Terry Cox

Trends and developments in east central European industrial relations

This article overviews developments in industrial relations in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland since the fall of the communist regimes in 1989, and assesses the extent to which key developments in these countries reflect both change and continuity from the communist period. We explore the four main institutions through which industrial relations have been conducted: trades unions, workers’ councils, employer organisations, and the tripartite arrangements involving representatives of unions and employers with the state.

Social and economic transformation in East Central Europe : institutions, property relations and social interests

The state managed economy and social relations under the old regimes three paths of development of the state managed economy paths of extrication the contested politics of social transformation transformation and institutional change inequality, poverty and unemployment towards a new system of industrial relations property ownership and enterprise participation problems and prospects.

Civil society and interest representation in Hungarian political development

During its first four years of parliamentary democracy Hungary has quickly developed many aspects of a stable functioning liberal democratic political system, and at the level of formal politics it...

Democratization and State–Society Relations in East Central Europe: The Case of Hungary

There has been much debate on the character of relations between state and society in post-communist democratic transition in East Central Europe. Approaches range from applications of corporatist theory to analyses in terms of the weakness of civil society in ECE. However, the findings of surveys of Hungarian interest group leaders conducted between 1994 and 2001 suggest that if evidence is sought on interconnections between interest group leaders and the state, and if connections beyond those provided by formal tripartite organizations are studied, arguments concerning the weakness of civil society are called into question, and at least should be qualified. This article draws on research funded by University of Strathclyde Research and Development Fund (1995–96) on ‘Interest Formation and Interest Representation in Eastern Europe’ and by the British Academy on ‘Interest Representation in Contemporary Hungarian Politics’, 2001–2. The author wishes to acknowledge the support of László Vass, Gergely Koppany, Sean Crossan and Irene McMaster for advice and assistance, and the useful comments of participants of panels at the annual American Political Science Association Convention, San Francisco, September 2001 and the International Council for East European Studies World Congress, Berlin, July 2005.

