East Central Europe in the COVID-19 crisis

ABSTRACT

This article introduces the Special Issue on Eastern Europe in the COVID-19 crisis. It seeks to shed light on the different and partly worse experiences in East Central Europe compared to those of the West by analysing the crisis, its governance, and effects in the region from the vantage point of specific vulnerabilities, which have been building up for years. We identify four major vulnerabilities – a severe crisis of care, strains in social solidarity, democratic erosion and dependent capitalism – which have contributed to the East having experienced high infection and death rates, major economic crises, and pandemic power grabs.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• democratic erosion
• crisis of care
• East Central Europe
• dependent capitalism
• social solidarity

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the continuous support and encouragement they received from EEP, especially from Andrea Pirro and David Gazsi.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s ).

Notes

1 In this essay, East Central Europe mostly refers to the east European EU member states with a special focus on the Visegrád countries. Western Europe refers mostly to the Central European region. Southern Europe had yet another distinct COVID-crisis, which we do not discuss here.

2 In 2021, the Hungarian Society for the Rights of Liberty (TASZ) filed a lawsuit against the government, for failing to publish data on hospital infections. From these data it turns out that almost ten thousand people caught the coronavirus in the hospital in 2020 (Kuli 2022; Dam 2021).

3 Interestingly, “Diagonal accountability mechanisms, freedom of expression and alternative sources of information and freedom of association, on balance, do not contribute to effective epidemic response: while these freedoms can be used to help constrain executives, they can also be used to mobilize against government mitigation measures” (McMann and Tisch 2021, 5).

4 Technocratic populism should in principle perform better in combatting the pandemic, as this rule bases its legitimacy on technocratic expertise (Guasti and Buštíková 2020; Buštíková and Baboš 2020).

5 Of course, while FDI-dependency allowed for retaining some of the inherited industrial structures, most countries in the region entirely de-industrialized, aggravating some of the problems during the pandemic described below.

Additional information

Funding

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the European University Institute’s Research Council. Research by Edgars Eihmanis has also been funded by the National Science Centre Poland [grant number 2020/37/B/HS5/00328], project webpage: https://pandemo.eu/.

Notes on contributors

Dorothee Bohle

Dorothee Bohle is Professor of Political Science at the University of Vienna. Previously, she was chair in social and political change at the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the European University Institute, Florence, Her research focusses on comparative political economy with a special interest in Eastern Europe. Her book Capitalist Diversity on Europe's Periphery (Cornell University Press 2012), which she co-authored with Bela Greskovits, is the winner of the 2013 Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research. She has published numerous articles and book chapters.

Edgars Eihmanis

Edgars Eihmanis is a post-doctoral fellow at the Willy Brandt Center for German and European Studies at the University of Wroclaw, and at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies, University of Tartu. He holds a PhD from the European University Institute. His research focuses on East European comparative political economy, and his work has appeared in the Journal of European Public Policy among others.