Journal articles on the topic 'Post-communism – Hungary'

Often the feeling prevails that everything is falling apart. In a way, this is true. The former centralist, bureaucratic, and dysfunctional system of support for order cannot be self-supporting and is collapsing. The new system, in all its aspects, is being born, prepared, thought through. But it is not yet up and working. Václav Havel

The ghost of Trianon continues to haunt Central Europe. The consequences of the unmaking of the Habsburg Kingdom of Hungary still confront diplomats, even more so now in the aftermath of communism and the demise of Soviet hegemony. The plight of Hungarian minorities in Hungary's neighboring states is a constant concern to diplomats as satisfactory accommodation of ethnic minorities fails throughout post-communist Eastern Europe. Specifically, a fear of destabilization on account of a crisis related to the several Hungarian minorities scattered in half a dozen adjacent states is never far from the surface.

The “Ex-communist party” label has often been used to describe the political ideas and political behavior of the former ruling communist parties operating in post-communist political systems. Yet, the former ruling communist parties have not only followed diverse paths of organizational transformation, but also have developed very different strategic visions of their role in the politics of post-communism. By comparing the political environments faced by the former ruling organizations of East Germany and Hungary and then utilizing content analysis to identify the strategic visions of each of the two organizations, this article demonstrates how different post-communist national political settings have resulted in divergent strategic visions for successor parties in Germany and Hungary.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate vertical and horizontal mismatch between education and current occupation for graduates in four post-communist societies: Hungary, Poland, Lithuania and Slovenia. In this way it contributes to the field by exploring how mechanisms, known from previous studies on western societies, affect job mismatch in emerging market economies. Design/methodology/approach – Two dependent variables are constructed: working in a non-graduate occupation as defined by the ISCO job title depicts vertical mismatch; assessment of the job from the perspective of the fields of study describes horizontal mismatch. Since the dependent variables are dichotomous ones, binary logistic regression models are fitted to the data predicting the incidence of mismatch. Explanatory variables cover mechanisms affecting job mismatch: variation by fields of studies, accumulated work experience during studies, labour market uncertainties during early career, trade off between job safety and job mismatch, persistence of “bad” labour market entry during early career, influence of parental background on school-to-work transition. Findings – The analysis reveals significant differences for study fields in association with occupational specificity of the disciplines. Only study-related work experience seems to be advantageous to find a matching job. Labour market uncertainties increase the probability of job mismatch. Job safety is more important than a matching job. Originality/value – Mismatch in first occupation has strong and long-lasting effect on the job match even five years after the graduation. The effect of parental background on job mismatch is curvilinear.

AbstractThe problem addressed in this article is the adequacy of the recently developed quality of democracy model in analyzing post-communist democracies in the context of their recent accession into the European Union. In order to provide some clarification of this question, the conceptual framework is utilized in light of past and recent political developments in Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland and Romania. Several procedural and substantive dimensions of the model are examined, particularly participation and competition, accountability, governance, rule of law, corruption and aspects of popular legitimacy. The main conclusion is that while the model proves its ability to understand some of the specific dynamics and peculiarities of these cases, it is less successful in showing how democratic legitimacy becomes institutionalized.

This analysis compares the effects on social mobility of the political transformations in Eastern Europe which took place in the 1950s and the 1990s. The author examines absolute and relative mobility rates in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Russia and Slovakia based on data from national random samples taken in 1993 and 1994. Log-linear models are applied to mobility tables for four periods, 1948-52, 1952-63, 1983-88 and 1988-93, to determine change in the strength of association between occupational categories. Searching for the effect of the transition to communism the author compares occupational mobility between 1948 and 1952 with occupational mobility between 1952 and 1963. In order to assess the effect of the transition from communism, mobility between 1983 and 1988 is compared to mobility between 1988 and 1993. It was definitely the transition to communism in the late 1940s that released the more intensive flows between basic segments of the social structure compared to what occurred during the exit from communism in the 1990s. Using both the diagonals and the constant social fluidity models, the author finds no evidence of increasing openness in post-communist countries. Contrariwise, in the 1948-63 period some significant change occurred in relative mobility chances. The conclusion is that the “first transformation” gave rise to a turn in social fluidity on the “genotypical” level.

