Abstract
Two decades ago, East European state socialism met with a paradoxical fate. Between 1989 and 1991, communist party hegemony was abolished, leaving the very idea of socialism permanently discredited—or so it seemed. Yet in the decade that followed, “socialistic” principles and practices would retain—or perhaps acquire—a surprising degree of popular appeal. Was this a cultural legacy of systematic indoctrination? A strategic response to material insecurities? Perhaps a combination of both? In this article, it is argued that many previous efforts to unravel the paradox are inadequate because they ignore both the “strategic” dimensions of culture and the cultural dimensions of instrumental reason. Using life-history data on the former East Germany, it is shown that apparently discredited ideologies can acquire renewed salience in the wake of regime change if they (1) remain culturally available as strategies of action that (2) provided material opportunities or symbolic privileges in the past, and (3) promise to ameliorate new problems engendered by alternative strategies.
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Notes
Given the astonishing meekness of Party officials in the face of popular revolt, some scholars went so far as to argue that Communism had collapsed because members of the ruling parties themselves no longer believed in the historical project of international socialism (Chirot 1996; Maier 1997; Hollander 1999). According to Hollander (1999, p. 278), “Soviet communism unraveled not so much because of massive popular discontent as because of the changed attitude of those who presided over it.” Forced to recognize state socialism’s inherent inefficiency and flawed theoretical premises, he surmises, erstwhile true believers simply lost their will to go on.
Had these old regimes been founded on neo-liberalism, for example, then post-transition support for “socialism” would have seemed less like a legacy of indoctrination than of rebellion against it. After all, neo-liberalism does not promise to solve problems like unemployment and social inequality—on the contrary, it considers a gradual rise in both to be a healthy sign of a growing economy.
One influential cross-national survey of public opinion offers at least five distinct ways of measuring support for “socialism”: (1) as the extent to which one favors or opposes “socialism” as previously experienced in one’s own country, (2) as the extent to which “socialism” (in its previous form or a “more democratic type”) should serve as a model for the country’s “future development,” (3) as a preference for economic intervention by the state (e.g., standard of living subsidies and income caps), (4) as a principle of allocation based on need rather than achievement, or (5) as support for a communist or socialist political party (Kluegel et al. 1995).
Focusing exclusively on this period also has some admitted limitations. An obvious limitation is that developments during the years that followed cannot be fully taken into account. A related limitation is that eastern Germany was just embarking on a rapid and dramatic transformation of its political, institutional, and economic structures and would not regain its “equilibrium” for at least a decade afterward. Hence, it is highly unlikely that the political orientations of former East Germans would have stabilized so soon after reunification went into effect. Fortunately, however, the theoretical framework I develop does not assume either structural or ideological stability. On the contrary, it is intended to apply, in the first instance, to precisely the type of transition context that obtained during the period of study.
Thus, my argument does not rule out the possibility that some process resembling socialization is involved in the development of some kinds of psycho-social characteristics, such as personality and self-concept. My point is, rather, that we should be more cautious before assuming that political orientations are merely reflections of internalized dispositions. Although psycho-social traits like self-concept can also vary over time (Demo 1992), the salience of political ideas is a function of both availability and circumstance. Hence, evaluations of ideational strategies are more likely to vary with context and over time than is the case with more foundational psychic traits.
In the interest of clarity, I use “birth cohort” (or “cohort”) to refer to persons of about the same age in a particular society, while “generation” will denote age-graded biological roles (e.g. grandparent, parent, child, or grandchild) within a kinship unit (cf. Ryder 1965; Alwin and Krosnick 1991).
In the GDR, as in most state-socialist societies, participation in state-sponsored youth organizations was intended to promote adherence to orthodox understandings of socialism starting at the tender age of five or six. However, because participation in these organizations was nearly universal, family background remains a more likely source of political differentiation than formal membership in organizations like the Young Pioneers or the Free German Youth (FDJ). Although holding special offices in the FDJ before or after the age of majority usually signified exceptional commitment to socialism, only a very small proportion in any given cohort actually did so.
One type of mnemonic resource is autobiographical memory, or the stocks of knowledge that accumulate in the course of an individuals’ life span (Olick 1999; Straughn 2007). However, information about the past may also be transmitted by “mnemonic technologies other than the brain” (Olick 1999, p. 342), including diaries, photographs, and other personal records, as well as through public technologies of “collective memory” such as museums, monuments, or the mass media.
In eastern Germany, for example, qualitative research by the author (Straughn 2001) suggests that support for the idea of socialism is sometimes rooted in memories of educational, occupational, or political opportunity in the GDR, perceived in retrospect as superior to those provided by the new order. In contrast, citizens who were exposed to images of Western prosperity during the state socialist period often became disillusioned with the potential of “real socialism” to outperform Western capitalism.
Hypothesis 5 thus implies that evaluations of socialism should be more favorable in a postcommunist context than in a transition society that lacks direct experience with state socialism.
