The year 1989 marks an upheaval in Central and Eastern Europe and stands for a radical change in such spheres as society, economy, politics and culture in this region. The volume presents a collection of articles and analyses exploring a broad range of aspects of post-1989 developments ranging from historical legacies and politics of history, changing values and mentality, old and new inequalities, elites and European integration, written by recognised social scientists from both Eastern and Western Europe. The chapters included in the volume present not only recent advances and findings, but also state-of-the-art of research and emerging trends and future challenges in the above-mentioned areas.
This book offers a selection of papers from the conference which was held by the Sonderforschungsbereich (Collaborative Research Center) 580 in Dornburg near Jena, Germany. International experts discuss key issues of contemporary sociological research on the late socialist societies, their power and functional elites, and their experiences of transition. In its first section, the recruitment and careers of socialist and post-socialist administrative and economic elites is observed. In its second section, the focus is on elites as creators and creations of social and political change. This book is an excellent analysis showing that elites play the decisive role in the multi-layered process of societal transition, just as they provided the key to understanding the societal dynamics and mechanisms of state socialism before the collapse of the system
„Who rules in Eastern Europe?“ became a fundamental question for western researchers and other observers after communist regimes were established in the region, and it gained further importance as state socialism expanded into Central Europe after the Second World War. A political order which, according to Leninist theory of the state and to subsequent Stalinist political practice, was primarily a highly centralised and repressive power organisation, directed, as if it were natural, researchers attention towards the highest echelon of office holders in party and state. Extreme centralisation of power in these regimes was consequently linked to an elitist approach to analysing them from a distant viewpoint. It is one of the many paradoxes of state socialism, that a social and political order which presumptuously claimed to be the final destination of historical development and to be based on deterministic laws of social evolution, which claimed an egalitarian nature and denied the significance of the individual, was per ceived through the idiosyncrasies, rivalries and personal traits of its rulers. The largest part of these societies remained in grey obscurity, onlyoccasion ally revealing bits of valid information about a social life distant from the centres of power. It is debatable whether this top-headedness of western re search into communist societies created a completely distorted picture of re ality, however, it certainly contributed to an overestimation of the stability of these regimes, an underestimation of their factual diversity and a misjudge ment of the extent of conflicts and cleavages dividing them.
