ABSTRACT
It is an obvious absurdity, but one rarely noticed, that most social science research on the transformations in Central and Eastern Europe fails to consider what is happening in post-socialist societies, what is changing and what is staying the same, and in what direction they are heading. The transitology paradigm, writes Akos Rona-Tas (1998), assumes the answers to the most intriguing questions before they can even be posed. Eastern European transformations are seen as leading inexorably to the consolidation of liberal democracy and capitalism. Post-socialist societies are consequently categorized as “in transition”. Transition is the orthodox term drawn from 1970s and 1980s experiences of transition from authoritarianism to democracy in Latin America and Southern Europe.2 As such, it tends to conceive systemic change in a narrow, teleological fashion, presupposing “a fundamental political and economic distinction between what was and what is to come” (Kennedy 1994: 2).3 Dissenting from this view are sociologists who suggest that East European transitions are path-dependent or sui generis given their recent socialist past. They study the post-socialist emergence of new and hybrid institutional forms that are distinct from Western markets and polities (Stark and Bruszt 1997; Burawoy and Krotov 1992). Very few scholars however, have analyzed the so-termed transitions as a comprehensive societal transformation that is shifting the very boundaries of state and civil society, public and private, national and international.
