Art and Democracy in Post-Communist Europe
Art and Democracy in Post-Communist Europe

Author: Piotr Piotrowski

Publisher: Reaktion Books

Published: 2012-08-01

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 1861899319

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When the Iron Curtain fell in 1989, Eastern Europe saw a new era begin, and the widespread changes that followed extended into the world of art. Art and Democracy in Post-Communist Europe examines the art created in light of the profound political, social, economic, and cultural transformations that occurred in the former Eastern Bloc after the Cold War ended. Assessing the function of art in post-communist Europe, Piotr Piotrowski describes the changing nature of art as it went from being molded by the cultural imperatives of the communist state and a tool of political propaganda to autonomous work protesting against the ruling powers. Piotrowski discusses communist memory, the critique of nationalism, issues of gender, and the representation of historic trauma in contemporary museology, particularly in the recent founding of contemporary art museums in Bucharest, Tallinn, and Warsaw. He reveals the anarchistic motifs that had a rich tradition in Eastern European art and the recent emergence of a utopian vision and provides close readings of many artists—including Ilya Kavakov and Krzysztof Wodiczko—as well as Marina Abramovic’s work that responded to the atrocities of the Balkans. A cogent investigation of the artistic reorientation of Eastern Europe, this book fills a major gap in contemporary artistic and political discourse.

Post-Communist Democracies and Party Organization
Post-Communist Democracies and Party Organization

Author: Margit Tavits

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013-06-24

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 1107276802

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Scholars of post-communist politics often argue that parties in new democracies lack strong organizations - sizable membership, local presence, and professional management - because they do not need them to win elections and they may hinder a party's flexibility and efficiency in office. Post-Communist Democracies and Party Organization explains why some political parties are better able than others to establish themselves in new democracies and why some excel at staying unified in parliament, whereas others remain dominated by individuals. Focusing on the democratic transitions in post-communist Europe from 1990 to 2010, Margit Tavits demonstrates that the successful establishment of a political party in a new democracy crucially depends on the strength of its organization. Yet not all parties invest in organization development. This book uses data from ten post-communist democracies, including detailed analysis of parties in the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, and Poland.

Trust and Democratic Transition in Post-communist Europe
Trust and Democratic Transition in Post-communist Europe

Author: Ivana Marková

Publisher:

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 9780191734922

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A collection of essays concerned with theoretical and empirical analyses of trust and distrust in post-communist Europe which show that, while political and economic changes can have rapid effects, cultural and psychological changes may linger and influence political trust and representations of democracy.

The Defeat of Solidarity
The Defeat of Solidarity

Author: David Ost

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-07-05

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 1501729276

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How did the fall of communism and the subsequent transition to capitalism in Eastern Europe affect the people who experienced it? And how did their anger affect the quality of the democratic systems that have emerged? Poland offers a particularly provocative case, for it was here where workers most famously seemed to have won, thanks to the role of the Solidarity trade union. And yet, within a few short years, they had clearly lost. An oppressive communist regime gave way to a capitalist society that embraced economic and political inequality, leaving many workers frustrated and angry. Their leaders first ignored them, then began to fear them, and finally tried to marginalize them. In turn, workers rejected their liberal leaders, opening the way for right-wing nationalists to take control of Solidarity. Ost tells a fascinating story about the evolution of postcommunist society in Eastern Europe. Informed by years of fieldwork in Polish factory towns, scores of interviews with workers, labor activists, and politicians, and an exhaustive reading of primary sources, his new book gives voice to those who have not been heard. But even more, Ost proposes a novel theory about the role of anger in politics to show why such voices matter, and how they profoundly affect political outcomes. Drawing on Poland's experiences, Ost describes lessons relevant to democratization throughout Eastern Europe and to democratic theory in general.

Art beyond Borders
Art beyond Borders

Author: Jerome Bazin

Publisher: Central European University Press

Published: 2016-03-01

Total Pages: 531

ISBN-13: 9633860830

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This book presents and analyzes artistic interactions both within the Soviet bloc and with the West between 1945 and 1989. During the Cold War the exchange of artistic ideas and products united Europe?s avant-garde in a most remarkable way. Despite the Iron Curtain and national and political borders there existed a constant flow of artists, artworks, artistic ideas and practices. The geographic borders of these exchanges have yet to be clearly defined. How were networks, centers, peripheries (local, national and international), scales, and distances constructed? How did (neo)avant-garde tendencies relate with officially sanctioned socialist realism? The literature on the art of Eastern Europe provides a great deal of factual knowledge about a vast cultural space, but mostly through the prism of stereotypes and national preoccupations. By discussing artworks, studying the writings on art, observing artistic evolution and artists? strategies, as well as the influence of political authorities, art dealers and art critics, the essays in Art beyond Borders compose a transnational history of arts in the Soviet satellite countries in the post war period. ÿ

Post-Communist Malaise
Post-Communist Malaise

Author: Zoran Samardzija

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2020-05-15

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 0813587166

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The collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was supposed to bring about the “end of history” with capitalism and liberal democracy achieving decisive victories. Europe would now integrate and reconcile with its past. However, the aftershocks of the financial crisis of 2008—the rise in right-wing populism, austerity politics, and mass migration—have shown that the ideological divisions which haunted Europe in the twentieth century still remain. It is within this context that Post-Communist Malaise revives discourses of political modernism and revisits debates from Marxism and seventies film theory. Analyzing work of Theo Angelopoulos, Věra Chytilová, Srdjan Dragojević, Jean-Luc Godard, Miklós Jancsó, Emir Kusturica, Dušan Makavejev, Cristi Puiu, Jan Švankmajer, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Béla Tarr, the book focuses on how select cinemas from Eastern Europe and the Balkans critique the neoliberal integration of Europe whose failures fuel the rise of nationalism and right-wing politics. By politicizing art cinema from the regions, Post-Communist Malaise asks fundamental questions about film, aesthetics, and ideology. It argues for the utopian potential of the materiality of cinematic time to imagine a new political and cultural organization for Europe.

