Newsletter - Social Science in Eastern Europe 2000-2
France
French Research on Eastern Europe
French social science research on Russia and Eastern Europe is bearing marks
of its origin. French visitors and social scientists have always had a strong
fascination for Russia (among the best known the Marquis de Custine or Anatole
Leroy-Beaulieu, but also Durkheim's followers Marcel Mauss and Celestin Bougle
and even occasionally Emile Durkheim himself [43]).
After 1917, the Soviet Union, and afterwards, from 1945-1948 on, the whole
Soviet bloc gave rise to lots of divisions about just interpretation, with
strong ideological contents (aggravated by lack of information), motivated by
partisan purposes, involving often political exiles.
But an upsurge of research marked the turn of the 60s and 70s. Three sets of
facts caused the scholars' interests to change: first, the arrival of new
generations of social scientists who were able to get their inquiries free of
certain inherited ideological burdens; second, increased transparency in East
European countries; and finally, entering into the field, beside linguistic
studies and classical studies of civilisations, both related to area studies, of
social science approaches which, instead of emphasizing the specificity of this
part of the world, applied to it their own paradigms and methods. Thus,
economists, sociologists, historians, demographers, political scientists have
contested the validity of culturalist paradigms or more simply culturalist
hypotheses. This modernised approach has questioned explanations grounded on the
uniqueness of political systems or on ethno-historical causalities. Since the
1980s, the scientists that have been studying this area have become increasingly
aware of its complexity and diversity, as well as of the necessity to place
their hypotheses into particular contexts. Moreover, French scientific work has
gone international and French scholars, often invested with leadership roles,
have become involved in multinational teams, particularly those with European
Union's funding. However, as regards financial resources, British research has
an advantage over the French one as it has better foothold in Brussels, whereas
German research has another advantage, that of enjoying better funding thanks to
half private half public foundations.
1. A short history
Before 1989, as regards the development of studies on Soviet Russia, the USSR
and Eastern Europe, different periods can be distinguished. The first period
goes from the 1917 revolution to the creation of the Soviet bloc in the wake of
the World War II. So, in 1917, the review Le Monde slave was started in
Paris, which permitted Ernest Denis to bring together people for whom the
Russian upheavals were worthy of scientific investigation. This period was
marked by two kinds of empirical resources: evidence produced by emigres and
visitors back from the USSR[44]. In both cases,
suspicion about partiality of analyses caused their audience to be limited. As
for the emigres, "wrapped up in their personal tragedies, overcome by their
bitterness, paralysed by the recent date of the event, haunted by the hope of a
possible about-turn, (they) were only rarely able to go beyond plea and passion
and achieve scientific objectiveness"[45].
The evidence presented by French intellectuals (Jacques Sadoul), as well as the
Russian-born ones (like Victor Serge or Boris Souvarine) was suspected of being
partial and in consequence rejected, because "passion - be it admiring or
horrified - outweighs objectiveness and the science has nothing to gain by
it"[46] Let us note for that period the
strong intellectual ascendancy of somebody like Pierre Pascal, a Bolsheviks'
friend, who reportedly "deliberately chose to keep silent"[47].
In the aftermath of the 1939-1945 war a new state of political affairs marked
the beginning of a new period, but France, in spite of its tradition showed
little interest in East European studies. Yet the stabilization of the Soviet
regime, its extension to Eastern Europe, followed by the cold war, provided
sufficient reason not only for scientific studies but also for public support of
such an undertaking. By contrast such supports were largely provided to
scientists in the United States and Germany, while their French colleagues had
to wait for changes that occurred in the sixties when De Gaulle's particular
political views on the question (based on the convergence theory) made French
foreign policy independent of its American ally. But intellectual curiosity
appeared before, maybe with the first big crisis of the Soviet bloc in 1956 that
in a roundabout hit the pro-communist French elites. It was after the
revelations at the 20th Soviet communist party congress and their consequences
for the satellite countries that the stranglehold on the French research studies
and university work got relaxed, so that the availability of new documentary
resources (spreading of Soviet documents, liberalization of scientific
exchanges, increasing numbers of personal accounts, and, since the beginning of
the sixties, proliferation of dissident literature) opened new avenues to
studies of the Soviet world. From that moment, historical studies made much
progress in France (Georges Haupt, Marc Ferro, Michel Heller), as well as the
studies of ethnic groups in the Soviet Union (Alexandre Bennigsen, Chantal
Quelquejay, Helene Carrere d'Encausse), of the social, political and juridical
system, even of geostrategy (Basile Kerblay, Rene Girault, Michel Lesage, Henri
Chambre, Jean Laloy, Pierre Hassner, Moshe Lewin before his leaving for the
United States), of the economic system (Eugene Zaleski, Georges Sokolof, Marie
Lavigne, Pierre Naville), of the cultural activity (Georges Nivat, Jean Bonamour),
of the satellite countries (Pierre Kende, François Fejtö, Georges Mond, Pavel
Tigrid, Zdenek Strmiska, Thomas Lowit), of the international communism (Annie
Kriegel, Ylios Yananakis)[48].
