Trends in Research on State Socialist Globalization: The Old and the New Mainstream

Abstract

This chapter reviews recent developments of research on the history of globalization in post-war East Central Europe, and more broadly in Eastern Europe, and deconstructs the arguments presented in the revisionist perspective on state socialist globalization. Several influential works have undertaken a thorough revision of conventional approaches to the globalization of European state socialist countries. It is contended that the region became much more globalized in the three or four decades following World War II than previously thought. This new understanding highlights distinctive structural and temporal patterns of globalization within the region. In particular, the globalization of this region was shaped by its relations with the Global South, as the expansion of East-South links largely offset the deficits in their relations with the Western world. Furthermore, the year 1989 assumes a new role in the globalization process; several authors explicitly refute the notion that the regime changes accelerated the region's globalization, arguing instead that these changes only altered the nature of the region's globalization.

For a long time, mainstream research on the history of East Central European state socialist countries emphasized the region's isolation from the world economy.¹ These works argued that such isolation had been partly intentional and partly unintentional, an inherent consequence of a centrally planned economic system that treated the uncontrolled outside world as a source of uncertainty and trouble.² Full autarky was not pursued or achieved, but economic independence was an important goal especially in the 1950s, with similar efforts also commonly seen later in the region.³ The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) aimed to transcend national frameworks and promote self-sufficiency throughout the Eastern Bloc, but its policy met with mixed results. Since the member countries often resisted the idea and their centrally controlled economies were too inflexible to facilitate cooperation, the actual COMECON projects launched to achieve self-sufficiency were also plagued by low efficiency.⁴ The isolation of the state socialist countries was exacerbated by Cold War politics; international trade was hampered in some areas by the political and economic interventions of the capitalist countries, especially the United States of America. The most notable example of such steps was in 1949 when the United States and 14 other countries established the Coordinating Committee on Multilateral Export Controls (CoCom). CoCom prevented the export of strategically important goods to communist countries as well as technologies that could potentially be used by their military.⁵

However, it is not only in economic terms that mainstream literature has highlighted seclusion. Curbing the inflow of ideas, information, and cultural products from Western countries has also been cited as an important feature of the state socialist regimes.⁶ Restrictions on the freedom of movement have been and are still seen as emblematic of these regimes, as evidenced by the frequent references to the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall in scholarly studies, news articles, and even cinematic productions on the region during that period.⁷

Interpretations with other focuses, scopes, and concerns have also emerged related to the global embeddedness of state socialist Eastern Europe. These, however, have not gained as widespread acceptance as the ones outlined above, not even the world-systems theory developed by Immanuel Wallerstein, which stands out among them because of its internal coherence and academic prevalence.⁸ World-systems theory focuses on the unequal distribution of resources and power in the world. It maintains that a distinct social system prevails on a global scale beyond the control of individual nation states; this is conceptualized as the global economic system. In this order, all countries are interconnected and interrelated, and any changes that occur in each country are largely due to changes in the actual world-system. However, a specific world-system is conditioned by the interactions among nation states of uneven power. Since economic relations in the world-system are politically determined, its structure is relatively stable. Even though Wallerstein did not specifically focus on socialist countries, his world-systems theory suggests that state socialist countries, in their attempts to establish alternative economic systems, faced opposition from the dominant capitalist ‘core’ countries. This pressure manifested itself through economic sanctions, trade barriers, and other forms of interference aimed at isolating, and thus, undermining socialist economies. As a result, socialist countries often found themselves marginalized and excluded from global economic networks.⁹ Thus, the representatives of the world-systems theory did not question the assessment that the ‘semiperipheral’ position of the Eastern European state socialist countries went hand in hand with their relative political, economic, and cultural isolation from the centre.¹⁰

The mainstream interpretation of state socialist globalization has been challenged by a number of influential studies published in recent years. This historiographical turn has been stimulated by rapidly growing scholarly interest in the globalization of Eastern Europe and, specifically, of the East Central European state socialist countries, over the last one and a half decades.¹¹ Besides important surveys dealing with specific countries and particular aspects of the globalization process, scholarly research has also produced a number of comprehensive works and edited volumes on the subject. In fact, somewhat surprisingly, in many respects, the globalization of the East Central European state socialist countries prior to 1989 is a subject more thoroughly researched today than the globalization of the region since 1989.¹²

Such heightened attention is certainly justified in that the earlier interpretations, which emphasized the isolation of these regimes in a rather one-sided way, need to be supplemented and refined. At the same time, this engagement with state socialist globalization and the shifting interpretations can also be traced back to subjective factors, that is, the preferences of the researchers and the internal development of the field; interest in East Central European history has clearly declined in international scholarship since the turn of the millennium, while global history and the history of globalization have become more frequently researched worldwide. Consequently, for experts on the history of the region, studying the various forms in which globalization has manifested itself in East Central Europe offers an opportunity to align themselves with a current and important direction of academic research and to counteract, to some degree at least, the above-mentioned negative trend regarding the treatment of the East Central European region.

