Savoring Polishness: History and Tradition in Contemporary Polish Food Media

This article examines the future-oriented use of the culinary past in Poland’s food discourse through a qualitative analysis of popular food media (printed magazines and TV). We analyze how interpretations of food and culinary practices from the past are connected to contemporary debates. We contend that media representations of the culinary past co-create projects of Polish modernization in which diverse voices vie for hegemony by embracing different forms of engagement with the West and by imagining the future shape of the community. We distinguish between a pragmatic and a foodie type of culinary capital and focus on how they differently and at times paradoxically frame cultural memory and tradition. We observe the dynamics of collective memory and oblivion, and assess how interpretations of specific periods in Poland’s past are negotiated in the present through representations of material culture and practices revolving around food, generating not only contrasting evaluations of the past but also diverging economies of the future. Finally, we explore tradition as a set of present-day values, attitudes, and practices that are connected with the past, but respond to current concerns and visions of the future.

The Logic of the Punisher: Retrospective Voting and Hyper-Accountability in Lithuania

This article explores the roots of electoral hyper-accountability in Central and Eastern Europe. I focus on Lithuania: a country that is a stable liberal democracy, but has re-elected none of its governments (in the same party composition) since the restoration of independence. Survey data from the Lithuanian National Election Study reveal that Lithuanian voters are constantly dissatisfied with the economy and retrospectively evaluate it worse than the objective indicators would suggest. This partially explains why the Lithuanian voters constantly turn away from the government parties at parliamentary elections. However, their subsequent choice between parliamentary and new (previously marginal) parties is another puzzle. Using the 2016 Lithuanian post-election survey, I test how retrospective voting (economic and corruption issues) and political factors (trust and satisfaction with democracy) explain vote choice between the three types of parties (governmental, oppositional, and successful new party). It appears that new parties in Lithuania capitalize on double dissatisfaction, as the logic of the punisher comprises two steps. First, due to economic discontent, she turns away from the incumbent. Second, due to political mistrust, she often turns not to the parliamentary opposition, but to new parties. An analysis of retrospective economic evaluations hints at the political roots of hyper-accountability: these two steps are connected, as dissatisfaction with democracy is a strong predictor of negative retrospective evaluations of economy. Additional analysis of the 2019 post-election survey corroborates the results and reveals that a similar logic also applies in direct presidential elections.

The Political Opportunity Structure and the Evolution of the Organizational Base of Peasants’ and Farmers’ Protest Activity in Poland in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

The main research question of this article is as follows: What was the impact on the protest potential of peasants and farmers in the analyzed periods of the relations between the structure of political opportunity and the way these social groups were organized? In the author’s opinion, the impact was indirect, although it remodelled the organizational aspects of how the peasant and farmer movement functioned: from organizations in the form of political parties, through trade unions in the period of state socialism, up to producers’ organizations in contemporary Poland. It must be added, however, that the key factor responsible for these changes in the organizational background of the peasantry was changes within those social groups themselves: firstly, the empowerment of the peasantry in the inter-war period, the professionalization of farmers during state socialism, and the marketization of their activity after 1989.

Historical Sociology in Poland: Transformations of the Uses of the Past

The development of Polish institutional sociology since the 1920s reflects the combined effects of domestic political and cultural factors, along with international interdependencies. Historical sociology shares in the vicissitudes of the whole discipline. Although historical sociology was only weakly institutionalized before 1989, some of the best sociological studies produced in Poland under socialism display the keen use of historical imagination, inspired both by the pre-1939 domestic tradition and by Marxist theory. This article examines the path of historical sociology in Poland after 1989 and the connection between the sociological uses of history and the experience of post-communist transformation. We posit that the social transformation experience and how it was addressed by social science directly translate into the use of history in Polish sociology after 1989. We argue that the role of historical sociology in Poland since the end of the 1990s was a function of the potential of the past as a symbolic resource in the growing interdependence between Poland and Western Europe. However, the post-1989 research agendas of historical sociology were forged according to the mode of responsiveness to political agendas predating 1989. An overview of the development of Polish historical sociology demonstrates that the ahistorical transitological thinking after 1989 has been challenged by critical agendas in historical sociology, but it was, in the first place, a reaction to the increased potential of the past as a symbolic resource in political debates. Thus, the rationale for the passage to the third wave of historical sociology was primarily political.

