Agency versus Intervention: Post-Socialist Transition in the Eastern Bloc
SCT Thesis by Iva Sopta '23
Abstract:
On November 21st, 1991, a crowd of 50,000 people marched past the City Council building to protest Milošević’s regime in Belgrade. My mother was one of them. In 2016, 20,000 people rallied in front of the Serbian Parliament against Vučić’s regime. I was one of them. The political transitions in the Eastern Bloc have been claimed as the success of Western
involvement, but what should we make of the agency and counter-revolutionary movements led by the populations of the region themselves? My thesis will explore the history and politics of Western involvement in Eastern European countries that started democratizing after the fall of communism. Through comparative analysis and case studies of different Eastern European countries, I hope to show how Western political influences and goals have affected and continue to affect the development of Eastern Europe. By exploring the questions of personal agency, western democratization, and post-socialist reconstruction, this paper will try to examine the discrepancies between theory and experience. It asks the question of how has the West influenced the notion of post-socialist transitions to democracy in Eastern Europe and claimed it as its own victory?
Research Question(s):
How have Western scholars understood the post-socialist transitions in Eastern Europe?
How do people who lived through the transitions understand and explain it?
Can we connect experience with explanation? Is there a macro-explanation that accounts for and resonates with experience? Is it true to how people experience it?
Courses that informed thesis:
Political Development (Rotimi)
The F-Word (Hultgren)
Personal and Political (Ozge)
Total Theory (Pitcher)