East European Politics and Societies 

About: East European Politics and Societies is an academic journal published by SAGE Publishing. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Politics & Democracy. It has an ISSN identifier of 0888-3254. Over the lifetime, 1077 publications have been published receiving 16986 citations. The journal is also known as: East European Politics & Societies & Eastern European politics and societies.

National Interests, State Power, and EU Enlargement

Abstract: The EU enlargement process and its consequences are decisively influenced by material national interests and state power. Current EU leaders promote accession primarily because they believe it to be in their longterm economic and geopolitical interest, and applicant states embark on the laborious accession process because EU membership brings tremendous economic and geopolitical benefits, particularly as compared exclusion as others move forward. As in previous rounds of EU enlargement, patterns of asymmetrical interdependence dictate that the applicants compromise more on the margin—thereby contributing to a subjective sense of loss among those countries (the applicants) that benefit most. Domestic distributional conflict is exacerbated everywhere, but the losses are in most cases limited, inevitable and, in the longer term, even beneficial. Once in, we should expect applicant states, like their predecessors, to deploy their voting and veto power in an effort to transfer resources to themselves. While overrepresentation of smaller states gives the applicants an impressive number of votes, the lack of new “grand projects” essential to existing members, the diversity of the new members, and above all, the increasingly flexible decision-making structure of the EU, will make it difficult for the new members to prevail.

Lost in Transition Nostalgia for Socialism in Post-socialist Countries

Abstract: Why is there nostalgia for real socialism? Is it but a logical response to sudden, dramatic transformation? Don’t people remember those days anymore—or do they remember them all too well? In popular opinion, nostalgia for socialism is something fabricated, invented, and then imposed by different groups of people to achieve some goals: to open a new commercial niche, to attain political credit, to win popular support, to get artistic inspiration, and so on. Thus, many academic studies have examined only this instrumental side of the phenomenon, limiting it to the “industry of nostalgia” only. But research shows that nostalgia is in fact a retrospective utopia, a wish and a hope for a safe world, a fair society, true friendships, mutual solidarity, and well-being in general, in short, for a perfect world. As such, it is less a subjective, arbitrary, ideological effort to recall the past as it is, an undetermined, undefined, amorphous wish to transcend the present. So nostalgia for socialism in fact does not...

The Radical Right in Postsocialist Central and Eastern Europe: Comparative Observations and Interpretations

Abstract: The writer Tom Wolfe is said to have observed that “the specter of fascism is constantly hovering over America but always seems to land in Europe.” With the break-up of the Soviet empire and the world of socialist (and “anti-fascist”) regimes in Eastern Europe, there seems to be even more landing ground now. But in contrast to the widespread literature on the transformation process in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE),1 scholarly attention to right-wing radical or ultranationalist parties and movements in the region and their impact on democratic consolidation is scattered. So far, only a few essays and contributions to edited volumes have addressed the topic; most of the literature is journalistic rather than academic, and country-speciŽ c rather than comparative.2 Often, analogies are drawn between the post-1989 CEE radical right and interwar fascism in terms of images of a “Weimarization” of Eastern European politics and the return of the precommunist, ultranationalist or even fascist past.3 However,