In social scientific studies of Europe's new democracies, there has emerged an analytical approach which transcends the teleology of 'transitology' and, focusing on the impact of culture and history, is sensitive to the contingencies and 'eventfulness' of social transformations. The main thrust of this article is that such a culturo-historical approach may prove useful not only in assessing the different results to which the processes of democratization lead at the national level, but also to assess the general direction of political change after 1989 towards democracy. Building on Eisenstadt's notion of modernity as a cultural and political program, this article therefore attempts to understand the revolutions of 1989 not only as the mere sum of particular national events, but also as part of an 'entangled history', that is, as a common, transnational phenomenon which was based on and articulated a shared cultural understanding.
Key words■ cultural history ■ East-Central Europe ■ institutional convergence ■ modernity ■ revolutions of 1989 ■ transnational cultureIn twenty years of in-depth research into the emergence of Europe's new democracies, the social sciences have greatly enhanced our knowledge about how democratic institutions were established and took root in some of the countries of the former communist part of the world. For all its achievements, however, the literature on post-communist societies is increasingly characterized by a sense of disillusionment. Already at the turn of the century, Paul Kubicek (2000) had wondered whether, ten years after the momentous events of 1989, post-communist political studies were not twenty years behind the rest of their discipline in terms of methodology and theory development. With the twentieth anniversary of the annus mirabilis approaching, some of Germany's leading experts on political change in Central and Eastern Europe struck a similarly negative tone. In the early 1990s, they argued, the ability to study rapid social change at first hand had created high
The historiography of the Cold War has witnessed a revived interest in non-material factors such as culture and ideology. Although this incipient cultural history of the Cold War has focused mainly on the period from 1945 until the early 1960s, the signing of the Helsinki Final Act in 1975 turned ideas into potent factors of international politics when East European opposition groups began to expose how their governments violated the accord's human rights provisions. By putting the emergence of one such opposition group, the Polish Workers' Defense Committee, in an international context, this article extends Cold War cultural history into the 1970s and 1980s, tracing how human rights ideas affected international and domestic politics. The Communist states' willingness to put up with the human rights provisions in the Helsinki Final Act was not sufficient to “shame” them internationally. Instead, what happened is that Western leftists, after encountering East European dissidents, increasingly perceived human rights as a precondition for the success of their own political project and hence revoked what Robert Horvath calls the “revolutionary privilege” long granted to Communist regimes. Because Communism's identity was so closely related to its struggle with the West, this criticism was particularly damaging. Only within the dynamics of a cultural framework from earlier stages of postwar history did transnational human rights advocacy become effective.
Most scholars studying Polish politics agree that some of the country's fiercest political conflicts evolve around a cultural cleavage that Poland's Third Republic inherited from the communist period. The existing literature, however, provides no answer as to why this cleavage sustained its importance despite the events of 1989. Therefore, the article seeks to refine some of the theoretical categories used to analyze cultural legacies. In particular, it argues that cultural systems are transmitted through time primarily because they sustain their capacity to endow social reality with meaning. Focusing on right-wing discourse and in particular on the conflict over Poland's 1997 constitution, the article then shows that some of the cultural paradigms of the Solidarity period interacted with the character of the Polish transition as a compromise in a way that provided right-wing politicians with a meaningful framework within which to challenge their opponents and advance their claims.
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