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Days after the European Union resolved a dispute with Poland and Hungary over a rule of law mechanism that threatened to halt the bloc's €1.8tn budget and coronavirus recovery fund, the clash between the two sides is widening. Both countries saw opinions go against them in the EU's top court yesterday. What began as a confrontation over democracy and the law, moreover, is fast becoming a culture war. … Despite having a liberal-minded urban youth, Poland and Hungary remain, overall, more socially conservative than many western European societies. For both ruling parties, appeals to family values are popular with their rural, older voter base. But evocations of traditional values also create a narrative that obscures the true nature of the showdown with Brussels and western EU members. This is over democracy and rule of law: judicial reforms, restrictions on media and erosions of checks and balances that help PiS and Fidesz to entrench themselves in power. Instead, the two parties can claim to be fighting back against alleged EU attempts to impose “alien” liberal values on unwilling societies.

—Financial Times, 17 December 2020

Over the past decade, the Hungarian leader has boasted of creating an “illiberal democracy” and has faced allegations of cronyism and corruption. Poland's ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party has only been in power for five years but has also mounted an assault on judicial independence and rule of law in that time.

—The Guardian, 9 December 2020

Bearing this division over central values in mind, this special issue steps toward an exploration of the contested region that is Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), shedding light on some of the ongoing complex societal developments that make it noteworthy.

The fortieth anniversary of Sartre's death, on April 15 of this year, found much of the world in lockdown in response to a new virus, Covid-19, which has changed humanity's situation on this planet in ways we will be struggling to elucidate for years to come. In these unprecedented circumstances, Sartre's thought has been an obvious resource to help us understand the impact and ramifications of this pandemic. The virus has been an unsparing indicator in itself of social injustice, unmasking the pious platitudes of our advanced, modern democracies. In the United States in particular, the reality is truly ugly. Covid-19 has shed pitiless light on the disparity between affluent white communities, able to “shelter in place” and avoid putting their members at risk of infection, and less affluent black and brown districts, where workers on subsistence salaries, often without health-care benefits, have been forced to work in unsafe conditions, with terrible consequences for them and their families. Living in the “richest” country on earth, we can imagine only too easily Sartre's vitriolic assessment of America in its present crisis. And it is just as easy to imagine the fervor with which he would have embraced the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted all over the world, provoked by the 8 minute 46 second video clip that showed the matter-of-fact murder by asphyxiation of George Floyd by white police officers in Minneapolis.

Abstract

This article presents the impact of the changing world order on the situation of Central and Eastern Europe, paying particular attention to Poland. It looks at the geopolitical and economic conditions during the regional superpower rivalry between the United States, China, Russia, and the European Union within the emerging multipolar order, which is manifested in the 17 + 1 format and the Three Seas Initiative. Poland, trying to get out of the peripheral status resulting from the neoliberal shock doctrine, is currently losing its ability to balance between China and the United States, is antagonizing Russia in the process, and weakening ties within the European Union. Changing its peripheral dependence requires a reevaluation of its stance toward Eurasian integration and its openness to China.

Abstract

Participation is essential in societal development. Nevertheless, it still tends to be implemented unsystematically, and to be interpreted loosely without attention to context. For effective implementation, trust needs to be taken more seriously. The nexus between participation and trust plays a key role in societal processes toward democracy. Highlighting it is particularly relevant to the political, economic, cultural, and environmental transition in Ukraine, where participation is encouraged while the level of trust is fragile, resulting in multiple adverse effects on everyday life. Accordingly, this article investigates the significance of effectively implementing participation and the impact of trust upon its quality, depicting Ukraine as a counterexample. While participation is vital, it needs to be managed with care, according to the level of trust in society.

