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This study examines educational inequalities under socialism in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Russia to assess the extent to which egalitarianism was achieved and whether there was restratification after the common retreat from egalitarian ideology and practices since the 1970s. Exploring the extent of parental influences in three key educational outcomes and their changes in four birth cohorts, the study finds remarkable stability across cohorts and across transitions. Contrary to expectation, the net effect of parental social capital (communist party membership status) is prominent only in the former Soviet Russia and Bulgaria, moderate in Czechoslovakia, and negligible in Hungary and Poland. On the other hand, the effect of parental cultural capital is consistently strong but its influence is somewhat weaker at higher transitions. Its inclusion also dramatically reduces the effect of parental education and father’s occupation, suggesting that a significant extent of intergenerational transmission of educational inequality is mediated through parental cultural capital rather than human capital per se.

Although there are many journalistic accounts of ongoing political events narrating about pro-democratic or antiauthoritarian movements, such as strikes, riots, and protest letters, not many scholarly analyses devote attention to the longitudinal analysis of the preceding events that lead to a spur of protests. Not many scholars account or are able to account for the activity of political dissidents that is often hidden, purposely censored, and covered from public eye. Most frequently, until the street strike and riots, the degree of spread of dissident activity within a country is unknown to scholars. It is equally difficult to find information about the national and international networks that political activists form to gain support and acceptance of their acclamations, propositions, and calls for political or economic reforms. Furthermore, only access to dissident press allows researchers to glimpse the activity of existing organizations looking at issues censored by existing governments.

It is often said that we live in a time of crisis for social democracy. Many of the West European centre-left parties that seemed the natural parties of government in the second half of the twentieth century are in decline. The most common long-term explanations centre on a shrinking working class, a widening gap between the party elite and their core voters, and the challenges from new populist parties and/or greens. Short-term policy factors include the failure to address the recent financial and refugee crises. None of these factors carry much explanatory weight for developments in Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic in the three decades since the transition from communism. We find that much of the explanation for the rise and the fall of the five social democratic parties in these countries lies in the dynamics of party competition and party system change. All parties face dilemmas of policy, electoral appeal and coalition-building. The Central European cases suggest that it is how social democrats handle such challenges and make difficult choices about strategy and tactics that ultimately shapes their long-term fate. Centre-left parties are stronger masters of their fortunes than much of the literature on the decline of social democracy suggests. Consequently, seeking a common structural explanation for the rise and decline of social democratic parties might be a double fallacy: both empirically misleading and a poor base for policy advice.

This chapter analyzes the early post-transition privatization and enterprise reform efforts of three major countries: Poland, Czechoslovakia (subsequently the Czech Republic), and the Soviet Union (subsequently Russia). For each, it discusses the prevailing ideologies of key decision makers and their external advisors prior to and during the transition process, the initial conditions faced by reformers and advisors, the policy frameworks that evolved, the results achieved, the mistakes made, and the opportunities missed. The ultimate conclusion is that while privatization could have and probably should have been done better, it nonetheless had to be done. The Czech Republic and Russia, and others in the region, are better off after the flawed privatizations they carried out than they would have been had they avoided or delayed divestiture. Poland, which did quite well at first in the absence of mass and rapid privatization, now finds itself burdened with a number of expensive and unproductive state firms. This chapter shows how and why these outcomes came about, and discusses the role of external advisors in the process.

In the aftermath of the Communist Era, Czechs and Slovaks sought to enter the European Union (EU) in order to participate in Western European markets and polities. To gain entry, they had to reform their labor laws based on EU protocols. This study analyzes changes in labor law in the Czech Republic by focusing on differences between statutes and regulations in the Communist and Post-Communist Eras. The study is framed by international approaches to law that locate sources of legal change in international organizations and protocols. In reforming Czech labor law, EU labor law standards were established through internal political processes that were themselves shaped by EU requirements rooted in pluralism and the rule of law.

This chapter presents a brief historical overview of Czech libraries and librarianship with special attention paid to the ways in which this history laid the foundations for present postcommunist developments. This is followed by a more detailed discussion of important changes in the wake of the “Velvet Revolution” from my perspective as library user and as active participant in the process of postcommunist change in the library world of the Czech Republic.

An aspect of globalization is the creation of macro-regions through integration. A macro-region is a territorial unit created through the process of cooperation, cohesion, and integration. Areas of integration can be political, economic, and social. An example of a macro-region is the European Union (EU). For EU member states and for acceding countries economic integration means accepting EU rules and regulations. The rationale behind these laws and rules is to increase economic, financial, and trade cooperation among partner countries. To increase the viability of this macro-region, the EU, has emphasized the need for social integration, which is the expansion of self-identification by individuals from viewing themselves as citizens of a country to a broader European identity, a citizen of Europe. This paper evaluates the impact of joining the European Union on the labor markets of Central and Eastern Europe countries, an economic integration; and the parallel expansion of the citizens’ identity expanding to include a European self-image, a social integration.