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Recent studies have explored the history of consumerism in communist Eastern Europe, suggesting that socialist consumption followed its own rhythm and logic. However, when it comes to waste-making and recycling existing literature focuses on post-industrial waste practices of the Soviet bloc, paying little attention to post-consumer waste. However, socialist societies did not follow the West's example and refrained from introducing single-use materials, such as disposable beverage containers. Could this also mean that socialists did a better job to deal with their own post-consumer waste than the West? The current scientific knowledge does not answer that question. To cover that gap in the research, this article situates socialist beverage containers and especially recyclable soft drink bottles made of glass in a wider discourse about the meaning of waste, discards, recycling, and material culture in socialism, particularly in Hungary. It suggests that the socialist waste dilemma was unique to Eastern European economies because of its social, ideological, and cultural layers, of which the scientific community has limited understanding. It proposes that despite different ideological foundations, the socialists battled with similar waste problems than in the West, however systematic differences were large enough to produce less post-consumer waste and recycle that waste more efficiently compared to the West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article seeks to cast doubt on the prevailing notion that regards the Allied occupation of (Southern) Italy as a harbinger of democracy by examining it from a local, decidedly bottom-up analytical perspective. I argue that the Allies disfavored the formation of political parties and the expression of political thought, even though 'you can't have a democracy without political parties', as the Italian-American Charles Poletti, one of the principal American civil affairs officers (CAO) organizing the occupation on-site, phrased it. This was particularly true during the first phase of the occupation, when military priorities reigned supreme. However, even at a later point, after the CAOs had theoretically assumed the role of an external supervising authority, a deep distrust of the country's political parties informed much of the Allies' attitudes. Rather than serving as a foundational layer for democracy, the Allies perceived the country's political parties as a threat to democratization insofar as these were believed to obstruct the former's political and economic agendas. Such antagonisms between occupier and occupied, of course, especially applied to Italy's largest and most well-organized party during the period of the Allied occupation – the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout Central and Eastern Europe, various governments supported the creation of memorial museums of political violence during state socialism. While much scholarly attention has been given to Hungary's House of Terror and the Baltic museums of occupations, this article examines the contrasting situation in Southeastern Europe, where state actors were generally absent and which witnessed relatively belated and overwhelmingly bottom-up processes. The article analyses the particularity of political prisons as 'difficult heritage'. It scrutinizes the commonalities and entanglements between the memorialization of political prisons in three Southeastern European countries marked by distinctive trajectories both during and after communism: Albania (Spaç), Romania (Sighet and Piteşti), and Croatia (Goli Otok). The article shows how in the absence of state-level policies to address transitional justice, activism surrounding difficult heritage memorialization has aimed to fill the gap. It also argues that the relationship between site memorialization in Southeastern Europe and the wider European models is doubly constitutive: first, the memorialization of Sighet in 1990s Romania borrowed approaches from Western European Holocaust memorialization, then shaped a European wide set of best practices; second, a wave of new memorial initiatives after 2010 in Southeastern Europe was connected to the Europeanization of memory and transnational engagements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]