Abstract

The level of trust in politicians also in government institutions is taken as an indicator of the state of society in general. Various studies have shown that the population of the Central Eastern European countries, and especially the citizens of the Czech Republic, lack trust in state institutions and democratic structures. The trust of the Czech population in government institutions is, compared to other (Western) European countries, at a relatively low level. This article aims to discuss different factors that are currently influencing this lack of trust: the historical, cultural, and institutional. The empirical data for this article is based on the European Values Study and Czech surveys of public opinion concerning trust in government institutions.

Around Christmas 2020, a deal featuring the “reasonable” divorce between the United Kingdom and the European Union was announced by representatives from both sides. This far-reaching political event—based, from the British side, on an ideology for regaining sovereignty, not shying away from ostentative falsehoods, and taking advantage of sophisticated communication techniques—will cause socioeconomic, sociocultural, and socioenvironmental damage. It contradicts the vision of many British academics who have played a decisive role in the initiation and development of the theory of social quality and its approach worldwide over the past decades. They focused on social justice and the equitable participation of citizens in societies that are sustainable, fair, inclusive, open, and economically vibrant, thus following the contours of the 1997 Amsterdam Declaration on Social Quality. This deal consists of a complex web of incalculable agreements that have not been fully negotiated. It is a hastily crafted recipe for a further breakdown of UK–EU relationships.

Abstract

Although Hungary joined the European Union in 2004, it seems that it has not yet been able to catch up with its Western European neighbors socioeconomically. The reasons for this are numerous, including the fact that this former historical region (Kingdom of Hungary), today the sovereign state of Hungary, has a specific sociocultural image and attitude formed by various historical events. And the nature of these events can explain why Hungary's economic development and overarching political narrative differ so markedly from Western Europe. The aim of this article is to present the unique location of Hungary in the context of Central and Eastern Europe, and to address such factors as urbanization and industrialization, migration, population, politics, economic development, and social values crisis. We argue that these factors, including the European status quo that emerged after 1945, have influenced the existing sociopolitical, socioeconomic, and sociocultural differences between Hungary and Western European EU states.

Abstract

In the recent years, one of the most popular subjects of research in political science has been the rise of populism. In Poland, an anti-establishment government has won a second electoral cycle in a row. However, unlike in Hungary, the opposition received a comparable share of the vote. In this article, I try to show how a country with a seemingly homogeneous population could have become so divided. I argue that the current polarization is based on the lack of social recognition of the less well-off citizens and areas, and on the lack of social cohesion: deeply rooted cultural and moral divisions in society overlapping with differences in economic situation. Those underlying causes explain why civil society in Poland is still able to mobilize, but they also let us predict that the divisions will not disappear soon. Although the political preferences of the youth suggest a strong demand for more pluralism, the new gender cleavage may deepen with time, based on a similar logic: diverging life courses and a lack of social cohesion and recognition exploited by polarizing parties. The explanations offered here contribute to the understanding of not only the success of anti-establishment parties in Poland but also of the differences between the Western and Central and Eastern European political mainstream.

Kate Kirkpatrick, Becoming Beauvoir: A Life (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), xiv +476 pp. ISBN: 9781–350–04717–4

Simone de Beauvoir, Diary of a Philosophy Student: Volume 2, 1928–29. The Beauvoir Series. Edited by Barbara Klaw, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, Margaret Simons, and Marybeth Timmerman; translated by Barbara Klaw; series edited by Margaret Simons and Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019), xii +374 pp. ISBN: 978–0-252–04254–6

During the preparation of this issue of the International Journal of Social Quality, the authors were confronted with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. This event thoroughly transcends the issue of the health of people as such. It affects almost all living conditions and the all-encompassing challenge of the sustainability of human life on earth, including flora and fauna. An emerging hypothesis is that pandemics like this one are partly determined by the nature of the current modern ways of life, which drastically disturb the balance of ecological systems. Inevitably, citizens, policymakers, and scientists are confronted with extremely complex challenges that—logically—must be approached in comprehensive ways. In this issue, four articles are published that are—in preliminary form—connected with the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic.