Journal articles on the topic 'Hungary – Economic policy – 1968-1989'

Reform of the domestic economic system is the distinctive element of Hungary's foreign economic strategy in the 1980s. The need for systemic economic reform stems from Hungary's status as a small country, heavily dependent on foreign trade, many of whose imports can no longer be met within the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance alone. The many obstacles to economic reform lie in a heritage of policy choices that responded to domestic and CMEA supply constraints rather than to principles of comparative advantage. Such policies undercut the initial economic reform in 1968 and contributed to a major economic crisis in 1979–82. The subsequent changes in policy priorities and institutional mechanisms prompted by this crisis aimed to reduce Hungary's insulation from the larger international economy and make the economy more efficient. Politically, economic reform is possible in Hungary largely because of the impact of the 1956 revolt on both the subsequent composition of the political elite and the norms and features of collective leadership that guided its decision making afterwards. Nevertheless, the political and economic structures on which collective leadership rests weaken reform advocates and obstruct consistent implementation of their policy preferences. Yet Hungary's economic situation in the late 1970s altered the political balance offerees in favor of reformists, permitting them to alter both economic structures and policies.

The article is devoted to the characteristics of economic reforms in the Hungarian People's Republic carried out in the late 1950s-1960s by representatives of the reformist wing of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party (HSWP) under the leadership of J. Kadar. It is noted, in particular, that the ultimate success of the ruling communist regime was the economic reform, the main provisions of which came into effect on January 1, 1968, having received the name "a New economic mechanism." The reform anticipated the transition from a centralized directive-planning system to an indicative one, i.e., the elements of market-based relations were introduced along with the existing socialist planned economy. As the study pointed out, liberal transformations in Hungary resulted from J. Kadar's policy of consolidation and social harmony after the revolutionary events of 1956, and their goal was primarily to increase the population's welfare. Both the best Hungarian economists and political figures took an active part in developing essential reforms under the chairmanship of the Secretary of the Central Committee of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party Rezső Nyers, Prime Minister Jenő Fock, Vice Prime Minister Lajos Fehér. It is emphasized that the economic reforms in the Hungarian People's Republic brought the following changes: mandatory planning tasks were canceled, material incentives appeared, pricing practices changed, liberalization of agriculture took place, and small-scale production with the simultaneous functioning of large cooperative farms originated. Based on the developed scientific material, it was concluded that the most significant successes were in agriculture. However, after the events in Czechoslovakia in 1968, the liberal changes in Hungary, which destroyed the directive management system, caused dissatisfaction among the communist leaders of the countries of the socialist camp and in the Kremlin. There were also many opponents of reforms in the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party and in the party-state apparatus, which ultimately led to the collapse of the New economic mechanism in 1972–1973. Based on the analysis of specialized domestic and foreign publications, the author points out that the amount of scientific literature on the studied issues in modern Ukrainian historical science is insufficient.

The Hungarian industrial revolution started in the second half of the 19th century, which caused therevaluation of the geographical peripheries in Hungary. After the Trianon Treaty the rural areas of Hungarylost their foreign markets and became the "country of three million beggars". The socialist industrializationof the systems of Rákosi and Kádár absorbed the surplus of rural labour, but the industrializationmeant the redistributive exploitation of the agricultural areas and the further impoverishment. Afterthe political transition in 1989, the rural Hungary could not be the "pantry of the Council for MutualEconomic Assistance", and the final crisis of the Hungarian agricultural sales finalized the deformationof the three-quarters of Hungary, the major part of the rural areas in Hungary. In the recent decades thebrain drain worked in the Hungarian peripheries, the disinvestment and the pauperization increased.The emerging of the new latifundia and the monoculture commodity production operate independently,separated from the Hungarian rural people in the sense of ownerships and production. As the result ofthese negative processes, significant part of the society in the peripheral areas declassed. In this hopelesssituation awareness only a conscious regional policy and above all, a very well-considered education isonly able to offer a chance for break

Through an historical analysis of the transnational practices of economists during the Cold War, Johanna Bockman rejects the narrative that the revolutions of 1989 represented the victory of ‘Western economics’, and especially neoliberalism, over ‘East-European socialism’. Rather, Bockman shows that the space of exchange, as well as policy experimentation in socialist states such as Yugoslavia and Hungary, led to the articulation of alternative, decentralised, ‘market socialisms’ from the 1950s up until the 1980s. Instead of operating within separate and incommensurable paradigms of ‘capitalist’ and ‘socialist’ economics, Bockman shows how neoclassical theory and its long tradition of comparing distinct economic systems became the centralepistemeallowing for the transnational exchange of ideas between economists of both the East and the West. This review-essay evaluates the book’s central claims but argues that the book stands on weaker ground when arguing that a reformed socialism was a viable option in Eastern Europe after 1989.

The purpose of the article is to characterize the activities of the largest and most influential Protestant churches in Hungary: Reformed (Calvinist) and Lutheran (Evangelical). These religious denominations along with the Catholic denomination belong to the so-called historical churches of Hungary. The chronological framework is the following: 1948 – the year of the communist regime’s rapid attack on the political, economic, educational activities of the Reformed and Lutheran churches and the signing of a compromise cooperation agreement with them, which lasted until 1990. 1989 – the liquidation of the State Administration for Churches, socio-political transformation in Hungary, which resulted in gaining absolute freedom. Based on Hungarian historiography, the relations between the Protestant churches and the state during the reign of Janos Kadar (1956 – 1988), called by Hungarian researchers the Kadar era, and are analyzed. It was Janos Kadar, the leader of the “soft dictatorship”, who managed to turn the Hungarian People’s Republic into “the funniest barracks in the socialist camp”. The background for the successful policy of the Hungarian government after the revolutionary events of 1956 was the achievement of social harmony, including through great tolerance and flexibility in the religious sphere. The article notes that representatives of the Reformed and Lutheran churches did not take an active part in the preparations for the events of 1956, but pastors and congregations supported the revolution. It is stressed that the relations with the Protestant denominations were settled specifically during the 50s of the twentieth century; the authorities managed to turn part of the clergy into their allies. Based on the analysis of the scientific literature, it is identified that relations were compromise in the 60s and 70s of the twentieth century, as the leadership of the Reformed and Lutheran churches helped the government to pursue the policy of the Popular Front in the struggle for socialism. Owing to it, no one was persecuted for their religious beliefs. In the 1980s, the state’s influence on historical churches gradually weakened, and processes leading to socio-political transformation in the late 1980s started, and as a result, churches in Hungary gained absolute freedom.

Over-fertilization before 1989 resulted in high phosphorus levels in agricultural soils of Hungary, but the accumulated reserves seem to have been depleted in recent decades due to under-fertilization. The aims of this study were to map the spatial pattern of phosphorus level and its change in the last few decades in Hungary to document the effect of fertilization and underlying socio-economic conditions on P concentrations, to identify the role of soil properties in changing soil soluble P and to quantify the total amount of soluble phosphorus level change in agricultural areas in the last few decades in the country. Two soil datasets were analyzed (National Pedological and Crop Production Database of Hungary and the Land Use/Land Cover Area Frame Survey, LUCAS, topsoil dataset), representing the status of soil nutrient contents in 1989 and in 2009. The measured phosphorus concentrations were compared to the reported phosphorus fertilization inputs. We also evaluated the effect of some important soil properties on soluble phosphorus content and on its change. We produced three maps by using kriging methods: soluble phosphorus levels in 1989, in 2009 and the change between 1989 and 2009. The results confirmed that phosphorus levels in agricultural areas depend mainly on agricultural use, while soil physical characteristics play a smaller role. Nevertheless, we demonstrated that the decrease in soil phosphorus levels was significantly influenced by soil chemistry (pH and CaCO3 content). The mean soluble phosphorus level was 108 mg/kg in 1989 and 28 mg/kg in 2009, and the median values were 100 and 22. The total loss (caused by harvesting, fixation and erosion) is ~1.5 million tons of soluble phosphorus, which is twice as much as the reported phosphorus balances indicated. In conclusion, our results show that approximately 50% of agricultural areas in Hungary are characterized by a very low supply of phosphorus (according to the latest data), posing a risk of nutrient depletion in these areas.

Between 1945 and 2010 three main types of corporatism were discussed in the political science literature: the ‘classic’ and ‘lean’ corporatism that existed in the West European countries and the ‘illusory’ corporatism that dominated in Central and Eastern Europe after 1989. The aim of the paper is to examine whether a new version of corporatism, which I call ‘patronage’ corporatism, emerged in Hungary and Poland during the first term of the governments formed by populist political parties (in Hungary between 2010 and 2014 and in Poland between 2015 and 2019). In patronage corporatism the authorities autonomously conduct heterodox economic policy. They enter into alliances only with ideologically close trade unions. While their cronies legitimize authorities’ decisions at the governmental level vis-à-vis the citizens and at the international level, the government fulfils some of their socio-economic and organizational demands. Furthermore, the government cooperates with its allies to destroy other trade unions that are perceived as hostile towards the authorities. The paper shows that the capture of power by populist parties in Hungary and Poland led to the development of patronage corporatism in these countries.

After 1989 the countries of Eastern Europe embarked upon new directions away from central economies and one-party systems towards market economies and democratic systems. The courses of these political and economic transformations largely depended upon the ability of the emerging regimes to create legitimacy. In particular, those regimes which suffered from greater political divisiveness and significant economic problems were more likely to be confronted with a crisis of legitimacy. In this paper, the legitimation crisis theory is examined for post-communist Czechoslovakia and Hungary. It is found that the developments in Czechoslovakia and Hungary during this early transition period support the hypothesis, and, in addition, they hold implications for the survival of other transitional regimes as well as those in the West which have increasingly been confronted with questions of legitimacy.

