Post-Communist Transitions in Eastern Europe and Central Asia Video Series Launch
Michael Rossi Rutgers University Department of Political Science Masters Program in United Nations and Global Policy Studies Summer Series 2021 This Graduate-level course offers students advanced theoretical, historical, and comparative studies of social and political transitions from single party Communist rule in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Over the past three decades, former Communist states have produced a myriad of governments that include consolidated liberal democracies like in Poland and the Czech Republic, weak democracies like Serbia and Romania, illiberal hybrid regimes like Russia and Ukraine, and entrenched authoritarian dictatorships like Turkmenistan and Belarus. Nearly all are still struggling to build a civil society based on political pluralism, and an economic sector designed for the free market but still adherent to social welfare. This course examines the post-Communist world in four sub-sections: Central Europe Southeastern Europe Russia and the Near Abroad Central Asia Highlighting certain countries in each region, we will examine the relative capabilities and obstacles each region has experienced in transitioning from decades of various types of authoritarian Communist government. As such, this course provides a balance of theory and example to a series of debates in economic, political, social, and cultural issues that are part of larger studies on democratic transition. The student who successfully completes this class will obtain skills that will enable him or her to: 1. Formulate empirical theories and popular understandings of “democracy” as both a unit of collective action for group rights and privileges and a frame of mind for individual liberties and securities. 2. Identify institutional and cultural conditions of states and societies on the eve of transition, the “legacies” of the authoritarian period, and the “paths” available for each state’s development towards socio-political pluralism. 3. Note the importance of the role of social and political elites in shaping, or at the very least influencing, the nature of a new political order that leads to either full democratic consolidation or remains in some proverbial “halfway house” between full democracy and full authoritarianism. 4. Critically analyze post-transition issues including policies of reconciliation between previously contentious social, political, and cultural communities, ongoing narratives of nationalism and ethnocentrism, and strategies for crafting new narratives of multiethnic citizenship. This course also serves to break down a number of assumptions and misconceptions of democracy as being synonymous with liberalism. A number of examined cases will show that democracy as a political mechanism can operate, quite successfully, alongside limited civil liberties and co-fraternal citizenship. A final objective of this course is to question whether “liberal democracy” is the most mature and developed form of democratic politics, and argues that much of the features of liberal democracy has contributed towards the surge in national populist movements in countries previously regarded as "success stories". All lectures and interviews are recorded for the Graduate seminar offered through the M.A. Program in United Nations and Global Policy Studies in the Department of Political Science at Rutgers University New Brunswick. Each lecture video will be accompanied by a bibliography of assigned readings.
