Goodbye, post-socialism? Stranger things beyond the Global East

ABSTRACT

During the 2010s, several studies questioned the conceptual stability of “post-socialism.” I review some of these critiques, paying particular attention to the contradictions of the “Global East,” proposed lately as a substitute concept. Resisting this recent call to abandon it and building on recent scholarship, I suggest three spatial and temporal extensions that will assist researchers in using the lens of “post-socialism” to explore new questions, by: documenting the use of “strategic anachronisms,” best illustrated by universal anti-communism; configuring post-socialism as a heterochrony and messy temporality; and reorienting the concept from its connection with the past to a connection with a potential socialist future, among other things by provincializing East European/Former Soviet Union post-socialisms. The concept of post-socialism prompts plenty of inspiring questions about theory-making, challenges to neoliberal normalization, shifting notions of value, failure and success, local and global histories and possible futures for socialism, and comparative urbanism, thus allowing further exploration of contemporary and emerging politics, East and West, South and North. Scholars might be better off leaving the concept radically open and using it, selectively, as a toolkit, without relying on deterministic assumptions and putative master narratives. “To let a thousand flowers bloom” might be a more productive epistemological terrain than attempting to rationalize and then eradicate the concept of post-socialism. Assigning meta categories that classify global space is, of course, optional; if we have to give a name to our object of study, scholars should use, for want of a better term, post-socialism.

KEYWORDS:

• post-socialism
• epistemology
• Global east
• postcolonialism
• Global north
• Global south

Acknowledgements

I presented earlier versions of this article at the conference “City and Cityness in Central Eastern Europe,” held at the Institute of Sociology, University of Wrocław, May 2021 and the “9^th CATference” held at ELTE University in Budapest, June 2022. I thank the two anonymous reviewers and Łukasz Moll, Bogdan Popa, Erin McElroy, Gabriel Jderu, and Matthias Bernt for feedback and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See work on nonaligned European and non-European countries.

2. See, for instance, Schwenkel (2015, 2020), Jderu (2022, 2023), and Sadowski-Smith and Luca (2022).

3. I thank Reviewer #1 for this suggestion and phrasing.

4. Again, I thank for Reviewer #1 for this phrasing and suggestion.