Date: 2017
Type: Thesis
The politics of alcohol in late socialist Romania and Czechoslovakia
Florence : European University Institute, 2017, EUI, HEC, PhD Thesis
WAHLEN, Esther, The politics of alcohol in late socialist Romania and Czechoslovakia, Florence : European University Institute, 2017, EUI, HEC, PhD Thesis - https://hdl.handle.net/1814/44971
Retrieved from Cadmus, EUI Research Repository
This thesis examines the politics of alcohol in Eastern bloc states in the 1970s and 1980s. In this period, socialist governments ceased describing alcohol problems as a symptom of exploitation or as the result of a lack of socialist consciousness. Instead, they developed short-term methods to tackle the consequences of drinking, such as hospital treatment for alcoholics and counseling services for their family members. The thesis revolves around the question of why socialist states embarked on this pragmatic approach to social problems. The politics of alcohol serves as a lens through which I study how socialist states rearranged their ideas about state responsibility and good social order in the 1970s and 1980s. In five chapters, I reconstruct the new categories of social organization that arose in that period. Analyzing consumption politics, treatment programs for alcoholics, debates about family problems, and new safety precautions in Romania and Czechoslovakia, I show how in each of these fields, central governmental institutions delegated the responsibility for coping with alcohol problems to smaller social units: to scientific experts, to the institution of the family, and to the individual. I argue that by reassigning state responsibility, socialist governments did not retreat from authority. On the contrary, they strove to rearrange governing rationalities and thereby adapt socialist states to post-industrial realities.
Additional information:
Defence date: 23 January 2017; Examining Board: Pavel Kolář, European University Institute; Alexander Etkind, European University Institute; Ulf Brunnbauer, Universität Regensburg; Marius Turda, Oxford Brookes University
Cadmus permanent link: https://hdl.handle.net/1814/44971
Full-text via DOI: 10.2870/664228
Series/Number: EUI; HEC; PhD Thesis
Publisher: European University Institute
LC Subject Heading: Drinking of alcoholic beverages -- Political aspects -- Romania -- History; Communism -- Romania -- History -- 20th century; Drinking of alcoholic beverages -- Political aspects -- Czechoslovakia -- History; Communism -- Czechoslovakia -- History -- 20th century