Vladimir Tismaneanu

The concept of totalitarianism emerged between the two world wars in twentieth-century Europe to become a central concept of Cold War social science designed to highlight similarities between the Nazi and Soviet regimes and implicitly to contrast these forms of dictatorship with liberal democracy. While in the 1960s and 1970s many critics challenged the concept’s Cold War uses as an ideology of “the West,” the idea of totalitarianism and later “post-totalitarianism” played important roles in East Central Europe, where they helped dissident intellectuals, academics, and activists both to understand and to challenge Soviet-style communism. The concept of “totalitarianism” remains heavily contested. But whatever one thinks about the concept’s social scientific validity, there can be no doubt that it played a crucial role in both the scholarship of communism and the public intellectual debates about the possibilities of post-communism. Aviezer Tucker’s The Legacies of Totalitarianism: A...

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The 1989 revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe signaled the demise of the communist bloc. They represent the triumph of civic dignity and political morality over ideological monism, bureaucratic cynicism, and police-state dictatorship. Their significance cannot be overestimated. The ousting of communist rule across the region that began that year irrevocably altered the geopolitical landscape. But it also gave rise to a potentially dangerous situation, as the absence of norms and predictable rational behavior in the postcommunist states conceivably could have led to global chaos. This is not to wax nostalgic for the Cold War–era world order, but simply to point out that the end of Leninism and the fall of the Iron Curtain created a radically novel situation. It in no way diminishes the triumph of 1989 to acknowledge that ethnic rivalries, rampant political and economic corruption, and the rise of illiberal political parties and movements as well as collectivist and nativist trends have afflicted much of the postcommunist world since then. Understanding the repercussions of “the upheaval in the East,” however, will help us better to grasp the meaning of ongoing debates about liberalism, socialism, nationalism, civil society, and the very notion of human freedom in the aftermath of a most atrocious century.1 After 1989, Central and Eastern Europe had to make the transition from Leninist pseudomodernization to genuine modernity. This was no simple task, for at the root of most postcommunist problems lay the misdevelopment of society under Leninism. As Tony Judt noted, “seventy

This book provides a lot of useful in-depth information by using many helpful charts and tables. Through these and the large scale research she has conducted, Petričević has managed to show the complexity and interdependence of the different factors influencing compliance. The findings that are presented are, however, very condensed, and would benefit from being expanded not through inclusion of additional data or cases, but mainly by giving the audience a less thick and more extended exposition of the study. Nevertheless, the author has made an excellent contribution to the understanding of the actual topic of compliance with eU anti-discrimination legislation. Overall this informative and thoroughly researched book will be of interest to a broad audience of academics and practitioners, as well as an invaluable basis for further research on factors influencing compliance, as well as on the discrepancies between different states and their ability to comply.

