From Homo Sovieticus to Homo Europaeus: Allegiance and Resistance to Exogenous Models of Socio-political Development in Eastern Europe

Both the installment of communist regimes and the EU integration came with promises of economic development and increased social justice for the Eastern European countries. However, both models had faced significant deadlocks, and the communist model eventually collapsed. Although with significant variation and different levels of intensity, the most recent literature attests a growing anti-European discourse both in the most successful models of democratization and in the so-called laggards. Starting from this general assessment, this paper focuses on six post-communist countries: Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia. Our main assumption is that it is possible to draw a comparison between two highly different models of exogenous developments as well as between the diverse reactions the former have generated in the ‘receiver-countries’. . Despite significant differences in terms of content and form, we find that in both models of development the initial allegiance/compliance phase was progressively replaced by contestation and even radical rejection. In this paper we posit that the shift from allegiance to contestation or rejection can be explained by specific pre-communist legacies and, more specifically, by the timing of state formation. By critically drawing on the types of communist regimes offered by Kitschelt et al. (1999), our hypothesis is that countries, in which industrial societies had emerged prior to the advent of Communism, presented several competing visions of modernity, endorsed by conflicting political actors in the inter-war period. These conflicting visions re-emerged following the demise of communism, intensified the process of Europeanization and catalyzed, eventually, instances of contestation (e.g. Czech Rep., Hungary, Poland and Slovakia). Contrariwise, countries in which industrial societies developed only after the rise to power of communist parties presented no such instances, since they had never been confronted to alternative visions of modernity. In this case, former communist rulers shaped both the processes of democratization and EU integration. Yet, once these countries achieved the status of EU members, forms of contestation did emerge, while valorizing discourses related to the pre-communist cognitive legacies, such as the instrumentalist vision of ethnicity and cultural distinctiveness. It is possible to document that both in Romania and Bulgaria political élites rely more and more on both material and non-material aspirations and place their ethnic and cultural distinctiveness at the forefront of their political agendas. Nevertheless, the picture is more complex than it may appear at a first glance, as we can identify different ways of acceptance and rejection of exogenous models of development across the comparative analysis. In order to analyze the different phases and sequences across and within the progressive shift from allegiance to contestation\rejection in the two exogenous models of social and economic development, the paper makes use of a qualitative-based analysis, while it intends to integrate several quantitative tests to further validate our hypotheses.