The seventies and eighties brought about various incentives for research
work, such as: the appearance of democratic opposition leading to the epic
Solidarity upsurge (that produced a major impact on French public opinion and
the elites), the regime liberalization in countries such as Hungary and Poland,
after attempts made at openings which had resulted in the Helsinki Conference,
and a contrario, the Brezhnevian stagnation that reached its highest
point with the invasion of Afghanistan, the Ceaucescu regime, the Czech and
German gerontocracies. This is the period when certain institutions, such as
French government agencies condescended to grant some additional funding to
research groups, as for example P. Kende's and Z. Strmiska's Group for
Inequality Studies, or Sociological Observatory for the USSR and Eastern Europe
(Z. Strmiska and G. Mink) inside the Centre National de la Recherche
Scientifique, or yet the Alain Touraine's research team which studied Solidarity
(Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales).
But some weaknesses inherited from that period had consequences for the state
of mind of scholars and their readiness to undertake research work after 1989.
Among teachers and inside the French educational system there has been little
interest in the outside world, a tendency that only recently began to be
reversed thanks to European challenges and educational pressures of
globalisation. Another reason for this state of affairs was a double-ideologisation
of the Sovietology research field, mostly turned to the study of the political
system to the detriment of the observation of particular national societies,
while the political elites in power were convinced that the Soviet empire was
immutable. As a result for the research policy, there was a lack of interest on
the part of institutions and therefore a lack of funding for studies focused on
national specificities and breakdown dynamics.
2. After 1989-1991: Actors and scientific activity
There are several actors in France dedicated to and implied in studying and
doing research work on Central and Eastern Europe, in teaching about and
specializing in it. They can be divided in two categories:
* institutional actors (universities, public research institutions,
government's institutions)
* non-governmental institutions, actors coming from civil society
(associations ruled by the 1901 law, as for example the Association of Slavists
at the Institut d'Etudes Slaves (founded in 1919 by Ernest Denis), Transitions -
a grouping of former students of Central and Eastern Europe, the ex-USSR
included, from the Paris Institut d'Etudes Politiques[49]).
The first category includes more or less important actors (for their human
potential, the scope of their activity, their impetus capability, their
financial resources, the latter determining all the rest).
Universities:
Many French universities have Slavic languages or Slavonic studies
departments, coupled sometimes with civilisation studies. At some of them
teaching staff has created research teams. In our field, certain universities
have assumed leading parts. In Paris, these are University Paris IV, the
Institut National des Langues Orientales (INALCO), the Ecole des Hautes Etudes
en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), and similarly, in all university towns there are
universities that have developed area studies (as, for example, Polish studies
at Lille University). Particularly worth mentioning is a doctoral degree course
at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques in Paris, now in charge of Dominique Colas
(after Helene Carrere d'Encausse), comprising multidisciplinary teaching
covering the whole of the geo-political space of the former Soviet bloc.
The Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)
This is an institution completely and exclusively dedicated to scientific
research. Though it possesses its own research teams, its present policy tends
to co-finance joint teams.