Ian Bremmer and Ray Taras, eds., New States, New Politics: Building the Post-Soviet Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 743 pp., ISBN 0–521–57101–4Bruno Coppieters, Alexei Zverev and Dmitri Trenin, eds., Commonwealth and Independence in Post-Soviet Eurasia (London: Frank Cass, 1998), 232 pp., ISBN 0–714–64480–3Leslie Holmes, Post-Communism: an Introduction (Oxford: Polity Press, 1997), 260 pp., ISBN 0–745–61311–xMichael Mandelbaum, ed., Post-Communism: Four Perspectives (US Council of Foreign Relations, 1996), 208 pp., ISBN 0–876–09186–9Ilya Prizel, National Identity and Foreign Policy: Nationalism and Leadership in Poland, Russia and Ukraine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 443 pp., ISBN 0–521–57157–xRichard Rose, William Mishler and Christian Haerpfer, Democracy and Its Alternatives: Understanding Post-Communist Societies (Oxford: Polity Press, 1998), 270 pp., ISBN 0–745–61926–6Barnett R. Rubin and Jack Snyder, Post-Soviet Political Order (London/New York: Routledge, 1998), 201 pp., ISBN 0–415–17068–0Graham Smith, Vivien Law, Andrew Wilson, Annette Bohr and Edward Allworth, Nation-Building in Post-Soviet Borderlands: The Politics of National Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 304 pp., ISBN 0–521–59045–0Vladimir Tismaneanu, Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy, Nationalism, and Myth in Post-Communist Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 217 pp., ISBN 0–691–04826–6Gordon Wightman, ed., Party Formation in East-Central Europe: Post-Communist Politics in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Bulgaria (Vermont: Edward Elgar, 1995), 270 pp., ISBN 1–858–898132–8It is now about 10 years since the communist bloc ceased to exist (1989 is the year when communism was defeated in central-eastern Europe, and in 1991 its bastion – the Soviet Union – fell). What it left behind are a couple of die-hard communist survivor-states, an urge to ‘rethink’ or ‘re-define’ many fundamental concepts of political science, and a large swathe of land that is still to be properly categorised in registers of comparative political science. ‘Post-communism’ is the most popular term to cover this territory. But does it refer to something real today, or does it just express some kind of intellectual inertia? How much do the ‘post-communist countries’ still have in common with each other and to what extent are they different from any others?

The intractable war in Yugoslavia, the breakup of Czechslovakia, the nationalist rumblings in Hungary and Romania, and manifestations of imperial and nationalist longings in Russian politics signify nationalism's enduring potency in Central and Eastern Europe. While some foreign observers worried about this potency, the new elites largely believed that liberalism in power could overcome those forces. Liberal democracy's triumph supposedly meant the end of History,inter alia,aggressive nationalism in Eastern Europe. They believed that these national liberation movements had cooperative, mutually supportive relationships that would flower after Communism ended. Nationalist discords were due to Eastern Europe's previous historical post-1914 nightmares, but the new post-1989 states would have amicable relations with their neighbors. Ostensibly, nationalism, once freed from Soviet repression, would bring an end to Soviet rule and usher in a new ‘springtime of nations.'

AbstractThe goal of this paper is to put into focus and explain distinctive features of the political developments in Lithuania during second post-communist decade, comparing them with other Baltic States (Latvia and Estonia) and those Central European countries with political systems which resembled most closely Lithuania (Poland and Hungary) by the end of the first post-communist decade. In all these countries, second post-communist decade witnessed the rise of the new successful populist parties. The author argues that this populist rise is the proper context for understanding of Rolandas Paksas’ impeachment in Lithuania in 2003–2004. His Order and Justice Party has to be classified together with the Kaczynski twins Law and Justice Party and its even more radical allies in Poland, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz and Gábor Vona’s Jobbik in Hungary, Juhan Part’s Res Publica in Estonia and Einars Repše’s New Era in Latvia. They all were right-wing populist parties, proclaiming in their anti-establishment rhetoric the war on corruption of the (ex-communist) elite and the coming of new politics. While the rise of right-wing populism did not change the political system in Estonia and Latvia, its outcome in Hungary and Poland was the breakup of the ex-communist and anti-communist elites pact which was the foundation of the political stability during first post-communist decade. The Kaczynski twins founded Rzecz Pospolita IV (4th Republic of Poland), grounded in the thorough and comprehensive lustration of the ex-communist cadres. Fidesz leader Orban used the two-thirds majority in the Hungarian parliament to promulgate a new constitution. Lithuania is unique in that the ex-communist and anti-communist elites pact was not abolished, but preserved and consolidated thanks to the collaboration of all, by this time, established and left-of-center populist parties during the impeachment proceedings. The impeachment of Paksas can be considered as the stress test of the young Lithuanian liberal democracy just on the eve of the accession of Lithuania to the European Union and NATO. An unhappy peculiarity of the stress tests is that they sometimes break or damage the items tested. Preventing the transformation of liberal post-communism into populist post-communism in Lithuania, the impeachment as stress test was a success. However, against the expectation of many observers, it did not enhance the quality of democracy of Lithuania. The legacy of impeachment are disequilibrium of the balance of power between government branches in favor of the Constitutional Court, strengthening of the left-of-centre populist political forces and the interference of secret services into Lithuanian politics with the self-assumed mission to safeguard Lithuanian democracy from the perils of populism.