selves out of the process” (p. 23). For example, when leaders attempt to identify quality candidates, they may place more value on male attributes and masculine characteristics; this shapes both the supply and demand of female candidates. Since there are likely fewer female thanmale candidates who possess male attributes, the supply of “quality” female candidates may be low. Moreover, if parties privilege masculine characteristics, this also reduces the demand for female candidates. Yet previous research does not account for these gendered norms in the recruitment process. These limitations in extant research have restricted our understanding of the ways in which gender shapes political recruitment and may provide incomplete explanations of women’s numeric underrepresentation. In light of these limitations, Kenny maintains that a feminist institutionalist approach—one that “integrates insights from feminist and new institutional theory”—is needed to advance our understanding of political recruitment (p. 9). This approach explicitly acknowledges that gender is a key aspect of political recruitment and recognizes that the formal and informal institutions that define political recruitment are gendered. It emphasizes the role of institutions, institutional continuity, and institutional change. In particular, the book stresses the need to examine “incremental and internal processes of change” in an effort to fully appreciate the gendered nature of political recruitment (p. 10). The author argues that adopting this approach establishes gender as a central dimension of political recruitment. In doing so, Kenny contributes to the small but bourgeoning body of literature that bridges the gap between feminist scholars and institutionalist research. She argues that in order to understand the political recruitment process and how it shapes women’s numeric representation, scholars must consider gendered power inequalities in politics and the continuity and change of deep-rooted gender norms over time. Political institutions have long been male dominated; men established the rules of the game and structured institutions to benefit those in power (i.e., men). This privilege serves to perpetuate the gendered power structure. As a result, if scholars want to understand the gendered aspects of political recruitment, it is essential to understand the complexities of individual institutions. Kenny evaluates the utility of this argument using a case study of candidate selection and recruitment in the Labour Party in postdevolution Scotland. She employs theory-guided process tracing and draws on 15 in-depth interviews to identify the gendered dynamics of the political recruitment process. The multimethod (both qualitative and historical) analysis represents another unique contribution of this research. She focuses on regional politics to examine how multilevel settings and newly established institutions both foster political openings for potential female candidates and impose constraints on them. The constituency-level analysis is necessary in order to shed light on the ways in which informal institutions are gendered and how difficult it is for potential female candidates to surmount obstacles posed by entrenched gender norms. Where it would be extremely difficult to identify these nuanced and complex aspects of institutions in a large-n analysis, the single case study is ideal for illuminating these features in the political system. The analysis is very well done and should serve as a model for students who seek to carry out micro-level case studies. Additionally, the interview evidence brought to bear in the analysis provides particularly persuasive support for, and examples of, the ways that implicit gender norms shape the political recruitment process. The compelling use of interviews and the meticulous process tracing represent a major strength of the book. While the author’s analysis is well executed, provides detailed insights into the gendered nature of political recruitment, and is appropriate for this study, the microlevel analysis represents one of the challenges of case study research. In particular, the author acknowledges that there are some limitations to the generalizability of the research. As such, readers should carefully consider the conclusions from this research to discern how factors present in other institutional contexts, but not in postdevolution Scotland (or vice versa), might modify women’s pathways to power. Indeed, the goal of this book is not to generate a general theory of politics; instead, the core of this research is the recognition that the nuances of institutions—which are highly variable across space and time—structure the supply and demand of female candidates. Political Recruitment provides a thorough critique of the state of the political recruitment literature. Norris and Lovenduski articulate the case for a feminist institutionalist approach to studying women’s recruitment. Gender and…

INTRODUCTION Communist regimes are partocratic ideocracies (as discussed by authors such as Leonard Schapiro, Alain Besancon, A. Avtorkhanov, and Martin Malia). Their only claim to legitimacy was purely ideological, that is, derived from the organized belief system shared by the elites and inculcated into the masses that the party benefited by special access to historical truth and therefore it enjoys infallibility. If this interpretation is correct, then de-radicalization (Robert C. Tucker), primarily in the field of ideological monopoly, leads to increased vulnerability. The demise of the supreme leader (Stalin, Mao, Hoxha) has always ushered in ideological anarchy and loss of self-confidence among the rulers. Attempts to restore the “betrayed values” of the original project (Khrushchev, Gorbachev) resulted in ideological disarray, change of mind among former supporters, desertion of critical intellectuals from the “fortress,” criticism of the old dogmas, awakening, a break with the past, and eventually, as in the case of Kolakowski or the Budapest school, apostasy. This chapter looks into the adventures of critical Marxism in Soviet-style regimes and its corrosive impact on the “Moscow Center” during the 1970s and particularly the 1980s. I conceptualize the “Gorbachev phenomenon” as a culmination of the revisionist ethos in the socialist bloc, which implicitly turns the focus of my contribution to the inherent paradoxes and fallacies of his perestroika. The latter are perceived to be inherent in the incompleteness of revisionism’s promise for change. Nevertheless, I by no means deny the role of this fascinating chapter of intellectual and political history in providing a fundamental lesson about the role of ideas in the disintegration of authoritarian regimes of Leninist persuasion. What I do state is that only the reinvention of politics operated by the dissident movements could offer the possibility to achieve genuine democracy and full liberty in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. I will also introduce the cases of China and North Korea in order to situate the demise of communism and Gorbachev’s reform within a comparative framework. I argue that communism in China has survived because, in the aftermath of the Tiananmen repression, the party created avenues of reintegration for the intellectual elite, thus lowering the impact of dissent and opposition. I therefore counterpose the sequence, so typical of communism’s evolution in Europe, revisionism to apostasy, to what I have called the technocratic revisionism of post-1989 Chinese intellectuals.

