2006 Ed A. Hewett Book Prize Winner
The AAASS Ed A. Hewett Book Prize, sponsored by the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (NCEEER), is awarded annually for an outstanding publication on the political economy of the centrally planned economies of the former Soviet Union and East Central Europe and their transitional successors.
David Ost
The 2006 Ed A. Hewett Book Prize was awarded to David Ost, Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, for The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Post Communist Europe, published by Cornell University Press.
In The Defeat of Solidarity Ost offers an explanation of the demise of Poland's Solidarity trade union and social movement. The Communist trade union inspired people across the globe in the 1980s, taking on Poland's Communist Party leadership, demanding economic improvements but also political rights, and winning major concessions well before the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. After 1989, these Polish workers were quickly pushed toward the dustbin of history with the help of their strong and globally respected trade union. A new elite emerged to implement economic and political changes in line with the Washington Consensus and, without the massive, organized force of Polish workers behind it, Solidarity gradually lost its political force. In its place, far right wing political forces have emerged.
Ost challenges the "rhetoric of inevitability" (to borrow the language of Brian Porter) surrounding the trade union's demise. He shows how this outcome was constructed in Poland, how it was constructed by Poles (not Western advisors), and how Solidarity itself was instrumental in this construction. Ost carefully documents how Solidarity increasingly distanced itself from trade union issues and encouraged its base to organize instead around religious and nationalist causes, which would not interfere with the leadership's enthusiastic pursuit of economic liberalism.
Although The Defeat of Solidarity was written before the Kaczynski brothers became a dominant political force in Poland, Ost's work draws a clear link between Solidarity's shedding of its worker base and the subsequent rise of the far right in Poland. Evicted from their labor party, and finding no mainstream political party willing to address the central issues of their lives (the loss of employment, status, and community), Ost argues that workers were driven into the hands of far right parties which both recognized their anger and provided targets for it.
But the more provocative argument in The Defeat of Solidarity lies in the implications that Ost draws from these events for the whole project of liberal democracy. Inspired by the work of Ken Jowitt, Ost argues that liberalism, with its emphasis on the individual and reason, is particularly ill-suited to channeling the anger and anomie of disenfranchised post-socialist workers. Presented with "necessary" and "rational" changes, workers lack a language to voice disagreement or a means of participating in the construction of their new existence.
Ost argues that currently unfashionable category of class provides a unique frame through which liberalism might (and has) successfully organize anger and incorporate the currently disenfranchised. Based as it is on interests (which can be negotiated), class is a framework in which opposition can be handled liberally (rationally). But if the concept of class cannot be embraced, the economic losers are left to organize along non-economic lines, contributing to the growth of identity politics in Poland. Identities are less open to negotiation than interests, and mobilized by the new right contribute to the emergence of illiberal politics. Thus, Ost argues that Polish political leaders, through their failure to embrace working class anger and the tainted concept of class, have undermined the democratic project rather than furthering it.
This argument about the importance of class as an organizing category for liberalism is fresh and unexpected. And it is a theoretical contribution that should go far beyond East European Studies and Political Science.
