What Exceptionalism? Post-Communist Human Development in the Larger Global Arena

Since 1989, many post-communist countries have been characterized as "exceptional.” There have been claims of Czech exceptionalism (in relation to employment policy and stability in party competition), Slovenian exceptionalism (in relation to social partnership and low polarization), Romanian exceptionalism (in relation to labor militancy), and Polish exceptionalism (in relation to cultural agendas and, more recently, to the fleeting evidence of GDP growth in a stagnant Europe). However, the financial crisis has put severe pressure on whatever policies, institutions or outcomes once distinguished these various "exceptionalisms." Employing a wider comparative lens and a longer time horizon, one can even see a remarkable degree of continuity and convergence across post-communist space, when compared to post-industrial European states on the one hand, and to developing countries, on the other. The main metric used to make this case is the human development index (HDI), which provides both rankings and composite scores reflecting per capita income (per capita GDP), education (years of schooling), and health (life expectancy, infant mortality). Zooming back in time and space reveals that the relative standing of most countries in post-communist Europe has remained roughly where it was at the time of the fall of communism, while differences between post-communist countries have even shown a slight narrowing. This begs the question of whether there are other long-acting geographic, geopolitical, demographic, and global-economic forces that are combining to reproduce the clustering in social development levels initially generated by communist development policy in spite of whatever variations have been in evidence since 1989.