Obviously, the literature on the subject is diverse, even if we consider only the works published in the last few years. Thus, it is not possible to give a comprehensive overview of all the recent research results; instead, some of the key findings and trends in related research are considered here. Such an approach is facilitated by the fact that many of the publications on the subject in recent years, while they have differed in the details, have taken up similar positions on the globalization of Eastern Europe. They have explicitly sought a critical re-examination and reinterpretation of the former mainstream narrative on the globalization of state socialist Eastern Europe. Since these new approaches and interpretations have become widely accepted within the scholarly community, they can now be considered dominant in this branch of research. Considering the significant body of research that can be regarded as revisionist in the above sense, one might argue that a new historical canon is emerging on the globalization of post-war Eastern Europe.¹³

Recent research offers remarkable new interpretations concerning the globalization in Eastern Europe between 1945 and 1989, including East Central Europe, in the following areas:

• a. the dynamics of the globalization process in the region;

• b. the structural patterns of globalization, and, in particular, the importance of the Global South concerning the international connections of the European state socialist countries;

• c. the historical continuities and divides in the globalization process, and in particular the significance of the year 1989—that is, the regime changes—in this regard throughout the region and beyond.

In what follows, these results will be discussed in the context of the traditional mainstream interpretations with a focus on East Central Europe.¹⁴

1.1 Dynamics of the Globalization Process

In addition to emphasizing the closed nature of the state socialist regimes of East Central Europe, the narrative on the history of the region has treated their transformation as an issue of key importance. Often, this transformation is characterized as gradual but sometimes it is seen as abrupt. It also tends to make a clear distinction between the initial, Stalinist phase of the regimes and the period that followed. The Stalinist era saw the rapid establishment of a repressive political system and the formation of a centrally controlled economic model, which then retained many of its essential features throughout the following decades, but which nevertheless eroded and transformed over time. A multifaceted description of the latter process can be found in the highly acclaimed work of János Kornai, who describes the classical socialist system as well as the reforms and liberalization it underwent—in effect, deviating from its original premises.¹⁵ Meanwhile, this change never followed a linear path, and it was not uniform across East Central Europe. In Czechoslovakia, a clear and lasting reversal of reforms occurred after 1968, while in Hungary there were only minor interruptions in the erosion of the centrally controlled economy and in its reform process from the late 1960s onwards. Poland stands out for its frequent changes of direction.

Much of the earlier literature also portrays the dynamics of the transnational relations of the East Central European state socialist regimes in a rather similar fashion. These countries isolated themselves from the outside world in the early 1950s, not only in economic terms but also in various areas of life, which included restrictions on the freedom of movement, on the exchange of cultural goods, and on many other aspects of culture and society. The closure was not uniform, however. For example, it was more pronounced in the area of travel: initially, citizens were not allowed to travel freely even to neighbouring socialist countries. Strong selectivity also appeared in terms of cultural exchange, with the import of Western films and books being prohibited, while the dissemination of cultural goods from other socialist countries—and especially from the Soviet Union—was supported by cultural policy.¹⁶

From the mid- to late 1950s, however, the regimes under study started to open up. While the trend was by no means uninterrupted, it brought about major changes over the next three decades. To continue with the previous example, citizens of the East Central European countries in the 1980s were able to travel much more freely and had access to more information and cultural products from the West than in the early period of state socialism.