This article reviews the implications of the collapse of Communism in Europe for some themes in recent social theory. It was often assumed that 1989 was part of a global process of normalization and routinization of social life that had been left behind earlier utopian hopes. Nothing that utopia is open to various interpretations, including utopias of the everyday, this article suggests, first that there were utopian dimensions to 1989, and, second, that these hopes continue to influence contemporary social and political developments. The continuing role of substantive utopian expectations is illustrated with reference to the politics of lustration in Poland and the rise of nationalist parties in Hungary. This analysis is placed in the context of the already apparent impact of the global economic crisis in post-communist countries. It concludes that the unevenness and diversity of the post-1989 world elude overly generalized attempts at theorization and demand more nuanced analyses.

In the post-communist period, the driving forces behind minority rights protection have been international—the incentives surrounding membership in the European Union and relations with Hungary—and domestic—the minority’s capacity to gain representation, and therefore leverage, in the political system. In this analysis of the current state of minority affairs, we focus largely on the domestic context—the politics of Hungarian minority representation in Romania, Slovakia, and Serbia—and the ramifications of relations with Hungary. In this overview, we will contextualize the key strategic situation in all three cases: the demographic challenge of inexorably declining minority populations. Given the size of their electorates, neither the half-million Slovak Hungarians nor the 1.2 million Romanian Hungarians can afford the kind of partisan split that could push all minority parties below the five percent electoral threshold. In Serbia, the Hungarian minority of around a quarter million benefits from the waiving of the electoral threshold. Nonetheless, they are a distinct minority even in Vojvodina, the region of their greatest concentration. We will also review ongoing controversies that have surrounded minority issues since the collapse of communism: language, education, and the issue of territorial and cultural autonomy.

AbstractThis review of the historical studies of cleavages and seeks to bridge the gap between the historical study of cleavages and frozen cleavage theory and the post-communist states of Europe which have transitioned to democracy. The study identifies the literature on frozen cleavages and new divides which have arisen transition, as well as the primary actors in their political representation and issue positioning. The key literature in the development of studies on cleavages was provided by Lipset and Rok-kan, but their work focused mostly on Western democracies and did not include any of the countries which were behind the iron curtain at the time. However, the transition of the post-communist nations of Europe are now several decades old. Since the demise of communist regimes in Europe, much literature has been produced on the newly democratic regimes developing there. This article provides a broad overview of general trends in cleavage literature and more specific developments for Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia. The main findings were that there are frozen cleavages present in the post-communist countries of Europe, but that much of the developments since the fall of communism seem to be unpredictable and change-able — a fact reflected by the instability and constant change in the party systems.

People differ vastly in perceptions of inequality, some seeing a small elite at the top of their society with a vast impoverished mass at the bottom, others a prosperous society with most people in the middle. This was found first for two nations, Australia and Communist-era Hungary. We extend these results to 43 nations and to the post-Communist era. The results support our original middle-range “reference group and reality blend” hypothesis. We extend the original findings to show that, for analogous reasons, socioeconomic development makes societies seem more egalitarian, that societies’ actual income inequality shapes perceptions, and that the collapse of Communism dramatically increased perceptions of inequality. In sharp contrast to these diverse perceptions, ideals are shared, almost everyone preferring prosperous egalitarian societies. Data are from 92 large representative national samples in 43 nations with more than 100,000 respondents, analyzed by multilevel generalized least squares (GLS) methods.

