
195).
Indeed, agrarian parties were almost universally ethnically based (the
Yugoslav Peasant Union was one exception), as were many of the liberal
and conservative parties, and – for obvious reasons – the radical nationalist
formations. But fragmentation according to ethnicity also applied to the left.
Faced by the bewildering ethnic array of the Austro–Hungarian Empire, the
social democrats had already abandoned statehood for ethnicity as
organising by the 1890s. By the end of the First World War, the social
democratic parties in the German, Habsburg and Russian empires had
formally split into their national branches, and the disintegration continued
within the newly independent states.
The level of ethnic compartmentalisation and political fragmentation was
particularly high in the Northern tier of Eastern Europe. In Czechoslovakia,
there were moderate socialist, agrarian, liberal, Christian democratic and
conservative parties catering to almost every single ethnic group. By way of
example, Poland had a total of 92 registered parties by 1925, about half of
which were ethnically Polish; in Latvia, ethnic fragmentation resulted in
separate party systems for Latvians, Russians, Germans, Poles and Jews,
while regional fragmentation prompted the emergence of parochial
Latgalian and Semgalian parties (cf. Crampton and Crampton 1996). In
Yugoslavia, the party system was also structured along ethnic lines, with the
National Radical Party being dominant in Serbia proper and the Democratic
Party among Serbs elsewhere, and the Croat People’s Peasant Party, the
Slovene People’s Party and the Yugoslav Muslim Organisation dominant
20 Handbook of Political Change in Eastern Europe
within their respective ethnic constituencies; over 40 parties participated in
the November 1920 election for the constituent assembly.
The new states invariably opted for formally Western-style constitutions,
albeit that Bulgaria and Romania were monarchies since the 19th century
and Yugoslavia and Hungary emerged as kingdoms in 1918–19. The
constitutional formats were conducive to extreme multi-partyism. The
problem was that these new, modern political systems largely had no base of
autonomous spheres and power-centres. The nation-builders inevitably had
to turn to the state, and paradoxically the state thus came to perform or
organise many of the functions of civil society. These attempts to create a
civil society from above were not entirely unsuccessful, but they also
resulted in a high degree of state control of social and political interaction.
The process of enforced social modernisation formed the basis of the
statism often mentioned as the main characteristic of interwar Central and
Eastern Europe. And even when the state did succeed in building structures
of civil society, it often proved unwilling to relinquish control (Kopstein
and Wittenberg 2010).
The Balkans constituted a special case. Bulgaria, Serbia and Romania
had been ruled by local proxies of the Ottoman Empire and when
independence arrived by instalments beginning in 1817, they simply cut
their remaining ties with Constantinople. Contrary to their tight hold at the
state level, the Turks granted local government considerable autonomy.
After conquering an area, the Ottomans preferred to rule through
intermediaries. Under the millet system, the Turks eliminated any residual
local secular government and replaced it with a religious authority of local
origin, or at least of local confession, with civic responsibilities. In the
Balkans, the Orthodox Church came to serve as the Ottomans’ agent for
regional and local government, and the Church became strongly identified
with the Ottoman state. When nationalism began to emerge within the
region, non-Orthodox groups saw the Orthodox Church as an obstacle to
their ethnic and nationalist goals. Religion thus tended to reinforce ethnic
differences, exacerbating social divisions and complicating political
development (cf. Jelavich and Jelavich 1965; Jelavich 1983a; 1983b).
As the Ottomans had eradicated the local aristocracies, the Balkan elites
were not landed but rather military and clerical, and relative latecomers to
political power, heavily reliant on the state and on clientelist relationships
(Grosjean 2011). Albania was even worse off than the other Balkan
countries when it became autonomous in 1913, as it had only a rudimentary
state administration; the country was in practice ruled by tribal structures
dominated by the Muslim clans of the north and was reduced to an
economic and political client of Italy.
As George Schöpflin has argued (1993, 24–25), the attempts by the
weakly grounded semi-authoritarian or fully fledged dictatorships – in the
Balkans as well as elsewhere in the eastern part of Europe – to build loyalty
The Resilience of History 21
to the state through the promotion of nationalism raised two problems: it left
open or exacerbated the national issue, and nationalism as a political
doctrine provided answers to very few questions of political organisation
and the distribution of power.
