- Call for papers -
Workshop: ‘Private Property: Postsocialist Promises and Experiences’
New Europe College (Institute for Advanced Studies)
Bucharest (Romania)
June 15-16, 2007
Convenors: Stefan Dorondel, Damiana Otoiu, Thomas Sikor
Background
The re-institution of private property rights was one of the most immediate concerns by governments after the breakdown of socialist regimes. Throughout Central and Eastern Europe, the newly elected governments started to device policies and strategies to hand over valuable resources into private hands. Whatever kinds of resources and sorts of public enterprise we can imagine, the restoration of private property was universally seen as a central element in the way forward. Governments and citizens expected private property to become not only an engine for economic, political and social progress in the move away from socialism but also a foundation for the creation of a market economy and liberal democracy.
International donors and western advisors concurred with this view as the primacy given to private property in Central and Eastern Europe matched the main tenets of neoliberalism. According to neoliberal thought, private property is necessary because it is the only way to create sufficient incentives for productive activity. It is also the most efficient way to organize property relations on resources because it unleashes the creative powers of individual activity hindered by other forms of property, such as state ownership or communal property. Consequently, the ‘golden rule’ for postsocialist policy-makers was that private property rights worked best to preserve natural resources, and that an enterprise in private ownership was most likely to succeed on the free market. This was the vantage point from which policy makers, international donors, and other property experts have looked at property in Central and Eastern Europe over the past sixteen years.
Nevertheless, this perspective has encountered a number of serious challenges over time. First, critics of neoliberal thinking have questioned the presumption of a linear ‘transition’ from socialism to capitalism. They pointed out the simplistic assumptions and evolutionary models underlying much of the ‘transitology’ written about postsocialist transformations. Their doubts resonate with critiques of evolutionary theories of property in other geographical settings. Neither postsocialist transformations nor property relations follow a unilinear, predictable transition toward exclusive private property.
Second, insights from empirical research indicate that the restoration of private property did not take place in an institutional vacuum. Instead, postsocialist property relations develop upon principles, legal terms, and social practices known from socialism. As Katherine Verdery (2003) suggests, we should not see property restitution as a process of ‘(re)creating private property’ but as a ‘process of transforming socialist property’. Or, in the words of David Stark (1996), postsocialist organizations and institutions are not rebuilding ‘on the ruins but with the ruins of communism’. As a result, postsocialist property relations do not follow a singular model but display significant variation.
Third, as Chris Hann has reminded us, property relations are also varied because of their embeddedness in broader social relations. Property is constantly made, remade and unmade by actual practices as part of national, regional, and local trajectories of economic, social, political, and environmental change. Property is a critical element in economic practices of production and exchange, as it determines access to productive resources. Property relations are also an integral element of broader processes of social differentiation and class formation, as they determine the distribution of control over resources. In addition, property relations are closely related to processes affecting the nature of the state at national and local levels. They are, finally, a key factor affecting – and being affected by – the use of urban and rural landscapes.
Objectives
The workshop aims to facilitate a critical assessment of private property in Central and Eastern Europe. It seeks to compare the promises of private property with actual experiences as regards to the nature of postsocialist property relations, the factors influencing them, and their interrelations with economic growth, democracy, social equity, and environmental protection. This comparison will yield maps of property politics, policies and practices in the region.
Questions
We invite contributions from anthropology, geography, political science, and sociology that address the following or related questions:
- What is the nature of ‘private property’, and how do private and public intersect in postsocialist property regimes?
- What socio-political actors and factors demonstrate critical influence on postsocialist property regimes, at the policy level and on the ground?
- How are postsocialist property relations linked with processes of social differentiation and class formation?
- How have the development of property and consolidation of state authority influenced each other?
- What are the linkages between property relations and changes in urban and rural landscapes?
- What are the connections between property and economic performance?
The workshop
The workshop will take place at New Europe College, Bucharest on June 15-16, 2007. The workshop will include 15 participants, to be recruited by way of this call. Interested parties are requested to submit short paper proposals (500-1,000 words) to Stefan Dorondel (s.dorondel@agrar. hu-berlin. de) and Damiana Otoiu (dotoiu@ulb.ac. be) until January15th, 2007.
The workshop will serve the intensive discussion of papers by peer discussants and in the group. Workshop languages will be both English and French. The workshop will also include several keynote speakers to provide assessments of postsocialist property relations. These include:
- Katherine Verdery, CUNY (accepted)
- László Bruszt, European University Institute Florence (inquired)
- Beatrice von Hirschhausen (to be confirmed)
The workshop is organized by the Junior Research Group on Postsocialist Land Relations at Humboldt University, Berlin, the Junior Research Group on Property Relations at Bucharest University, the Center for the Study of Political Life, Université Libre de Bruxelles and New Europe College. The Junior Research Group is a specialized research unit that examines issues of agrarian and environmental change in postsocialist countries, including field studies in Albania, Romania, and Vietnam. Junior Research Group on Property Relations is a centre for research organized within the Institute for Political Research (University of Bucharest) that examines the socialist and postsocialist regime of property in Central and Eastern Europe from a comparative perspective. New Europe College is an independent Romanian institute for advanced studies in the humanities and social sciences founded in 1994.
Expected publication
The papers of the workshop will form the basis for a special issue to be published with an international journal in English language.
Important deadlines
January 15th, 2007 Submission of paper proposals (500-1,000 words) to S. Dorondel and D. Otoiu
February 15th, 2007 Invitation of papers to be presented at the workshop
May 31st, 2007 Submission of papers to workshop organizers
June 15th-16th, 2007 Workshop at New Europe College in Bucharest
[sursa balkans]
