The crisis of Socialist modernity

The Communist states experienced rapid economic and social developments in the first decades after the Second World War. The launch of “Sputnik“ at the end of the 1950s appeared to signal the ascendancy of the state-socialist system, tempting Khrushchev into the euphoric pronouncement that the Soviet Union would overtake the USA within ten years. By the mid-1970s the process of catch-up had stagnated: planning crises and economic blockades, the oil shock and the debt trap, social decline and new nationalism signalled a profound crisis in the Communist world. This led at the end of the 1980s and early 1990s to the collapse of Communist domination in eastern Europe; meanwhile, although the system changed in China after the end of the Cultural Revolution, the Communist party was able to retain its grip.

Thus we can observe in the comparison of the Soviet Union and China a paradoxical situation in the 1970s: although the political and socio-economic development of the two countries was never synchronised and even in the 1950s when China was retarded by its attempts to ape the Russian processes of the 1930s (collectivisation), it restructured in its own context, nevertheless the 1970s appeared to be a period of far-reaching consequences. Trans-socialist processes began in both countries and while they led to different outcomes - to collapse in the Soviet Union, to consolidation on a new basis in China - in term of convergence, it is still the case that the two states came closer to each other in the 1980s.

From the starting point of the 1970s, the conference asks how far we can understand this crucial period as a period of epochal change for the Communist states, in which trans-systemic phenomena emerged and in which the course was set for later systemic change. In this way developments in the communist countries will be considered in relation to the processes of change taking place in western industrial nations: what is the relationship between western and socialist modernity? What remained of the original socialist vision of the future? Which trans-systemic changes came to the surface in the Communist world? How far did process of change established in western industrial states (liberalisation, critiques of progress technological change, the consumer and service society, ecological change) reach into communist states: can this be understood in the sense of a convergence of transnational phenomena? If so, how did people react to these tendencies in their respective countries?