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The operation of a religious organization under an oppressive regime, such as in communist countries, differs from that in a free society. There is extensive literature on the effects of regulation on competition in religious markets and on the religiosity of a population. Less attention has been given to the effects of oppressive regulation that aims to control and possibly eliminate religion rather than to promote a particular religious group. This paper focuses on the specific question of how churches deal with oppressive regulation, particularly how they choose between legal and illegal operation. It proposes that both the official and the black‐market way of supplying religious services have some advantages and disadvantages, and that dual operation is advantageous where the regulation is severe. The paper examines the operation of the Catholic Church in Central European countries under communist rule, particularly Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, and Ukraine, and the different strategies adopted by the Church concerning official and underground operation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sweden has long been regarded as a 'model' for societal development. Recently, with the rise of an anti‐immigrant party and negative news coverage of crime, the image of a progressive Sweden has frayed. Positive models for societal development have existed in the past and included the United States during the heyday of modernization theory. This paper argues that positive models are useful, partly to crystallize options among the much‐debated varieties of capitalism, and partly as ideals which can be held up by social thinkers and publics as aspirations for the good society. This paper reviews the evolution of the Swedish model from a 'middle way' between Soviet communism and American capitalism to a welfare state under strain. It also examines how the Swedish model has been reinforced by its high international standing. The perceptions of Sweden abroad and domestically have changed in recent years. While these perceptions have correctly identified challenges not just for Sweden but also for other countries with similar problems, Sweden's government and civil society may be able to address them. The paper explores the lessons that can be learned from the current shortcomings and potential renewal of the strengths of the Swedish model, including its wider influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the differences in female work experience across Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs). We use retrospective SHARELIFE data to analyse women's work history from 1950 to 1990. We provide descriptive evidence that women's work experience varied across CEECs. Furthermore, we argue that comparing the former provinces of the Russian Empire in Lithuania and Poland provides a natural experiment, allowing us to disentangle the effect of the differential implementation of the Soviet regime from the pre‐existing differences. We find that during communism, Lithuanian women worked 2 years more by age 50 relative to their Polish counterparts. This effect is one‐third of that found in the East–West Germany comparison. We propose several potential mechanisms behind this finding: the degree of land collectivization, the Church's influence and the sectoral composition. Accordingly, this study's findings highlight the importance of country differences in CEECs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper theoretically and empirically investigates factional arrangements within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the governing political party of the People's Republic of China. Using detailed biographical information of political elites in the Central Committee and provincial governments, we present a set of new empirical regularities within the CCP, including systematic patterns of cross-factional balancing at different levels of the political hierarchy and substantial faction premia in promotions. We propose and estimate an organizational economic model to characterize factional politics within single-party nondemocratic regimes and its economic implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article covers the consequences of the Bolsheviks' coup d'état in 1917 for the Soviet monetary system. I argue that the episode illustrates Gresham's Law, as three different currencies made an appearance in the Russian economy. This monetary disorder is scarcely mentioned by Marxist authors. It was a failure that would be mitigated by the subsequent New Economic Policy, an amendment to the Bolshevist War Communism programme of nationalisation and intervention in the economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late 1950s, the concept of socialist patriotism in Hungary was reformulated as a basic political concept in the ideology and propaganda of state socialism. The definite appropriation of Leninist contraposition of socialist patriotism and bourgeois nationalism became paramount in the second half of the 1950s because of the nationalist sentiments of the 1956 revolution. I trace the history of the concept of socialist patriotism in the 1960s and 1970s in socialist Hungary. During this period, socialist patriotism served as a slightly undetermined, yet didactic counter‐concept to set against 'bourgeois nationalism' which was characterised as a xenophobic sense of nation. From the late 1960s, the doctrine of socialist patriotism confronted a new ideological enemy: supra‐nationalism or cosmopolitanism. In the mid‐1970s, a new ideological equilibrium was elaborated in Hungary between socialist patriotism and proletarian internationalism, which served the economic and political