It created strong identities and a sense of belonging to the state for members of the
dominant group, but said next to nothing about political structures, the resolution of
conflicts of interests, the allocation of resources and values, participation and
representation, i.e. the day-to-day problems of political, economic and social life.
[ ] The comparative vagueness of the nationalist message, together with its
emotional intensity, produced a somewhat contradictory result. East European
nations in the interwar era reached a fairly high state of national consciousness of
their political identities as members of a nation and as to those excluded as nonmembers.
At one and the same time the implicit promise of equality and justice,
encapsulated in the nationalist message, was left unfulfilled, with inevitable
frustration and resentment at the social-political closures enforced against society by
its rulers.
The institution of the government party operating in a pseudo-parliamentary
system was common to all the post-independence polities of the successor
states: the governing parties (or coalitions) were incarnations of the
bureaucracies and the technocratic and military elites. Prime ministers
tended to emerge from the administrative elite and then proceeded to ‘elect’
a parliament to serve them. This system was, however, hegemonic, not
totalitarian, and parliamentary opposition both on the left and on the right –
even radical opposition – was tolerated as long as it did not threaten the
fundamental stability of the regime in power (Fischer-Galati 2002).
Hungary was a case in point: the ruling Unity Party was an instrument of
administration rather than an association of like-minded people, and as the
electoral system – with suffrage restricted to less than 30 per cent and an
open ballot in rural areas – virtually guaranteed it a permanent majority,
most of the formal requirements of democratic rule could be observed.
Likewise, Romania and Bulgaria had vocal parliaments, but their function
was to legitimise the governments designated by the monarchs. In Poland
and the Baltic countries, the representative systems also took on a façade
character after an initial experiment in extreme multi-partyism.
The elites were socially and economically conservative, and the truly
revolutionary force in the predominantly rural eastern part of Europe before,
during and after the First World War was the peasantry – not the working
class. There were only pockets of industrialisation in interwar Central and
Eastern Europe – Bohemia, Silesia, Warsaw, ódz, Riga, parts of Budapest,
the Romanian oil district – and worker radicalism on issues other than
wages and working conditions was ill-supported by the shallow roots of the
working class (Stephens and Kümmel 2002).
In the final analysis, not much happened by way of social and political
regeneration in Eastern Europe between the two world wars. Nationalism
22 Handbook of Political Change in Eastern Europe
and economic modernisation served as instruments of political mobilisation
rather than as attempts at solving the problems of nation building and
economic reform. Ethnic diversity remained very high, rural economic
development did not fulfil its promises and expectations, and
industrialisation remained largely confined to the industrial areas of the old
empires. The democratic regimes of the early interwar period, faced with
populist challenges of almost every conceivable ideological shade,
responded by ever grander promises of a swift entry into the modern world.
But as they did not have the capacity to come through on most of these
promises, they harvested dissatisfaction and disillusionment. This created a
climate that played readily into the hands of non-democratic forces, which
went on to develop a modern form of clientelism rather than a true civil
society.
The Resilience of Historical Cleavages
War and occupation was to leave a lasting imprint on the nation states of
Central and Eastern Europe. The map of Europe was drawn and redrawn
several times, first by Nazi Germany and subsequently by the victorious
anti-Hitler coalition (Berglund and Aarebrot 1997). In parallel with
territorial revisions on a vast scale, the new rulers opted for policies of
population transfers, inspired by Nazi and Soviet examples of ethnic
cleansing, but with an additional antecedent in the 1923 Lausanne
settlement after the Graeco–Turkish War of 1919–21.1
Between 1936 and
1956, an estimated 22 million people were transferred from, to or within
Poland, equalling no less than 70 per cent of the population as of 1939
(Davies 1986, 82). Throughout Central Europe, these drastic policies went a
long way towards creating ethnically almost homogenous states. However,
the Balkan states remained strongly multi-ethnic, and in the Baltic republics
multi-ethnicity was reinforced by emigration, deportations and Slavic
immigration. The USSR itself, of course, remained a multi-ethnic empire,
albeit that Moscow pursued its own nation- and state-building agenda
through Russification and attempts to create a homo sovieticus, with a
Balkan parallel in the proclamation of a ‘Yugoslav’ nationality.