Interface teams
It is common practice in universities to house research units (called joint
or associated units when they are backed by funds and personellcoming from the
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique). Among the best known, doing
scientific work on Russia and/or Eastern Europe, is the Centre d'Etudes des
Relations Internationales (CERI), a part of the Fondation Nationale des Sciences
Politiques, that is specialized in international relations and area studies (P.
Hassner, Anne de Tinguy, Jacques Rupnik, Marie Mendras, Kathy Rousselet among
others). A laboratory associated with Nanterre University Paris X, the
Laboratoire d'Analyse des Systemes Politiques (LASP) has brought together a
number of sociologists and political scientists interested in Central Europe's
developments (Michel Dobry, Aleksander Smolar, Georges Mink, Jean-Charles Szurek,
Myrianna Morokvasic, Mihnea Berindae). As for the economists, one of the most
important laboratories is ROSES at University Paris I (founded by M. Lavigne,
headed afterwards by Wladimir Andreef, Xavier Richet and now Gerard Duchêne).
At the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) there is a unit
specialized in historical, demographic and sociological research on the ex-USSR,
the Centre Russe, headed by historian Wladimir Berelowitch and demographer Alain
Blum, with, among other associates, Nicolas Werth. When necessary, other
specialists may be invited to join the activity of the centre, such as
economists Jacques Sapir or Bernard Chavance, or sociologist Alexis Berelowitch.
Other research units have some activity sectors focused on that part of the
world, such as CADIS (Centre d'Analyse et d'Intervention Sociologiques),
specialized in studies of social movements, headed by Michel Wieviorka. Other
researchers, members of different centres of the EHESS, have been working on
various East European regions, as, for example, Daniel Bertaux (life stories and
social mobility), Victor Karady (sociological theory, anti-Semitism), Patrick
Michel (sociology of religion), and also Krzysztof Pomian, Marie-Elisabeth
Ducreux (of the Centre d'Etudes Historiques), or Ewa Berard and many others.
Certain very active scholars have been working at research centres linked to
provincial universities (François Bafoil in Grenoble, Gilles Lepesant in
Bordeaux, Frederic Sawicki or Michel Maslowski in Lille, Joanna Nowicki and Paul
Gradhvol, Dominique Redor at Marne-la Vallee, and so on).
State administration
Three research centres have distinguished themselves by their results and/or
knowledge they have acquired of Eastern Europe. The most important beyond any
doubt is the CEDUCEE (Le Centre d'etudes et de documentation sur l'ex-URSS, la
Chine et l'Europe de l'Est at the Documentation Française) that was founded in
1962 by Françoise Barry, at French government's special request, in accordance
with General De Gaulle's policy and placed close to the Prime Minister (Edith
Lhomel, Marie-Agnes Crosnier, Michele Kahn, Alain Giroux, Jaroslava Blaha,
Daniela Heimerl, Celine Bayou are the centre's outstanding members). Marked by
the political climate of the time of its creation (war threats from the
"opposing bloc" in the sixties and seventies), the centre developed
economic analyses based on secondary sources. Its financial means, however
superior to those of universities, were nonetheless inferior to those American
scientists had at their disposal, whose works, published by the Joint Economic
Committee, were taken as a model. Apart from this centre, intended for
documentary purposes, there is the CEPII (Centre d'Etudes Prospectives et
d'informations Internationales), an organism embodied in the Commissariat Français
du Plan, grouping some very good economists, specialists of Russian and Chinese
economies (G. Sokolof, Gerard Wild, Françoise Lemoine, among others). In both
cases, the resources at the scholars' disposal were their good knowledge of
centrally administrated economies, as well as of accounting tools necessary for
correcting "official" data through cross-national comparisons, and the
construction of Industrial Exchanges Tables.
Later on (after 1989), another group was established inside the
Administration. Expertise activity of the Regional Development (Amenagement du
territoire - DATAR), needed cooperation of specialists suited for initiating
work in Eastern Europe under transition, in the domain of industrial conversion,
a domain in which France possesses rich experience. The centre had a team that
worked from 1990 to 1996 under the leadership of geo-politician Michel Foucher
and the region's specialist Jean-Yves Potel. This centre has now been taking
part in various consortiums funded by the European Union, but its expertise
activity has been given priority over its research tasks.