In the late 2000s far-right parties made significant gains in numerous countries of the European Union. Sharing the same agenda and discourse of discrimination, many of these parties collaborate today at the European level as well. Yet, it is unclear whether the contemporary European far-right is indeed homogenous in terms of ideology. This project in critical discourse analysis shows that the far-right in the EU is actually characterized by ideological diversity. The paper compares and contrasts how China, an emerging great power with a booming economy, has been portrayed in the early 2010s by far-right parties in the UK and Hungary. By identifying major references, metaphors, frames and argumentation schemes, the article concludes that despite belonging to the same party family, and being actual political allies, the British National Party (BNP) and the Jobbik party in Hungary construct fundamentally different images of the “Chinese Other”. The far-right in the UK, a major Western power, presents China clearly in hostile terms, mainly as a “dangerous, threatening intruder” into the British market. Additionally, in the discourse of the British far-right China is primarily identified as a communist dictatorship and used as a metaphor of oppression in the domestic UK context. Meanwhile, in Hungary, a post-communist country in Eastern Europe and a relatively recent member of the European Union, an opposite picture of China is constructed by the far-right. Here, China serves as a tool to distance Hungary from the West. China is positioned by the Hungarian far-right as a state where communism has lost its significance. By stressing the Asian origin of Hungarians, brotherhood is claimed among Hungarians and Chinese and China is presented as a “role model country” which successfully resisted “Western dominance”.

Abstract This paper aims to show the main processes of rural restructuring of Hungary after the change of political system and EU integration. It describes the changes of agricultural land-use, new dynamics of urban rural relations and rural development of the last 25 years. In the paper, we argue that the most dynamic changes happened in the era of post-communism, ended by EU-accession and the era of consolidation. A characteristic phenomenon of these changes was the urban demand for providing facilities related to rural landscape and culture. Therefore, permanent and temporary migrations into rural areas have become the most important element of development for rural places in the last decades. The introduction of a new Europeanised rural development system has shaped these processes and reconfigured local power relations, economic and social networks. These turbulent changes occurred at the same time with the collapse of the socialist-type co-operative and state farm system, along with the restitution and reprivatisation of land, resulting in the concentration of land use and agricultural production. The paper aims at analysing these processes by discussing the dynamics of urban-rural relationships and the new rural development system, while the final part focuses on land-use changes and its impacts on rural society.

Results of national surveys carried out in East-European countries convincingly showed that after the fall of communism the gender gap in earnings remained substantial. Following the same analytical framework here I explore a range of issues concerning the gender gap in membership in what I define as the “underclass” in 6 post-communist societies. The basic question is to determine whether or not such a gap exits. I find considerable cross-national variation in the odds of female/male membership in the underclass: women in Poland, Russia and Hungary appear to be most heavily over-represented in this category, while in Bulgaria and Slovakia, the effect of gender does not exist. In addition, the explanation for this gap cannot be found in the intergenerational transmission of poverty, in differences in marital status, and other social–demographic attributes commonly employed in quantitative studies. It is only the lower educational status of women, living in rural areas, and older age, which significantly interact with relatively higher representation of women in the underclass. After controlling for several characteristics of a person's socio–economic position I found that in four countries, namely in Poland, Russia, Romania and Hungary, a statistically significant net effect of gender remains which provides solid evidence for the feminization of the underclass in these societies.

