ABSTRACT
Making sense of the political post-communist transition has proved to be a difficult task. In comparison, the economic transition had a clear beginning – the command economy, and a clear target – the free market. In terms of political culture, even the word “transition” has little meaning, and the early observation that East European Studies as a discipline is still far away from forging a theory of change of political culture may still be accurate (von Beyme 1996: 349). First, do we actually know where East European political culture comes from? Does it have its roots in the precommunist past, a time that adepts of cultural legacies theories depict as doomed to “etatism” and “collectivism” even before the advent of communism (Schoepflin 1978)? Are these historical sources of eastern European political culture so corrupt as to have even perverted communism itself (Jowitt 1993)? Or does the region’s political culture derive from the less remote communist times, assuming the communist regime was successful in imposing its culture upon both elites and the community? And what were the features of the community political culture during communism? As all analysts point out, comparative research in eastern Europe suffers from a “tabula rasa problem,” as the first partially reliable comparable data were collected only as late as 1990 (Plasser and Pribersky 1996: 5). Surveys prior to this date are suspected of pro-regime bias and therefore almost useless. Second, where are these societies headed for? Perhaps the answer is toward a universal type of liberal or Western democratic political culture? But does such an entity even exist? If so how do we account for the broad range of different liberal cultures, from the individualistic Anglo-Saxons to the more collectivistic Germans, from the “feminine” Scandinavians to the “masculine” Americans (Hofstede 1998)? Differences in institutional culture among West Europeans are a common complaint within the European Union, where a “Northern” and a “Mediterranean” culture are allegedly in tense cohabitation. Even assum-
acquired the upper hand for good?