In recent years, a significant body of literature on globalization in Eastern Europe, and specifically in East Central Europe, has sought to comprehensively revise the picture thus established. What emerges from these studies is that the globalization of the East Central European region after 1945 was not only much more intensive than had been widely assumed, but that its temporal evolution had also followed a particular pattern.¹⁷

Johanna Bockman claims that state socialist countries engaged in a more radically globalizing project than their Western counterparts. While capitalist globalization, Bockman argues, reinforced hierarchical power relations between the centre and the periphery and—above all, under the banner of free trade—strived to maintain the economic relations of the former colonial system, the proponents of East-South rapprochement sought to create a new type of relationship. The latter also sought, as the reasoning goes, to make international relations more global than the old metropole-colony relations.¹⁸ The author reviews plans drafted by experts and politicians as well as contemporary discourse, without elaborating on the practical realization of the new type of global relations. This approach is quite prevalent in the research literature, as is the idea that the East-South relations were unique because they were largely based on solidarity instead of economic and other interests.¹⁹ Or, as one study suggests, “the main distinctive feature of socialist globalization” was that “while trade and outsourcing of economic projects were driven by questions of profitability, the way outsourcing and assistance were conducted was equally driven by principles of solidarity and mutual assistance.”²⁰ It is symptomatic of the revisionist ambitions that the conceptualization of the state socialist era as a period of isolation and immobility is dismissed as “a product of Cold War propaganda”²¹ and, accordingly, it is claimed that geographical “mobility was in fact key to the realization of socialist international ideology and to fostering the belief that global socialism offered the most desirable path to development and prosperity.”²²

Standing out from the new research trend, a collection of studies entitled Alternative Globalizations interprets the process unfolding in the region as one of several globalization processes, and—as its very title already indicates—nothing less than as an alternative to the Western-led process of globalization.²³ As the editors of the volume suggest, “[t]he idea of Western capitalism as the only engine of globalization bequeathed a distorted view of socialist and postcolonial states as inward looking, isolated, and cut off from global trends until the capitalist takeover in the 1980s and 1990s.”²⁴ The volume also leaves no doubt that the international embeddedness of the region was the result of a conscious policy of the Soviet Union and other socialist states to this end, and that it reached a high level: “The attempt to launch an alternative globalization project was revived more than a decade after the Second World War. […] The result was that from the 1950s, a whole set of connections, interactions, trade links, and routes of circulation for ideas and people rapidly came into being. This new globalization should correctly be seen as a project of the USSR and other socialist states”, even if it was not shaped by a single actor.²⁵ In fact, in another major study the socialist world emerges as an important co-producer of contemporary globalization: “Soviet and East European planning in particular can be considered one of the main globalizing forces of the mid- to late twentieth century that proved attractive to decolonizing states in the Global South looking to build their own economic sovereignty in the late 1950s and 1960s.”²⁶ Several other recent publications also present a similar interpretation of Eastern European and East Central European globalization in the state socialist era, with the topos of ‘alternative globalization’ repeatedly surfacing,²⁷ but in the volume cited above, the authors elaborate on this concept more thoroughly than ever before; accordingly, it plays an important role in understanding—and, in fact, reinterpreting—the globalization of state socialist Eastern Europe.

While a number of studies postulate an intensive globalization taking place in the state socialist countries, the single most comprehensive collective work on the subject published to date also argues that globalization in East Central Europe followed a unique timeline. Much of the globalization literature agrees that the 1970s and 1980s saw the start of a very powerful new wave of globalization in the Western world and beyond, but James Mark and Paul Bett maintain that a diverging time pattern prevailed in Eastern Europe. As they write, “… the last decades of the Cold War in fact saw the de-globalization of the region and a retreat from the claims to leadership on the global stage.”²⁸ The authors argue that this was primarily caused by a change in the relationship of the Eastern European countries with the Third World. While these relations experienced dynamic growth from the mid-1950s onwards, and the alternative globalization of the state socialist countries was a realistic and feasible aspiration for a large part of the political and cultural elites of the postcolonial world, by the 1970s and 1980s this policy had fizzled out. The fading commitments did not necessarily imply a decline in the volume of trade or other economic connections, but, as James Mark puts it elsewhere, “the values that underpinned these exchanges were no longer sustained by a belief in an alternative modernity”.²⁹ This can primarily be traced back to the easing of East–West tensions as a result of which “alternative global visions were hollowed out from within” in Eastern Europe.³⁰ Other recent publications have also put forward—in a less elaborate form—the idea that in the last decade or two of the state socialist regimes, the globalization of East Central Europe lost its dynamism.³¹