The paper focuses on the ways of visualizing political and economic transformation in the works of artists from post-communist Europe mainly in the 1990s. Those works, which today, in a wide geographical context, may be interpreted as problematizing the idea of transformation, were often originally appropriated by such discourses of the post-transformation decade as the art of the new media and technology (Estonia), performance (Russia), feminism (Lithuania), body art (Hungary), and critical art (Poland), which marginalized the problem of transformation. Analyses of the works of artists from Lithuania, Estonia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Russia make it possible to determine and problematize the poles of transformation in a number of ways, pointing at the inadequacy of those poles which traditionally spread from the end of totalitarian communism to democracy identified with free market economy. By the same token, they allow one to question their apparent antithetical character which connects the transformation process to the binary structures of meaning established in the period of the Cold War. The presented analyses demonstrate that the gist of the transformation was not so much the fall of communism, which is surviving in the post-1989 art of East-Central Europe due to the leftist inclinations of many artists with a Marxist intellectual background, but the collapse of the binary structure of the world. Methodologically inspired by Boris Buden, Susan Buck-Morss, Marina Gržinić, Edit András, Boris Groys, Alexander Kiossev, and Igor Zabel, they restore the revolutionary character of 1989 and, simultaneously, a dialectical approach to the accepted poles of the transformation. An example of ideological appropriation, which may be interpreted as problematizing the political transformation, is Trap. Expulsion from Paradiseby the Lithuanian artist Eglė Rakauskaitė. The first part of the paper focuses on Jaan Toomik’s May 15-June 1, 1992, interpreted in the theoretical terms proposed by Marina Gržinić and Boris Groys as a work of art that visualizes the concept of post-communism as excrement of the transformation process. Placed in the context of such works as In Fat(1998) by Eglė Rakauskaitė, 200 000 Ft(1997) by the Hungarian artist Kriszta Nagy or Corrections(1996-1998) by Rassim Krastev from Bulgaria, Toomik’s work is one of many created at that time in East-Central Europe, which thematized the transformation process with reference to the artist’s body. Krastev’s Correctionsproblematizes the transformation as a process of self-colonization by the idiom of the West, as well as a modification of the utopia of production, one aspect of which was propaganda referring to the body, changing it in an instrument that transformed the political order into a consumerist utopia where bodies exist as marketable products. The part titled, “The Poles of Transformation as a Function of the Cold War,” focuses on A Western View(1989) by the Bulgarian artist Nedko Solakov and This is my blood(2001) by Alexander Kossolapov from Russia. In a theoretical context drawn from the texts by Zabel, Buden, and Ekaterina Degot, Solakov’s work has been interpreted as problematizing the transformation understood as refashioning the world, no longer based on the bipolar division into East and West. The paper ends with an analysis of Cunyi Yashi, a work of the Hungarian artist Róbert Szabó Benke, which problematizes the collapse of the bipolar world structure in politics and the binary coding of sexual identity. In Szabó Benke’s work, the transformation is represented as rejection of the binary models of identity – as questioning their role in the emergence of meanings in culture.

THE VIOLENCE WHICH MARKED THE OVERTHROW OF Nicolae Ceaugescu's regime at Christmas 1989, and the recurrent disorders, especially in Bucharest, which have punctuated developments over the last nine months, have made Romania's experience of anti-Communist revolution strikingly different from that of its neighbours to the north and to the west. Whatever the political and social tensions emerging in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland (and whatever may be the GDR's legacy to a reunified Germany), it is unlikely that the charge of neo-communism will be central to their political debate. It is precisely that charge levelled against the government party (National Salvation Front/FSN) and against the person of Ion Ilescu by various opposition groups, and former prominent dissidents under Ceaugescu, which remains the most emotive issue in Romanian politics. The question of whether the revolution which overthrew Nicolae Ceauyescu and led to the dissolution of the Romanian Communist Party (RCP) was the result of a popular uprising or a coup d'état planned by Party members has haunted Romanian politics through the first nine months of the post-Ceauqescu period.

AbstractHigher education interest groups remain somewhat understudied from a comparative theory-driven perspective. This is surprising because political decisions regarding higher education must increasingly be legitimized to students, taxpayers, the academic community and society. This article aims to advance our understanding of higher education stakeholders in post-communist Europe. In our view, the region deserves more attention, not least because students and academics were very instrumental in bringing down communism and institutionalizing democracy. First, we draw on Klemenčič’s (EJHE 2(1): 2–19, 2012; SHE 39(3):396–411, 2014) distinction between corporatist and pluralist as well as formalized and informal systems of representation in higher education. Looking at survey data from four countries—Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovenia—we examine to what extent post-communist democracies have established corporatist institutions to facilitate the formal participation of various crucial stakeholder organizations, e.g. students’ unions, academic unions, rectors’ conferences, etc. Then we address whether higher education organizations enjoy privileged access to policy-makers compared to those from other policy areas, while engaging with the argument that higher education is a particular case of “stakeholder democracy” in a region otherwise characterized by weak civic participation and corporatism. To wrap up, we discuss different “mutations of higher education corporatism” in each country.

