In his interview-based study “Deserved: Economic Memories After the Fall of the Iron Curtain,” Till Hilmar compares memories of the post-socialist economic transition among East German and Czech engineers and health workers. He makes the following intertwined arguments. First, that “people's” evaluation of social change is guided by the problem of social inclusion, where inclusion means chiefly recognition of people's value as contributors to economy and society. Second, he reasons that recognition has to come from others, especially intimate others, and is thus closely connected to the development of people's social networks. Third, he drives home the point that looking for and giving such recognition is driven by cultural understandings about who deserves the given actors’ choices. Fourth, summarizing the previous three points, he contends that “structural changes” such as eastern Europe's post socialist transition are, perhaps surprisingly, fully compatible with peoples’ individualist accounts of success and failure.
Hilmar develops these arguments across five chapters and a brief epilogue. The introductory chapter outlines the theoretical influences that have informed his work. He condenses these influences into what he calls “the moral framework,” which he deploys throughout the book against a utilitarian or instrumentalist theory of how people evaluate themselves and others. In Ch. 1 Hilmar motivates the logic of comparison between East Germany and the Czech Republic by pointing to the similarity of both regions’ economic and political development before and during socialism. He also sketches the radically different trajectories of transition to a capitalist economy in both regions. The former GDR was literally taken over by the west, which simply imposed its institutional fabric on the east. As a consequence, most East Germans were found wanting in their preparedness to operate satisfactorily within these western institutions, leading to their systematic exclusion from many positions. Moreover, the eastern economy was literally dismantled as hopelessly outdated in every conceivable way. The Czech Republic could, by contrast, chart its own path of voucher privatization. While flawed by oligarchization, it still led to a cultivation of an entrepreneurial spirit.
With Ch. 2 Hilmar gets to his “main theoretical proposition: that the way disruptive economic change is remembered is guided by the problem of social inclusion.” While both countries underwent marketization, price liberalization, and privatization, the associated disruption took very different forms north and south of the Ore Mountains. The immediate and massive deindustrialization of East Germany led many of the engineers and health workers in Hilmar's sample to recurrent cycles of work, unemployment, and re-training. Unsurprisingly, most have experienced this period as deeply humiliating. Their coping strategies consisted of crafting a narrative of self and other that reemphasized the depth and detail of their education and skills of improvisation. They distanced themselves from what they saw as westerners’ superficiality and relentless self-promotion. The Czechs fared better. Their national discourse emphasized new opportunities, the virtues of creativity, and risk taking. Thus, East Germans remember transition as an act of colonization while Czechs saw it as something of an Eldorado.
Relying on surveys, Hilmar shows in Ch. 3 that both East Germans and Czechs professed directly after 1989 a strong support for individualistic, market-centric values. By the mid-1990s they shifted (putatively: back) to supporting egalitarian ideals. At the same time, however, Hilmar's narrative data show that both Czechs and East Germans continued to subscribe to both individualizing understandings of personal economic success and to claims of profound post-transition injustices. By analyzing his narrative data with the help of four ideal-typical narrative strategies that account for both deserved and undeserved success, as well as deserved and undeserved failure, Hilmar can show how the apparent contradiction dissolves into a profound ambiguity.
In Ch. 4 Hilmar tracks what happens to social relations in the transition from socialism to liberal capitalism. This move is essential for his argument because any sense of inclusion, any sense of deservingness has to be recognized by others to become stable. Informed by network theory, he sets out to explore “weak ties” and “strong ties” while tracing the interactional logics of breaking and maintaining these ties. Given the prevalence of individualizing moral evaluations, it is not surprising that he finds that, divergent economic trajectories put enormous strain on social relations leading to isolation on the one hand and self-selective sorting on the other. Beyond sorting, it remains unclear, however, what precise work particular kinds of social relations do for recognizing specific moral understandings.
In the short epilogue, Hilmar makes plausible the relevance of his findings for understanding the rise of populism. He rightly points to the appeal that populist leaders and parties derive from their recognition of cultural insiders as deserving their skills and contributions they make to society.
In sum: Deserved offers a seldom undertaken comparison which generates genuine insight. And it is a good read at that.