“General of Hungarian Medical Chamber (MOK), recalled my memory, about the history, purpose and goals of the MOK.” Re-founded in 1988, the MOK has previously been prohibited for decades since it ceased to exist after the World War 2, because 1945 it was deemed a fascist corporation. In its newly founded structure between 1988 and 1989, the MOK became soon the body for representing ethical, professional, social and health policy interests of medical doctors. Efforts of the MOK re-foundation turned out as a historical victory of the medical doctors’ community during the political changes of the socio-economic system in Hungary.

According to the classic partisan theory of spending, leftist parties are expected to increase government spending, and rightist parties are expected to decrease it. We argue that this relationship does not hold in post-Communist countries, where in the context of dual transition to democracy and to a market economy, leftist parties have had stronger incentives and better opportunities to enact tighter budgets, whereas rightist parties were compelled to spend more in order to alleviate economic hardships. We illustrate this theoretical argument with case studies from Hungary and Poland. We then test and find support for our theory by considering the influence of cabinet ideology on total, health, and education spending in thirteen post-Communist democracies from 1989 to 2004. We explore various alternative explanations and provide further narratives to support our causal argument.

This article contributes to ongoing debates in the transformatology literature, as well as the wider literature on the global neoliberal revolution, on the origins of neoliberalism in Soviet-style economies. Within these debates, the transition to a (free) market economy and liberal democracy in Hungary and elsewhere in the former Soviet bloc has commonly been perceived as an exogenous process, dating to the annus mirabilis of 1989. This article challenges this consensus. Through a case study of the Financial Research Institute ( Pénzügykutatási Intézet), the official research institute of the Ministry of Finance, and a programme of radical economic reform, known as ‘Turnabout and Reform’ ( Fordulat és Reform), published in 1987 by a group of experts at the institute, the article demonstrates that in the case of Hungary, neoliberalism was not simply an ‘imported project’, which arrived ‘from the West’ on the eve of the formal transition in 1989–1990. Rather, it is argued that it emerged organically in Hungarian society in the 1980s, as a response by domestic economic and political elites to the deepening crisis of the Kádár regime. Hence, the essential aim of the ‘neoliberal turn’ was to reconfigure the Hungarian economy in line with the exigencies of the capitalist world economy, while ensuring that the political transition went as smoothly as possible. As such, while obviously a repudiation of past policy, policymakers in Budapest pursued the similar objectives as central planners under ‘actually existing socialism’.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to address two questions: how do business and political (i.e. party politics and state) networks relate? What are the consequences of the relations between these two networks for the behaviour of the actors involved? Design/methodology/approach The research design consists of the historical approach based on relevant literature sources of the past, a relatively long period – from 1968, the beginning of the era of market socialism, until the first decade of the twenty-first century, by which time the market economy had been established for more than 20 years. The authors analyse the behaviour of economic and non-economic actors in Hungary based on cases and historical data, applying the IMP network approach. Findings Research findings demonstrate the long-term influence of the relation between business and bureaucratic networks on managerial and organizational network behaviour. The old and new pictures of the economic system are different, but the background to the pictures and the movement in the two pictures are quite similar. Research limitations/implications The historical illustrations and cases the authors have presented cannot be too widely generalized: the characteristics of the Hungarian mode of transition from market socialism to market economy impose important limitations on the generalizability of the findings. Practical implications The study offers lessons to policy makers: policy decisions can have long term, unanticipated impacts on non-target areas as well. Social implications The results confirm that the informal networks of socialism can replicate themselves and network structures can be repurposed in the system after the transition as well. Originality/value One contribution of the paper is related to the second network paradox: the cases illustrate non-business relationships with non-economic factors, particularly relations with bureaucracy. The other contribution is the description of how the transition from socialism to capitalism affected the networks that firms were embedded in before and after the transition.

Hungary represents the second most developed venture capital and private equity (VC&PE) market in Central and Eastern Europe. This article is based on a detailed survey of the entire VC industry between 1989–2010. It demonstrates that while there was a relatively strong correlation between the allocation of capital to VC&PE funds and the capital flow into the Budapest Stock Exchange, the changes in investment activities were closely related to election years. Investments had been hampered primarily not by the shortage of capital, but by a lack of demand and attractive business plans. The article illustrates the different roles and approaches of global, regional and country VC&PE funds in Hungary. It points out that VC investments hardly satisfied their principal function or mission, namely to support innovative start-up and small businesses. Government interventions in the VC market proved to be ineffective as well. Similarly to the whole region, the Hungarian market profited from a transitory situation in the case of high-value PE transactions between 2007 and 2008, at the beginning of the crisis, when the investment problems in Western Europe had yet not extended to the CEE region. From 2009 onward, however, the crisis has resulted in a drop in investments despite the significant amount of uninvested capital accumulated in recent years. As to the prospects for 2013, the early-stage VC segment in Hungary is expected to flourish owing to the Jeremie funds, while the high-value buyout segment of the market will suffer from both the euro zone debt crisis and the loss of transparency in economic policy.

This paper analyzes the negotiations within the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance during the final years of its existence, focusing on the Soviet reform proposals and M. S. Gorbachev’s vision of the “Common European Home” as well as on Eastern European reaction to them. In the second half of the 1980s, Gorbachev tried to found a “unified market” for the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance by introducing a market-oriented reform of the organization. However, this attempt did not materialize because of the East German and Romanian objections. After the collapse of Eastern European socialist regimes in 1989, the Soviet leadership urged the member-states to accelerate the reform of this international organization, hoping to achieve the pan-European economic integration through close cooperation between the totally reformed Council for Mutual Economic Assistance and the European Community. Although the Central European countries, namely Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland, aspired to join the EC individually, they agreed to participate in a successor organization of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance because the EC was not ready to accept them. Accordingly, by the beginning of 1991, all the member-states agreed to establish a consultative organization, which would be named the Organization for International Economic Cooperation). However, as the Soviet Union failed to sustain trade with the Central European countries, the three countries lost interest in the project. As a result, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance was disbanded without any successor organization. In other words, it did not collapse automatically after 1989 but came to an end as a result of various factors, such as rapidly declining trade between the member-states, Western disinterest in the cooperation with it, and the Central European policy changes.

Social Exclusion/Inclusion in the Context of Hungarian SportSimilar to international trends, this investigation of social exclusion/inclusion from sport was preceded by studying the impact of poverty on sport participation in Hungary. Research was made on inequality of chances and on the disadvantaged position of the lower classes in sport, even in state socialism. Following the transformation of the political regime in 1989-1990, there was a growing interest in exploring unequal social opportunities in sport, not only by marginal social groups, but also by the increasing number of lower middle class people dropping behind. However, Hungarian sport has never been studied in the context of social exclusion/inclusion. Theobjectiveof this paper is to approach sport in Hungary from these perspectives. Attempts are made to answer the following questions: in which fields of Hungarian sport can social exclusion be observed? How is social exclusion from sport linked to age, gender, dwelling place, socio-economic status and to the lack of cultural and social capital? How is the concept of social exclusion/inclusion understood by the actors in Hungarian sport? How can sport be used as a means to promote social inclusion for people marginalized by economic, social and cultural barriers? In order to answer the above questions, the followingmethodswere used: analyses of recent research findings on Hungarians' sport participation with a focus on deprivation; in-depth interviews with key persons (N= 15) in Hungarian sport with the aim to discover how the concept of social exclusion/inclusion is understood by them; and analyses of documents to explore which measures have been taken by sport policy to tackle social exclusion. Theresultsshow that exclusion from sport is widespread in Hungarian society. It is linked in a combined way to poverty, education, ethnicity, age, and settlements. It is established in early childhood and lasts the whole life cycle. Key excluded groups are in hopeless situations due to economic, social and cultural aspects, so they cannot overcome this problem alone. They receive assistance in several other areas, but they are left to their own resources in sport-related issues. Legally they should have access to sport, but they cannot claim their rights. The concept of combating social exclusion is generally not incorporated into the objectives and values of sport clubs and federations; it has not yet been an integral part of sport culture in Hungary. Government documents contain declarations in connection to tackling social exclusion, but very few actions are implemented to promote social inclusion. A majorconclusionof the paper is that a serious modification of sport policy does not mainly depend on the lack of financial recourses but on the lack of a strong determination of the Government. The involvement of the Hungarian population in sporting activity and the intention for their inclusion are much lower than it could be under the present economic circumstances.

Since the collapse of socialism in Hungary in 1989, political and economic factors increased residential mobility between Budapest and its agglomeration area. Social disparities have become more pronounced not only among the settlements of the agglomeration, but also within them. This paper identifies the different status-dependent paths within the general process of suburbanization using official statistical data, survey and interview analysis. The empirical research was made in 1992 and was repeated in 2002. We argue that higher status groups used the new opportunities to strengthen their status by choosing to move while the poor were forced to move to less advantageous sectors of the agglomeration. These phenomena are the consequences partly of spontaneous factors and partly of state and local government policies. The effects of market forces can be taken as spontaneous factors and they increased western type suburbanization. Several measures taken by states and local governments increased the impact of these factors, helping higher-status groups to move to favorable areas within and around the cities. The same urban and housing policy measures increased the risk of concentrating poverty in certain areas of cities and they resulted in the not-well-known outmigration of lower-status groups. These groups had to move out of the city because it became too expensive for them to live there. Poverty meant that they were unable to find places in high or middle-status suburban areas around the cities and they had to move to more distant, poorer areas of the country.

