Kneeling at the Altar of (Il)-Liberalism: The Politics of Ideas, Job Loss, and Union Weakness in East Central Europe

Pieter Vanhuysse

International Labor and Working-Class History, 2008, vol. 73, issue 1, 137-151

Abstract: As East Central Europe is fast approaching the end of its second decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, new studies of postcommunist politics and society can increasingly benefit from a longer historical perspective. We can now replace the “history of the present” lens that was typical of much research in the highly volatile 1990s with accounts that more extensively compare the most fundamental trends emerging from the decades before and after 1989–1990. In this spirit, both books under review make substantive and historically well-informed contributions to our understanding of the politics of work and workers in Central and Eastern Europe. In The Defeat of Solidarity, David Ost develops a gripping account of the progressive and interlinked defeats of labor interests and liberal democratic politics in Poland from the 1980s up to the present day. In Constructing Unemployment, Phineas Baxandall offers a theory of the political meaning of unemployment, applied mainly to the case of Hungary from the late 1940s until the end of the 1990s.

Date: 2008
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