In industrial societies, for example, industrial workers might be expected to exhibit affinities for ideologies favorable to trade unionism initially, but to oppose unionism if they experience (or anticipate) upward mobility into the ranks of management or a transition to self-employment. Swidler (1986, p. 283) herself seems to imply as much when she observes that “[b[eliefs about the social world…are linked to social-structural realities through the strategies of action they support.” Hence, in the event that the material realities change, social actors would be expected to revise their strategies and “retool” their toolkits accordingly.
Some authors have attributed greater affinity for the dominant ideology among men due to their lengthy periods of military service (e.g. Jones and Grupp 1982; Zaslavsky and Z 1981). In East Germany, such a case could also be made, as military service (either 18 months or 3 years) was compulsory for male citizens beginning in the 1960s. However, the available evidence suggests that military socialization did not have the effect of increasing the “system loyalty” of East German men. To the contrary, according to a qualitative life-history study conducted by the author, the grim conditions to which male conscripts were subjected were often a source of disillusionment and rarely a reason for increased confidence in the socialist system (Straughn 2001, chap. 5; Straughn 2005, pp. 1622–26). The quantitative results discussed below further attest to the weaker appeal of “socialism” among former East German men compared to women.
There is another reason that the South might exhibit lower support for socialism than other parts of the GDR. As Pfaff (2006) has argued, economic and symbolic neglect may have facilitated the disproportionate growth of oppositional networks that contributed to the central role of cities like Leipzig and Dresden in the peaceful protests against the socialist state in 1989. Hence, cultural repertoires and mnemonic legacies in this region may have continued to favor anti-socialist strategies to a greater extent than elsewhere, holding other factors constant.
Other data sets are currently available, but none provides as many of the desired variables as the EGLHS. Since the early 1990s, a number of first-rate surveys, both national and cross-national, have been fielded to track and explain fluctuations in the political orientations of postcommunist populations as they come to grips with ongoing social and economic change. To date, however, this understandable concern with the post-transition period has led to survey designs that emphasize the recent past and present, while leaving the pre-transition past less thoroughly explored. For example, major cross-national studies such as the International Social Survey Project (ISSP), the International Social Justice Project (ISJP), and the World Values Survey (WVS) have collected an impressive quantity of information about their individual respondents as of 1990. Yet they include only a small number of items about individual statuses and trajectories prior to the year of transition. (In the 1991 wave of the ISJP, for instance, data on prior communist party membership was collected for only three of eight postcommunist countries in the survey; the former East Germany was not included.) As a result, we still know relatively little about whether and how individual trajectories under the previous state socialist conditions might be related to respondents’ political orientations at the time the surveys were fielded.
The selection of cohorts was designed to reflect the major periods of East German history “in terms of their consequences for the biographical fates of people in the GDR” (Huinink et al. 1995, p. 14). This sampling rationale motivated a slight departure from the original 10-year interval structure of the GLHS (LV-West), in that the third-oldest East German cohort comprises those born 1951–53, rather than 1949–51. This alteration was made in order to capture the possible cohort effects of a “mini-boom” in birth rates for East Germans born in the early 1950s (Huinink et al. 1995).
In addition, the sample does not include persons who exited the GDR prior to the sampling date (October 1990)—for example, following the opening of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. As this exodus likely involved some degree of self-selection (e.g. with respect to age, class, and political orientation), the true population described by the survey is best characterized as those members of the sampled cohorts who chose to remain in the former GDR through October 1990. However, individuals who left the former GDR between October 1990 and the period of data collection were located and interviewed at their current place of residence.
As an indicator of affinity for a discredited political ideology, the “good idea, poorly implemented” formula may have originated in studies of public opinion in postfascist West Germany, where researchers sought to track levels of residual or latent support for the “ideals” of National Socialism across cohorts and over time (e.g., Weil 1987). Weil (1993a, b) includes an alternate formulation that replaces “socialism” with “communism” (both versions behave almost identically in his analyses). Zelle (2000) employs two somewhat different statements as direct measures of support for socialism (“In principle, socialism makes sense” and “Socialism is the better alternative”) in conjunction with an agreement/disagreement scale. Finkel et al. (2001) measure “socialist values” in eastern Germany with a conventional socialist idea item, as well as a “Third Way” item (“I would have preferred that the former DDR remained socialist, but with more democracy and market elements”).
An alternative measure of orthodox familial repertoires is closer in wording to the religious upbringing item, eliciting the perceived role of “conversations about politics or about current political events in the parental home during your school years.” However, the former was deemed too ambiguous for present purposes, since the ideological direction of the conversations was not specified. Data on parental religious affiliation are not available.
Although opportunities for state-sanctioned private travel to the “non-socialist abroad” were comparatively rare after 1961, they were not unheard of. During the 1970s and ‘80s, the thawing of “German-German” relations led to a cautious liberalization of restrictions on private travel between the two German states, especially in the wake of a 1984 agreement formally guaranteeing GDR citizens freedom of travel to the West. According to Naimark (1992: 80), some 5 million East Germans visited West Germany in 1987 alone. Although most (3.8 million) were of retirement age (and thus more “dispensable” from an economic point of view), the remaining 1.2 million visitors amounted to more than one for every twelve East German adults. All but a tiny minority (about 3 percent) evidently returned to the GDR afterward.