It is worth noting, as a sign of a late recognition of the expertise ability
of the specialists in this geo-cultural area, but also of their more extended
scientific basis that Michel Foucher has been appointed head of the Centre
d'Analyse et de Prevision (CAP) at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1999,
while this function is usually carried out by a diplomat, and that Prof
Marie-Claude Maurel, a renown specialist in agrarian issues in Russia and
Eastern Europe, has been appointed director of the Departement des Sciences de
l'Homme et de la Societe (in 1997) at the Centre National de la Recherche
Scientifique[50].
Between private and public spheres, there is the Institut Français des
Relations Internationales (with geo-politicians like Dominique Moisi or Thierry
de Montbrial and an economist specialist of the ex-USSR, Anita Tiraspolsky), as
well as some smaller units such as that of Pascal Boniface (IRSIS).
Paper media
Two main reviews have been in charge of publishing multidisciplinary works in
that field.
First of all, Le Courrier des Pays de l'Est (editor in chief,
Marie-Agnes Crosnier), a monthly review - a periodicity that makes it rather an
information and trend review - published under the care of the CEDUCEE, a unit
of the Documentation Française, with a public funding, though it has a quite
satisfactory subscriber basis (about 800). The Documentation Française has been
issuing now and then, in the series Problemes Politiques et Sociaux,
special issues on Eastern Europe, made up of selected papers on a given subject.
Up to the year 2000, every year since the seventies, the Documentation Française
published a yearbook on Central and Eastern Europe.
The Revue d'Etudes Comparatives Est-Ouest (directors A. Blum and G.
Mink, and editor in chief K. Rousselet) is the reference journal for academic
circles. With a less large circulation, the review is multidisciplinary and all
social science disciplines are represented in its editorial board. Anonymity
principle as well as a double referees system serve as guarantees of scientific
quality of the published articles. The review is financed by the CNRS. It has
been able to gather some representative members of young generation scientists
(Anne Gazier, Catherine Perron, Catherine Goussef, Jean-François Raviot).
The Institut d'Etudes Slaves publishes the Revue d'Etudes Slaves. The
Institut also issues the Bibliographie europeenne des travaux sur l'ex-URSS
et l'Europe de l'Est, and it carries out policy of publishing works such as
foreign language handbooks or proceedings of scientific meetings. It is also in
charge of an editorial series Cultures et Societes de l'Est. The Russian
centre, mentioned above, at the EHEES, publishes the Cahiers du Monde Russe.
Two independent reviews that had their moments of glory during the eighties, the
Nouvelle Alternative and the Autre Europe, are now striving to
survive.
However, certain general matter publishers are showing some more interest in
East European subjects these days. The main issues seem to be the years 1989 and
1991, the wars in former Yugoslavia, the extension of the European Union, the
consequences of the archive openings, the emergent economies, the Russian
circumstances.
3. Expansion of the research after 1989
The process of breaking up of the Soviet-type system and almost general
opening of research and observation fields, that previously had not been easily
accessible if not completely forbidden, on the one hand, and demand for more or
less basic expertise and knowledge concerning certain socio-economic reality
undergoing revolutionary transformation, on the other hand, put pressure on the
authorities to grant substantial funding, as they never had in the past, for
studies of Central and Eastern Europe. A program valid for a number of years,
given the title "Intelligence of Europe", a part of which was entitled
"Transition processes in Central and Eastern Europe", was launched on
July 20, 1989 by two major institutions, the Scientific Research Ministry and
the CNRS. The program, which was in operation until 1994, was endowed with
important financial resources. In 1991 and 1992, 202 projects were presented, 66
of which were approved with grants amounting to 11 million francs. In 1992, as a
response to a second call for proposals, 115 projects were submitted and 40 were
accepted, but with diminished funding (3.5 million francs, to which 1.2 million
was added for researches on enterprises, technology and work problems).
According to the evaluation report requested by the Scientific Research Ministry[51], these programs permitted to identify 27 CNRS
research units, 20 units from universities and 8 units coming from other bodies,
all of which having proved their capability to quickly come up to expectations
of the authorities.
