As famously argued by Katherine Verdery in “Privatization as Transforming Persons” (Sorin Antohi and Vladimir Tismaneanu, eds., Between Past and Future: The Revolutions of 1989 and Their Aftermath, 2000, 175–97), different economic regimes create different notions of personhood and thus different people: by conjecturing diverse value systems and incentive structures, economic arrangements shape subjectivities, not immutably but stably. The moment of systemic economic change, therefore, consists of a speedy process of remaking of persons: in the case of central and eastern Europe (CEE), from relationally formed and embedded “dividuals” of socialism to possessive individuals of capitalism and portfolio managers of neoliberalism. The portfolio one is to manage—in order to be ready for the market—is oneself, and its assets include education, skills, health, exercise routines, eating, work, and mind habits, incorporating those of flexibility and positivity. This transformation is always painful—not only were industries (and work, and communities structured by work) disappearing, austerity was undercutting vital safety nets, gender roles were reverting to more traditional ones, and workers’ status was being dramatically devalued—the ground of common understanding and acting in the world was also shifting, and the eventual normal of the neoliberal future was as yet invisible. Despite this universal pain, the moment of change is rarely taken up by the scholars of the region. Until now that is, when the gap has been thoughtfully and comprehensively filled by the Remembering the Neoliberal Turn, edited by Veronika Pehe and Joanna Wawrzyniak.
The volume comprises sixteen case studies from nine countries, all of which grapple with how this fluid and time-bound process of economic transformation and disorientation is remembered in the present. The case studies are divided into three parts, or registers of memory, as given by political elites, ordinary people, and cultural entrepreneurs. In each part, its authors demonstrate how registers affect and complicate each other.
Part one, devoted to memory from above, explores the foundational frames and tropes of political elites invented at the time, which render the nature and speed of change as natural and inevitable. For instance, Florian Peters shows that shock therapy persists as the definitive marker of the “before and after” in Poland, the foundational mythos of the new reality; Matej Ivančik traces Slovak elites’ attempt to funnel debate into the binary of “irrationality” of resisting the shock therapy, and the putative “rationality” of its adoption; in contrast, Tom Junes and Ivo Iliev explore Bulgaria, where the elastic annus mirabilis lasted until 1997, during which capitalism came to be enduringly conflated with post-communist plunder: neoliberalism arrived because of the state’s attrition, and the eventual anti-corruption eruption came to be defined as pro-democratic, even as it was mostly anti-capitalist; and finally Olga Malinova takes us to Russia where different caesura is actively produced: Boris El´tsin’s “hard, unstable” 1990s render Vladimir Putin’s 2000s as “stable and prosperous.” The simplifying binaries of the past justify political agendas, but they also lead to the dislocation of change remaining unrecognized. This is powerfully theorized by Thomas Lindenberger, who explores how the subaltern status of East Germany and its present day flirtation with right-wing ideology may be traced to this original misrecognition, a function of simplifying political speech.
If the top-down speech of the political class establishes the mnemonic frames, the vernacular memory from below complicates elite simplifications in powerful ways. Till Hilmar gives voice to the change-resistant undervaluation of care workers in Czechia and East Germany and their recovered pride; Jill Massino offers a fascinating glimpse into the way a female worker in Romania was shaped in communism, and how she was then made to bear the brunt on deindustrialization and the creation of a risk-absorbing docile worker in neoliberalism; and Tibor Valuch explores how workers in Hungary’s single-industry towns continue to narrate the loss of their communities. Switching gaze, Kamil Lipiński and Joanna Wawrzyniak analyze the variety of ways in which the newly birthed business elite remembers their own emergence, and how the social and cultural capital of western expats emerges as different than its other members. Adam Mrozowicki and Justyna Kajta trace narratives of present-day youths employed in precarious jobs—the quintessential neoliberal subjects—who often lean to the right and whose remembrance of Polish transition is molded by familial experience and stories, more than the grand memory of the elites.
The third part of the book attends to how cultural products—films, TV series, novels—represent the past at a time of change and how they are repurposed in the present. Veronika Pehe analyzes how the enduring appeal of transition era comedies signifies a buried memory of a time of change in Czechia; Saygun Gökariksel traces the lasting popularity of the film series, Psy, and decodes its portrayal of transition in Poland as masculinized corruption and banditry; Ksenia Robbe turns to the Russian novel Bad Weather to track how its contestatory themes of continuities get attenuated, in line with the elite narrative, in the subsequent TV adaptation; Olga Gontarska and Pehe ponder the absence of transition memory in Ukrainian cinema; Joanna Jabłkowska and Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska look to literary narratives, and Anna Lux to films, to trace how they work to complicate and contest the triumphalist tales of “perhaps difficult but necessary and ultimately successful” unification and integration of East and West Germany, and how they recover the misrecognized experience and memory of the East.
In its three parts, Remembering of the Neoliberal Turn broadens the scope and democratizes the analysis of collective memory in CEE: it decenters the heroic memory of the political classes and shows its various oversimplifications, as it recovers the complexity of experience on the one hand and meaning-making narratives on the other, both of ordinary people and cultural entrepreneurs. It thus attends to narrated pain as well as complicated progress. It is a key volume in understanding the emerging (right-wing) trends both in CEE and in the world. A comparative exploration of the memory of neoliberal birth globally, as well as theorization of neoliberalism as causal to the emerging right, are obvious next steps for which the groundwork has been laid here. The volume and the future research it enables would please Tony Judt, who in 2005 published his monumental history of Europe, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945. In 1945, Judt claimed, ALL of Europe, regardless of regime, embarked on the massive anti-fascist project of a social-democratic welfare state. Judging by our surprise at the re-emergence of the powerful right-wing, it seems the lessons and memory of the dismantling of the welfare state hold lessons and insights in need of rediscovery and relearning.