When we observe the social and political life in post-communist countries, we can also notice that generations of people born after the fall of communism are beginning to play an increasingly important role in shaping the views and political preferences of the whole society. Young people socialized in significantly different conditions than their parents’ generation represent (in many areas) attitudes that indicate their “generational difference”. The aim of the article is to describe and explain to what extent the assessments of systemic transformation in chosen post-communist countries are determined by the age of citizens. The author analyzes secondary data from surveys on public opinion in the following countries: Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Slovakia and Ukraine. In order to explain how young people perceive their position in relation to the older generation, which remembers the communist era, an appropriate case study was conducted. The study was conducted among students from six academic centers in Ukraine (Kyiv, Lviv, Nizhyn, Pereiaslav, Sumy, and Uzhhorod). It was found that the strength of the relationship between age and the perception of systemic change varies across countries. The deepest divisions between the older and younger generations were identified in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Ukraine and Bulgaria. It was also found that the young generation of contemporary Ukraine is trying to emphasize its own generational difference by creating its own political identity in opposition to the features attributed to older generations.

In the wake of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, close to two hundred thousand Hungarians crossed into Austria. About thirty thousand of these refugees were allowed to enter the United States. Their common experience of living under totalitarian communism and participating or being a witness to the exhilarating thirteen days of the revolution and their sudden, previously unplanned, departure from the homeland gave them a collective identity that was different from the one shared by the people of previous waves of Hungarian influx to the United States. The high educational level of the refugees attained before and after their arrival made their absorption into the mainstream relatively easy. The integration process was facilitated by the shaping of a positive image of the 1956 refugees by the US government and the media. The reestablishment of the communist system in post-1956 Hungary contributed to the perception that, for the refugees in the United States, there was no hope for return to the homeland. This assumption strengthened the attitudes of those who wished to embrace the American melting pot model. Many of the 1956-ers in the United Sates, however, were also comfortable with the notion of ethnic pride and believed in the shaping of a dual national identity.

The article discusses how the United States of America has contributed to the security of Central and Eastern Europe, both politically and militarily, since the end of the Cold War, using Poland’s example. It shows that the United States committed itself to the security of both Poland and the region, following the collapse of communism in Poland in 1989, albeit to a varying degree in different countries. America played a pivotal role in NATO enlargement in the 1990s, and in extending security assurances to Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, as well as to other countries in the subsequent years. It has continued to assist Poland with its defence reform, thus enhancing its military capabilities. It was also instrumental in strengthening NATO’s eastern flank after 2014, a salient point on Poland’s security agenda since it acceded to the Alliance. It is argued that American political and military involvement in Poland’s security has been both substantial and beneficial, and there is a real need for continued political and military cooperation with the USA and its presence in the region. In the article, the determinants of Poland’s post-Cold War security policy are outlined. Next, the roles that both countries have played in each other’s policies are explained. After that, the US contribution to Poland’s security, both in the political and military spheres, is presented. Finally, an attempt is made to evaluate American involvement, and the author’s perspective on the future of the Poland-US cooperation is offered.

Earnings management has received considerable attention as numerous papers were investigated different hypotheses. However, there is still no consensus on how efficiently detect and measure earnings managements. Nevertheless, most authors use methodology based on accruals, sophisticated models that attempt to separate total accruals into discretionary and nondiscretionary components. We may find wide range of use of alternative models to measure earnings management. Nevertheless, the researchers typically used five the most popular models: the Jones (1991) model, the modified Jones model (Dechow, Sloan, and Sweeney, 1995), Teoh, Welch and Wong (1998) model, Kasznik (1999) model and Kothari et al. (2005) model. However, it is confirmed that the environment where the company is operating influences on the earnings management. Therefore, we focus our study on the growing market of the developing European countries. In particular, our analysis comprises four different and independent samples from emerging Eastern European countries: Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, since earnings management in Eastern European countries is still barely explored. Consequently, our objective is to evaluate the ability of the existing models on earnings management for the environment of countries from the East of Europe. Our results confirm that the Jones (1991), Shivakumar (1996), Kasznik (1999) and Yoon and Miller model (2002) offers the most reliable results for detecting earnings management in emerging Eastern European post-communism economic environment. Additionally, based on broad analyses the results indicate that there is no superiority of the cross-sectional models vis-à-vis their time-series counterparts. Both methodologies are consistent in detecting earnings management for Eastern European companies. Therefore, we verified the importance of the previous evaluation of the ability of each model for detecting earnings management before its application. It is because each economic environment has different peculiarities and circumstances, as observed in case of our developing European countries.

