ABSTRACT
Arguably, post-1989 transitions in post-communist Eastern Europe have
been articulated through discourses of Western management and conditioning, usually reflecting collaboration with local ‘‘democratic’’ political
and business elites, or, conversely, opposition to recalcitrant, ‘‘Soviet-mentality’’
governments. As we have seen, the trajectories of this conditioning – neces-
sary in order to preserve the ‘‘standards’’ of such premier clubs as the EU,
NATO, or the World Bank – have been presented as a mixture of economic
exploitation and problematic multiculturalist identity politics in Grass’s and
Kundera’s novels.
