Social Movements in Eastern Europe: Problems of Understanding Non-Western Contexts

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-80
Author(s):  
Agnes Gagyi
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Eastern Europe

The Montage Connection between John Heartfield and László Lakner

2019 ◽  
pp. 565-588
Author(s):  
Cristina Cuevas-Wolf
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Visual Language ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
The West ◽  
Weimar Germany ◽  
Cross Pollination ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Visual Cultures

This article argues that during the 1960s the Hungarian conceptualist and painter László Lakner defined through his works a paradoxical, yet distinctive lineage of a New Leftist visual culture. Based in the tradition of transnational communist, antifascist visual expression, Lakner’s art responded and critiqued the communist regime in Eastern Europe during the 1960s. The German political photomonteur John Heartfield initiated such an alternative leftist visual language in Weimar Germany in his antifascist photomontages, published by the German magazine Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung, to create a politically engaged viewer from within the communist international movement. This essay compares the work of Lakner and Heartfield to show how the montage connection between these two artists stemmed from a transnational cross-pollination between communist visual cultures in the West and East that shared an international and oppositional character informed by radical social movements in the thirties and sixties.

‘The world’s shortest highway’: Entrepreneurial populism and the making of a personal campaign

2022 ◽  
pp. 136754942110622
Author(s):  
Lucian Vesalon ◽  
Vlad Botgros
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Social Activism ◽  
Single Issue ◽  
Peculiar Case

‘The world’s shortest highway’ is 1 metre long and was built in 2019 by a Romanian businessman as part of the campaign ‘Romania wants highways’. This brought interesting evolutions to the landscape of social movements in Eastern Europe. It was a highly personalised campaign, one which faced several internal contradictions and displayed an uncritical adoption of stereotypes about progress and development. We argue that it produced a discourse that revolves around ‘Westernisation’ and ‘nationhood’. As this article seeks to demonstrate, the campaign is framed in a discourse of ‘entrepreneurial populism’. By analysing this discourse, we contribute with a peculiar case to the debates on the varieties of populism and on the culture of business celebrities. Our analysis indicates that, although this single-issue campaign is nominally about highways, its substance is rather about business celebrities occupying the space of social activism.

scholarly journals History of Medicine in Eastern Europe: Sexual Medicine and Women’s Reproductive Health in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Kateřina Lišková
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Reproductive Health ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
History Of Medicine ◽  
Sexual Medicine ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Local Languages

Abstract Specific developments in reproductive health occurred in Eastern Europe, especially in the second half of the twentieth century. During state socialism, it was experts, not social movements, who furthered the agenda of women’s health and sexuality. New analyses from the region and written mostly by authors who speak the local languages attest to the wealth of histories, highlighting different timelines of reproductive health developments, the unexpected causes behind them, and the social actors and institutions which played decisive roles.

Decentralization and Democracy in Eastern Europe: A Sceptical Approach

1997 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
C G Pickvance
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Local Government ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Political Context ◽  
Implicit Model ◽  
Dimension Functions ◽  
Multidimensional Concept

The author focuses on the link between local government decentralization and democracy in Eastern Europe. It is shown that decentralization is a multidimensional concept and that actual local government systems can be positioned differently on each dimension (functions, control, and finance) depending on the implicit model of local government. Formal and substantive definitions of democracy are distinguished and some conventional measures examined; it is concluded that decentralization and democracy do not necessarily go together. The degree of decentralization and implicit models of postsocialist local government in Eastern Europe are then outlined, with a focus on the contrast between Budapest and Moscow. The development of social movements in the two capitals is taken as an index of substantive democracy and is shown to be influenced not only by the extent of decentralization but also by other features of the local political context. This illustrates the earlier argument that the relation between decentralization and democracy is an empirically variable one rather than a necessary one.

scholarly journals The Aesthetic Post-Communist Subject and the Differend of Rosia Montana

2012 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irina Velicu
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Central And Eastern Europe ◽  
Discursive Practice ◽  
Alternative Possibilities ◽  
Capitalist Economy ◽  
Post Communism ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Rosia Montana

By challenging the state and corporate prerogatives to distinguish between “good” and “bad” development, social movements by and in support of inhabitants of Rosia Montana (Transylvania) are subverting prevailing perceptions about Central and Eastern Europe (CEE)’s liberal path of development illustrating its injustice in several ways that will be detailed in this article under the heading “inhibitions of political economy” or Balkanism. The significance of the “Save Rosia Montana” movement for post-communism is that it invites post-communist subjects to reflect and revise their perception about issues such as communism, capitalism and development and to raise questions of global significance about the fragile edifice of justice within the neo-liberal capitalist economy. However, resistance to injustice (and implicitly affirmations of other senses of justice) is an ambiguous discursive practice through which Rosieni make sense as well as partake their sense of Rosia Montana. The movement brings about a public dispute which may be compared with a differend: (in Lyotard’s words), a conflict that cannot be confined to the rules of “cognitive phrases,” of truth and falsehood. This article argues that while post-communist events of “subjectification” are unstable and thus, are to be viewed aesthetically, this same ambiguous multiplication of political subjectivity may facilitate the creation of social spaces for imagining alternative possibilities of development.

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