Respondents in the last category (“other class”) are quite heterogeneous, comprising certain skilled and semi-skilled blue-collar and white collar occupations, as well as certain professional and semi-professional categories that cannot be readily classified in relation to the socialist means of production. See Solga (1993).
Although region of residence is reported as current, the overwhelming majority of respondents had resided in the same region since 1989, and more than 90 percent still lived in the same postal area.
If all the variables were linear, the total effect simply would equal to the sum of the direct and indirect effects, or atotal = a1 + (a2 * a3).
In the event that the association between later factors and the dependent variable is only “spurious,” or non-causal, then the former should have significant total effects in a bivariate model, but no significant net effects in the presence of prior, “confounding” factors. For example, if the association between religious affiliation and support for the idea of socialism is due to the confounding influence of religious upbringing on both, then the total effect of religious affiliation on support for socialism should be significant, but its net effect, controlling for religious upbringing, should not.
To minimize the risk of Type II error, the ML estimates were generated suing a full-information (FIML) approach, which takes into account information in cases with incomplete data (Arbuckle 1996).
The results for gender will be addressed further below under the heading of symbolic legacies.
In the case of region of residence and gender, there may be additional reasons besides prior symbolic privilege for the observed differences in support for socialism. For example, it was noted earlier that the concentration of regime opposition in the GDR South (and reform efforts in Berlin) may have resulted in regional variations in mnemonic legacies. Differences between women and men, in turn, could reflect gendered attitudes concerning the role of the state that are not specific to the state socialist or postsocialist contexts.
Of course, we do not know whether the protest “effect” on support for socialism can be attributed to the act of protesting itself (McAdam 1988), or whether some other variable—such as prior embeddedness in dissident networks (Pfaff 2006)—is responsible for both protest participation and subsequent orientations. It is quite possible, for example, that many protesters had already been exposed to radical repertoires before 1989 and took part in the anti-regime demonstrations, in part, because they were already more opposed to socialism than the average East German. Nonetheless, once oppositional repertoires are present, they appear to have an enduring influence on political orientations, regardless of how or when they were acquired.
Because it is not currently possible to model reciprocal effects between qualitative dependent variables, each alternative causal scenario is considered separately.
The effect of gender on religious affiliation is evidently mediated by gender differences in SED membership, since gender has a significant (negative) effect on SED membership, but no significant influence on religious affiliation when SED membership is included.
Respondents’ class position in 1989 is also related to parental class background. Although limitations of sample size preclude the addition of this variable to the models under discussion, the results from a separate, reduced model (not shown) are revealing. Holding party and religious affiliation constant, respondents whose fathers had worked in white-collar (rather than blue-collar) occupations were 3.6 times more likely (p < .001) to become service employees and three times more likely to self-employed (p < .05) rather than become workers, although service employees and private property owners did not differ with respect to paternal background.
Nonetheless, the impact of institutional affiliation on future class location is not due to differences in paternal background. Controlling for father’s occupation, SED members were still 3.6 times more likely than non-members to become service employees rather than workers (p < .001), and only one-third as likely to become self-employed rather than service employees. Religiously affiliated respondents, meanwhile, were more than twice as likely as the non-affiliated to become self-employed rather than to become workers (p < .05), and almost three times as likely to be self-employed as to hold a service occupation (p < .01). Thus, although white-collar background played an important role in steering respondents into either the socialist service class or self-employment, rather than the working class, it was their own choice between party and religious affiliation (and, indirectly, that of their parents) that ultimately decided between these two alternatives to working-class employment.
Since we know that party and religious membership are significantly related (in opposite ways) to support for socialism, it is possible that these similarities in protest rates mask underlying differences of motivation. For example, SED members may have joined the demonstrations in order to demand the reform of state socialism (thereby reducing the “gap between theory and practice”), while religiously affiliated protesters may have preferred a more liberal or social democratic alternative. On the variety of motives for opposition and dissent, see Joppke (1995), Straughn (2005), and Torpey (1995).
Of course, socialism was not the only ideology to stage a comeback after reunification. Though beyond the scope of the present article, a comprehensive account of political orientations in eastern (and western) Germany would also need to address the revival of nationalism and support for the far right after 1989.
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Acknowledgments
An early draft of this article was presented at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association. The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the sociology section at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. Karl Ulrich Mayer provided indispensable support and guidance for the author’s research on life trajectories and social change in the former East Germany. Heike Solga supplied the aggregation scheme for coding class status in a state socialist society. At Purdue University, Scott Feld, Viktor Gecas, Rich Hogan, Tim Owens, and Philo Wasburn offered helpful comments and criticisms of the article in its formative stages, as did Monica Prasad and Steve Rosenberg in Chicago. Sarah Mustillo helped sharpen the discussion of causal mediation. Lisa Fein read the manuscript in its penultimate form and corrected many errors and inconsistencies. The author alone is responsible for any remaining deficiencies.
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Straughn, J.B. Culture, memory, and structural change: explaining support for “socialism” in a post-socialist society. Theor Soc 38, 485–525 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-009-9090-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-009-9090-8