... That generation was com-posed of people such as: Alexander Dobrogeanu-Gherea, Elek Koblos,Eugen Rozvany, David Fabian, Marcel Pauker ... of militants who played significant roles after the Anti-fascist Insurrection (August 23, 1944): Iosif Chisinevschi, Chivu Stoica, Theo ...

The events of 1989 had world-shattering revolutionary consequences. They brought about a new vision of the political based upon a rediscovery of democratic participation and civic activism. The upheaval in the east, and primarily in the central, European countries, represented a series of political revolutions that led to the decisive and irreversible transformation of the existing order. When explaining 1989, one needs to focus on three major themes: the deep-seated meanings of the collapse of state socialist regimes in east central Europe, the nature of revolutions at the end of the twentieth century, and the role of critical (public) intellectuals in politics. There is no single factor that explains the collapse of Leninism: economics as much as politics, and culture as much as insoluble social tensions converged in making these regimes irretrievably obsolete. The aftermath of 1989 generated a fluidity of political commitments, allegiances and affiliations that signalled a genera...

LTI provides much more than the linguistic analyses for which it has been deservedly acclaimed. Klemperer included as well many enlightening observations about other aspects of the Third Reich and accounts of his personal experiences as what the Nazis termed a Volljude who lived openly in Germany throughout the entire twelve years of Nazi rule. The frequent disparaging references to American culture and Klemperer's praise for the Stalinist Soviet Union reflect his decision to cast his lot with Communism after the collapse of the Third Reich. For those interested in Klemperer himself, the book is therefore an essential supplement to his diary, particularly since it contains some passages that were omitted from the published edition of the diary. The translation is conscientious and readable, but the translator has not coped altogether successfully with the thorny problem of rendering into English the connotation-laden German words that Klemperer subjected to close analysis. Translating arthaft as "characteristic" or volkhaft as "national," for example, does not begin to convey the loaded meaning of such terms at the time of the Third Reich. Those German words, like the others on which Klemperer focused his analysis, are included in brackets, so this problem will not trouble readers who know that language. But since the purpose of the translation is to make the book accessible to those who do not know German, the decision to seek single-word English equivalents rather than provide explanatory phrases, at least in the cases of truly untranslatable words, is a regrettable shortcoming.

... The challenge is to work for social justice in the distribution of opportunities for individual growth and ... calls for a new beginning only to discover that a majority of the people refuse to go ... grip on the idea, there is nothing odd about the thought of a peaceful democratic revolution. ...

Since de-Stalinisation began in Eastern Europe, the 'dead hand' of institutional Marxism has been eroded by revisionist Marxism, with the turn to young Marx and the philosophy of human emancipa- tion to undermine prevailing orthodoxies. ...

... In Central Europe, Slo-vakia is ruled by a parochial government, which sees any form of criticism as a direct attack on the country's national security.4 An alliance of neo-Bolshevik and nationalist fundamentalists has emerged as a major political force in Rus-sia. ...

... In Central Europe, Slo-vakia is ruled by a parochial government, which sees any form of criticism as a direct attack on the country's national security.4 An alliance of neo-Bolshevik and nationalist fundamentalists has emerged as a major political force in Rus-sia. ...