13: The Politics of Communist and Former Communist Countries

Hilary Appel, Claremont McKenna College, hilary.appel@claremontmckenna.edu

Peter Rutland, Wesleyan University, prutland@wesleyan.edu

The governments in Communist and post-Communist countries alike have been deeply affected by the 2008 global financial crisis. In the post-communist region the crisis brought severe strains to economic and political systems that were still vulnerable after a twenty year process of transition from state socialism. How has the crisis undermined the shaky consensus that had emerged on the benefits of integration into global markets? Has the crisis generated any credible alternative development models in the region? How has China’s orientation toward global markets and the international community changed as a result of the crisis?

Among the new member-states of the European Union, how have the different responses to the 2008 crisis confirmed or refuted pre-existing assumptions about the strengths and weaknesses of their institutions? How have economic developments shaped attitudes toward European integration and cooperation? Does the growing variation in economic and political conditions in old and new member states undermine previous efforts to coordinate national foreign policies and security arrangements?

With the apparent stalling of the past wave of "color revolutions" can the authoritarian regimes from Belarus to Central Asia ride out the crisis? How has the Putin model stood up to the test of crisis? Can we expect to see some cases of "state failure?"

The crisis coincided with the outbreak of hostilities in Georgia and new fears of Russian assertiveness, from the gas shutdown of January 2009 to the closure of the US military base in Kyrgyzstan in August 2009. Is this the start of a new trend, a restructuring of the regional security system? Or is Russia still too weak to carve out a sphere of influence?

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, what are the main findings of the new field of post-communist studies? What is agreed, and what is still open to debate? What has the field contributed to political science more broadly? Panels that examine these and related questions and apply political science theory to institutional and policy developments in Communist and post-Communist countries in hard times are encouraged.