Democratic rebels
Eastern Europeans still engage in social protests
Archived article from Feb 23, 2001
By Ruby Keise
Jan Kubik began his research on Eastern Europe with two major questions in mind: Were people in the new democratic systems in post-communist Europe still using protest to pressure their governments as they did in the 1970s and 1980s? Was the situation in Poland different from that in other post-communist countries?
"Even after communism fell in 1989, I retained my interest in the complex interaction between the citizens and the state," says Kubik, an associate professor of political science on the New Brunswick campus and the director of the Center for Russian, Central and East European Studies. "It occurred to me that it would be very interesting to see whether the pattern of rebelliousness that was so clear in Poland during the late communist years continued in one way or another."
Kubik and Harvard Professor Grzegorz Ekiert designed a comparative project to study Poland, Slovakia, the former East Germany and Hungary. Their findings were the basis for their book, "Rebellious Civil Society: Popular Protest and Democratic Consolidation in Poland, 1989-1993" (University of Michigan Press), which recently won the 2000 American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies/Orbis Books Prize for an outstanding English-language book on Polish affairs.
The research confirmed the authors' hunch that protests continued in post-communist Eastern Europe and that there was more protest in Poland than in other countries. "We demonstrated that history matters," says Kubik. "Before 1989, Poland had the Solidarity movement, which was by far the biggest opposition movement communism had ever seen, with membership of up to 10 million people at some point."
The research also confirmed that "the view of communism as this uniformly oppressive totalitarian system was simply wrong. There was tremendous diversity in the way people in various countries not only tried to survive, but somehow resist and challenge the system."
Kubik, who first came to the United States in 1982 and joined the Rutgers faculty in 1991, says the focus of his book differs from that of other studies. "While there are studies on contributions made by the popular sector to the fall of non-democratic regimes, people's activities during democratic consolidation have not been systematically analyzed."
To collect the data, Kubik and his colleague engaged a team of researchers who reviewed daily and weekly papers for news about protests during the four years after the fall of communism. They looked for such details as how many people participated in the protest, how long it lasted, what were the demands, who organized the protest and what slogans were displayed.
"There were places that remained pretty oppressive and less open during the late communist period," states Kubik. "Poland and Hungary were clear examples of liberalization, while Romania and the former East Germany were much more oppressed.
"We thought it was important to understand this variety, where it came from and whether variety under communism had anything to do with very different developments and patterns after the fall of communism," Kubik stated.
"Rebellious Civil Society" focused more specifically on Poland because that country had the most powerful protest movement before 1989, and there was already an enormous amount of data, not only on protest but also on other elements of Polish politics. "We think we have more information than other researchers on this topic, and our data is more comprehensive," Kubik says.
In Poland, the demands were very concrete and people wanted correction of existing policies, Kubik says. "It seemed that the people succeeded in including items of importance to them on the public agenda and reminding the government that these issues needed to be addressed."
Although the impact of these protests is hard to gauge, Kubik says, "We think, nonetheless, that the impact of protest on government policy was considerable."
|
