Project Network: Institutions and Institutional Change in Postsocialism

"Institutions and Institutional Change in Postsocialism: Between History and Global Adaptation Pressures” are the themes of a multidisciplinary research network that has been established by eight German universities and research institutes in early 2010. Focusing on the successor states of the former Soviet Union, the network studies

• how political, economic, legal and cultural institutions are created and changed in a context of historical legacies and global integration.
  
• how political actors interpret and reframe institutional accounts, such as ideas of legitimate order and authority, to realise their interests and legitimize their intentions.

The network is envisaged to contribute to renewing East European area studies in Germany as a field where different disciplines engage in productive scholarly exchanges. Multidisciplinary communication is a key aim of the network: Social scientists who seek to explain the emergence and change of institutions are provided with opportunities to learn more about cultural and historical contexts.
Area specialists socialized in the humanities are offered conceptual perspectives that allow to interpret historically or culturally specific phenomena from a systematic and comparative perspective. Thus the network enables researchers to get acquainted with the state of the art in neighbouring disciplines. All network projects use qualitative methods of research, relying on case studies, small-n comparisons and contextualized data. And they all share a common interest in questions about:

• How institutions and their foundational ideas spread across geographic and ethnic borders
  
• How these institutions change through the incorporation into domestic settings and national cultures
  
• How outcomes of institutional change and adaptation can be appropriately conceptualized

For the period from 2010 to 2013, the network is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research as part of a programme to strengthen and develop area studies. Research institutes and universities in Berlin, Göttingen, Hamburg, Stuttgart-Hohenheim, Frankfurt/Main, Köln, München and Münster participate in the network. Their cooperation is intended to link and develop the capacities for East European studies existing in these academic centres.

The network consists of 13 projects. There is one common project that explores different disciplinary approaches to the interaction between domestically embedded institutions and external influences. New institutions require legitimatory accounts in order to become rules of the game accepted among political actors, but given their newness, their designers need to invent narratives that convey these institutions as rooted in shared traditions or values. The project examines how the different disciplines address this problem of constructing history.

The other network projects are mostly realised by Ph.D. students and cluster in three groups:

1. Paradigms, ideas and interests: cultural dispositions and the construction of history

The projects of this cluster study how historical narratives are constructed and evoked. To what extent are foreign ideas fitted to domestic traditions or rejected in order to demonstrate the persuasiveness of domestic historical narratives? Three projects belong to the cluster:

a) Institutionalisation of cultural legitimation: Comparing accounts of history in schoolbooks of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.

b) Pluralism in the legal discourse: Historical and contemporary references.

c) The discourse on economic policy: Failed transformation of economic thinking?

2. Culture or calculus? The instrumentalisation of meaning by elites

This cluster comprises five projects that investigate how elites in different spheres of society refer to domestic traditions or external examples in order to assign meaning, construct national identity or legitimise their positions. Do these elites successfully integrate universal modern values and ‘traditional Russian’ principles such as patriotism, statism, being a great power, collectivist solidarity and paternalism?

a) The “ideology of power”: The concept of “Sovereign Democracy” between tradition and modernity.

b) Orthodoxy and modernity.

c) Law and rhetorics.

d) Elite groups and their collective resources of meaning.

e) Cultural dispositions and their political instrumentalization in Russia’s economic transformation.

3. Economic and political system in a postimperial context

This cluster of four projects asks whether the postsocialist status quo of state capacity and economic structures represents a transitional or stable constellation. How do political and economic systems co-evolve as part of a postimperial modernisation, i.e., a socioeconomic development affected by the legacy of empires with large geographic scope, weak infrastructural capacity and hegemonial centres?

a) Diverging economic dynamics and central government: Russia and China in comparison.

b) The state as a motor of development? Central Asia in the view of the ‘Developmental State’ approach.

c) State and economy: Comparing arrangements of interest intermediation.

d) Social capability, economic growth and structural change in Russia.

More information on individual projects, events, publications and network partners is available at www.kompost.lmu.de.