The World of Labor and Workers in Modern East Central Europe: Introduction to the Thematic Issue

Abstract

The world of labor and the discourse about it has changed again and again in modern East Central Europe. Since the given framework of the introduction to the thematic issue does not allow me to provide a complete overview of the literature of contemporary East Central European labor history (see, for example, van der Linden 2008; Zimmerman 2017), here I am going to focus on answering the following questions: Why is East Central European labor history peculiar or special? How and why has the situation of labor history been changing during the last decades? What is the relation between global labor history and ece labor history? What kind of gaps are there in the research and what are the most important research trends? A. From a global historical point of view, the modern, late nineteenthand twentieth-century development of societies in East Central Europe (Puttkamer 2010; Livezeanu and Klimó 2017) differs in several ways from both the Western and the Eastern regions of the continent (Tomka 2013). This diversity especially can be seen in the social and economic position or role of labor and the working class. The differences can be seen in the delay of the industrial development and the partial or incomplete foundation of capitalism and a civil, bourgeois society. Yet, developments in the sense of their content and trends were basically similar to Western Europe, which was considered as the center of civilization and modernization, and thus the normative model. Another important specificity of the East Central European region is that societies had been relatively open here until the mid-twentieth century. However they became more closed after 1945, when they became part of the Soviet sphere of interest. With this decisive change these countries exited the international systems of migration and the free movement of labor. Later, as the