For many years, Polish students of Latin America have been proving themselves to be innovative and dynamic. What’s more, before Poland’s freedom from Soviet control, its scholars showed themselves to be remarkably independent and incisive students of their own Eastern European reality, both past and present. To take just one example, Witold Kula’s theory of feudalism, based on Polish historical experience, was also remarkably enlightening when applied to the analysis of traditional Latin American rural society.
Against this background, a group of Polish scholars organized a most ambitious international and interdisciplinary conference in May and June 1990 with the purpose of comparing twentieth-century Latin America and East-Central Europe. Two years later, the proceedings appeared in print. The main organizer was a Latin Americanist historian, Ryszard Stemplowski. By limiting the time period to the last century and recommending the “world system” and a variety of “modernization theory” as key theoretical tools, Stemplowski hoped to impose some degree of unity on the project. The impression conveyed by the published proceedings, however, is one of extreme diversity.
In theoretical terms, the best-known participant, Jerzy Topolsky, sharply criticizes Immanuel Wallerstein as well as the modernization concept. He recommends the comparison of macroregions (such as Eastern Europe and Latin America) as integrated wholes in their dynamic structure” (1:30-32), however such a comparison might actually be carried out. In other papers, varieties of dependency theory and the “informal sector” approach are also tried. Yet for all the methodological discussion, there is a notable lack of understanding of the crucial distinction between “close” and “distant” comparison. Comparing Latin America and “Eastern Europe” (referring mostly to East-Central Europe, although some authors do not exclude the Soviet Union as of 1945) is necessarily a case of distant comparison. Even so, many papers discuss some of the ubiquitous differences rather than the more or less surprising similarities. Indeed, explicitly comparative papers are actually fewer than those dealing with either “Eastern European” or Latin American topics. Some are rather lengthy, others extremely short (two to four pages). There is one attempt to summarize the discussion of economic contributions (2:401-4), but none concerning the other debates.
From this reviewer’s late-1993 perspective, some of these 1990 discussions have unavoidably become outdated—above all the recent recovery of Spanish American economies after the “lost decade.” Meanwhile, expectations in “Eastern Europe have declined. Neverthelesss, several very stimulating and valuable contributions can be found. One is the study by the German scholar Dittmar Dahlmann (1:181-97) comparing the Zapatismo of Morelos with the contemporary movement of Nestor Makhno in the Ukraine. Analogies are surprisingly numerous. Two contributions by the Pole Wojciech Roszkowski, on land reform in Eastern Europe after World War I (2:213-42) and uniformity versus diversity there before and after 1945 (1:49-64), stand out as excellent comparative syntheses in one of the two macroregions. Another Pole, Henryk Szlaifer, persuasively argues that the 1930s lend themselves quite well to a comparison of the economic policies of Latin American and Eastern European states (1:162—72). Most interesting is a truly comparative paper on the Comitern’s policy toward Eastern Europe and Latin America from 1919 to 1943, by the Pole A. Kochański (2:15-41). Yet this is a very preliminary study, as relevant archives in Russia remained closed to the author.
I also found the critical review by U.S. writer David Ost of the latest transition-to-democracy analyses of recent developments in Eastern Europe to be very fine indeed (2:137-46). Students of transition in, for instance, Latin America may analyze the phenomenon in terms of elite competition for national power in the framework of a capitalist economy securing a “civil society.” But as Ost rightly points out, this approach is impossible in the Eastern European case. There, the Communist system rooted out civil society. The first and crucial step took place when nonelite groups tried to build up an independent civil society once again as a “public sphere of social interaction that has nothing to do with government” (2:142). Transition theorists have blatantly ignored this crucial distinction.
The Polish conference organizers found in the 1989 European transition a stimulus for launching their large-scale comparative project. As Ost and others show, however, the methodological problems of comparison become clearly more difficult to tackle after 1945 and even 1989. Since then, the Eastern European countries have found themselves in a profoundly different situation from those of Latin America, with the sole exception of Cuba.