The cleavage structure of the pre-war era had survived the Second World
War intact, but with one important addition. War against and/or occupation
by Nazi Germany had introduced a fascist/anti-fascist cleavage. By the end
of the war few, if any, Central and East Europeans were openly professing
fascist sympathies; the overwhelming majority of them now pledged
allegiance to anti-fascism. The initial Soviet concept for the so-called
popular democracies in liberated Central and Eastern Europe called for
these countries to be governed by broad ‘anti-fascist’ coalitions with their
roots in the national fronts that had been part and parcel of the underground
The Resilience of History 23
resistance against the German occupiers. The small, and in many cases
insignificant, communist parties were cast for a major role within these antifascist
coalitions. It was to the advantage of the communists and their allies,
if part of the competition could be disqualified on real or trumped up
charges of harbouring pro-fascist sympathies; and the Soviet authorities
actually did not agree to local or national elections until the old ruling elites
and their potential followers had been barred from taking part in the
electoral process (Berglund and Ekman 2010).
The election results were in all likelihood a source of great concern to
Moscow. Polling 38 per cent of the vote in the general elections in
Czechoslovakia in May 1946, the local communists had done very well,
particularly considering that this gave them, and their long-time social
democratic coalition partner, a parliamentary majority (Broklová 1995). But
this was all there was by way of reassuring electoral reports for Moscow.
In the Hungarian general elections of November 1945, almost two-thirds
of the voters had come out in favour of the Smallholders Party (Hellén
1996); in Poland, the Polish Peasant Party of Stanis aw Miko ajczyk had
apparently done considerably better than officially reported in the rigged
plebiscite of November 1946 and the even more tightly controlled elections
in February 1947 (Grzybowski 1994); in Bulgaria, the communistdominated
Patriotic Front had carried the general elections of November
1945 due to the boycott of several non-communist parties, including the
majority faction of the Bulgarian Agrarian Union of Nikola Petkov, which
had unsuccessfully called upon the Allied Control Commission to supervise
the election carefully so as to avoid fraudulent practices (Fowkes 1995); and
in Romania, it took yet another openly fraudulent election to provide the
communists and their allies with a majority in the 1946 parliament
(Dellenbrant 1994).
These elections were followed by other elections which reduced the
space for political pluralism until it had been eliminated altogether. The
social democrats were forced to merge with the communists, and the nonsocialist
parties were either infiltrated by the communists or banned. Many
of the popular democracies formally preserved the multi-party format, but
the surviving non-communist parties were permanent allies of the ruling
Marxist-Leninist parties, totally reconciled with operating within the
framework of the fundamental principles of the world communist
movement. These principles included unconditional acceptance of the
leading role of the Marxist-Leninist party, the consistent application of the
principle of democratic centralism with its distinctly authoritarian
components, and the unwavering support of the notion of eternal friendship
and alliance with the Soviet Union (Berglund and Dellenbrant 1994).
24 Handbook of Political Change in Eastern Europe
The Communist Legacy
Within a few short years, the popular democracies of Central and Eastern
Europe had been transformed into mere carbon copies of the Soviet political
system. The party space was dominated by one single force and the
dominant Marxist-Leninist force was itself constrained by the Soviet
mentor. The social and economic programme on which the new regimes
embarked was one of radical modernisation, inspired by the Soviet crash
programme for industrialisation of the 1920s and 1930s. The means of
production were socialised; the agricultural sector was collectivised and a
number of gigantic industrial projects – like the Nowa Huta steelworks in
Poland – were initiated throughout the Soviet bloc. The long-term
consequences were manifold. The traditional middle class and rural
constituencies of the liberal, conservative and agrarian parties were wiped
out and the traditional working class and urban constituencies of the leftwing
parties were substantially strengthened; the countryside was
impoverished and the role of traditional religious values was sharply
reduced; illiteracy was wiped out or sharply reduced; the average level of
education jumped upwards as dramatically as industrial output and the
standard of living.