The spectre of Communist expansion as a result of the Second World War represented for Pope Pius XII one of the greatest concerns. The unambiguously pro-Soviet orientation of the Czechoslovak government in exile and the crucial influence of Communists in the inner architecture of the restored state convinced the Holy See that Czechoslovakia was already in 1945 fully absorbed into the Soviet sphere of influence. This fact strengthened the Pope’s conviction of the necessity to resume relations with Prague as soon as possible and to send a nuncio there who would provide reliable information and protect the interests of the Church threatened both by open persecution and by propaganda manoeuvres in favour of a “progressive Catholicism”. The importance of the relations with Czechoslovakia stood out also in the international perspective, in which Czechoslovakia, in contrast to Poland or Hungary, seemed to be the last observatory still accessible to the Vatican diplomacy in the whole East-Central Europe. The year 1947 represented a caesura in the relations between the Holy See and Czechoslovakia. In the international context, this year was generally perceived by the Vatican as a definitive reinforcement of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe. In the Czechoslovak framework, the greatest importance was ascribed to the political crisis in Slovakia in autumn 1947, during which the Communists definitively took over the political power in Slovakia. The lost struggle over the predominantly Catholic Slovakia, that for some time had been considered by the Vatican one of very few hopes for the defence of Christian interests in the Republic, was perceived by the Holy See as a dominant breakthrough on the way to the total Communist transformation of Czechoslovakia. While in the immediate post-war period the Holy See had tried to come to terms with Czechoslovakia also at the price of some compromises, in winter 1947/1948 the last hopes for a diplomatic solution vanished and were replaced by the conviction that in the confrontation with Communism not diplomatic, but spiritual weapons — prayer, testimony, martyrdom — were of crucial importance.

In the article, the guest editor Piotr Dutkiewicz and editor-in-chief Yuriy M. Pochta introduce the current issue of the journal, interpreting cross-cutting topics such as democratic development and the construction of national identity in the societies of the East and the West. They believe that the most appropriate heuristic explanation for these issues today is the idea that after the end of the Cold War the hopes for the final victory of the liberal democratic project on a global scale ended in disappointment. The end of history never took place, just like the victory of communism did not take place previously. All these years we have been witnessing an imitation of liberalism, the era of which is already over. There is currently a global revolt against the liberal imitation imperative. From this point of view, there is a great interest in articles devoted to Russian-Turkish relations, the place of the Central Asian states in the international rankings of democratic development, the evolution of the political development of the Lebanese Republic, the formation of democratic political regimes in such Eastern European EU member states as Poland and Hungary, the role of parties in the political life of Great Britain and Nigeria, as well as such theoretical and methodological problems of political science as the processes of forming future political leaders, methodology of the study of GR-management and approaches to the study of the political and psychological characteristics of the heads of Russian regions. In general, this issue of the journal pictures the current state of democratic development of Western and non-Western countries in the context of globalization, which is at the stage of transition from American monopolarity to multipolarity, from imitation of the Western liberal-democratic project to the search for its own development projects. The authors believe that from the point of view of Russia and its interests the materials of this issue allow for outlining the prospects for further research on ways to build the most effective relations with world and regional powers, the possibilities of protecting its sovereignty and its geopolitical interests, and the mechanisms for forming the Russian post-Soviet identity at the national and regional levels.

After its establishment in 1918–1919, Czechoslovakia was a multinational state and some of its minorities protested against their being included into it. The nationality problem was related to the collapse of the First Czechoslovak Republic in 1938 and the loss of some of its territories to Germany, Poland, and Hungary. It may be pointed out that the 1920 Constitution did not recognize a separate Slovak national identity and that the Czechs and Slovaks were termed “Czechoslovaks.” The post-Munich Second Republic recognized a separate Slovak nationality; however, the state came to its end in March 1939. In 1945, after its reestablishment as a national state of the Czechs and Slovaks, the country's government attempted to liquidate the national minorities' problem in a drastic manner by transfer (expulsion) of Germans and Hungarians.