After the Second World War, Hungary adopted the so-called Soviet model, which gave rise to significant changes in the state organisation. “Centralisation” and “democratic centralism” are the keywords which described the operation of government and local bodies in the four decades between 1945 and 1990.Through the change of the townscape of one settlement, this study throws light on how the change in administrative status and the centrally determined settlement policy affected urban development in Hungary, similarly to other former socialist states.Our highlighted example is Berettyóújfalu, whose administrative status changed from period to period in its 19–20th century history. Today, Berettyóújfalu’s townscape is basically determined by three architectural periods: the era of the Austro–Hungarian Monarchy (1867–1918), the period between the two world wars (1918–1944) and the age of state socialism (1949–1989). Out of these periods, the third one was the most significant, as the most important interventions into the townscape occurred at that time.It seems that in Berettyóújfalu, the appearance of urban buildings has not been brought about by economic forces, but expressly by the change in the settlement’s administrative status. It was this change that influenced the town’s architectural character, which consists of two components: the official buildings and the residential building stock.In the era of socialism, the construction of housing estates also falls into the category of public developments, as after the Second World War, the system of state organisation changed fundamentally. Local governments ceased to exist, their role was taken over by hierarchical councils. Consequently, urban policy and urban construction became central duties according to the socialist state concept.The centrally developed industry and the resulting increase in the population was served by building housing blocks with system-building technology. These panel apartment blocks occupied the urban fabric that had been an integral part of the former townscape.In this way, this changed townscape could become a kind of architectural reader on Central and Eastern European history and urban development of the 19–20th centuries.Összefoglaló. A második világháború után Magyarország átvette az úgynevezett szovjet modellt, amely jelentős változásokhoz vezetett az államszervezetben. A „központosítás” és a „demokratikus centralizmus” azok a kulcsszavak, amelyek az állami szervek, s mellettük a helyi szervek működését jellemezték az 1945 és 1990 közötti négy évtizedben.Jelen tanulmány egy település városképének változásán keresztül arra világít rá, hogy Magyarországon – hasonlóan a többi volt szocialista államhoz – miként hatott a közigazgatási státus változása és a központilag meghatározott településpolitika a városépítészetre.A mai Berettyóújfalu településképét alapvetően három építési periódus határozza meg: az Osztrák– Magyar Monarchia kora (1867–1918), a két világháború közötti időszak (1918–1944) és az államszocializmus periódusa (1949–1989). Ezek közül a legmarkánsabb a harmadik, ugyanis ekkor történtek a legjelentősebb beavatkozások a településképben. E korszakokat és a mai városképet tekintve úgy tűnik, hogy a városias épületek megjelenése Berettyóújfaluban nem a gazdasági erő hozadéka volt, hanem kifejezetten a közigazgatási helyzetének megváltozásáé. Ez befolyásolta igazán a mai építészeti karaktert, amelynek két összetevője van: egyrészt a hivatali, másrészt a lakóépület-állomány.Az államszocializmusban a lakótelepek építése is a középítkezések körébe esik, miután a második világháború után alapvetően megváltozott az államszervezet rendszere. Az önkormányzatok megszűntek, helyüket a hierarchikusan működő tanácsok vették át. Ennek velejárója volt, hogy a településpolitika, a városépítés központi feladattá vált a szocialista államfelfogásnak megfelelően.A központilag meghatározott módon telepített ipart, a hozzá kapcsolódó lakosságnövekedést házgyári lakások felépítésével szolgálták ki. Ezek a paneles lakóházak épp azt a városszövetet foglalták el, amely egyébként a maga módján szervesen illeszkedett a korábbi városképbe.Ilyen módon ez a megváltozott településkép egyfajta építészeti olvasókönyvévé vált a 19–20. század közép-kelet-európai történelmének és városépítészetének.

This paper explores the theoretical possibility of re-interpreting the conventional wisdom of the transition economy literature on privatisation. Around 1989/90 the emphasis had been put on de-etatization and good corporate governance and little attention was paid to the necessity of integrating the Eastern economies into the network of transnational corporations (TNCs). Today, it is clear that this is the name of game. Without TNCs, privatisation simply does not produce the expected results. Based on the experience of Hungary, this paper describes an alternative model where the key policy variable is the rise of manufacturing exports. It is argued that for resource-poor transition economies privatisation to foreign strategic investors is the single most important question of the ownership revolution. Once this policy is advanced, the rise in exports can help to underpin macroeconomic stability. In other words divesting the manufacturing sector to TNCs is the beginning of a virtuous circle, where large and well publicized sell-offs help to attract portfolio investors and greenfield investors as well.

AbstractAlthough the communist regime, in literature as well as in all areas of social life, aimed at uniformity and creating an “art” serving propaganda purposes in the entire Central and Eastern European region, the Romanian Stalinist “cultural project” differed in many respects from that of other countries, e.g. Hungary's. In this era, the discourse emphasizing revolutionary transformation and radical policy change decisively builds on the image of the enemy; and the fault-lines between past and present, old and new, and the idea of the need for continuous political struggle also prevail in both poetry and prose as eternal actualities.For the Transylvanian Hungarian community, the 1989 Regime Change was supposed to mean the end of nationalist dictatorship, of the infinitely intensified ideological/political terror, of the deliberate policy of ethnic homogenization, and the solution of minority issues as well as of internal and external conflicts. Nevertheless, after a few months of cloudless enthusiasm, in 1990, Transylvanian Hungarians had to face the rearrangement of previous power structures; they confronted national and ethnic conflicts, disguised assimilation, and economic vulnerability. This paper aims to present the ideological/political characteristics which determined Transylvanian Hungarian poetry during the Communist Dictatorship and after the 1989 Regime Change.

Starting on September 11, 2001, and following both actions and reactions around the world, it may well be that we have arrived at a major tipping point in terms of socio-economic development, political reform, as well as many other global issues - from financial and economic coordination to climate change as well as hunger and disease challenges in the developing world. On November 9, 1989 (more than 20 years ago), the world watched as the Berlin Wall was tumbling and with it the Cold War was slipping into memory as the morning fog. During the last two decades, progress was accomplished on many fronts but great opportunities were also missed or wasted both within the US (for instance, health care and social security reforms) as well as around the world where the Washington Consensus mantra of privatization and unbridled globalization led to the socioeconomic polarization of many former Warsaw pact countries as well as former parts of the Soviet Union and in effect made many people around the world cynical as to the capacity of free market regimes to allow for equitable and sustainable economic development along civic renaissance.

The media system formed in Poland after the Second Word War was subordinated to political practice. The ruling communist party treated the radio, press and television as one of the most important tools for exercising power and controlling social processes. All the content being conveyed was scrupulously censored. The same applied to articles concerning the Federal Republic of Germany. Throughout the entire era of the People’s Republic of Poland, the RFG was ‘the villain of the piece’. The press published numerous articles in reminder of the Second World War and successive anniversaries of specific crimes, incessantly recalling their scale, the destruction and the number of victims. The texts frequently referred to the revisionist policy of the post-war RFG. West Germany was thus presented as a militaristic state, striving to obtain nuclear weapons and rockets, exerting pressure on her Western partners to push armament programmes and frustrating disarmament, a state where the left was suppressed and the German Communist Party was persecuted by the police while the Nazis (NDP) grew in strength. In view of Bonn’s obsession with regard to the re-unification of Germany, Poland, went the narrative, could not trust West Germany. Such an image of the RFG in the Polish media was congruent with the objectives of Poland’s foreign policy toward that country.In 1968, the events occurring in the FRG, the youth’s protest on a mass scale, the brutal methods of the police, the passing of emergency laws which restricted citizens’ freedoms, were reported accurately, emotionally and with a propaganda bias. These reports were given an additional emphasis by their tone, which was alarmist, often hysterical and with no shortage of loaded headlines, which usually made reference to the Second World War and the perpetual threat posed to both Poland and the other Eastern Bloc states by the FRG. There were few references in the Polish press to 1968 in Germany. They were recalled, in principle, only when criticising the Western life style and the ‘moral collapse of the West’, reporting terrorism-related events in Germany, in particular, the Red Army Faction in the 1970s and the appointment of Joschka Fischer as foreign minister of the FRG in 1998. On the other hand, mention was frequently made of the events related to the Second World War, associating them with the German expectations of apologies for the expulsions, statements puing a question mark over the Oder and Lusitian Neisse rivers, and so forth. Throughout these years, a relatively considerable amount of column space was devoted to the German political scene, expressing interest in particular elections. In the entire period analysed here, the Polish media were very eager to report German problems and troubles such as the titles. the fall of a government, economic woes, terrorism, the excesses of the young people, the defeat of Germany’s national football team, or the FRG’s ‘only’ winning a silver medal in the Olympics. Pre-1989, this willingness to pesent the FRG unfavourably is highly visible; later it becomes less direct, though it can still be perceived in some of the titles.

BackgroundCardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMR) is increasingly used to assess patients for myocardial viability prior to revascularisation. This is important to ensure that only those likely to benefit are subjected to the risk of revascularisation.ObjectivesTo assess current evidence on the accuracy and cost-effectiveness of CMR to test patients prior to revascularisation in ischaemic cardiomyopathy; to develop an economic model to assess cost-effectiveness for different imaging strategies; and to identify areas for further primary research.Data sourcesDatabases searched were: MEDLINE including MEDLINE In-Process & Other Non-Indexed Citations Initial searches were conducted in March 2011 in the following databases with dates: MEDLINE including MEDLINE In-Process & Other Non-Indexed Citations via Ovid (1946 to March 2011); Bioscience Information Service (BIOSIS) Previews via Web of Science (1969 to March 2011); EMBASE via Ovid (1974 to March 2011); Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews via The Cochrane Library (1996 to March 2011); Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials via The Cochrane Library 1998 to March 2011; Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects via The Cochrane Library (1994 to March 2011); NHS Economic Evaluation Database via The Cochrane Library (1968 to March 2011); Health Technology Assessment Database via The Cochrane Library (1989 to March 2011); and the Science Citation Index via Web of Science (1900 to March 2011). Additional searches were conducted from October to November 2011 in the following databases with dates: MEDLINE including MEDLINE In-Process & Other Non-Indexed Citations via Ovid (1946 to November 2011); BIOSIS Previews via Web of Science (1969 to October 2011); EMBASE via Ovid (1974 to November 2011); Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews via The Cochrane Library (1996 to November 2011); Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials via The Cochrane Library (1998 to November 2011); Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects via The Cochrane Library (1994 to November 2011); NHS Economic Evaluation Database via The Cochrane Library (1968 to November 2011); Health Technology Assessment Database via The Cochrane Library (1989 to November 2011); and the Science Citation Index via Web of Science (1900 to October 2011). Electronic databases were searched March–November 2011.Review methodsThe systematic review selected studies that assessed the clinical effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of CMR to establish the role of CMR in viability assessment compared with other imaging techniques: stress echocardiography, single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) and positron emission tomography (PET). Studies had to have an appropriate reference standard and contain accuracy data or sufficient details so that accuracy data could be calculated. Data were extracted by two reviewers and discrepancies resolved by discussion. Quality of studies was assessed using the QUADAS II tool (University of Bristol, Bristol, UK). A rigorous diagnostic accuracy systematic review assessed clinical and cost-effectiveness of CMR in viability assessment. A health economic model estimated costs and quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs) accrued by diagnostic pathways for identifying patients with viable myocardium in ischaemic cardiomyopathy with a view to revascularisation. The pathways involved CMR, stress echocardiography, SPECT, PET alone or in combination. Strategies of no testing and revascularisation were included to determine the most cost-effective strategy.ResultsTwenty-four studies met the inclusion criteria. All were prospective. Participant numbers ranged from 8 to 52. The mean left ventricular ejection fraction in studies reporting this outcome was 24–62%. CMR approaches included stress CMR and late gadolinium-enhanced cardiovascular magnetic resonance imaging (CE CMR). Recovery following revascularisation was the reference standard. Twelve studies assessed diagnostic accuracy of stress CMR and 14 studies assessed CE CMR. A bivariate regression model was used to calculate the sensitivity and specificity of CMR. Summary sensitivity and specificity for stress CMR was 82.2% [95% confidence interval (CI) 73.2% to 88.7%] and 87.1% (95% CI 80.4% to 91.7%) and for CE CMR was 95.5% (95% CI 94.1% to 96.7%) and 53% (95% CI 40.4% to 65.2%) respectively. The sensitivity and specificity of PET, SPECT and stress echocardiography were calculated using data from 10 studies and systematic reviews. The sensitivity of PET was 94.7% (95% CI 90.3% to 97.2%), of SPECT was 85.1% (95% CI 78.1% to 90.2%) and of stress echocardiography was 77.6% (95% CI 70.7% to 83.3%). The specificity of PET was 68.8% (95% CI 50% to 82.9%), of SPECT was 62.1% (95% CI 52.7% to 70.7%) and of stress echocardiography was 69.6% (95% CI 62.4% to 75.9%). All currently used diagnostic strategies were cost-effective compared with no testing at current National Institute for Health and Care Excellence thresholds. If the annual mortality rates for non-viable patients were assumed to be higher for revascularised patients, then testing with CE CMR was most cost-effective at a threshold of £20,000/QALY. The proportion of model runs in which each strategy was most cost-effective, at a threshold of £20,000/QALY, was 40% for CE CMR, 42% for PET and 16.5% for revascularising everyone. The expected value of perfect information at £20,000/QALY was £620 per patient. If all patients (viable or not) gained benefit from revascularisation, then it was most cost-effective to revascularise all patients.LimitationsDefinitions and techniques assessing viability were highly variable, making data extraction and comparisons difficult. Lack of evidence meant assumptions were made in the model leading to uncertainty; differing scenarios were generated around key assumptions.ConclusionsAll the diagnostic pathways are a cost-effective use of NHS resources. Given the uncertainty in the mortality rates, the cost-effectiveness analysis was performed using a set of scenarios. The cost-effectiveness analyses suggest that CE CMR and revascularising everyone were the optimal strategies. Future research should look at implementation costs for this type of imaging service, provide guidance on consistent reporting of diagnostic testing data for viability assessment, and focus on the impact of revascularisation or best medical therapy in this group of high-risk patients.FundingThe National Institute of Health Technology Assessment programme.

Diosdado Macapagal, Philippine President from 1961-1965, whose career was made rich by working in the foreign service, belonged to a tradition of championing a Foreign Policy shaped under America’s tutelage, adhering to democratic ideals, dismissive of Communism, and indifferent to neutralism and non-alignment. While various groups branded this policy as one of mendicancy that jeopardized Philippine Independence itself, President Manuel Roxas, who instituted it in 1946, was given little to no option but to side with America. The Second World War’s apocalyptic results required prompt and massive reconstruction and industrialization, necessitating foreign aid. This study reveals a chapter in the Philippines’ Cold War History, which show instances of balancing the state of dependence on America with neo-realist postures. Macapagal worked for Land Reform to peacefully address Communism within and collaborated with America in the name of national security to counter possible foreign communist infiltration. In an anarchic world forged by Cold War developments, Macapagal secured US financial and military assistance and defended national interest in a neorealist posture to the point of championing views more orthodox and even contrary to that of America. Filipino’s preference for collaboration with America made the neo-colonial situation manageable at that time, to still reap whatever the superpower is willing to give while it promoted its own global agenda. Macapagal worked within this neo-colonial setting by balancing dependency and neorealism. References Abaya, Hernando. Our Vaunted Press: A Critique. Philippine Graphic 35, no. 16 (1968). Buszybnski, Leszek. “Realism, Institutionalism, and Philippine Security.” Asian Survey 42, no. 3 (2002). Carr, Edward. What is History? New York: Pelican Books, 1961. Constantino, Renato. Identity and Consciousness: The Philippine Experience. Quezon City: Malaya Books, 1974. _________________. The Nationalist Alternative. Quezon City: Foundation for Nationalist Studies, 1984. David, Randolph. “Philippine Underdevelopment and Dependency Theory.” Philippine Sociological Review 28, no. 1/4 (1980). De Castro, Rene. “Historical Review of the Concept, Issues, and Proposals for an Independent Foreign Policy for the Philippines: 1855-1988, 1989.” https://www.asj.upd.edu.ph/mediabox/archive/ASJ-27-1989/decastro.pdf Accessed May 13, 2022. Fifield, Russel. “Philippine Foreign Policy.” Far Eastern Survey 20, 4 (1951). Forbes, William. The Philippine Islands. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1945. Gribble, Richard. Anti-Communism, Patrick Peyton, CSC and the C.I.A. Journal of Churchand State 45, no. 3 (2003). Guinto, Josias. A Study of Philippine Foreign Policy. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Santo Tomas, 1955. Higginson, P. (1980). The Vatican and Communism from ′Divini Redemptoris′ to Pope Paul VI. New Blackfriars. 61 (719) pp. 158-171 From: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43247119 John XXIII. Pacem in Terris, Encyclical Letter. April 11, 1963. https://www.vatican.va/content/john-xxiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_j xxiii_enc_11041963_pacem.html Accessed: 19 March 2022. Lent, J. (1966). “The Press of the Philippines: Its History and Problems.” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly (1966). Macapagal, Diosdado. A Stone for the Edifice: Memoirs of a President. Quezon City: MAC Publishing House, 1968. __________________. Constitutional Democracy in the World. Manila: Santo Tomas University Press, 1991. __________________. From Nipa Hut to Presidential Palace: Autobiography of President Diosdado Macapagal. Quezon City: Philippine Academy for Continuing Education and Research, 2002. __________________. Imperatives of Economic Development in the Philippines, University of Santo Tomas, 1957.__________________. New Hope for the Common Man: Speeches and Statements of President Diosdado Macapagal. Volume 1. Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1962. __________________. New Hope for the Common Man: Speeches and Statements of President Diosdado Macapagal. Volume 2. Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1963. __________________. 1963 State of the Nation Address. Delivered at the Old Legislative Building in Manila. Retrieved: March 19, 2022 From: https://www.officialgazette.gov.ph/1963/01/28/diosdado-macapagal-second-state- of-the-nation-address-january-28-1963/Accessed: 19 March 2022. __________________. 1964 State of the Nation Address. Delivered at the Old Legislative Building in Manila. https://www.officialgazette.gov.ph/1964/01/27/diosdado-macapagal-third-state-of-thenation-address-january-27-1964/Accessed March 19, 2022. __________________. 1965 State of the Nation Address. Delivered at the Old Legislative Building in Manila. https://www.officialgazette.gov.ph/1965/01/25/diosdado-macapagal-fourth-state-of-the-nation-address-january-25-1965/Accessed March 19, 2022. Magsaysay, Ramon. Roots of Philippine Policy. Foreign Affairs 35, no. 1 (1956). Manglapus, Raul. (1960). The State of Philippine Democracy. Foreign Affairs 38, no. 4. Official Gazette. Official Week in Review (May 27-June 2, 1962). Official Gazette. Official Week in Review (January 17, 1965). Perez, Louis. Dependency. The Journal of American History 77, no. 1 (1990). Pineda-Ofreneo, Rosalinda. A History of Philippine Journalism Since 1945. Mandaluyong: Cacho Hermanos, 1984. Pius IX. Qui Pluribus, Encyclical Letter. Issued November 9, 1846. https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-ix/it/documents/enciclica-qui-pluribus-9-novembre-1846.html Accessed: 19 March 2022. Pius XI. Divini Redemptoris, Encyclical Letter. Issued March 19, 1937. https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_19370319_divini-redemptoris.html Accessed March 19, 2022. Russell, Bertrand. Portraits of Memory and Other Essays, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1956. Van der Kroef, Justus. “Communism and Reform in the Philippines.” Pacific Affairs 46, no. 1 (1973). Velasco, Andres. “Dependency Theory.” Foreign Policy, 33 (2002).

The article describes the history of the policy of “urban rehabilitation” in Hungary from its introduction in the 1970s until the 1990s. The main focus is on the dialectic of how different capitalist crises open new intellectual and institutional spaces for new policy ideas and practices, and how certain professional groups navigate within these spaces while they are paving the way for the next round of crises. In the first section, the history of urban rehabilitation policies in Hungary is introduced from the 1970s until the 1990s; then in the second section, it is shown how this history is shaped by political–economic crises and structural changes. Finally, some aspects of expert brokerage are highlighted to propose a new methodology of historically analyzing policy changes.

In many post‐socialist countries, there is a strong social ideal that, in order to live a fulfilled life, men and women should have children; thus “childfree” lifestyles are much less popular than in North‐Western Europe. In this article, we explore factors leading to childlessness among men who were mostly socialized under state‐socialist conditions and in the subsequent transition period by analysing 30 in‐depth interviews conducted with heterosexual childless men over 50 in Hungary. Older interviewees who grew up in state socialism followed a standardized life‐course and went through the same life‐course events—including school, work, and, in some cases, childless marriages. However, the political change of 1989–1990 interrupted these standardized life‐courses. Our results show that, besides individual‐level factors, macro‐level factors connected to the political‐economic transition in the early 1990s influenced our interviewees’ pathways to childlessness. In this sense, we can say that the change of policy regime influenced these men’s choices, as in most cases there was a strong interplay between the individual‐ and the macro‐level factors.

Research Question: Can the F-Score predict the stock market returns in the cross section of international stock markets? Motivation: The majority of the literature, in the area of the F-Score metric, has examined whether it can be used to predict future financial profitability, the relationship of F-Score with book-to-value metrics and the momentum premium and whether it can be used as a successful investment strategy tool. There only three studies that examine the relationship between the F-Score and future stock returns, without the use of complementary variables, and in other countries except Europe. This paper seeks to fill this gap. Data: The dataset of the present research consists of listed European companies from 21 countries (in random order: Finland, United Kingdom, Switzerland, Turkey, Hungary, Portugal, Spain, Poland, Norway, Luxembourg, Italy, Netherlands, Ireland, Greece, Belgium Germany, Denmark, France Czech Republic, Sweden, Austria), from 1989 to 2016. We collect firm-level accounting information as provided by Worldscope, as well as the monthly total returns for common stocks from Datastream. Tools: With the use of a dataset consisting of European companies from 21 countries, portfolio analysis and time series regressions are performed using abnormal monthly returns (monthly returns minus risk-free interest rates). Findings: We find that the F-Score is a statistically significant predictor as well as an economically meaningful index. Its performance forecasting ability is visible in developed Europe, both in small and large companies, and remains stable after controlling for established cross-sectional determinants (such as book market, investment, and company size). Contribution: This study seeks to fill the gap in the stock return and F-Score relationship in a European setting controlling for the other financial variables. Our empirical models are tested across a number of different economic and stock market backgrounds and the implications of our results are of particular interest for academics, for investors (retail and institutional) and for policy makers.

In the article, the authors examine the different phases of feminisation of the horse racing field in Poland, starting from the early communist times up to the present. The empirical material for the article is comprised of 20 in-depth interviews with women riders whose careers spanned different decades and is supplemented by field observation and statistics. Following the nationalisation of horse racing in 1950, women were excluded due to the employment policy pursued by the State Horse Racetrack Company and the traditional apprenticeship system. Things changed in 1968, when the status of amateur riders was formally established. After 1989, along with the privatisation of horse racing stables, a new influx of women riders was observed, although only a few have achieved the jockey status so far. The analysis of the social context and class background of women in horse racing is supplemented with the investigation of stereotypes on women’s attributes internalised by female riders. The main claim of the article is that although the socio-economic conditions for horse racing in Poland changed dramatically over many decades, women invariably played ‘rescue roles’, which placed them on the fringes of the world of horse racing.