Improving Living Conditions, Deepening Class Divisions: Hungarian Class Structure in International Comparison, 2002–2018

This article investigates the changing relationship of class and the living conditions of individuals in Hungary in comparison with other European countries. Our central question is to what extent class position determines the material living conditions of individuals in Hungary, how this relationship has changed, and how significant it is compared to other European countries. Our analysis is a direct test of the death-of-class thesis in one of the core fields of class analysis. Our results show that there has been a rapid and large-scale restructuring of Hungarian society after 2010, with two notable tendencies. The first is an overall improvement of material living conditions at all levels of the class structure, the other is the gradual solidification and polarisation of class structure.

Blind Spots in Post-1989 Czech Historiography of State Socialism: Gender as a Category of Analysis

Gender is rarely considered in the works on state socialism in Czech history writing. Given the prominence of the equality of the sexes in communist rhetoric and the heated anti- and pro-feminism media and intellectual debates of the 1990s, the omission stands out as a remarkable loss of opportunity in historical research. It also defies logic. For if “emancipation” and “equality” were so strongly present in pre-1989 discourse and women constituted half the population, does it not follow that the plain demographic fact should drive the interest of researchers to inquire where this population was, what it did, and what it had to say? The question has so far attracted primarily sociologists, but how does it fare in historiography? What are the losses of the absence and the gains of the inclusion of a gender perspective on the history and memory-making of state socialism? This article will first consider the status quo of gender blindness in Czech historiography and its possible reasons in the context of the legacy that state socialism left to social sciences and humanities: the legacy of expertise, disciplinary legitimation and epistemological legacy. A discussion of the consequences of the near absence of gender history and analysis from post-1989 interpretations of state socialism in historiography follows: blind spots and loss of knowledge, lack of precision and a gender bias of historical accounts, and perpetuation of false legacy. Finally, the article discusses the gains to Czech historiography, memory-making and international discussion, if scholars do consider gender.

The Reform Communist Interpretation of the Stalinist Period in Czech Historiography and Its Legacy

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.

The Effectiveness of Grassroots Lobbying at the Regional Level in Poland: The Cases of Opole and Subcarpathian Region

This article examines the effectiveness of grassroots lobbying at the regional level in Poland. For the purpose of the article, “loyalty to the citizens versus party theory” was formulated. It distinguishes two stages of the policy-making process within which the councilors react differently to grassroots lobbying. The first stage refers to the preparation of the law by the region’s board. The theory assumes that the more people pressure the legislator to persuade the board to their initiative, the more inclined he is to endorse it. This way he proves loyalty to the citizens and secures his reelection. The second stage concerns the legislators’ voting behavior. In this case, grassroots lobbying has a neutral impact on them. The councilors remain loyal to the party leaders and vote accordingly so that their position on the party list is guaranteed in the next election. In order to verify the theory, a study consisting of anonymous interviews with sixty legislators from the Opole and Subcarpathian Assembly was conducted. The outcome of the research indicates that (1) a considerable majority of legislators were positively influenced by grassroots lobbying to pressure the region’s board; (2) the voting behavior of the majority of legislators was not impacted by grassroots lobbying; (3) grassroots lobbying is the most effective at the first stage of the policy-making process; (4) the structure of government does not determine the legislators’ reaction to grassroots lobbying; (5) the party’s status (in power or in opposition) impacts the legislator’s voting behavior.

Trianon in Popular History in Late-Socialist and Post-Transition Hungary: A Case Study

The main purpose of this article is to show how the changing dynamics of governmental memory politics and shifting institutional frameworks influenced the space for and type of discourses about Trianon in popular historiography in the decades spanning 1979 to 2010. I first introduce the way academic historiography addressed the issue of the peace treaty and its consequences. Second, I situate popular historical discussions about Trianon within the broader landscape of historical knowledge production. Analyzing publication patterns of História (1978) and Rubicon (1989), the two most widely read mainstream popular historical journals, complemented with a discussion of Trianoni Szemle, a journal established for the purpose of discussing this single topic, I reflect both on the journals’ (self-)positioning under changing currents and the intensity of governmental interest and control. As the centennial of the signing of the peace treaty draws near, such a case study provides an opportunity to observe symptomatic mechanisms of illiberal memory politics in juxtaposition to its authoritarian and democratic predecessors.

Writing on Communist History in Central Europe: Introduction

What challenges have we met while writing the history of communist countries before and after 1989? This article introduces a special section devoted to the historiography of the recent past in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. It shows that many of the methodological choices made after 1989 eschewed any critical examination and replicated or denied choices made before 1989 without reflecting on them. The section also reflects upon personal continuities. And it finally shows that history writing has been instrumentalized for political purposes after 1989 just as it had been before 1989. In other words, it acutely raises the question of continuities in historical practices despite the 1989 political rupture.