Several inferences may be drawn on the basis of the socioeconomic
indicators in Table 2.1. It is readily seen that communist Central and Eastern
Europe trails behind the industrial nations of the West. The East European
countries rarely come out at the very top of the list of socioeconomic
indicators and they seldom surpass West Germany, which entered the postwar
era in a state of devastation and destruction, much like that of Central
and Eastern Europe. Hence, when the East European countries actually rank
at the top of the list, it is not necessarily an indicator that they are ahead of
Western Europe, the United States and the United Kingdom. The large share
of industrial workers in the Hungarian labour force in 1978 (58 per cent)
and the huge industrial output in the GDR, Bulgaria and Romania as of
1978 (62, 55 and 58 per cent of the GDP, respectively) testify to rapid social
transformation and economic development, particularly compared to prewar
conditions (Hellén 1996) and also compared to the first decades of the
post-war era. The data also serve as a reminder that Central and Eastern
Europe did not provide fertile ground for what is sometimes referred to as
the post-industrial society, with its emphasis on service production and
small-scale enterprises.
By the end of the 1980s, Central and Eastern Europe was closer to
Western Europe than ever before in terms of modernity, but with a class
structure marked by the equalizing impact of almost 50 years of ‘real
socialism’ (Wessels and Klingemann 1994). As indicated by Table 2.1,
tremendous socioeconomic changes took place under communism, mainly
in favour of industry to the detriment of the agricultural sector. An almost
The Resilience of History 25
equally important change, which is not shown in the table, is the change in
life-style in rural areas due to collectivisation. Briefly, collectivisation
entailed the introduction of an industrial life-style for agricultural workers.
In sum, many of the advantages of a modern and urban organisation of
labour, such as fixed working hours, regulated holiday periods, pensions
and fixed wages, were introduced without consideration for anything like
cost-benefit analysis.
Table 2.1: Socioeconomic indicators for Central and Eastern Europe
Poland CSSR Hungary GDR Bulgaria Romania Albania FRG Highest
Urban pop. % in
100,000+ cities
1950 23 14 38 20 9 10 0 48 71 UK
1960 27 14 22 21 14 16 8 51 72 UK
1976 20 17 28 24 24 25 8 35 72 US
Labour force,
% in industry
1960 29 46 35 48 25 21 18 48 48 FRG
1977 38 49 58 51 38 31 24 48 58 Hun
GDP,
% in industry
1960 51 65 58 – – – – 54 56 CSSR
1978 52 60 47 62 55 58 – 42 62 GDR
GDP,
% in agriculture
1960 23 13 20 – – – – 6 n/m
1978 16 9 15 10 18 15 – 3 18 Bulg
Literacy rate, %
1960 98 99 98 99 85 99 – 99 100
1970 98 n/a 99 99 91 98 - 99 100
Telephones
per 1,000 pop.
1966 41 105 56 75 – – – 108 481 US
1975 76 177 100 150 88 56 – 318 697 US
Newspaper circ.
per 1,000 pop.
1960 145 236 143 456 182 147 47 307 477 Swe
1975 248 300 233 463 232 129 46 312 572 Swe
TV receivers
per 1,000 pop.
1965 66 149 81 188 23 26 1 193 362 US
1975 180 249 223 302 173 121 2 307 571 US
Note: Dates may be approximate. The Romanian data on urbanisation were gathered in 1971 and
not in 1976 and the East German data on newspaper circulation were collected in 1965 rather than
1960. The Bulgarian data on literacy were gathered in 1965 rather than 1960 and the Romanian
and Albanian data on newspaper circulation are from 1974 and 1965 respectively.
Sources: Taylor and Hudson, (1972), Taylor and Jodice (1983a, 1983b).