IntroductionFor over five years, Romanians have been using their bodies in public spaces to challenge politicians’ disregard for the average citizen. In a region low in standards of civic engagement, such as voter turnout and petition signing, Romanian people’s “citizenship of the streets” has stopped environmentally destructive mining in 2013, ousted a corrupt cabinet in 2015, and blocked legislation legalising abuse of public office in 2017 (Solnit 214). This article explores the democratic affordances of collective resistive walking, by focusing on Romania’s capital, Bucharest. I illustrate how walking in protest of political corruption cultivates a democratic public and reconfigures city spaces as spaces of democratic engagement, in the context of increased illiberalism in the region. I examine two sites of protest: the Parliament Palace and Victoriei Square. The former is a construction emblematic of communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu and symbol of an authoritarian regime, whose surrounding area protestors reclaim as a civic space. The latter—a central part of the city bustling with the life of cafes, museums, bike lanes, and nearby parks—hosts the Government and has become an iconic site for pro-democratic movements. Spaces of Democracy: The Performativity of Public Assemblies Democracies are active achievements, dependent not only on the solidity of institutions —e.g., a free press and a constitution—but on people’s ability and desire to communicate about issues of concern and to occupy public space. Communicative approaches to democratic theory, formulated as inquiries into the public sphere and the plurality and evolution of publics, often return to establish the significance of public spaces and of bodies in the maintenance of our “rhetorical democracies” (Hauser). Speech and assembly, voice and space are sides of the same coin. In John Dewey’s work, communication is the main “loyalty” of democracy: the heart and final guarantee of democracy is in free gatherings of neighbors on the street corner to discuss back and forth what is read in the uncensored news of the day, and in gatherings of friends in the living rooms of houses and apartments to converse freely with one another. (Dewey qtd. in Asen 197, emphasis added) Dewey asserts the centrality of communication in the same breath that he affirms the spatial infrastructure supporting it.Historically, Richard Sennett explains, Athenian democracy has been organised around two “spaces of democracy” where people assembled: the agora or town square and the theatre or Pnyx. While the theatre has endured as the symbol of democratic communication, with its ideal of concentrated attention on the argument of one speaker, Sennett illuminates the square as an equally important space, one without which deliberation in the Pnyx would be impossible. In the agora, citizens cultivate an ability to see, expect, and think through difference. In its open architecture and inclusiveness, Sennett explains, the agora affords the walker and dweller a public space to experience, in a quick, fragmentary, and embodied way, the differences and divergences in fellow citizens. Through visual scrutiny and embodied exposure, the square thus cultivates “an outlook favorable to discussion of differing views and conflicting interests”, useful for deliberation in the Pnyx, and the capacity to recognise strangers as part of the imagined democratic community (19). Also stressing the importance of spaces for assembly, Jürgen Habermas’s historical theorisation of the bourgeois public sphere moves the functions of the agora to the modern “third places” (Oldenburg) of the civic society emerging in late seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe: coffee houses, salons, and clubs. While Habermas’ conceptualization of a unified bourgeois public has been criticised for its class and gender exclusivism, and for its normative model of deliberation and consensus, such criticism has also opened paths of inquiry into the rhetorical pluralism of publics and into the democratic affordances of embodied performativity. Thus, unlike Habermas’s assumption of a single bourgeois public, work on twentieth and twenty-first century publics has attended to their wide variety in post-modern societies (e.g., Bruce; Butler; Delicath and DeLuca; Fraser; Harold and DeLuca; Hauser; Lewis; Mckinnon et al.; Pezzullo; Rai; Tabako). In contrast to the Habermasian close attention to verbal argumentation, such criticism prioritizes the embodied (performative, aesthetic, and material) ways in which publics manifest their attention to common issues. From suffragists to environmentalists and, most recently, anti-precarity movements across the globe, publics assemble and move through shared space, seeking to break hegemonies of media representation by creating media events of their own. In the process, Judith Butler explains, such embodied assemblies accomplish much more. They disrupt prevalent logics and dominant feelings of disposability, precarity, and anxiety, at the same time that they (re)constitute subjects and increasingly privatised spaces into citizens and public places of democracy, respectively. Butler proposes that to best understand recent protests we need to read collective assembly in the current political moment of “accelerating precarity” and responsibilisation (10). Globally, increasingly larger populations are exposed to economic insecurity and precarity through government withdrawal from labor protections and the diminishment of social services, to the profit of increasingly monopolistic business. A logic of self-investment and personal responsibility accompanies such structural changes, as people understand themselves as individual market actors in competition with other market actors rather than as citizens and community members (Brown). In this context, public assembly would enact an alternative, insisting on interdependency. Bodies, in such assemblies, signify both symbolically (their will to speak against power) and indexically. As Butler describes, “it is this body, and these bodies, that require employment, shelter, health care, and food, as well as a sense of a future that is not the future of unpayable debt” (10). Butler describes the function of these protests more fully:[P]lural enactments […] make manifest the understanding that a situation is shared, contesting the individualizing morality that makes a moral norm of economic self-sufficiency precisely […] when self-sufficiency is becoming increasingly unrealizable. Showing up, standing, breathing, moving, standing still, speech, and silence are all aspects of a sudden assembly, an unforeseen form of political performativity that puts livable life at the forefront of politics […] [T]he bodies assembled ‘say’ we are not disposable, even if they stand silently. (18)Though Romania is not included in her account of contemporary protest movements, Butler’s theoretical account aptly describes both the structural and ideological conditions, and the performativity of Romanian protestors. In Romania, citizens have started to assemble in the streets against austerity measures (2012), environmental destruction (2013), fatal infrastructures (2015) and against the government’s corruption and attempts to undermine the Judiciary (from February 2017 onward). While, as scholars have argued (Olteanu and Beyerle; Gubernat and Rammelt), political corruption has gradually crystallised into the dominant and enduring framework for the assembled publics, post-communist corruption has been part and parcel of the neoliberalisation of Central and Eastern-European societies after the fall of communism. In the region, Leslie Holmes explains, former communist elites or the nomenklatura, have remained the majority political class after 1989. With political power and under the shelter of political immunity, nomenklatura politicians “were able to take ethically questionable advantage in various ways […] of the sell-off of previously state-owned enterprises” (Holmes 12). The process through which the established political class became owners of a previously state-owned economy is known as “nomenklatura privatization”, a common form of political corruption in the region, Holmes explains (12). Such practices were common knowledge among a cynical population through most of the 1990s and the 2000s. They were not broadly challenged in an ideological milieu attached, as Mihaela Miroiu, Isabela Preoteasa, and Jerzy Szacki argued, to extreme forms of liberalism and neoliberalism, ideologies perceived by people just coming out of communism as anti-ideology. Almost three decades since the fall of communism, in the face of unyielding levels of poverty (Zaharia; Marin), the decaying state of healthcare and education (Bilefsky; “Education”), and migration rates second only to war-torn Syria (Deletant), Romanian protestors have come to attribute the diminution of life in post-communism to the political corruption of the established political class (“Romania Corruption Report”; “Corruption Perceptions”). Following systematic attempts by the nomenklatura-heavy governing coalition to undermine the judiciary and institutionalise de facto corruption of public officials (Deletant), protestors have been returning to public spaces on a weekly basis, de-normalising the political cynicism and isolation serving the established political class. Mothers Walking: Resignifying Communist Spaces, Imagining the New DemosOn 11 July 2018, a protest of mothers was streamed live by Corruption Kills (Corupția ucide), a Facebook group started by activist Florin Bădiță after a deadly nightclub fire attributed to the corruption of public servants, in 2015 (Commander). Organized protests at the time pressured the Social-Democratic cabinet into resignation. Corruption Kills has remained a key activist platform, organising assemblies, streaming live from demonstrations, and sharing personal acts of dissent, thus extending the life of embodied assemblies. In the mothers’ protest video, women carrying babies in body-wraps and strollers walk across the intersection leading to the Parliament Palace, while police direct traffic and ensure their safety (“Civil Disobedience”). This was an unusual scene for many reasons. Walkers met at the entrance to the Parliament Palace, an area most emblematic of the former regime. Built by Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu and inspired by Kim Il-sung’s North Korean architecture, the current Parliament building and its surrounding plaza remain, in the words of Renata Salecl, “one of the most traumatic remnants of the communist regime” (90). The construction is the second largest administrative building in the world, after the Pentagon, a size matching the ambitions of the dictator. It bears witness to the personal and cultural sacrifices the construction and its surrounded plaza required: the displacement of some 40,000 people from old neighbourhood Uranus, the death of reportedly thousands of workers, and the flattening of churches, monasteries, hospitals, schools (Parliament Palace). This arbitrary construction carved out of the old city remains a symbol of an authoritarian relation with the nation. As Salecl puts it, Ceaușescu’s project tried to realise the utopia of a new communist “centre” and created an artificial space as removed from the rest of the city as the leader himself was from the needs of his people. Twenty-nine years after the fall of communism, the plaza of the Parliament Palace remains as suspended from the life of the city as it was during the 1980s. The trees lining the boulevard have grown slightly and bike lanes are painted over decaying stones. Still, only few people walk by the neo-classical apartment buildings now discoloured and stained by weather and time. Salecl remarks on the panoptic experience of the Parliament Palace: “observed from the avenue, [the palace] appears to have no entrance; there are only numerous windows, which give the impression of an omnipresent gaze” (95). The building embodies, for Salecl, the logic of surveillance of the communist regime, which “created the impression of omnipresence” through a secret police that rallied members among regular citizens and inspired fear by striking randomly (95).Against this geography steeped in collective memories of fear and exposure to the gaze of the state, women turn their children’s bodies and their own into performances of resistance that draw on the rhetorical force of communist gender politics. Both motherhood and childhood were heavily regulated roles under Ceaușescu’s nationalist-socialist politics of forced birth, despite the official idealisation of both. Producing children for the nationalist-communist state was women’s mandated expression of citizenship. Declaring the foetus “the socialist property of the whole society”, in 1966 Ceaușescu criminalised abortion for women of reproductive ages who had fewer than four children, and, starting 1985, less than five children (Ceaușescu qtd. in Verdery). What followed was “a national tragedy”: illegal abortions became the leading cause of death for fertile women, children were abandoned into inhumane conditions in the infamous orphanages, and mothers experienced the everyday drama of caring for families in an economy of shortages (Kligman 364). The communist politicisation of natality during communist Romania exemplifies one of the worst manifestations of the political as biopolitical. The current maternal bodies and children’s bodies circulating in the communist-iconic plaza articulate past and present for Romanians, redeploying a traumatic collective memory to challenge increasingly authoritarian ambitions of the governing Social Democratic Party. The images of caring mothers walking in protest with their babies furthers the claims that anti-corruption publics have made in other venues: that the government, in their indifference and corruption, is driving millions of people, usually young, out of the country, in a braindrain of unprecedented proportions (Ursu; Deletant; #vavedemdinSibiu). In their determination to walk during the gruelling temperatures of mid-July, in their youth and their babies’ youth, the mothers’ walk performs the contrast between their generation of engaged, persistent, and caring citizens and the docile abused subject of a past indexed by the