Description
Book Synopsis
Social Currents in Eastern Europe traces the diverse social currents that have developed alongside and interacted with political and economic forces to bring about change in Eastern Europe. In this second edition—which significantly updates and expands the previous edition to include a new introduction, revisions throughout, as well as five new chapters, including timely material on ethnic war in the former Yugoslavia—Ramet extends and develops the theory of social change upon which the book is based.
Ramet draws on interviews conducted over a ten-year period with individuals active in arenas for social change—intellectual dissent, feminism, religious activism, youth cultures and movements, and trade unionism—in eight East European countries: East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania. She shows how the processes leading to the ultimate collapse of communism began more than a decade earlier and how th
Table of Contents
Tables ix
Preface to the Second Edition x
Preface to the First Edition xi
Abbreviations xv
I. Introduction 3
2. Social Currents and Social Change 24
II. Dissent and Parallel Society in the 1980s
3. Disaffection and Dissent in East Germany 55
4. Underground Solidarity and Parallel Society in Poland 84
5. Independent Activism in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania 120
III. Religious and Ethnic Currents
6. Religious Change and New Cults in Eastern Europe 155
7. Church and Dissent in Praetorian Poland 178
8. Serb-Albanian Tensions in Kosovo 196
IV. A New Generation
9. Feminism in Yugoslavia 219
10. Rock Music and Counterculture 234
11. Young People: The Lost Generation 262
V. Collapse of the Old Order
12. Bulgaria: A Weak Society 279
13. Strong Societies: Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia 288
14. Dominoes: East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and the Future of Europe 313
15. The Great Transformation 338
VI. Building New Systems
16. Core Tasks for a Pluralist Order 371
17. Yugoslav Breakup and Ethnic War 401
18. Civil Society and Uncivil Chauvinism 431
19. Propositions About the Future 455
Appendixes: Public Opinion Polls 461
Notes 483
Selected Bibliography 565
Index 569
