An Active Society in a Networked World

The development of post-socialist countries, their successful and less successful aspects, is well documented. In the mid-1990s, Klaus Nielsen, Bob Jessop, and Jerzy Hausner stated that in the light of so many emerging publications about these problems every author should have a very good reason for additional enlargement of the already expansive corpus of literature (Nielsen et al., 1995: 3). The above-mentioned authors substantiated their contribution by researching dialectics, structure, and strategic action in the processes of post-socialist transformation. They linked the research on the unique process with some general problems of political economy and social theory. Three decades later, we need an even better excuse to engage in our exploration. Our excuse is to tackle the issue of universal and continually emerging problems of strategic steering of complex societies.

Despite the expansive corpus of literature, the issues are far from exhaustively researched and numerous unsolved questions and dilemmas remain. First, can already existing theoretical and methodological approaches be used or at least modified for research on the development of contemporary societies? In the early transitology, different authors mostly emphasised the relationship with developmental studies, which evolved by researching third-world countries and post-communist studies (Bunce, 1998; Karl and Scmitter, 1995; Ma, 1998; Wiarda, 2002). The question of applicability of neoclassical economic theory, which was, because of the influence of some international organisations, generously employed for the formation of recipes for the East-European transition, even though economic science was unable to construct mainstream economic theory capable of explaining the success of transition processes, was also often raised (Bell, 2012). Can the multi-level and more democratic approach of the current EU grand strategies avoid the perils, disappointments, and considerable discrepancies between expectations raised by ideas for post-socialist institutional changes and the consequences of measures that did not take into account specific characteristics of post-socialist societies (Genov, 1999: 58–61, Szelenyi, 2014; Gevorkyan, 2018)?

Second, what is the role of purposeful action in developmental trajectories? Are they the result of strategic choice – if that choice was even possible – or does the path-dependency play the central role (Rončević and Makarovič, 2010; Beyer in Wielghos, 2001)?

Third, in the specific context of Eastern Europe, even after decades of scholarship there is a fundamental disagreement about transition being a story of success or not (Berend and Bugarič, 2015; Shleifer and Treisman, 2014; Poznanski, 2001; Janos, 2001; Burawoy, 2001; Berend, 2001). So, as we can see, this research area still presents numerous challenges and unsolved questions.

Finally, it should be emphasised that processes of post-socialist development represent unique empirical evidence, which enables new insights into some universal issues from the social development area of research; amongst them are the issue of developmental factors and the possibility of constructing efficacious developmental policies.