It is certain that this exceptional institutional support gave a momentum to
French social science research. Sociology, economy and history have most
benefited from it, juridical science, political science, demography and
geography coming next. Thanks to these grants, several works were published and
dozens of reports were submitted for assessment to the Scientific Research
Ministry. As a part of the programs, dozens of scholars from Central and Eastern
Europe could afford to spend between a month and a year working in French
research units. The works carried out were related to the following fields:
* analysis of attitudes of people faced with social, economic and political
constraints during the period of regime transition (30% of research work carried
out). Studies were focused on very different subjects: adaptive strategies of
individuals and social classes (farmers), or social groups (elites, ethnic
minorities), emergence of partisan movements (political parties, counter-power,
etc.)
* privatisation, competitiveness of economy (30% of research work)
* job management and employment, emergence of new managers, salary and wage
policy and problems directly connected to enterprises were subjects of a dozen
of studies
* re-interpretation of history and its use was also a subject of a dozen of
studies[52].
4. Some problems
The collateral effects of the disappearance of the Soviet bloc have
destabilized the profession of researchers specialized in Central and Eastern
Europe (Russia included). Several causes can be considered:
1) Endogenous facets of the professional legitimacy crisis
- The upsetting of the frontiers in the real world has unsettled the
boundaries between scientific disciplines. The collapse of the ideological
fronts and crumbling of the single true frontier that was the border separating
the Soviet system as a whole[53] from the rest
of Europe, then a growing number of new geo-political frontiers, as well as new
sub-groups in search of their particularity (Russia, CIS, Central Europe, Balkan
Europe, selection of candidate countries for entry into the European Union), all
these facts have raised new and relevant questions about the dividing lines
between professions. Should in future Russian studies be separated from those of
Central Europe as from those of South-eastern Europe? What kind of unity in the
real world justifies the maintenance of the ancient professional unity?
- Constraints of professional legacies didn't stop operating. Before 1989,
the professional body was actually disunited, cliquish and overideologized. The
perverse effects of this legacy appear in continuing partisan views and are
shown in some people's need to justify their past views by projecting their
concepts onto the present. Let us just remind the multiplicity of
self-definition "concepts": post-socialism, post-Communism, post-Sovietism,
"authentic" socialism. The debate that opposed "shock
therapy" to "gradualism" was ideologically distorted, which also
revealed how the past was pressing down on the present. Some focused their
attention exclusively on the social effects in order to condemn the market;
others neglected social problems in order to give the market absolute priority.
- It was the field's unity that was seriously thrown into confusion,
revealing to what extent the profession was ill at ease. What could justify the
perpetuation of a multidisciplinary body of regional specialists? Is it
geography, Slavic ethnic origin, a dominant linguistic family, similar
trajectories of emergent economies, the beginning of political pluralism, or,
last but not least, a common starting point, that is, the end of the Soviet
system?
2) Exogenous questioning of the profession's legitimacy
- The profession was to undergo the sudden arrival of comparative
transitology, which asked "its share of the cake" of the knowledge
concerning that geo-cultural area, but its claim was based on the knowledge
gained through studying other societies that had managed to get rid of their
authoritarian regimes (Latin America, Southern Europe, etc.). This special
branch of political science was seen by many specialists of Central and Eastern
Europe as a threat of competition, even a danger of calling into question the
very usefulness of post-communist transition studies.
- The advent in the field of approach diversity that put forward particular
disciplines (economy, sociology, demography, etc.) and behind, in second place,
the area specificity, did not produce good results only. For a moment, highly
specialized economists disputed the capability of Soviet or post-Soviet economy
experts to account for the current state of affairs, which in their opinion
pertained to the methods of classical economy[54].
Initially disconcerted by this claim, economists specialized in the area later
were able to show to what extent the dialectics between "break-up" and
"continuity" was important in the cases of post-Communist economies.
The "path-dependence" theory gained new followers among the ex-sovietologists.
In any case, the time was on the side of ex-sovietologists and legitimated their
work: the after-effects of the Soviet system that these first specialists alone
had been able to decipher accompanied the differentiation processes.