integration of the Eastern bloc countries. In this sense, socialist patriotism was meant to express a link with socialist political order, its achievements and its institutions, in contrast to the ethnic character and revanchist tendencies of nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the Teen‐Age Program, an international academic exchange program for high‐school‐age students established by the US government in 1949. Relying on dominant American child development theories, the officials who designed this program believed that all secondary school students, anywhere in the world, underwent the same critical period of psychological development during their acutely malleable teen years. They also claimed that all high school‐age students required adequate parental supervision to ensure that they developed well‐adjusted "democratic" personalities during this intense transitional phase from childhood to adulthood. Fearing the influence of what were considered to be authoritarian childrearing practices on secondary students in postwar occupied Germany and Austria, planners designed this exchange program to give select German and Austrian teenagers a chance to experience the American way of democratic living for themselves, by letting American sponsor parents raise these foreign young people as members of their own families for a full academic year. Believing the program was a success by the mid‐1950s, planners decided to expand it to target other secondary school students from world regions of geopolitical interest in the fight against Soviet Communism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1979, a group of activists belonging to the EPLF (the Eritrean People's Liberation Front) came across a materialistic interpretation of the national question, which was penned at the turn of the century by one Dov Ber Borochov (1881–1917), a Russian–Jewish intellectual who was a leading ideologue of Marxist Zionism. Among the fruits of this encounter was a book advocating the Eritrean people's right to self‐determination. Owing to developments in the Soviet Union and Marxist circles in the 1920s, Borochov's works were all but ignored throughout the remainder of the century. How, then, did a Spanish translation of his treatise, Nationalismo y lucha de clases (known in English as The National Question and Class Struggle), find its way into the hands of Eritrean nationalists? Furthermore, against the backdrop of Moscow and Havana's open support for Ethiopia, what attracted these Eritreans to the thought of an obscure Marxist–Zionist intellectual? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporaneously to the American McCarthyite response towards communism during the early cold war there existed a similar reaction in the United Kingdom. Like its counterpart in the United States, British McCarthyism not only attacked internal 'reds' but also non‐communist elements within the nation's borders. The phenomenon denounced and accused governmental and societal institutions and individuals for tolerating and even abetting the communist conspiracy then supposedly threatening the survival of the realm. Led by former Foreign Office mandarin Robert Vansittart and championed by the Conservative member of parliament Waldron Smithers, this British McCarthyism targeted the Church of England, the BCC and most notably the governing Labour party. The article explores how this politicised form of British anti‐communism functioned and transpired. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After several waves of COVID-19 pandemic, the October 2021 general election in the Czech Republic turned into a "referendum" about the government dominated by the populist party ANO (Action of Dissatisfied Citizens) led by Andrej Babis. I Party Politics in the Czech Republic: From Stable Party System to Populist Breakthrough The Czech party system emerged as an exception to the highly volatile party systems of the newly established democracies in central and eastern Europe (Lane and Ersson, 2007). At the same time, the parties of the SPOLU coalition have launched another campaign against the ANO party built on the party's "dark sins". A new populism vs anti-populism divide (for example, Moffitt, 2018) had become central to political contestation, supplanting the traditional competition between left and right parties, already shaken by the rise of populist parties in previous years. [Extracted from the article]

Did the International Monetary Fund (IMF) play a role in the United States and its Western allies efforts to contain the advance of communism during the Cold War? To answer this question, we construct a new database containing the number of conditions applied to over 500 IMF loans since 1970 and analyse how the distance from a borrowing country to its closet communist neighbour affected the IMF conditionality. We show that the Fund imposed fewer conditions on loans to countries geographically closer to the communist bloc. Results are stronger when neighbouring communist countries were not part of the Warsaw Pact. This pattern persisted during the 1990s, when the Fund helped former communist countries in their transition to market economies. However, we find no strong evidence of such discretionary treatment by the IMF after 2001, when the containment of communism had ceased to be the West's top priority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses Schmitt's concept of sovereign dictatorship—a departure from the normal legal order aiming to bring about a new mode of legality—as applied to the Marxist, and then Soviet, "dictatorship of the proletariat." Unlike Schmitt, Marx and Engels, as well as Soviet legal theorists, saw the space for law even while aiming to dispense with the legal form on the road to communism. This is best explained by Schmitt's failure to recognize the importance of legal systems not only for controlling social conflict, but also for coordination, the need for which does not disappear in extraordinary circumstances. *This article was initially written as part of my LLM studies at Harvard Law School. I thank my supervisor, Professor Adrian Vermeule, for his guidance and advice, as well as other friends (and enemies) for motivating my project. I am also grateful to the Ratio Juris production team for their exceptionally thorough editing of my original text. Any mistakes remain my own. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The collapse of communism in Central, East and South‐East Europe led to great hopes in the early 1990s. Three decades on, the initial optimism has given way to a mixed assessment: while the political transformation appears irreversible in some countries, a relapse to more authoritarian forms of government has occurred elsewhere. Similarly, the economic catch‐up process takes much longer than originally anticipated. Many of the challenges might not be a legacy of state socialism but could be more deeply rooted. We provide an overview of where quantitative economic history research stands on the origins and persistence of this fundamental West‐East‐divide, focusing on the period before 1870 (by which time income differences were well established). Serfdom was proposed as an early answer. Non‐agricultural explanations fall into three strands: demography, institutional weaknesses, and market access. We briefly discuss to what extent the factors identified here might have generated long‐run stagnation in region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the turn of French intellectual Georges Bataille to a theory of general economy. Topics include the argument of Bataille on the shared political-economic logic of capitalist accumulation and communism, Bataille's engagement with G. W. F. Hegel, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Karl Marx, and information on volume one of "The Accursed Share" by Bataille.

The 'Party and Youth League' model in the Chinese communist movement was copied from Soviet Russia, but its practice by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Youth League has been little studied, especially at the local level. This article draws on a variety of sources to analyse the model's operation in Shanghai. My findings reveal a lasting rivalry between the Communist Party and the Youth League in Shanghai, which both experienced a rise and fall from 1925 to 1927. Despite efforts from leaders on both sides, this conflict went unresolved. The Youth League's transformation from a 'younger brother' to a 'powerful competitor' within the revolutionary communist community vividly reflects the fact that the Chinese communists were far removed from the iron rule of Bolshevism at that time, and highlights the complexities and difficulties of localizing the international communist movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Since the dissolution of the USSR, the former Soviet countries not included in the enlargement of the European Union (EU) have experienced divergent development. While the so‐called Eastern Partnership (EaP) countries established closer ties with the EU, the Central Asian (CA) states mostly gravitated towards Russia and China. Thus, despite belonging to a similar economic and political system, the two groups of countries pursued transition to a market‐oriented economy and fostering development with varying results, creating a neat contrast to facilitate the study of patterns of growth and disparity. Purpose: Based on an analysis covering more than two decades, the article explores the growth paths of the EaP and CA countries. Given their bumpy economic performances, the article aims, first, to show how these affected economic disparities among them. Second, it aims to identify the factors which most influenced different development trajectories. Approach and methods: Through analysis of panel data, the article seeks to explain long‐term economic growth (1992–2015) in terms of endowments of production factors, macroeconomic stabilization and transition reforms, external conditions and institutional development. Sources of growth are identified to reveal how they affected income per capita and shaped convergence in the two groups of countries. Findings: The EaP and CA countries show different growth patterns since the end of communism. While the EaP economies shrank more during the 1990s compared to the CA group, they bounced back faster during the 2000s. The EaP economies, being more closely connected to the EU, were more affected by the Great Recession of 2007–2009 than those of the CA. Overall, economic disparities between these sets of countries have slightly increased. Physical capital, foreign direct investment, natural resources, openness to trade and the transition reforms significantly explain economic growth, with stronger effects in the EaP compared to CA countries, which suggests the EU's neighbourhood instruments have been effective in promoting growth. Policy implications: Our findings suggest that stepping up reforms, preserving macroeconomic stability, enhancing openness to trade and accumulating factors of production spurred growth in both EaP and CA countries. Pursuing closer ties with the EU economies fostered growth by strengthening investment, foreign trade, structural and market reforms, and by better use of natural resources. Given the large variations seen between countries in both groups, more detailed country diagnoses are needed to tailor interventions according to the specifics of each country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]