Another feature of communist policies was a marked increase in
investment in education on all levels, particularly in technical fields. This
26 Handbook of Political Change in Eastern Europe
produced large middle classes, but not middle classes structured in the same
way as in Western Europe. Income distribution was weakly, or not at all,
linked to education. Nor was political and social stratification only a matter
of education. Who belonged to the ruling class, the so-called nomenklatura,
was defined by the ruling party and in terms of access to this party. But to
the extent that education can be used as an indicator of modernity, the
relative size of the population with a middle-class education was higher
than ever before in the late 1980s. This is clearly a legacy of communist
rule. The new middle classes could have provided the basis for the
establishment of a civil society, but this kind of pluralism was also
anathema to the ruling communist parties. Eastern Europe had its fair share
of supposedly independent civil society organisations, but they were
monitored, controlled and infiltrated by the communist regimes to the point
that they hardly qualified as non-governmental organisations (Linz and
Stepan 1996). Only Poland came out of the 1980s with a civil society of
significance, but this was not primarily the work of the new middle classes.
It was rather the product of a movement with deep roots in the Catholic
Chrurch – the traditional bearer of Polish nationalism.
The social transformation on which the communist regimes embarked
called for a strong government presence; and there is indeed a case to be
made for the notion that the communist regimes of Central and Eastern
Europe had state building as a top level priority (Berglund and Aarebrot
1997). The concept of a liberal state with the emphasis on individual rights
and freedoms and rule of law was obviously alien to the communist leaders,
but they definitely needed strong and efficient state machinery capable of
levying taxes, mobilising the masses and supervising the individuals. Nation
building or identity politics was also of obvious importance for the leaders
of communist Central and Eastern Europe, particularly for the leaders of
countries affected by large-scale border changes and population transfers.
But identity politics in many ways represented a Pandora’s Box of horrors
and had to be handled with great care. The territorial revisions and
population transfers had, after all, been initiated by the Soviet Union; and,
to the extent that the Soviet Union did not itself benefit from the changes,
the beneficiary was a neighbouring socialist country also aligned with the
Soviet Union.
The 40 years of communism in Central and Eastern Europe included
successive waves of political and economic liberalisation, but – with Poland
and Hungary as the two major exceptions – the fundamental features of the
Marxist-Leninist system remained intact until the very end. The first
(almost) free parliamentary elections in Poland in June 1989 and the gradual
return to genuine political pluralism in Hungary in the late 1980s set a
dangerous precedent for the hibernating Stalinist and neo-Stalinist regimes
in Central and Eastern Europe and served as a source of inspiration for
dissidents throughout the region. Marxist-Leninist tradition would have
The Resilience of History 27
called for Soviet intervention sooner rather than later. Stalin would not have
condoned free elections and the return to genuine political pluralism
anywhere within the Soviet bloc, nor would Khrushchev, nor Brezhnev. But
Gorbachev was willing to take a chance on reform communism and thus
paved the way for the breakdown of Soviet-style communism throughout
the entire region. The countries of Central and Eastern Europe found
themselves thrust into their third experiment in democracy in the 20th
century.
Towards Democracy and European Integration
The collapse of communism and the subsequent dissolution of the Soviet
Union opened up the region for political pluralism once again. Sympathizers
of the interwar parties – at home or in exile – were quick to take advantage
of this opportunity to carve out a political niche for their preferred parties.
But the thus resuscitated parties were ill prepared for the fluid
socioeconomic structure in post-communist Eastern Europe. The situation
was particularly precarious for the agrarian parties, whose constituency had
been wiped out by collectivisation. The workers in the large-scale
agricultural industries that had replaced private farming were not
necessarily thrilled by the prospect of giving up their jobs and life style. The
old-style social democratic parties also failed dismally at the polls. The
Czech Social Democratic Party is in fact the only social democratic party of
significance in the region to have ideological and organisational ties to the
interwar era and beyond.
