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

Offering a single, coherent framework of the political, economic, and social phenomena that characterize post-communist regimes, this is the most comprehensive work on the subject to date. Focusing on Central Europe, the post-Soviet countries and China, the study provides a systematic mapping of possible post-communist trajectories. At exploring the structural foundations of post-communist regime development, the work discusses the types of state, with an emphasis on informality and patronalism; the variety of actors in the political, economic, and communal spheres; the ways autocrats neutralize media, elections, etc. The analysis embraces the color revolutions of civil resistance (as in Georgia and in Ukraine) and the defensive mechanisms of democracy and autocracy; the evolution of corruption and the workings of “relational economy”; an analysis of China as “market-exploiting dictatorship”; the sociology of “clientage society”; and the instrumental use of ideology, with an emphasis on populism. Beyond a cataloguing of phenomena—actors, institutions, and dynamics of post-communist democracies, autocracies, and dictatorships—Magyar and Madlovics also conceptualize everything as building blocks to a larger, coherent structure: a new language for post-communist regimes. While being the most definitive book on the topic, the book is nevertheless written in an accessible style suitable for both beginners who wish to understand the logic of post-communism and scholars who are interested in original contributions to comparative regime theory. The book is equipped with QR codes that link to www.postcommunistregimes.com, which contains interactive, 3D supplementary material for teaching.

Why do some governing parties limit their opportunistic behaviour and constrain the extraction of private gains from the state? This analysis of post-communist state reconstruction provides surprising answers to this fundamental question of party politics. Across the post-communist democracies, governing parties have opportunistically reconstructed the state - simultaneously exploiting it by extracting state resources and building new institutions that further such extraction. They enfeebled or delayed formal state institutions of monitoring and oversight, established new discretionary structures of state administration, and extracted enormous informal profits from the privatization of the communist economy. By examining how post-communist political parties rebuilt the state in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia, Grzymala-Busse explains how even opportunistic political parties will limit their corrupt behaviour and abuse of state resources when faced with strong political competition.

Media Transformations in the Post-Communist World: Eastern Europe's Tortured Path to Change, edited by Peter Gross and Karol Jakubowicz, is a collection of analyses of Eastern European media by some of the most distinguished scholars in the field. This in-depth exploration shows how despite positive changes after the fall of Communism, the transformations of societal institutions, including the mass media, have turned out to be slow, uncertain, and unsatisfying to many when measured against the admittedly ambiguous and overly Panglossian expectations. This collection offers readers a different view of post-Communist media by examining the mass media's evolution in the region from a more holistic perspective. The contributors to this volume respond to essential questions, including: Is the post-Communist transition and transformation over? When can it be considered over? Each chapter contributes to our understanding of these questions by offering theoretical overviews and country-specific studies. This collection serves as an affirmation that the study of mass media is essential to understanding the nature and workings of democracy in the long-suffering nations of Central and Eastern Europe, with international applications. Media Transformations in the Post-Communist World is an indispensable contribution to the study of Eastern Europe after Communism, and the transformations of mass media in the region.

In the summer and fall of 1998, ultranationalist Polish Catholics erected hundreds of crosses outside Auschwitz, setting off a fierce debate that pitted Catholics and Jews against one another. While this controversy had ramifications that extended well beyond Poland’s borders, Geneviève Zubrzycki sees it as a particularly crucial moment in the development of post-Communist Poland’s statehood and its changing relationship to Catholicism. In The Crosses of Auschwitz, Zubrzycki skillfully demonstrates how this episode crystallized latent social conflicts regarding the significance of Catholicism in defining “Polishness” and the role of anti-Semitism in the construction of a new Polish identity. Since the fall of Communism, the binding that has held Polish identity and Catholicism together has begun to erode, creating unease among ultranationalists. Within their construction of Polish identity also exists pride in the Polish people’s long history of suffering. For the ultranationalists, then, the crosses at Auschwitz were not only symbols of their ethno-Catholic vision, but also an attempt to lay claim to what they perceived was a Jewish monopoly over martyrdom. This gripping account of the emotional and aesthetic aspects of the scene of the crosses at Auschwitz offers profound insights into what Polishness is today and what it may become.