Conclusion
A new generation of scholars are fretting at the doorstep of different
scientific institutions and waiting for achieving full academic
status. Things were easier for them than for previous generations. First of all,
the access to these countries is quite easy nowadays; so, for example, doctoral
degree course students at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques in Paris can make
their field trip to Eastern Europe in order to accomplish empirical surveys
before writing their theses. This is made all the easier by scholarships granted
for particular subjects. In general, long-term scholarships have been increased
in numbers and they have been diversified. Today there are doctoral grants for
the best students but there are also European scholarships. A set of new
academic institutions is ready to accept French doctoral students (Central
European University, Natolin branch of Bruges College, Collegium Budapest, etc.)
France has created new establishments like kinds of out-posts for scientific
observation that have been taking care of doctoral students, as the Centre Marc
Bloch in Berlin, the Centre Français des Recherches en Sciences Sociales in
Prague, and there will be soon a similar centre in Moscow. This active policy of
direct contact with the field is a sine qua non condition for the advent of new
generations in the research domain of Central and Eastern Europe.
At the same time, partisan cleavages are losing ground, giving way to
promotion on the meritocracy criteria alone, which is a fact of paramount
importance for the future of this generation of scientists.
Getting East European scholars out of their locked up condition was a real
performance test for French social scientists. The challenge consisted in being
able to offer these scholars a value-added that was impossible for them to gain
in Eastern Europe. For example, France could offer to sociologists coming from
the post-communist world a different tradition in social theory, more focused on
qualitative sociology issues (life histories applied to social mobility,
conversion theory and symbolic, social and cultural capital theories, sociology
of social movements). The most spectacular of all was undoubtedly French
historians' contribution to the "archives revolution", even if now and
then there was some lack of epistemological distance toward their contents.
We can say that the results of the past decade are rather good: the changes
that took place in the East forced the research and university units to react
quickly and properly; they were able to defend their specificity against attacks
coming from outside their domain. The weak point, a kind of "French
deficiency", by contrast with many other countries is the lack of a unique
professional corporation functioning in accord with democratic principles,
imposing its authority as a national and representative association.
[42] E-mail : georges.mink@u-paris10.fr]
[43] See << Sociologues et politistes
français face aux révolutions russes >>, ed. by Dominique Colas, Cahiers
A. Leroy-Beaulieu, Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, Paris,
Cahiers nb. 1, 1998, p. 80.
[44] See the introduction by Hélène Carrère
d'Encausse to the research guidebook L'Union Soviétique, by Lilly Marcou,
Armand Colin, 1971, pp. 11-29.
[45] Idem, p. 13.
[46] Idem, p. 14. In fact, these statements
also reveal how demanding the political arena was in the sixties as to carefully
chosen words, the major argument being that of positivism, for those who aspired
to become specialists of the Soviet Union.
[47] Idem, p. 14.
[48] This enumeration, of course, is not
exhaustive.
[49] The relative weakness of professional
association activity prevents me from speaking about it in this paper; it will
be enough to mention that, though a Slavists' association exists inside the
Institut d'Etudes Slaves, there is no global unifying association like the AAASS
in the United-States or other European countries that could bring together all
social sciences disciplines dedicated to that geo-cultural area and could, for
example, take responsibility for organizing national congresses etc.
[50] It is more or less common that
specialists of this geo-cultural area apply for positions connected with
scientific diplomacy, as for example A. Berelowitch who was appointed to be
cultural attaché in Moscow, or historian Antoine Mares appointed director of
the Centre Français des recherches en Sciences Sociales in Prague.
[51] Report on the science teaching and
research, Central and Eastern Europe, to the Mission scientifique et technique (DSPT
6), March 1995.
[52] Information letter PECO, <<
Intelligence of Europe >>, no. 3, March 1993, p. 14.
[53] Didn't people use to say, by way of
joke, that Poland had 5 borders with the USSR : those with East Germany, the
USSR, Czechoslovakia, and also those with the sky and the sea...
[54] See for that the report by the
evaluation panel regarding the CEPII works on Eastern Europe (members: J.P.
Dessertine, J.M. Guehenno, P. Lenan, G. Mink, M. Nuti, D. Rosati, J. Sapir),
internal document, Paris, November 12, 1992, 9 p.
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