Russian Modernisation—A New Paradigm

to the concrete by ‘operationalising’ the various aspects of structuration in each of five challenges. This can be done by creating middle range theoretical concepts and by advancing by means of specified hypotheses. While structuration theory as such is not falsifiable in these more concrete sets of theoretical propositions we should aim at creating falsifiable propositions concerning the concrete historical explanations of structuration processes. In each of the clusters that make up the research programme of the Finnish School of Excellence our analysis should identify Russian development or modernisation effort in terms of the following: resources; structural constraints; agency in terms of identity, cognitive resources and organisational capacities; agency in terms of frames and schematas, cultural codes, values and norms; the reproduction basis of institutions, intended and unintended results; and the role of informal networks and patterns. In this way, departing from structuration theory we take distance from reduction into abstract categories (for example differentiation and integration in the functionalist tradition and the work of Arnason) as well as from the totalising efforts to subsume arbitrarily all kinds of phenomena to all-encompassing civilisational concepts. Five macro-level modernisation challenges In order to grasp the internal Russian political and cultural constellations of modernisation and their position vis-à-vis the larger global community, the Finnish Centre of Excellence, which is represented in the essays of this collection, proposes a multi-level, interdisciplinary approach, which enables close dialogue and interaction between studies on different themes and periods. Our intention is that this new approach will eventually result in a new paradigm in Russian studies. The ‘Finnish school’ represents an interdisciplinary and multi-positional research programme based on shared research problems regarding a joint set of methodological and theoretical approaches. It combines in-depth empirical analysis of Russia with theoretical ambition that extends beyond the Russian context. The Centre of Excellence advances a Finnish approach that emphasises choice and agency, intended and unintended results and the social constitution of culture. In this regard, in order to grasp the emphasis on choice and agency and to account for both intended and unintended consequences, the Centre of Excellence has developed a concept of five ‘Russian challenges’ as a heuristic way of defining the problem. Russia is not a coherent or omnipotent actor. Rather it is a complex institutional tension field formed by various structuration processes in which various actors make the process happen based on their own often contradictory interests and intentions. The five major challenges Russia faces are: diversification of the economy; development of the political system, whether on the basis of a model of democracy or authoritarian governance; a choice of the model for the welfare regime; the basic orientation in foreign policy, whether conflict or integration; and the construction of a post-communist form of rationality and cultural identity. The results of the Centre of Excellence are expected to challenge traditional and contemporary views on Russian modernisation. At the same time, the programmatic intention MARKKU KIVINEN & TERRY COX 10 seeks to ‘bring Russia back to Russian studies’ (Cohen 1999), and to the core of social theory as such. The Centre of Excellence maintains that Russia should not be seen only as an empirical case; we view it as a challenge for our understanding of basic social processes of modernisation in general. On the basis of the structuration theory we have arrived at a research setting presented in Figure 1. The essays in this edited collection represent some aspects of a more comprehensive research programme based on five clusters. The first challenge: diversification of the economy. Russia’s modernisation prospects will be based on its economy regardless of the approach adopted. Therein the key challenge is economic diversification. While Russia must reap full benefits from its energy resources to generate the necessary finances, it also must lessen its excessive energy dependency in the domestic economy and foreign trade. Our approach to diversification refers not only to the diversification of industry but also to the social and organisational forms of public and private units involved in economic activities. Over the last six years, a new research programme has been developed in Finland on the structuration of Russian energy policy (Aalto 2012; Aalto et al. 2014), the policy frames guiding it and the role of energy in economic modernisation in general. In his essay Pami Aalto analyses Russia’s choices for modernising its energy sector as revealed in the case of Arctic offshore oil. He integrates discussion on various structural dimensions with an analysis of the varying interests of several significant actors. He argues that the simultaneous realisation of the Russian energy companies’ profit interests, the fiscal interests of the government and sustainability and social development interests depends on the proper diagnosis of four structural dimensions: the resource geographical, financial, institutional and ecological. However the energy resources as such are not the main problem of Russian modernisation contrary to what part of the diversification debate suggests. Rather the problem is the frames Russian actors use to weigh the policy environment through which FIGURE 1. ASPECTS OF RUSSIAN MOdERNISATION. RUSSIAN MOdERNISATION—A NEW PARAdIGM 11 the resource wealth can be actualised. This seems to support one of the basic hypotheses of the Centre of Excellence: if, following Giddens, structure is understood as comprising both the resources and rules of the game, Russia’s problems, on a general level, are less to do with resources and more to do with agency and the rules of the game. This collection also contains two essays on this thematic area focusing on the structuration of modernisation problems during Soviet times. Katalin Miklossy and Sari Autio-Sarasmo have previously shown that even under socialism, economic development was not possible endogenously but presupposed interaction with the Western world and ‘neo-endogenous’ competition within the socialist bloc. In her essay Sari Autio-Sarasmo shows how scientific-technical cooperation with the West had both intended and unintended effects within the Soviet system, finally jeopardising some of its basic structural principles. In a similar vein Katalin Miklossy presents a dynamic process in which the structural principle of competition was adopted by the Soviet bloc both in economy and in culture. The second challenge: a hybrid political regime. The development of Russian institutions remains at the core of the modernisation process. All the sub-projects in this thematic area are connected to the question of what the Russian state is like today and what will determine its institutional development in the future. Although all sub-projects are organisationally independent, they are linked to each other through the connecting concepts of agency, rules of the game and cultural self-understanding. The cluster team produces a comprehensive picture of Russian institutional development and the study of agency, and therefore includes political and legal systems, public administration, companies, social networks and the media. In this volume Vladimir Gel’man and Andrei Starodubtsev examine the results of several Russian policy reforms in the 2000s. Again we can see the relevance of agency and structuration in their analysis. There is no ‘structural causation’ from electoral authoritarianism to individual reform projects. They conceptualise the tax and budget reform as a success story where intended results were achieved and the conditions for the reproduction of the system in 2000 were established. However, many structural constraints of the authoritarian modernisation project and the lack of strong democratic agencies are causing failures in several reform efforts. The authors argue that this failing can even jeopardise the incentive for the elite of the whole project of authoritarian modernisation. Jussi Lassila’s analysis of the Russian elite and the opposition shows some of the key processes of discursive constitution of the actors in the political scene. The opposition seems to operate within the same populist discourse as the elite. Lassila calls this Russia’s ideational paradox. He argues that Putin’s personal vigour has been a successful substitute for the weak institutional system but Russia’s post-Soviet development has created a highly productive soil for the emergence of a popular rupture. Whether the populist opposition is able to substitute electoral authoritarianism with new structural principles that would be more competitive and democratic, remains a problem awaiting any resolution. The third challenge: the welfare regime. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, socialist welfare structures have experienced rapid, large-scale changes and constant reformulation. Modernisation and institutional reforms have not necessarily proceeded as expected and Russian welfare institutions remain rather weak and of low quality. This cluster examines welfare on the one hand as structures and processes, and on the other hand as cultural meanings and agency. At the national level in Russia, welfare will be assessed through federal policies and relevant indexes. At the meso and micro levels, we deal with different (state and non-state) MARKKU KIVINEN & TERRY COX 12 welfare providers, agents within them and various vulnerable groups; class structures; as well as the professionalisation of work within welfare institutions. At the same time welfare is also approached through problems concerning bodily, sexual and gender issues. International and

Reconsidering the Hungarian revolution of 1956

The fortieth anniversary of the Hungarian uprising of October‐November 1956 came fortuitously several years after the collapse of the communist system in Hungary and the Soviet Union, following which archives in both countries have been opened to scholarly scrutiny. These changes have permitted scholars ‐ and the public at large ‐to identify those events as a revolution, and to examine and document it in ways that were hitherto forbidden. The nature of that revolution has been and continues to be explored and debated, and the debate feeds into the present attempts to redefine the nations place in post‐communist Europe: various groups have attempted to claim 1956 as their own. Both the scholarly and the political debates are likely to continue.

State and organized interests in post-communist Hungarian politics

Abstract The paper reviews different approaches to the study of both the state and civil society in post-communist East Central Europe and questions the predominant view in the literature that civil society in the region is weak. Existing research has focused on the one hand, on the elitist character of the state and the growing strength of the central executive within government, and on the other hand, on the low levels of grassroots involvement in interest groups and civic associations. Drawing on data from two different research projects on Hungary, one on the state, the other on interest group politics, the paper suggests there is evidence of more effective interest representation and more dynamic inter-relations between state and society than is usually assumed.

