Capitalism and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe: Assessing the Legacy of Communist Rule by Grzegorz s> Ekiert Stephen E. Hanson (review)

560 SEER, 83, 3, 2005 Finally,Plokhyand Sysyndo not dealwith other Christianreligions,although Protestantismhas had a long historyin Ukraine and evangelical missionaries have recently had great success in their proselytizing among post-Soviet Ukrainians. Nevertheless, this collection is a must for those interested in the role that EasternChristianityplayed in the formationof a modern Ukrainian nation. Department ofGermanic andRussian Studies SERHY YEKELCHYK University of Victoria, Canada Ekiert, Grzegorz and Hanson, Stephen E. (eds). Capitalism andDemocracy in Central andEastern Europe: Assessing theLegacy ofCommunist Rule.Cambridge UniversityPress,Cambridgeand New York,2003. xiii + 375 pp. Tables. Notes. References. Index. ?19.99: $29.99 (paperback). THIS is a trulyexcellent book about legacies. The main title is opaque but the subtitle accurately describes its content. A dozen distinguishedcontributors stickremarkablycloselyto thatthemewithoutsignificantoverlaporrepetition. As a result it has the flavour of a monograph rather than a collection of conference papers.A cover-to-coverreadprovidesa wealth of understanding about the concept of historicallegacies that transcendsthe particularfocuson the post-Communist world, though that focus provides a useful degree of coherence and realitythat enrichesthe theorizing. The central question addressed by the book is the tension between the concept of historical legacies and the obvious fact that the uniformity of Communist rule was replaced very quickly by diversity: how can legacy account for diversity? And in the presence of such diversity, does 'postCommunist 'mean anythingat all?If the diversityof post-Communistpolities merely reflects current politics there is little space left for such a concept as legacy. The authorsof this book seek to rescue the concept of legacy in three ways: first, by pointing to the impact of diverse pre-Communist legacies as influencesinpost-Communistpolities;second, by remindingusof the diversity within the post-war Communist world what might have been uniformity before I945 was never so uniform after I945 and became ever more diverse from I956 onwards;third, by pointing out that political and culturallegacies arejust like familylegacies resourcesto be used, refusedor squanderedby later generations. The inheritors of the I990S could chose to use, abuse, manipulateor misrepresenttheirpre-Communist,orthodox-Communist,late reformist-Communist and anti-Communist-transition inheritances without opposition from dead generations. The 'weight of history' is the wrong metaphor; the 'wreckageof history' as a source of building materialsfor currentconstruction is the rightone. An introductionby Ekiertand Hanson touches on all the later themes, and an 'epilogue'by PaulPiersonarguesthecasefor 'contextualizedcomparisons'. Herbert Kitschelt discusses the perennial tension between the power and reach of explanatorymodels. Proximate causes always score well in correlations and regressions but relatively badly in terms of meaning. An earlier generation of electoral researchers,troubled by the statisticalpower of party REVIEWS 56I identification to predict voting choice, called this the funnel of causality. Kitschelt applies this to explanations of post-Communist diversity:long-term legacies, from pre-Communist legacies cannot be expected to correlate with post-Communist diversityas stronglyas more proximate causes, yet in terms of fundamental causal reasoning (rather than correlations) they may have greater explanatory power. Nonetheless there is a need to connect-up the distantpast with the present by some plausiblechain of influence ratherthan assumingthata (perhapsweak)pre-Communist/post-Communist correlation indicatesa genuine influenceor what Kitscheltcalls 'a Good Cause'. Ekiertthen uses EBRD, Freedom House, and TransparencyInternational indices to chart the diversityof post-Communisttrajectoriesin the i 990S and produces a four-stagedescriptiveoverview (p. I I5) that combines 'facilitating legacies, facilitating features of the power-transfer, and a more facilitating post-Communist reformprogramme to predict a 'successfultransformation'. There isjust a whiffof old American 'modernism'about a model that ends up with 'success'or 'failure'ratherthan diversitybut it could easilybe rephrased in termsof diversity. Jeffrey S. Kopstein and David A. Kelly contributea chapteron the impact of geography -distance from the West, interactionwith the West and, most interestingly,the 'neighbourhood effects'that generate statisticalautocorrelation or, in layman'sterms,distinctiveregionalpatterns.The concept may be more important even than the statistics. To confirm rather than infer 'neighbourhood effects' requires surveysand in-depth interviewsthat reveal conscious model-setting,bench-marksettingor imitation. Anna Grzymala-Bussediscusseswhy Communist successorpartieswere so successfulin some post-Communistcountriesand not in others.She concludes that I989-9 i was the deadline for internal party reform or reconstructionif the party was to succeed in the post-Communist era. By contrast, Allison Stangerreviewsthe diverseexperience of constitutionaland legal...

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