1.2 Structural Patterns of Change

For a long time, mainstream interpretations of globalization concerning the second half of the twentieth century have taken as a starting point that the main actors determining the process of globalization were the United States and Western Europe, gradually joined by Japan and other emerging Asian countries, with other regions around the world being involved mainly vicariously through these central actors.³² The decades following World War II are frequently referred to as ‘American Globalism’,³³ and the growth of global economic interconnections established by several Western European countries, sometimes even more dynamic than those of the United States, has also received much attention.³⁴ In fact, with few exceptions, the new technologies that helped increase global connectivity, such as in the field of communications, originated in the United States and Western Europe.³⁵ It was also these regions that were the most active in exporting capital, which boosted the diffusion of new technologies across continents.³⁶ After World War II, the United States and the Western European countries created an entire system of international organizations, often with a global reach.³⁷ They were the regions attracting the most foreign visitors; they were also the main destinations for international migration. The United States also had a major impact on the worldwide spread of consumerism and popular culture.³⁸

Research on the globalization of specific countries and regions of the world has therefore focused primarily on the intensity of their links with the United States and with Western Europe. While this approach may lead to considerable simplifications, it is undeniable in the light of the above that the role these regions played in the progress of globalization during the period was paramount. The relations any other country or group of countries developed—or failed to develop—with these regions were indeed a key determinant of their globalization.

In contrast, most recent research projects dedicated to the globalization of Eastern Europe—including the East Central European state socialist countries—have adopted a different focus. They pay particular attention to the relations between the Second and the Third World, or, to put it differently, between the Eastern Bloc and the Global South. As part of these efforts, the role of the Eastern European state socialist countries in decolonization has become a frequent area of research.³⁹ Other studies discuss these relations in the context of the Cold War.⁴⁰ Many of them take an approach relying on case studies.⁴¹ These contributions demonstrate the diversity of the East-South relations and many of them argue, either directly or implicitly, for their crucial importance. For several authors, the globalization of the European state socialist countries was based first and foremost on the expansion of their relations with the Third World. As James Mark and Paul Betts write, by deepening this relationship, the socialist countries sought “to escape political, cultural and economic marginalization in a western-dominated world system”.⁴² When this vision floundered, it meant for them a retreat from the global stage. The already cited concept of ‘alternative globalization’ is also based primarily on the idea that the European state socialist countries were able to compensate for the deficiencies of their relations with the Western world by establishing relations with the postcolonial world.⁴³ Similar arguments are found in other studies that demonstrate the significant progress of state socialist globalization by depicting the relations the Eastern Bloc established with the Third World.⁴⁴ This interpretation also fits in with the emerging trend in Cold War literature after the turn of the millennium, the representatives of which argue that the Cold War tensions eased in Europe with the construction of the Berlin Wall and, from the early 1960s on, the United States and the Soviet Union directed their interventionist ambitions towards the Global South.⁴⁵

1.3 Historical Continuities and Divides

Traditionally, historical and social science literature sees the Eastern European—and, specifically, the East Central European—regime changes in the year 1989 as symbolic of the fall of communism; it is also an important historical dividing line not only in these regions, but also in Europe in general, and even in the global context.⁴⁶ Not infrequently, 1989 is even presented as the end of an era in world history: the terminal year of the ‘short twentieth century’.⁴⁷

Accordingly, until recently, works on the globalization of the East Central European region have given a prominent role to regime changes, even though hardly any studies have actually addressed the issue systematically.⁴⁸ On the one hand, the regime changes represented a breakthrough in terms of these countries’ reintegration into the world economy. The new democracies left behind the inefficiently functioning COMECON, which had hindered the diversification of the region's trade and other economic connections, and hence impeded its globalization in many respects, and now opened the region up to the world market. Often implementing radical market reforms and sometimes even resorting to shock therapy, they rapidly adopted a convertible currency regime, removed restrictions on foreign trade, and created a favourable legal and economic environment for transnational corporations and foreign direct investment (FDI). While consumers in Eastern Europe used to have little or no access to such basic products as bananas and oranges, they now had, almost overnight, access to virtually the same selection of products and services—from well-designed cars to branded cosmetics—that were available to Western Europeans and Americans.⁴⁹ On the other hand, the borders opened in both directions to tourists and other visitors, but also to various media of information and cultural goods. In this way, the products of global and especially American mass culture not only reached the region unhindered, but also came to dominate in many respects.⁵⁰ However, the transformation did not bring about an immediate effective functioning of new economic institutions or a rapid economic catch-up with the leading economic powers, because, among other reasons, the process started from a very low level due to the transformational crisis that followed the regime changes.⁵¹