1956—Discoveries, legacies and memory

Since the end of the 1980s, a great deal of original and innovative research has been carried out on the events, meanings and memories of 1956 in Eastern Europe. After 1989 it became possible for researchers to explore previously closed archives and to freely interview participants in the events of 1956 without fear of repression or reprisals. As a result, the 1990s witnessed a steady stream of important new publi cations revealing new evidence of the diplomatic, political and social background, the events and motivations of political leaders, and the repercussions and legacies of 1956 in Eastern Europe. The period up to the fortieth anniversary year of 1996 saw a concentration of new published work reflecting the ongoing research on 1956, and further evidence and insights have continued to be produced in the years since then. The research produced in the early post-communist years was particularly fruitful in uncovering, or recovering, the detailed history of the events and developments of 1956, much of which had been suppressed, repressed or forgotten in the years of communist rule that followed. Important work of this kind has also continued during the past 10 years, but perhaps with the benefit of the perspective offered by a slightly longer time span, it has been complemented by a growing amount of work that develops a deeper understanding of the broader context and legacy of 1956. Some of the more recent research, exploring both the recovery of the history of 1956 and its legacy and memory, was presented at a conference on 1956 and its Legacy Hungary and Poland on 29 30 March 2006 at the University of Glasgow. The papers reflected the current and recent work of scholars from Great Britain, Hungary and Poland. Two institutions represented at this conference-the Institute for the Study of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution in Budapest, and the Institute of National Remem brance in Warsaw have played key roles in the making of the new history of 1956 and its legacy. This edited collection includes revised versions of nearly all the papers presented at the Glasgow conference, along with two extra papers, including one by a US scholar on Soviet aspects of 1956. In order to provide some background to the

The New History of the Russian Peasantry

Books reviewed in this article: Stephen Frank, Crime, Cultural Conflict and Justice in Rural Russia, 1856–1914 Judith Pallot, Land Reform in Russia 1906–1917: Peasant Responses to Stolypin’s Project of Rural Transformation Yanni Kotsonis, Making Peasants Backward: Agricultural Cooperatives and the Agrarian Question in Russia, 1861–1914 David Moon, The Russian Peasantry 1600–1930: The World the Peasants Made Judith Pallot (ed.), Transforming Peasants: Society, State and the Peasantry, 1861–1930 Since the end of the 1970s, there has been an upsurge in writing on the Russian peasantry during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and some of the most recent examples are discussed here. The work is characterized by its richness of new information and an extension of scholarship into new aspects of peasant economy, society and culture of the period. Much of this new work avoids detailed theorizing, presenting itself as a more grounded and complex understanding than provided by earlier, ‘ideologically driven’ Marxist and neo–populist approaches, while at the same time drawing on concepts introduced by J.C. Scott and others. This essay offers an account of this body of research and explores its implications for an understanding of the period in terms of class analysis and capitalist development.

The picnic on the border: an Interview with László Vass

ON 28 FEBRUARY 1989, THE LEADERSHIP OF THE Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party took a momentous decision to dismantle the high-security installations along its border with Austria. The National Headquarters of the Frontier Guards then worked out a programme, initially seen as lasting for two years, for the removal of the high wire fence and electric alarm system that had been installed all along the 350-kilometre border. It thus marked the beginning of the dismantling of the iron curtain across Europe and preceded the fall of the Berlin Wall by several months. The new border policy was announced on 2 May at an international press conference at Hegyeshalom, and on the 27 June a ceremony was held in which some wire of the border fence was symbolically cut by Alois Mock and Gyula Horn, the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of Austria and Hungary. The decision, carried out with the approval of the Soviet leadership, was seen initially as a means of improving relations between Hungary and Austria and ‘normalising’ the movement of the citizens of each country across the common border. However, as Mark Kramer notes in his essay in this collection, it ‘had the unintended effect of spurring tens of thousands of East Germans to travel to Hungary, a country they were allowed to visit with minimal restrictions’, from where they planned to move ‘en masse to the western border area, hoping to be granted permission to cross into Austria’. Meanwhile the relaxation of border controls attracted the interest of people in opposition circles in Hungary; an idea soon emerged to organise a symbolic meeting between Hungarians and Austrians from each side of the border, based on a picnic at which Austrians and Hungarians would move across the border to eat and drink with each other. The event, it was hoped, would give further impetus to the many other changes taking place in Hungary in 1989 in the direction of democratisation and greater openness. Perhaps surprisingly, the idea for the event came from the opposite end of Hungary, from Debrecen in the east. The idea originated with Ferenc Mészaros, along with Mária Filep and László Magas, members of the Debrecen Hungarian Democratic Forum (HDF, Magyar Demokrata Fórum) group following a dinner with Otto von Hapsburg on 20 June 1989. Hapsburg, a direct descendent of the last Hapsburg EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES Vol. 63, No. 9, November 2011, 1627–1638