Post-Communist Mafia State
Post-Communist Mafia State

Author: B lint Magyar

Publisher: Central European University Press

Published: 2016-03-01

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 6155513546

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Having won a two-third majority in Parliament at the 2010 elections, the Hungarian political party Fidesz removed many of the institutional obstacles of exerting power. Just like the party, the state itself was placed under the control of a single individual, who since then has applied the techniques used within his party to enforce submission and obedience onto society as a whole. In a new approach the author characterizes the system as the ?organized over-world?, the ?state employing mafia methods? and the ?adopted political family', applying these categories not as metaphors but elements of a coherent conceptual framework. The actions of the post-communist mafia state model are closely aligned with the interests of power and wealth concentrated in the hands of a small group of insiders. While the traditional mafia channeled wealth and economic players into its spheres of influence by means of direct coercion, the mafia state does the same by means of parliamentary legislation, legal prosecution, tax authority, police forces and secret service. The innovative conceptual framework of the book is important and timely not only for Hungary, but also for other post-communist countries subjected to autocratic rules. ÿ

Crafting Democracy
Crafting Democracy

Author: Jennifer A. Yoder

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Published: 2013-02-07

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 144221600X

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The importance of subnational regions to politics, governance, and economic development in Western Europe has long been recognized. However, far less is known about recent steps to introduce a regional level of politics in East Central Europe. Reforms there are part of the larger process of crafting democracy; that is, regional reforms are linked to the economic and political transition away from communism and toward “Europe,” specifically the European Union. Crafting Democracy offers an important comparative analysis of the process and outcomes of region-building in the four Visegrád countries. Jennifer A. Yoder investigates why some but not other post-communist countries chose to introduce a regional level of elected government. In the 1990s, for example, Poland boldly took the lead in regionalization, while the Czech Republic and Slovakia lagged behind. Hungary, meanwhile, declined to create regions. The author argues that these regional reform processes have potentially far-reaching implications for state-society relations, political participation, and policymaking at the domestic level. The emergence of new actors at the subnational level, moreover, creates opportunities for cross-border and European Union–level initiatives.

Constructing the Limits of Europe
Constructing the Limits of Europe

Author: Rumena Filipova

Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand

Published: 2022-04-30

Total Pages: 498

ISBN-13: 3838216490

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This comparative study harks back to the revolutionary year of 1989 and asks two critical questions about the resulting reconfiguration of Europe in the aftermath of the collapse of communism: Why did Central and East European states display such divergent outcomes of their socio-political transitions? Why did three of those states—Poland, Bulgaria, and Russia—differ so starkly in terms of the pace and extent of their integration into Europe? Rumena Filipova argues that Poland’s, Bulgaria’s, and Russia’s dominating conceptions of national identity have principally shaped these countries’ foreign policy behavior after 1989. Such an explanation of these three nations’ diverging degrees of Europeanization stands in contrast to institutionalist-rationalist, interest-based accounts of democratic transition and international integration in post-communist Europe. She thereby makes a case for the need to include ideational factors into the study of International Relations and demonstrates that identities are not easily malleable and may not be as fluid as often assumed. She proposes a theoretical “middle-ground” argument that calls for “qualified post-positivism” as an integrated perspective that combines positivist and post-positivist orientations in the study of IR.

Politically Unbecoming
Politically Unbecoming

Author: Anthony Gardner

Publisher: Mit Press

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780262028530

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Mapping contemporary artists who reject the aesthetics of democratization (and its neoliberal associations) in order to explore alternative politics and practices. From biennials and installations to participatory practices, contemporary art has come to embrace an aesthetic of democratization. Art's capacity for democracy building now defines its contemporary relevance, part of a broader, global glorification of democracy as, it seems, the only legitimate model of politics. Yet numerous artists reject the alignment of art and democracy--in part because democracy has been associated not only with utopian political visions but also with neoliberal incursions and military interventions. It is just this paradox of democracy that Anthony Gardner explores in Politically Unbecoming, examining work from the 1980s to the 2000s by artists who have challenged democracy as the defining political, critical, and aesthetic frame for their work. In doing so, these artists also develop alternative artistic politics and practices that can remap the transformations in art and its politics since the end of the Cold War. The artists whose work Gardner examines all spent their formative years in Eastern or Western Europe, developing "postsocialist" practices in the wake of socialism's eclipse by neoliberalism (and inspired by nonconformist art from socialist-era Europe). All of these artists--who include Ilya Kabakov, the art collective NSK, and Thomas Hirschhorn--depend on participation between audience and artwork; yet for them, participation does not exemplify democratization but rather offers critical engagement with certain tropes of democracy. These artists, Gardner argues, enact an aesthetic that is "politically unbecoming" in two senses: in its withdrawal from overdetermined political categories of contemporary art; and in its perceived indecency in defying the "propriety" of democracy.