Even so, there is no shortage of social democratic or socialist parties in
contemporary Eastern Europe. This is the preferred party label of the former
ruling communist parties. They were initially at the very centre of a new
divide – communists versus anti-communists. It was partly a classical
struggle for power. The old communist power elite wanted to keep as much
as possible of its privileged position, while the new power elite set out to
replace it. But there was also a moral dimension attached to it. The region
had just come out of a period of half a century or more of totalitarian rule,
accompanied by violation of human and civil rights, corruption of the
system of justice and election fraud; and it was generally felt that the
perpetrators of these and other crimes should be brought to justice. Some
anti-communist formations went one step further and called for full scale
lustration of public administration. But with the notable exception of
Czechoslovakia and the German Democratic Republic (GDR), this call for
lustration did not make a lasting impression on the political system and, in
fact, the former communist parties were accepted as legitimate contenders
for political power within the political system, once they had pledged
themselves to parliamentary democracy. This policy of inclusion rather than
28 Handbook of Political Change in Eastern Europe
exclusion was endorsed not only by the new political elites but also by the
voters. In a similar vein, it may be noted that the reformed communist
parties turned out to be extremely flexible. Many of them became
champions of the market ecomomy and some of them have campaigned on
distinctly liberal platforms. Left/right may be a meaningful distinction in
Eastern Europe but it clearly does not carry the same connotations as in
Western Europe (Szelényi and Szelényi 1995).
Nationalism remained on the agenda. It was a particularly salient issue in
the former Soviet republics that were now at liberty to pursue their state and
nation building projects as they saw fit. But it was also a dominant issue in
the Yugoslav and Czechoslovak successor states. With the dissolution of
Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia in the early 1990s, a new definition of
nationhood was instated. This new definition is very similar to the ideals of
the nation-state found in countries that have retained a constant concept of
nationhood across regimes throughout the 20th century. This is brought out
in the official Czechoslovak, Czech and Slovak statistics on the ethnic
composition of Czechoslovakia, the Czech Republic and Slovakia over time
(Table 2.2).
In the Czechoslovak censuses of 1921 and 1930, the core group was
widely defined as people of ‘Czechoslovak’ nationality. Some 65 per cent
of the population were considered as belonging to the national core of this
artificial nation state. The minorities – that is, those who were not
considered ‘Czechechoslovak’ – included Germans, Poles, Ruthenes,
Magyars and Jews. The nationalities excluded from the core thus consisted
of Slavic as well as non-Slavic speakers, and one excluded group, the Jews,
was not linguistically defined at all. Gypsies were not even listed. The
Czechoslovak core population included Czechs, Moravians and Slovaks.
The 1991 censuses list Czechs and Slovaks as the largest groups of the
Czech and Slovak republics respectively. The definition of the core group is
apparently much narrower now, but with more than 80 per cent of the
national grand totals, these narrowly defined majority groups nevertheless
account for considerably more than the 65 per cent reported for the
Czechoslovak nationality in the censuses of 1921 and 1930. Similar
observations can be made upon comparing the official statistics of
Yugoslavia in the interwar period with early censuses in the successor
states. The old Serbo-Croat nationality has been discarded.
In this context, Estonia, Latvia, and maybe Macedonia, stand out as
deviant cases. Until the early 1990s, they were countries with decreasing
ethnic homogeneity, but with a linguistically defined, and thus limited,
definition of nationhood that has remained stable across previous regimes.
The large minority groups – in Estonia and Latvia: a Russian diaspora
population; in Macedonia: a potentially irredentist Albanian minority – have
made post-communist nation building difficult, but by no means impossible.
Estonia and Latvia have reversed the negative demographic trends and
The Resilience of History 29
Macedonia seems to have worked out an interethnic power sharing
arrangement (see Chapter 4–5 and 18).
Table 2.2 classifies the Central and East European countries into four
groups, using as a measure of ethnic homogeneity the percentage of the
population reported as belonging to the core, or majority, population. It
should be noted that the main purpose of the table is classification of
countries. Estimates in terms of percentages have only been included where
relatively reliable international sources are available.
