Anomie, Distributive Injustice and Dissatisfaction with Material Well-Being in Eastern Europe: A Comparative Study

After the second World War the communist parties of Eastern Europe kept a firm grip over their countries. After the velvet revolutions of 1989, however, they suddenly seemed to lose their hold. Initially, it was generally accepted that the so-called post-communist countries of Eastern Europe would undergo a rather rapid transition with the demise of communism. They would change from societies characterized by a command economy and a one-party political system into societies with a market economy and a pluralistic political system. Recently, however, observers have cast serious doubt on these optimistic expectations (Longworth, 1993; Juchler, 1994). Although there has been some suggestion of the developments predicted, it remains to be seen whether the goals involved in this transition will actually be reached in all post-communist countries. In some countries we do, in fact, see developments that might lead to the anticipated transformation. In others, however, we can notice changes that seem to herald imminent societal collapse. There are also countries where the former communist parties have managed to cling to power or where they have recaptured it. It is not the aim of this article to trace the above mentioned fundamental political and economic changes. We confine ourselves to the unintended consequence of those changes: a societal state of disorder. Each of the countries in contemporary Eastern Europe can be characterized as disorderly, albeit to different degrees. In this article we focus on some of the attitudes the inhabitants of post-communist countries have developed towards this disorderly state of affairs. How do they judge the situation and their own position as far as justice and fairness are concerned? How satisfied are they with their material situation? Do they think that they have got what they deserve? Do they think they get what they want? Do they feel they get what they need? To arrive at a theoretically fruitful interpretation of this situation, we first look for a theoretical framework able to yield predictions about these attitudes. Next we apply data to check whether these predictions make empirical sense. For the sake of interpretation, we will compare our findings for relatively disorderly post-communist countries with findings drawn from the more orderly West. After all, by systematically comparing countries from the East with countries from the West it is possible to highlight how unique the societal situation in contemporary Eastern Europe really is. A Durkheimian Framework A theoretical framework that makes it possible to interpret the situation of relative disorderliness in Eastern Europe in a fruitful way and that yields answers to the above mentioned research questions can be found in the works of Emile Durkheim (1893, 1897). It so happens that Durkheim has argued that the degree of disorderliness of a particular society can be established by looking at the degree of value consensus within it. The values people have in common determine, in his opinion, the stable regulation of social interaction and the structuring of individual needs and desires. Societies where value consensus is absent, he refers to as anomic.(1) An anomic situation arises, for example, when the institutions that normally regulate interaction in a society have been rendered inoperative by sudden unexpected changes in prosperity and adversity. Such a situation leads to the distortion of a communal sense of values and standards. This distortion, for its part, weakens the regulative bond and the restraining force of the conscience collective. This means that anomie, in Durkheim's conception, is a particular form of deinstitutionalisation or, to be more precise, a sudden normative deregulation of society due to the inactivity of the conscience collective. It is also, however, a particular form of individual disorientation. In a situation of anomie people are thrown back upon their own elementary behavioural propensities. …