Ceaușescu-era architecture. In addition to performing a new caring imagined community (Anderson), women’s silent, resolute walk on the crosswalk turns a lifeless geography, heavy with the architectural traces of authoritarian history, into a public space that holds democratic protest. By inhabiting the cultural role of mothers, protestors disarmed state authorities: instead of the militarised gendarmerie usually policing protestors the Victoriei Square, only traffic police were called for the mothers’ protest. The police choreographed cars and people, as protestors walked across the intersection leading to the Parliament. Drivers, usually aggressive and insouciant, now moved in concert with the protestors. The mothers’ walk, immediately modeled by people in other cities (Cluj-Napoca), reconfigured a car-dominated geography and an unreliable, driver-friendly police, into a civic space that is struggling to facilitate the citizens’ peaceful disobedience. The walkers’ assembly thus begins to constitute the civic character of the plaza, collecting “the space itself […] the pavement and […] the architecture [to produce] the public character of that material environment” (Butler 71). It demonstrates the possibility of a new imagined community of caring and persistent citizens, one significantly different from the cynical, disconnected, and survivalist subjects that the nomenklatura politicians, nested in the Panoptic Parliament nearby, would prefer.Persisting in the Victoriei Square In addition to strenuous physical walking to reclaim city spaces, such as the mothers’ walking, the anti-corruption public also practices walking and gathering in less taxing environments. The Victoriei Square is such a place, a central plaza that connects major boulevards with large sidewalks, functional bike lanes, and old trees. The square is the architectural meeting point of old and new, where communist apartments meet late nineteenth and early twentieth century architecture, in a privileged neighbourhood of villas, museums, and foreign consulates. One of these 1930s constructions is the Government building, hosting the Prime Minister’s cabinet. Demonstrators gathered here during the major protests of 2015 and 2017, and have walked, stood, and wandered in the square almost weekly since (“Past Events”). On 24 June 2018, I arrive in the Victoriei Square to participate in the protest announced on social media by Corruption Kills. There is room to move, to pause, and rest. In some pockets, people assemble to pay attention to impromptu speakers who come onto a small platform to share their ideas. Occasionally someone starts chanting “We See You!” and “Down with Corruption!” and almost everyone joins the chant. A few young people circulate petitions. But there is little exultation in the group as a whole, shared mostly among those taking up the stage or waving flags. Throughout the square, groups of familiars stop to chat. Couples and families walk their bikes, strolling slowly through the crowds, seemingly heading to or coming from the nearby park on a summer evening. Small kids play together, drawing with chalk on the pavement, or greeting dogs while parents greet each other. Older children race one another, picking up on the sense of freedom and de-centred but still purposeful engagement. The openness of the space allows one to meander and observe all these groups, performing the function of the Ancient agora: making visible the strangers who are part of the polis. The overwhelming feeling is one of solidarity. This comes partly from the possibilities of collective agency and the feeling of comfortably taking up space and having your embodiment respected, otherwise hard to come by in other spaces of the city. Everyday walking in the streets of Romanian cities is usually an exercise in hypervigilant physical prowess and self-preserving numbness. You keep your eyes on the ground to not stumble on broken pavement. You watch ahead for unmarked construction work. You live with other people’s sweat on the hot buses. You hop among cars parked on sidewalks and listen keenly for when others may zoom by. In one of the last post-socialist states to join the European Union, living with generalised poverty means walking in cities where your senses must be dulled to manage the heat, the dust, the smells, and the waiting, irresponsive to beauty and to amiable sociality. The euphemistic vocabulary of neoliberalism may describe everyday walking through individualistic terms such as “grit” or “resilience.” And while people are called to effort, creativity, and endurance not needed in more functional states, what one experiences is the gradual diminution of one’s lives under a political regime where illiberalism keeps a citizen-serving democracy at bay. By contrast, the Victoriei Square holds bodies whose comfort in each other’s presence allow us to imagine a political community where survivalism, or what Lauren Berlant calls “lateral agency”, are no longer the norm. In “showing up, standing, breathing, moving, standing still […] an unforeseen form of political performativity that puts livable life at the forefront of politics” is enacted (Butler 18). In arriving to Victoriei Square repeatedly, Romanians demonstrate that there is room to breathe more easily, to engage with civility, and to trust the strangers in their country. They assert that they are not disposable, even if a neoliberal corrupt post-communist regime would have them otherwise.ConclusionBecoming a public, as Michael Warner proposes, is an ongoing process of attention to an issue, through the circulation of discourse and self-organisation with strangers. For the anti-corruption public of Romania’s past years, such ongoing work is accompanied by persistent, civil, embodied collective assembly, in an articulation of claims, bodies, and spaces that promotes a material agency that reconfigures the city and the imagined Romanian community into a more democratic one. The Romanian citizenship of the streets is particularly significant in the current geopolitical and ideological moment. In the region, increasing authoritarianism meets the alienating logics of neoliberalism, both trying to reduce citizens to disposable, self-reliant, and disconnected market actors. Populist autocrats—Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, the Peace and Justice Party in Poland, and recently E.U.-penalized Victor Orban, in Hungary—are dismantling the system of checks and balances, and posing threats to a European Union already challenged by refugee debates and Donald Trump’s unreliable alliance against authoritarianism. In such a moment, the Romanian anti-corruption public performs within the geographies of their city solidarity and commitment to democracy, demonstrating an alternative to the submissive and disconnected subjects preferred by authoritarianism and neoliberalism.Author's NoteIn addition to the anonymous reviewers, the author would like to thank Mary Tuominen and Jesse Schlotterbeck for their helpful comments on this essay.ReferencesAnderson, Benedict R. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 2016.Asen, Robert. “A Discourse Theory of Citizenship.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90.2 (2004): 189-211. 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Introduction This paper offers a survey of familiar popular music performers and songwriters who reference coffee in their work. It examines three areas of discourse: the psychoactive effects of caffeine, coffee and courtship rituals, and the politics of coffee consumption. I claim that coffee carries a cultural and musicological significance comparable to that of the chemical stimulants and consumer goods more readily associated with popular music. Songs about coffee may not be as potent as those featuring drugs and alcohol (Primack; Schapiro), or as common as those referencing commodities like clothes and cars (Englis; McCracken), but they do feature across a wide range of genres, some of which enjoy archetypal associations with this beverage. m.o.m.m.y. Needs c.o.f.f.e.e.: The Psychoactive Effect of Coffee The act of performing and listening to popular music involves psychological elements comparable to the overwhelming sensory experience of drug taking: altered perceptions, repetitive grooves, improvisation, self-expression, and psychological empathy—such as that between musician and audience (Curry). Most popular music genres are, as a result, culturally and sociologically identified with the consumption of at least one mind-altering substance (Lyttle; Primack; Schapiro). While the analysis of lyrics referring to this theme has hitherto focused on illegal drugs and alcoholic beverages (Cooper), coffee and its psychoactive ingredient caffeine have been almost entirely overlooked (Summer). The most recent study of drugs in popular music, for example, defined substance use as “tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, cocaine and other stimulants, heroin and other opiates, hallucinogens, inhalants, prescription drugs, over-the-counter drugs, and nonspecific substances” (Primack 172), thereby ignoring a chemical stimulant consumed by 90 per cent of adult Americans every day (Lovett). The wide availability of coffee and the comparatively mild effect of caffeine means that its consumption rarely causes harm. One researcher has described it as a ubiquitous and unobtrusive “generalised public activity […] ‘invisible’ to analysts seeking distinctive social events” (Cooper 92). Coffee may provide only a relatively mild “buzz”—but it is now accepted that caffeine is an addictive substance (Juliano) and, due to its universal legality, coffee is also the world’s most extensively traded and enthusiastically consumed psychoactive consumer product (Juliano 1). The musical genre of jazz has a longstanding relationship with marijuana and narcotics (Curry; Singer; Tolson; Winick). Unsurprisingly, given its Round Midnight connotations, jazz standards also celebrate the restorative impact of coffee. Exemplary compositions include Burke/Webster’s insomniac torch song Black Coffee, which provided hits for Sarah Vaughan (1949), Ella Fitzgerald (1953), and Peggy Lee (1960); and Frank Sinatra’s recordings of Hilliard/Dick’s The Coffee Song (1946, 1960), which satirised the coffee surplus in Brazil at a time when this nation enjoyed a near monopoly on production. Sinatra joked that this ubiquitous drink was that country’s only means of liquid refreshment, in a refrain that has since become a headline writer’s phrasal template: “There’s an Awful Lot of Coffee in Vietnam,” “An Awful Lot of Coffee in the Bin,” and “There’s an Awful Lot of Taxes in Brazil.” Ethnographer Aaron Fox has shown how country music gives expression to the lived social experience of blue-collar and agrarian workers (Real 29). Coffee’s role in energising working class America (Cooper) is featured in such recordings as Dolly Parton’s Nine To Five (1980), which describes her morning routine using a memorable “kitchen/cup of ambition” rhyme, and Don't Forget the Coffee Billy Joe (1973) by Tom T. Hall which laments the hardship of unemployment, hunger, cold, and lack of healthcare. Country music’s “tired truck driver” is the most enduring blue-collar trope celebrating coffee’s analeptic powers. Versions include Truck Drivin' Man by Buck Owens (1964), host of the country TV show Hee Haw and pioneer of the Bakersfield sound, and Driving My Life Away from pop-country crossover star Eddie Rabbitt (1980). Both feature characteristically gendered stereotypes of male truck drivers pushing on through the night with the help of a truck stop waitress who has fuelled them with caffeine. Johnny Cash’s A Cup of Coffee (1966), recorded at the nadir of his addiction to pills and alcohol, has an incoherent improvised lyric on this subject; while Jerry Reed even prescribed amphetamines to keep drivers awake in Caffein [sic], Nicotine, Benzedrine (And Wish Me Luck) (1980). Doye O’Dell’s Diesel Smoke, Dangerous Curves (1952) is the archetypal “truck drivin’ country” song and the most exciting track of its type. It subsequently became a hit for the doyen of the subgenre, Red Simpson (1966). An exhausted driver, having spent the night with a woman whose name he cannot now recall, is fighting fatigue and wrestling his hot-rod low-loader around hairpin mountain curves in an attempt to rendezvous with a pretty truck stop waitress. The song’s palpable energy comes from its frenetic guitar picking and the danger implicit in trailing a heavy load downhill while falling asleep at the wheel. Tommy Faile’s Phantom 309, a hit for Red Sovine (1967) that was later covered by Tom Waits (Big Joe and the Phantom 309, 1975), elevates the “tired truck driver” narrative to gothic literary form. Reflecting country music’s moral code of citizenship and its culture of performative storytelling (Fox, Real 23), it tells of a drenched and exhausted young hitchhiker picked up by Big Joe—the driver of a handsome eighteen-wheeler. On arriving at a truck stop, Joe drops the traveller off, giving him money for a restorative coffee. The diner falls silent as the hitchhiker orders up his “cup of mud”. Big Joe, it transpires, is a phantom trucker. After running off the road to avoid a school bus, his distinctive ghost rig now only reappears to rescue stranded travellers. Punk rock, a genre closely associated with recreational amphetamines (McNeil 76, 87), also features a number of caffeine-as-stimulant songs. Californian punk band, Descendents, identified caffeine as their drug of choice in two 1996 releases, Coffee Mug and Kids on Coffee. These songs describe chugging the drink with much the same relish and energy that others might pull at the neck of a beer bottle, and vividly compare the effects of the drug to the intense rush of speed. The host of “New Music News” (a segment of MTV’s 120 Minutes) references this correlation in 1986 while introducing the band’s video—in which they literally bounce off the walls: “You know, while everybody is cracking down on crack, what about that most respectable of toxic substances or stimulants, the good old cup of coffee? That is the preferred high, actually, of California’s own Descendents—it is also the subject of their brand new video” (“New Music News”). Descendents’s Sessions EP (1997) featured an overflowing cup of coffee on the