Posttotalitarian Discourses in Central and Eastern Europe

This article reviews research on public discourses in postcommunist, that is, posttotalitarian Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries. It looks especially at those recent discourses that, in various ways, reappropriate pretotalitarianism, totalitarianism, and posttotalitarianism in instances of public communication. The article looks at how language and discourse function within the national public spheres in the posttotalitarian CEE and at how, within those spheres, certain common, cross-national tendencies as well as differences can be observed between the studied countries. As the article shows, temporality and spatiality constitute two basic dimensions of the “late” posttotalitarian (public) discourses in CEE. Those discourses also often oscillate between locality and globality and reappropriate collective pasts and futures as key means of constructing postcommunist CEE identities. Keywords: identity; language and social interaction; mass media; political communication; social change