When Bulgarians elected a parliament dominated by the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) in their first, free postcommunist election, they were considered the mavericks of eastern Europe. As Misha Glenny critically points out, “Bulgaria bucks the trend” was a recurrent phrase in English-language reports of the 1990 contest. But four years later, after an intervening non-socialist government, a second socialist victory seemed to be following trends set in Lithuania, Hungary and Poland. In a front-page article in The New York Times several months before Bulgaria's 1994 election, the east European trend towards embracing ex-communists is described as beginning in Lithuania, with no mention of Bulgaria's earlier socialist victory and its continual socialist electoral strength. Then, following the election, the Washington Post reported that the results “brought the fourth former Communist Party to power in Eastern Europe, after Hungary, Poland and Lithuania.“

How does language influence politics? Usually when this question is posed, it is understood to concern relations within a polity among communities whose members speak different languages. Our concern, however, is what contribution politicians’ language may make to the choice between authoritarianism or democracy. Of course, we reject any reduction of that determination to language alone.

The study of change in political Russian during the Soviet and post-Soviet era has concentrated on the consequences of variation in content. As Meyer observed, during the Soviet period scholars mainly evaluated the degree to which “routine thinking in terms of the official doctrine … [exerted] an effect on actions taken or not taken…” Remington called attention to the existence in the Soviet period of “two interdependent but opposed codes,” one for “the ritualized world of public life” and the other for private interaction—a difference that, as early as 1960, Tucker had traced back to origins in tsarist Russia.

The former Soviet state openly and directly manipulated patterns of economic development and the allocation of social resources in order to influence individual-level demographic decision making. In perhaps the most notable example, the state, through an internal passport system and limits on central city registration, attempted to regulate patterns of population movement and urban growth. In this paper I shall show that while the operation of the passport and propiska system was quite similar to market-based signals in terms of individual perceptions of costs and benefits, the non-migration functions of the passport and “propiska,” or registration system, operated in an anti-market fashion. By preventing migrants from integrating themselves into distributional networks in restricted cities, the passport and propiska system generated a situation in which potential migrants either acquired propiskas through semi-legal avenues, denied themselves access to distributional networks or elected not to migrate.

This paper introduces the notion of “nesting orientalisms” to investigate some of the complexity of the east/west dichotomy which has underlain scholarship on “Orientalism” since the publication of Said's classic polemic, a discourse in which “East,” like “West,” is much more of a project than a place. While geographical boundaries of the “Orient“ shifted throughout history, the concept of “Orient” as “other” has remained more or less unchanged. Moreover, cultures and ideologies tacitly presuppose the valorized dichotomy between east and west, and have incorporated various “essences” into the patterns of representation used to describe them. Implied by this essentialism is that humans and their social or cultural institutions are “governed by determinate natures that inhere in them in the same way that they are supposed to inhere in the entities of the natural world.” Thus, eastern Europe has been commonly associated with “backwardness,” the Balkans with “violence,” India with “idealism” or “mysticism,” while the west has identified itself consistently with the “civilized world.“

The public sphere, according to Habermas, is “in principle inclusive,“ so much so that “however exclusive the public might be in any given instance, it could never close itself off entirely and become consolidated as a clique; for it always understood and found itself immersed within a more inclusive public of all private people.” Further, Habermas specifies that “the public sphere of civil society stood or fell with the principle of universal access,” that any absolute exclusions made it “not a public sphere at all“—for the public sphere “anticipated in principle that all human beings belong to it.“’ The theoretical tension between principles of inclusion and exclusion thus has been essential to the delineation of the public sphere—in its eighteenth-century historical origins and in its twentieth-century academic formulation—and that tension structured the dual aspect of the public sphere, conceived as a phenomenon of social structure and cultural representation.