The legacy of communist political culture in East-Central Europe: A study of the post-communist mind.

摘要

This thesis considers the psychosocial legacy of communism and its implications. Its main hypothesis focuses on the conceptualization, analysis and interpretation of the evidence of the continuity of communist political culture, and on the temporal and logical (analytical) relationship between "communist" and post-communist political cultures under transitional conditions. Thus I am trying to investigate what kind of mindset the citizens of Eastern Europe have inherited from the communist period, and how this mindset affects the post-communist political and economic transformations. In devising the concept of the "Post-Communist Mind" (PCM) I have attempted to avoid certain conceptual and methodological trappings associated with the concept of political culture. The PCM may be viewed as a legacy or residue of "communist" rule in the sphere of values, orientations, mentalities and behavioral matrixes, i.e. as the internalized legacy of specific social, ideological and institutional features of the "communist" state; this residue is conceptualized as a set of specific socio-psychological symptoms.;The argument of the thesis recognizes that both the institutional (structural) and culturalist approaches may contain relevant leads in explaining the Eastern European transformations, as far as their methods are causally substantiated and respect the complex logic inherent in the transformations and empirical evidence of individual-country cases. The theory of socialization is applied to explain the link between communist structures and ideology on one hand, and communist and post-communist political culture on the other. After having separated and investigated the PCM symptoms as they have emerged in the post-communist transformation processes, I suggest that to a large extent they contradict the requirements of a modern civic culture and democratic polity. (We may expect that the PCM will co-determine and limit the options available to the current processes of building a functioning market economy, and at the same time the consolidation or completion of democracy.);The thesis builds on general approaches to politics and society as developed by Max Weber and T. Parsons, on comprehensive theories of communism, as well as on available theories of the post-communist transformation, as well as on analyses of public opinion surveys conducted in communist and post-communist Eastern Europe. Its focus is mainly, but not solely, on East/Central Europe.;The thesis combines the "soft" interpretive approach with causal explanation analysis; heuristically it combines the deductive and inductive approaches. Part of the project is a direct and self-administered Delphi opinion survey designed to obtain expert opinions on values and dispositions held in Eastern Europe from selected groups of professionals.;The analyses here, inevitably, are preliminary and tentative, but hopefully they will make a substantial contribution to the debate on the post-communist transformation.