sleeve, while punk’s caffeine-as-amphetamine trope is also promulgated by Hellbender (Caffeinated 1996), Lagwagon (Mr. Coffee 1997), and Regatta 69 (Addicted to Coffee 2005). Coffee in the Morning and Kisses in the Night: Coffee and Courtship Coffee as romantic metaphor in song corroborates the findings of early researchers who examined courtship rituals in popular music. Donald Horton’s 1957 study found that hit songs codified the socially constructed self-image and limited life expectations of young people during the 1950s by depicting conservative, idealised, and traditional relationship scenarios. He summarised these as initial courtship, honeymoon period, uncertainty, and parting (570-4). Eleven years after this landmark analysis, James Carey replicated Horton’s method. His results revealed that pop lyrics had become more realistic and less bound by convention during the 1960s. They incorporated a wider variety of discourse including the temporariness of romantic commitment, the importance of individual autonomy in relationships, more liberal attitudes, and increasingly unconventional courtship behaviours (725). Socially conservative coffee songs include Coffee in the Morning and Kisses in the Night by The Boswell Sisters (1933) in which the protagonist swears fidelity to her partner on condition that this desire is expressed strictly in the appropriate social context of marriage. It encapsulates the restrictions Horton identified on courtship discourse in popular song prior to the arrival of rock and roll. The Henderson/DeSylva/Brown composition You're the Cream in My Coffee, recorded by Annette Hanshaw (1928) and by Nat King Cole (1946), also celebrates the social ideal of monogamous devotion. The persistence of such idealised traditional themes continued into the 1960s. American pop singer Don Cherry had a hit with Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye (1962) that used coffee as a metaphor for undying and everlasting love. Otis Redding’s version of Butler/Thomas/Walker’s Cigarettes and Coffee (1966)—arguably soul music’s exemplary romantic coffee song—carries a similar message as a couple proclaim their devotion in a late night conversation over coffee. Like much of the Stax catalogue, Cigarettes and Coffee, has a distinctly “down home” feel and timbre. The lovers are simply content with each other; they don’t need “cream” or “sugar.” Horton found 1950s blues and R&B lyrics much more sexually explicit than pop songs (567). Dawson (1994) subsequently characterised black popular music as a distinct public sphere, and Squires (2002) argued that it displayed elements of what she defined as “enclave” and “counterpublic” traits. Lawson (2010) has argued that marginalised and/or subversive blues artists offered a form of countercultural resistance against prevailing social norms. Indeed, several blues and R&B coffee songs disregard established courtship ideals and associate the product with non-normative and even transgressive relationship circumstances—including infidelity, divorce, and domestic violence. Lightnin’ Hopkins’s Coffee Blues (1950) references child neglect and spousal abuse, while the narrative of Muddy Waters’s scorching Iodine in my Coffee (1952) tells of an attempted poisoning by his Waters’s partner. In 40 Cups of Coffee (1953) Ella Mae Morse is waiting for her husband to return home, fuelling her anger and anxiety with caffeine. This song does eventually comply with traditional courtship ideals: when her lover eventually returns home at five in the morning, he is greeted with a relieved kiss. In Keep That Coffee Hot (1955), Scatman Crothers supplies a counterpoint to Morse’s late-night-abandonment narrative, asking his partner to keep his favourite drink warm during his adulterous absence. Brook Benton’s Another Cup of Coffee (1964) expresses acute feelings of regret and loneliness after a failed relationship. More obliquely, in Coffee Blues (1966) Mississippi John Hurt sings affectionately about his favourite brand, a “lovin’ spoonful” of Maxwell House. In this, he bequeathed the moniker of folk-rock band The Lovin’ Spoonful, whose hits included Do You Believe in Magic (1965) and Summer in the City (1966). However, an alternative reading of Hurt’s lyric suggests that this particular phrase is a metaphorical device proclaiming the author’s sexual potency. Hurt’s “lovin’ spoonful” may actually be a portion of his seminal emission. In the 1950s, Horton identified country as particularly “doleful” (570), and coffee provides a common metaphor for failed romance in a genre dominated by “metanarratives of loss and desire” (Fox, Jukebox 54). Claude Gray’s I'll Have Another Cup of Coffee (Then I’ll Go) (1961) tells of a protagonist delivering child support payments according to his divorce lawyer’s instructions. The couple share late night coffee as their children sleep through the conversation. This song was subsequently recorded by seventeen-year-old Bob Marley (One Cup of Coffee, 1962) under the pseudonym Bobby Martell, a decade prior to his breakthrough as an international reggae star. Marley’s youngest son Damian has also performed the track while, interestingly in the context of this discussion, his older sibling Rohan co-founded Marley Coffee, an organic farm in the Jamaican Blue Mountains. Following Carey’s demonstration of mainstream pop’s increasingly realistic depiction of courtship behaviours during the 1960s, songwriters continued to draw on coffee as a metaphor for failed romance. In Carly Simon’s You’re So Vain (1972), she dreams of clouds in her coffee while contemplating an ostentatious ex-lover. Squeeze’s Black Coffee In Bed (1982) uses a coffee stain metaphor to describe the end of what appears to be yet another dead-end relationship for the protagonist. Sarah Harmer’s Coffee Stain (1998) expands on this device by reworking the familiar “lipstick on your collar” trope, while Sexsmith & Kerr’s duet Raindrops in my Coffee (2005) superimposes teardrops in coffee and raindrops on the pavement with compelling effect. Kate Bush’s Coffee Homeground (1978) provides the most extreme narrative of relationship breakdown: the true story of Cora Henrietta Crippin’s poisoning. Researchers who replicated Horton’s and Carey’s methodology in the late 1970s (Bridges; Denisoff) were surprised to find their results dominated by traditional courtship ideals. The new liberal values unearthed by Carey in the late 1960s simply failed to materialise in subsequent decades. In this context, it is interesting to observe how romantic coffee songs in contemporary soul and jazz continue to disavow the post-1960s trend towards realistic social narratives, adopting instead a conspicuously consumerist outlook accompanied by smooth musical timbres. This phenomenon possibly betrays the influence of contemporary coffee advertising. From the 1980s, television commercials have sought to establish coffee as a desirable high end product, enjoyed by bohemian lovers in a conspicuously up-market environment (Werder). All Saints’s Black Coffee (2000) and Lebrado’s Coffee (2006) identify strongly with the culture industry’s image of coffee as a luxurious beverage whose consumption signifies prominent social status. All Saints’s promotional video is set in a opulent location (although its visuals emphasise the lyric’s romantic disharmony), while Natalie Cole’s Coffee Time (2008) might have been itself written as a commercial. Busting Up a Starbucks: The Politics of Coffee Politics and coffee meet most palpably at the coffee shop. This conjunction has a well-documented history beginning with the establishment of coffee houses in Europe and the birth of the public sphere (Habermas; Love; Pincus). The first popular songs to reference coffee shops include Jaybird Coleman’s Coffee Grinder Blues (1930), which boasts of skills that precede the contemporary notion of a barista by four decades; and Let's Have Another Cup of Coffee (1932) from Irving Berlin’s depression-era musical Face The Music, where the protagonists decide to stay in a restaurant drinking coffee and eating pie until the economy improves. Coffee in a Cardboard Cup (1971) from the Broadway musical 70 Girls 70 is an unambiguous condemnation of consumerism, however, it was written, recorded and produced a generation before Starbucks’ aggressive expansion and rapid dominance of the coffee house market during the 1990s. The growth of this company caused significant criticism and protest against what seemed to be a ruthless homogenising force that sought to overwhelm local competition (Holt; Thomson). In response, Starbucks has sought to be defined as a more responsive and interactive brand that encourages “glocalisation” (de Larios; Thompson). Koller, however, has characterised glocalisation as the manipulative fabrication of an “imagined community”—whose heterogeneity is in fact maintained by the aesthetics and purchasing choices of consumers who make distinctive and conscious anti-brand statements (114). Neat Capitalism is a more useful concept here, one that intercedes between corporate ideology and postmodern cultural logic, where such notions as community relations and customer satisfaction are deliberately and perhaps somewhat cynically conflated with the goal of profit maximisation (Rojek). As the world’s largest chain of coffee houses with over 19,400 stores in March 2012 (Loxcel), Starbucks is an exemplar of this phenomenon. Their apparent commitment to environmental stewardship, community relations, and ethical sourcing is outlined in the company’s annual “Global Responsibility Report” (Vimac). It is also demonstrated in their engagement with charitable and environmental non-governmental organisations such as Fairtrade and Co-operative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere (CARE). By emphasising this, Starbucks are able to interpellate (that is, “call forth”, “summon”, or “hail” in Althusserian terms) those consumers who value environmental protection, social justice and ethical business practices (Rojek 117). Bob Dylan and Sheryl Crow provide interesting case studies of the persuasive cultural influence evoked by Neat Capitalism. Dylan’s 1962 song Talkin’ New York satirised his formative experiences as an impoverished performer in Greenwich Village’s coffee houses. In 1995, however, his decision to distribute the Bob Dylan: Live At The Gaslight 1962 CD exclusively via Starbucks generated significant media controversy. Prominent commentators expressed their disapproval (Wilson Harris) and HMV Canada withdrew Dylan’s product from their shelves (Lynskey). Despite this, the success of this and other projects resulted in the launch of Starbucks’s in-house record company, Hear Music, which released entirely new recordings from major artists such as Ray Charles, Paul McCartney, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon and Elvis Costello—although the company has recently announced a restructuring of their involvement in this venture (O’Neil). Sheryl Crow disparaged her former life as a waitress in Coffee Shop (1995), a song recorded for her second album. “Yes, I was a waitress. I was a waitress not so long ago; then I won a Grammy” she affirmed in a YouTube clip of a live performance from the same year. More recently, however, Crow has become an avowed self-proclaimed “Starbucks groupie” (Tickle), releasing an Artist’s Choice (2003) compilation album exclusively via Hear Music and performing at the company’s 2010 Annual Shareholders’s Meeting. Songs voicing more unequivocal dissatisfaction with Starbucks’s particular variant of Neat Capitalism include Busting Up a Starbucks (Mike Doughty, 2005), and Starbucks Takes All My Money (KJ-52, 2008). The most successful of these is undoubtedly Ron Sexsmith’s Jazz at the Bookstore (2006). Sexsmith bemoans the irony of intense original blues artists such as Leadbelly being drowned out by the cacophony of coffee grinding machines while customers queue up to purchase expensive coffees whose names they can’t pronounce. In this, he juxtaposes the progressive patina of corporate culture against the circumstances of African-American labour conditions in the deep South, the shocking incongruity of which eventually cause the old bluesman to turn in his grave. Fredric Jameson may have good reason to lament the depthless a-historical pastiche of postmodern popular culture, but this is no “nostalgia film”: Sexsmith articulates an artfully framed set of subtle, sensitive, and carefully contextualised observations. Songs about coffee also intersect with politics via lyrics that play on the mid-brown colour of the beverage, by employing it as a metaphor for the sociological meta-narratives of acculturation and assimilation. First popularised in Israel Zangwill’s 1905 stage play, The Melting Pot, this term is more commonly associated with Americanisation rather than miscegenation in the United States—a nuanced distinction that British band Blue Mink failed to grasp with their memorable invocation of “coffee-coloured people” in Melting Pot (1969). Re-titled in the US as People Are Together (Mickey Murray, 1970) the song was considered too extreme for mainstream radio airplay (Thompson). Ike and Tina Turner’s Black Coffee (1972) provided a more accomplished articulation of coffee as a signifier of racial identity; first by associating it with the history of slavery and the post-Civil Rights discourse of African-American autonomy, then by celebrating its role as an energising force for African-American workers seeking economic self-determination. Anyone familiar with the re-casting of black popular music in an industry dominated by Caucasian interests and aesthetics (Cashmore; Garofalo) will be unsurprised to find British super-group Humble Pie’s (1973) version of this song more recognisable. Conclusion Coffee-flavoured popular songs celebrate the stimulant effects of caffeine, provide metaphors for courtship rituals, and offer critiques of Neat Capitalism. Harold Love and Guthrie Ramsey have each argued (from different perspectives) that the cultural micro-narratives of small social groups allow us to identify important “ethnographic truths” (Ramsey 22). Aesthetically satisfying and intellectually stimulating coffee songs are found where these micro-narratives intersect with the ethnographic truths of coffee culture. 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