This edited collection addresses the dynamics of the post-Communist transition in Central Eastern Europe. Its contributors present a detailed analysis of the events unfolding during the last three decades in the region, focusing in particular on identity-building processes and reforms in Belarus, Bulgaria, Czechia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Ukraine. The contributors outline reasons why some of these states accomplished a decisive break with the Communist past and became members of European and transatlantic structures, while some opted for pseudo-transition and fostered hybrid political regimes, jeopardizing their genuine integration with the West. A group of states which decided to preserve their Communist legacy is also explained. The collection describes and scrutinizes the formation of geopolitical affiliations and the evolution of discourses of belonging. It also traces the fluctuating dynamics of national decision-making and institution-building, as many of the post-Communist states reconsider and re-elaborate their initial ideas and visions of Europe today. Finally, the collection brings to light the rapidly changing perceptions of the region by the major global actors—the European Union, People’s Republic of China, Russian Federation, and others.

By providing a survey of consumption and lifestyle in Hungary during the second half of the twentieth century, this book shows how common people lived during and after tumultuous regime changes. After an introduction covering the late 1930s, the study centers on the communist era, and goes on to describe changes in the post-communist period with its legacy of state socialism. Tibor Valuch poses a series of questions. Who could be called rich or poor and how did they live in the various periods? How did living, furnishings, clothing, income, and consumption mirror the structure of the society and its transformations? How could people accommodate their lifestyles to the political and social system? How specific to the regime was consumption after the communist takeover, and how did consumption habits change after the demise of state socialism? The answers, based on micro-histories, statistical data, population censuses and surveys help to understand the complexities of daily life, not only in Hungary, but also in other communist regimes in east-central Europe, with insights on their antecedents and afterlives.

Yellow Star, Red Star asks why Holocaust memory continues to be so deeply troubled—ignored, appropriated, and obfuscated—throughout Eastern Europe, even though it was in those lands that most of the extermination campaign occurred. As part of accession to the European Union, Jelena Subotić shows, East European states were required to adopt, participate in, and contribute to the established Western narrative of the Holocaust. This requirement created anxiety and resentment in post-communist states: Holocaust memory replaced communist terror as the dominant narrative in Eastern Europe, focusing instead on predominantly Jewish suffering in World War II. Influencing the European Union's own memory politics and legislation in the process, post-communist states have attempted to reconcile these two memories by pursuing new strategies of Holocaust remembrance. The memory, symbols, and imagery of the Holocaust have been appropriated to represent crimes of communism. Yellow Star, Red Star presents in-depth accounts of Holocaust remembrance practices in Serbia, Croatia, and Lithuania, and extends the discussion to other East European states. The book demonstrates how countries of the region used Holocaust remembrance as a political strategy to resolve their contemporary "ontological insecurities"—insecurities about their identities, about their international status, and about their relationships with other international actors. As Subotić concludes, Holocaust memory in Eastern Europe has never been about the Holocaust or about the desire to remember the past, whether during communism or in its aftermath. Rather, it has been about managing national identities in a precarious and uncertain world.

The fall of the Berlin Wall launched the transformation of government, economy and society across half of Europe and the former Soviet Union. This text deals with the process of change in former Communist bloc countries, ten of which have become new European Union (EU) democracies while Russia and her neighbours remain burdened by their Soviet legacy. Drawing on more than a hundred public opinion surveys from the New Europe Barometer, the text compares how ordinary people have coped with the stresses and opportunities of transforming Communist societies into post-Communist societies and the resulting differences between peoples in the new EU member states and Russia. Subjects covered by Understanding Post-Communist Transformation include: Stresses and opportunities of economic transformation Social capital and the development of civil society Elections and the complexities of party politics The challenges for the EU of raising standards of democratic governance Differences between Russia’s and the West’s interpretation of political life Written by one of the world's most renowned authorities on this subject, this text is ideal for courses on transition, post-communism, democratization and Russian and Eastern European history and politics.

This is the first volume to overview the complex Romanian transitional justice effort, detail the political negotiations that have led to the adoption and implementation of relevant legislation, and assess these processes in terms of their timing, sequencing, and impact on democratization.