The changes in Eastern Europe were met with a response from the academic world: economists and political scientists were particularly active, and the social consequences of the regime changes also attracted considerable attention from sociologists.⁵² For this branch of research, institutionalized as ‘transitology’, the transformation was, as the name suggests, a transition between autocracy and democracy, or between a centrally controlled economy and a market economy. In practice, however, researchers studying economic transition often regarded state socialism as an exogenous factor in the post-1989 development trajectory and, accordingly, paid little attention to it.⁵³ This is why the historical literature that has sought to historicize the post-regime change period has criticized transitology for its overly narrow choice of topics and research aspects.⁵⁴

In connection with the revisionist interpretations noted above, several recent studies have also tackled the role of the regime changes in the globalization process of East Central Europe in an explicit way.⁵⁵ Perhaps the most sophisticated argument in this respect is put forward by Besnik Pula, who claims that the integration of the East Central European countries into the world economy had begun long before 1989, which he calls “socialist protoglobalization”: a period in which socialist industry and Western industry began to integrate. According to Pula, the depletion of the internal reserves of the Stalinist industrialization model, the opportunities of the world economy in the 1970s, and the reform policies of the socialist countries all contributed to the adoption of different versions of an import-led growth model that heavily depended on Western financial resources and markets.⁵⁶

In the 1970s, relations between East Central European companies and Western firms became more complex and, Pula argues, evolved beyond simple technology transfer and greenfield investment into more complex, long-term inter-organizational relationships, including joint ventures, production cooperation, and joint research and development. As a result, during this period, not only did trade between the socialist countries and the West expand, but transnational corporations became increasingly involved in the introduction of new technologies, production techniques, and management methods in East Central Europe. Thus, the new FDI-driven and export-oriented economic system that emerged in the region after the regime changes has its origins in the links between reform socialism and transnational corporations.⁵⁷

Pula does not entirely deny the importance of 1989, but ascribes a much smaller role than usual to it in the progress of economic change and globalization, stressing “the importance of past organizational capacities in interpreting the region's global integration and its patterns during the immediate postsocialist period as a direct consequence of the legacy of 1970s socialist protoglobalization”.⁵⁸

James Mark and several of his collaborators go further in their work on the global significance of 1989, claiming that the regime changes did not mark a turning point in the globalization of Eastern Europe. Instead, only the frame of globalization changed in the region from that point onwards. As they write, “[t]he collapse of Communist ruled polities thus did not represent the entry of Eastern Europe into a global economy. 1989 should be understood as the culmination of an engagement with what was called an ‘interdependent’ world economy that Communist elites had themselves encouraged. It was also a choice about the form that such globalisation should take.”⁵⁹ The Third World is again a key part of the argument: regime changes have brought Eastern Europe closer to the West, but relations with the Third World ended or declined sharply. Thus, they continue, 1989 was a “»de-globalising« moment” for Eastern Europe.⁶⁰ Some of the same authors elsewhere affirm this position: the impact of the regime changes was not that they facilitated globalization in the region, instead, “the fall of state socialism in 1989–91 was rather a moment that crystallized the choice over how to globalize”.⁶¹

The interpretations presented here thus question the role of the regime changes in East Central Europe, and in the wider Eastern European region, in a novel and important respect.⁶² Doubts have already been raised about the significance of the regime changes concerning various aspects, including the extent to which the goals widely accepted at the time of the collapse of state socialism, such as the establishment of the rule of law, were achieved in East Central Europe, and, in particular, in such parts of the region as Hungary. However, it is a new proposition that the regime changes did not bring about a fundamental turn in the course of the globalization of these countries, and, indeed, that 1989 can actually be interpreted as a ‘de-globalizing moment’. The plausibility of this thesis will be considered in more detail in Chapter 4.

As demonstrated in this chapter, there has been a large body of recent work making sweeping generalizations about the globalization of Eastern Europe, including East Central Europe, during the state socialist period. These accounts have not systematically explored a number of important aspects, so it would certainly seem useful to continue the research by gathering further empirical evidence. Thus, the next part of this study takes a comprehensive empirical approach to the globalization of the East Central European state socialist countries, which might also constitute a basis for the assessment of the recently emerging revisionist interpretations.