2024-03-09 15:38:31
by To Hilmar*
My recent book Deserved reconstructs people’s experiences with, and memories of, disruptive economic change. It foregrounds the voices of individuals who endured the “shock therapy” of the 1990s – the transition from communism to market society – in two societies.
The analysis is driven by a historical-comparative argument: Before 1989, East Germany and Czechia (then known as the German Democratic Republic and the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic) had developed similar social and economic models. Claus Offe referred to them as the state-socialist “success stories”, characterized by the principle of “economic integration” as a social contract. Both had strong industrial bases, dominated by large, state-owned companies, and near full employment for both male and female workforces. There was great pride in their skills and technical traditions, a legacy of the industrial heartlands around the river Elbe, which was propagated as a form of economic nationalism by these regimes. However, the revolutions of 1989 led these societies down radically different political and economic paths. Politically, the GDR ceased to exist, while Czechia emerged as an independent nation in 1993. Economically, East Germany experienced a rupture; deindustrialization there was rapid, with industrial production plummeting by almost 75% in the first two years post-1989, leading to widespread unemployment, a need to place a significant part of the population on welfare measures, and initially, wages aligning with West German levels. In contrast, Czechia saw a relative preservation of industrial structures, maintaining employment stability, but with public sector wages remaining very low, and stagnating for decades after 1989.
What do these divergent trajectories mean for how people perceived the economic transformations of the 1990s at the time, and how they remember these changes today? Deserved addresses this question by exploring the economic memories centered around everyday work experiences – including unemployment, fear of unemployment, downsizing companies, retraining, and starting new businesses. East Germans had a much lower sense of economic agency in the 1990s compared to Czechs, who had political leaders like Václav Klaus framing the transformation as a manly endeavor to return to a “natural” state of market order. The economic memories of East Germans are marked by a strong sense of social exclusion, despite the extensive cushioning of this transition by the German state through measures like short-term work schemes. The economic memories of Czechs often reflect a more positive view of the transition to a market society after 1989, even though this period also saw a significant rise in inequalities and dramatic gender disparities in labor market outcomes, departing from what was once a more egalitarian society.
There is considerable variation in narratives about economic change that emerge from the interviews. When we focus on the ways in which these narratives portray the economic agency of individuals – both in biographical accounts of one’s own choices and opportunities after 1989, and in observations of the economic agency of others – we find a deep level of social meaning in them. These stories offer insights into how people perceive legitimate inequality in a market society, and how they rationalize who deserves what and why. The book traces how people link their image of individual agency in the past to present outcomes. These personal accounts offer a qualitatively rich perspective on justice reasoning and the moral economies that shape popular experiences of the 1990s.
The analysis tackles a specific puzzle: Despite the profound influence of structural factors on life trajectories after 1989 – factors such as the skills one possessed in 1989, age, gender, location, ethnicity, and the size of one’s firm – people often attribute economic outcomes to individual decisions or characteristics. People tend to understand economic success or failure post-1989 as a matter of personal character. Common sayings like “you can’t wait for someone to take care of you!” or “you have to take matters into your own hands” express this belief. Additionally, some apply subjective ideas about post-1989 temporalities to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate claims of being an economic victim of the post-1989 labor market crisis. They argue that while it might have been acceptable to be unemployed in the early 1990s, “blaming the system” for one’s misfortune ten or twenty years after the change is unacceptable. Sociologists, of course, know that life chances were significantly influenced by structural changes in the early 1990s: those who experienced unemployment then were more likely to face it again later.
Why do people lean towards meritocratic interpretations? There was a dramatic weakening of languages of solidarity post-1989. The book refines this diagnosis, arguing that a key part of the answer lies in understanding that people experience economic upheavals within specific social environments and networks of social relationships – such as friends, coworkers, and family. It’s the quest for social recognition of their economic choices and outcomes that drives them towards meritocratic frameworks of meaning. Social recognition and the sense of social inclusion or exclusion in the present craft people’s economic memories of the time.
The memories of past economic experiences may be politically significant. For instance, Philipp Manow has found that in East Germany, support for the far-right wing party AfD is more influenced by past unemployment experiences than by current socio-economic status. But the analysis of economic memory in the context of post-1989 transformations offers lessons that extend beyond this specific historical setting. It’s a broader phenomenon: the way people relate to economic disruptions such as automation shapes their current political identities. Yet, in this important area of research, economic and political sociologists are just beginning to explore the relevant qualitative aspects and processes of meaning-making. Deserved is an initial step in this direction.
The economic changes driven by the climate crisis are a case in point: the decarbonization of the US and European economies, coupled with global competition with China, brings massive economic changes on the ground. Fear of the economic consequences of climate transitions appears to be influenced by social classand the green transition is being interpreted through a lens of justice. Taking into consideration the post-1989 transformations in Central and Eastern Europe allows us to ask how cultural factors influence how people frame narratives of economic change, because similar economic experiences can be interpreted in diverse ways. It also underscores the influence of memory for how we envision economic futures: The path forward into the climate crisis will likely be heavily influenced by imaginations of the past.
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* To Hilmar is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Vienna and a faculty fellow at Yale University’s Center for Cultural Sociology. He is interested in popular ideas about economic inequality and is developing methodological approaches to understand cultural narratives about economic change. Starting March 2024, he is a PI in the Horizon Project CIDAPE on inequality, climate change and the force of political emotions
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