Table 2.2: Ratings of ethnic homogeneity in terms of the relative size of the
regime-proclaimed majority nationality (%)
Censuses 1
Country Majority Population 1920 1930 1993
Stable approximate nation Lithuania Lithuanians 811923 801992
states: stable definition of Hungary Magyar 971992
the majority nationality; Bulgaria2
Bulgarians 83 871934 85 – 90
large majorities
Newer approximate nation- Poland3
Poles 70 70 99
states: stable definition of Romania Romanians 72 89
the majority nationality,
large majorities in the early
1990s but smaller majorities in
the interwar era
Recent approximate nation- Czechoslovakia ‘Czechoslovaks’ 661921 67
states: devolved from The Czech Rep. Czechs 81
dissolved ‘Mini-Empires’, Slovakia Slovaks 86
large or medium-large Yugoslavia ‘Serbo-Croats’ 741921 771931
majorities in the early 1990s Serbia Serbs 801991
Slovenia Slovenes 991991
Croatia Croats 781991
Former approximate nation Estonia Estonians 861934 621992
states with a decreasing Latvia Latvians 771935 53
majority population until Macedonia Macedonians 651991
the early 1990s
Notes: (1) The censuses of the interwar period are generally unreliable in their estimates of the size
of ethnic minorities. The figures are, nevertheless, interesting as expressions of perceived size of
regime proclaimed core populations. (2) The 1993 Bulgarian census data suggests that ethnic
minorities account for more than 10 per cent of the population. (3) The Polish interwar estimates
are highly questionable. Polish nationality was at last partly determined by the ability of the
respondent to understand the census-taker when addressed in Polish.
Sources: Based on Berglund and Aarebrot (1997, 161) and data from Crampton and Crampton
(1996).
The European house that emerged in the aftermath of the breakdown of
communist totalitarianism had more rooms in it than the old and familiar
Cold War European building of states. In this sense, the unification of
30 Handbook of Political Change in Eastern Europe
Germany in October 1991 was unique. All the other recent border changes
in Central and Eastern Europe have been by-products not of amalgamation
but of secession and/or breakdown. Sometimes this process resulted in new,
ethnically homogeneous entities – sometimes it did not. The Czech and
Slovak republics are clearly more homogeneous than the federal
Czechoslovak republic from which they seceded. Due to a continuous and
systematic influx of ethnic Russians into the Baltic region, Estonia and
Latvia came out of the Soviet Union with much more by way of ethnic
diversity than before. On the whole, however, contemporary Central and
Eastern Europe stands out as distinctly more homogeneous than its interwar
counterpart.
In the early 1990s, the prevailing mood in Eastern Europe was generally
upbeat and strongly in favour of reintegration with the West. Democracy
and parliamentarism was reinstated and Moscow’s former allies in the
region lined up for membership negotiations with NATO and the EU. With
the notable exception of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, the former Soviet
republics were only partially affected by this wave of democratisation. Most
of them initiated a process of democratisation featuring political pluralism
and competitive elections, but turned into hybrid regimes locked in
transition between democracy and authoritarianism. Ukraina and Georgia
are included in this book by virtue of their recent attempts to break out of
this mould and forge close relations with the West. Further West the
transition to democracy was a success story. The 12 East European EU
member (10) or candidate (2) countries are certified democracies in the
sense that they live up to EU democratic standards. Countries like Albania,
Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia are already deeply embedded in EU
structures and will have to pass the same democratic litmus test before
being invited to join the Union as full members.
This is not to say that the new democracies of Eastern Europe owe their
democratic status to the EU. The point we want to make is that the prospect
of EU membership and the active involvement of the EU in the process of
democratisation made a difference (Berglund et al. 2009). The Copenhagen
criteria of 1993 specified the democracy requirements at some length. New
member states should not only have free and fair elections with all which
that entails; they should also rest on a foundation of the rule of law and
respect for human rights. Respect for and protection of national minorities
was mentioned as a fourth criterion. The drawn out negotiation process
between the European Commission and the candidate member countries, the
so called acquis communautaire, was designed to bring the legal framework
of the new arrivals up to EU standards. The new democracies of Eastern
Europe thus ended up at the receiving end of a massive cultural transfer of
Western principles of good governance. But this is a special treatment
available only for potential member countries and beyond reach for
countries such as Moldova, Ukraine and Georgia, currently enrolled in the
The Resilience of History 31
EU Neighbourhood Policy (ENP).
The EU has not only created a divide between in- and out-group
countries in Eastern Europe. It has also drawn Eastern Europe into the
ongoing conflict about European integration in general and the EU in
particular. The EU friendly voices still dominate the East European
discourse, but Euroscepticism is becoming more and more widespread
(Mudde 2005). It is a complex phenomenon with a touch of
centre/periphery to it, but also with elements of nationalism and – in some
cases – xenophobia. The anti-Turkish sentiments in Austria, Germany and
France have struck a chord among East European nationalists keen on
preserving the EU as Union of Christian countries.
Conclusion
The turbulent and dramatic political history of Eastern Europe has brought
many changes. The collapse of the empires paved the way for a host of new
states. Many of them are still there, though not necessarily within the same
borders as in 1918. Two of them – Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia – were
to break up into half a dozen new nation states in the early 1990s. Three of
them – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – were annexed by the Soviet Union
in 1940 and reappeared as independent states in 1990. The region has been
at the very centre of two world wars; it has been exposed to foreign
occupation and domination and – in some cases – recurrent waves of ethnic
cleansing. The totalitarian experience was not quite over until communism
broke down in 1989–90; and the most recent episodes of ethnic cleansing in
the Yugoslav wars of independence are not even that far removed.
Nationalism – also in its milder forms – clearly remains a driving force in
the region. It was a centrifugal political force in political history of the
multi-ethnic empires. It was the dominant force of interwar Europe; it
survived communism with a vengeance and restructured post-communist
Europe. State and nation building remains a top-level priority throughout
the region from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The fault-line between Western
and Eastern Christianity, separating the Western and Eastern empires, also
makes its presence felt over time (see Figure 2.1). It is at any rate tempting
to attribute the importance attached to clientelism and kinship structures in
Orthodox countries to their Byzantine heritage. Countries on the Western
side of this fault-line have a different, more modern, political culture less
conducive to corruption.
Communism represents only a small part of the long history of Eastern
Europe, but it was nevertheless to leave a lasting impression. It served as an
agent of modernisation in a region thus far only partially industrialised.
Czechoslovakia had been a leading industrial nation already before the
Second World War, but East of Bohemia and Moravia there were only
32 Handbook of Political Change in Eastern Europe
pockets of industrialisation in interwar Central and Eastern Europe in and
around cities like Warsaw, ódz, Riga, and Budapest, and in the Romanian
oil district. The communist rulers set out to catch up with the West and
embarked on an extensive programme of industrialisation. It was based on
a Soviet blue print and had a devastating impact on the traditional social
structure. Private farming was wiped out and the vast majority of peasants
enrolled in large-scale agricultural industries. This undermined the basis for
the once well defined urban/rural cleavage in Eastern Europe. The class
structure that emerged was fuzzy. There were workers and – as time went
by – more and more people with a higher education and a ‘middle class’
standard of living (see Table 2.1); and it is hardly surprising that postcommunist
parties have found it difficult to carve out stable niches of
electoral support in this fluid socioeconomic setting.
The parties in comtemporary Eastern Europe often describe themselves
referring to the well known European party families – as socialist,
conservative or liberal – and many of them are part of a corresponding
faction of the European Parliament. This suggests that the same cleavages
might be operative across the continent. The country-specific chapters will
tell us to what extent this is true.
First, however, we will dwell at some length one of our key concepts –
political cleavages. This term is often reserved for fundamental long-lasting
divisions. This is why we describe ethnicity and religion as cleavages, and
the tensions between communists and anti-communists in the early 1990s as
a transient issue divide. The following chapter sets out to put the cleavage
concept into a broad theoretical context.
NOTES
* Acknowledgements: This chapter is partly based on Chapter 2 in the 1998 version of The Handbook
of Political Change in Eastern Europe, written by Tomas Hellén, Sten Berglund and Frank Aarebrot.
1. The peace settlement, which replaced the 1920 Peace Treaty of Sévres, gave Turkey all of
Anatolia and Eastern Thrace. To prevent any future disputes, it also called for a compulsory
population exchange; some 1.3 million Greeks and some 380,000 Turks were forced to emigrate
(Jelavich 1983a, 172).
The Resilience of History 33
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