The article attempts to make sense of recent developments in Hungary’s relationship with the EU and the US by explicating the logic behind the formation of its post-Cold War identity. The article’s central theoretical argument derives from social identity theory (SIT) in social psychology which argues that social groups strive for positive distinctiveness and provides concrete hypotheses concerning the identity management strategies that groups use to enhance their relative position. Extrapolating the identity management techniques predicted by SIT to international politics, I suggest that states may enhance their relative standing by imitating more advanced states (strategy of social mobility), trying to displace the higher-ranked state (strategy of social competition), or finding a new arena in which to be superior (strategy of social creativity). The article argues that Orban’s government post- 2010 steps in domestic and foreign policy can be conceptualized as attempts to redefine Hungary’s identity by moving away from the strategy of social mobility pursued since the end of communism towards the strategy of social creativity.

AbstractThis special issue focuses on the developments in ethical standards in the post-communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) including the former Soviet Union. Over thirty years have elapsed since the demise of the Soviet Bloc and, despite some common institutional features, the societies have had very different experiences with uneven developments across the region since the collapse of communism. In this special issue, the authors explore business and management ethics situated within the context of the challenges that face these still transforming post-communist societies. The papers cover a range of issues and countries including Albania, Belarus, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, North Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia. Potential further avenues for research are identified in the field of business ethics in post-communist societies.

This article presents an analysis of the formation of organized interest groups in the post-communist context and organizational populations over time. We test two theories that shed doubt on whether vital rates of interest groups are explained by individual incentives, namely, the political opportunity structure and population ecology theory. Based on an analysis of the energy policy and higher education policy organizations active at the national level in Hungary, Poland, and Slovenia, we find that while the period of democratic and economic transition indeed opened up the opportunity structure for organizational formations, it by no means presented a clean slate. Communist-era successor and splinter organizations survived the collapse of communism, and all three countries entered transition with relatively high density rates in both organizational populations. We also find partial support for the density dependence hypothesis. Surprisingly, the EU integration process, the intensity of legislative activity, and media attention do not seem to have meaningfully influenced founding rates in the two populations.

This article is concerned with the continuities in the interpretation of the 1950s in Czechoslovakia from 1956 to the present. It first concentrates on the way the year 1956 (one that remained quiet in the country, as opposed to Poland and Hungary) has been treated in Czechoslovak historiography. It aims to show that an almost exclusive focus on political history has produced until today a misleading image of this apparent communist stability as based on repression rather than on a genuine basis of support for the communist rule. The German historiography of communism shows the usefulness of a socio-political approach that could serve as model. The article then further retraces the permanence of this misleading interpretation to the influence of a highly politicized narrative of the terror period inspired by the work of historian Karel Kaplan and other intellectuals of the Prague Spring era. For this it makes use of Kaplan’s autobiography, which has only ever appeared in French. One particular point of interest is the historiographical treatment reserved to the Stalinist leader Klement Gottwald. The article suggests that this reform communist narrative, which blames the terror on the Soviets without questioning the responsibility of Czech society, has kept the history of the 1950s in Czechoslovakia from evolving at the same pace as the historiography of the post-1968 period. It therefore needs to be acknowledged and challenged.

Similar to Poland, Hungary also experienced a peaceful transition from communism to democracy and market economy. The Hungarian Round Table Talks were organized in 1989, following the successful Polish model. While the Round Table Talks were similarly crucial in Hungary and in Poland in paving the way for institutional and political changes, and concluded in a very successful manner for the opposition parties, conspiracy theories similar to those seen in Poland (see Soral and Kofta in this issue) are proliferating in Hungary as well. The article argues that the rejection of the “compromises” around the transition is due to the very nature of populism: it likes black-and-white, Manichean logic. This article briefly introduces the process of the Round Table Talks and summarizes the literature’s findings on the general social psychological impacts of the transitions. Transitions always provide fertile ground for conspiracy theorizing as they are unexpected even with widespread consequences that fall beyond the control of most members of a society. But in Hungary, these conspiracy theories have been politically exploited in order to fuel discontent towards the democratic institutions - and in this way, they were instrumental in the “second transition”, the illiberal de-democratization after 2010.

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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