"False conclusions are being drawn in the (ex-)Communist world, where the magic of the market is supplanting the magic of planning, whereas the market will by and large be no more efficacious an instrument of economic welfare for these states that had been planning, since the primary economic difficulties of these states derived (and derive) not from their internal economic mechanisms but from their structural location in the capitalist world-economy.”

Immanuel Wallerstein: Geopolitics and Geoculture: essays on the changing world-system (1991)
https://archive.org/details/geopoliticsgeocu0000wall

"The same incidentally is also true for Western art. If the world were not so much interested in what’s going on right now in New York and Los Angeles and if contemporary American art did not act as a source of information about the current state of affairs in American society, then this art would lose much of its attraction.
Likewise, Eastern European art is seen, and must be seen, as Eastern European; if the Eastern European artists like it or not - and most do not, you know. But it doesn’t change things. They are looked upon as being part of their society, as being sources of information about their society in general. So Eastern European art is first and foremost an art that is subjugated to the external point of view, – and every point of view is an external point of view on art.

Being subjected to this external judgment on it, this art becomes Eastern European; becomes informative about what Eastern Europe is, what Russia is, what the Czech Republic is. So we can’t ignore that. And in this sense, Eastern European art is really Eastern European art and nothing else."

Boris Groys: East of Art: Transformations in Eastern Europe: “The Complicity of Oblivion” (2003)
see:/east-of-art-transformations-in-eastern-europe-the-complicity-of-oblivion/

 
Inke Arns: A Toolbox of Everyday Media in Eastern Europe,
in “Small Media Normality for the East’,( P. Schultz/D. McCarty/ G. Lovink / V. Cosic (eds.) Ljubljana: Digital Media Lab (1997)

"Civil disobedience represents perhaps the fundamental form of political action of the multitude [ … ] It is not a matter of ignoring a specific law because it appears incoherent or contradictory to other fundamental norms, for example to the constitutional charter. In such a case, in fact, reluctance would signal only a deeper loyalty to state control. Conversely, the radical disobedience which concerns us here casts doubt on the State’s actual ability to control."

Paolo Virno: A Grammar of the Multitude, Semiotext(e) /Foreign Agents, The MIT Press, Cambridge, and London, 2004

Pavel Barša: How To Kill a Dream: Our Life after 1989 in the Limbo of the End of History, 2009 

"But the Syndicate was much more than a piece of software: it was a network of people. The Syndicate was founded in January 1996 on the last day of the Next 5 Minutes 2 Festival in Rotterdam. It was a network which devoted itself to fostering contacts and co-operation, improvements in communication and an exchange between institutions and individuals in Eastern and Western Europe active in the media and media culture. By allowing regular e-mail communication between participants regarding forthcoming events and collaborative projects the Syndicate mailing list developed into an important channel and information resource for announcing and reporting new projects, events and developments in media culture. The complete mail archive is kept at http://www.v2.nl/mail/v2east/"

"Since the first meeting in Rotterdam in 1996, which was attended by 30 media artists and activists, journalists and curators from 12 Eastern and Western European countries, the Syndicate network grew steadily. In August 2001, it linked over 500 members from more than 30 European and a number of non-European countries. The original idea was to establish an East-West network as well as an East-East network. In the meantime, however, the Syndicate had increasingly developed into an all-European forum for media culture and art. Over the last few years the division between East and West had been growing less important as people cooperated in ever-changing constellations, in ad-hoc as well as long-lasting partnerships."

Andreas Broeckmann, Inke Arns: Rise and Decline of the Syndicate

13 Nov 2001 15:52:49 +0100
www.tacticalmediafiles.net

"That day, we had scheduled-announced a late evening-night party at the Hybrid Workspace with music, more performances, projections, beer, etc. All documenta X visitors who wanted to come to the party had to have an invitation (or rather, a visa). And, by the way, all visitors to documenta X - who had paid their 25 or whatever DM - wanted to see everything there was to see and get their money's worth. However, the only way to get an invitation to the party was to apply for it much in the way we, here in Eastern Europe, would need to apply for an entry visa whenever we have to go to the West. Basically, the idea was to make the visitors feel with their own bodies what it actually means to live behind the Schengen Curtain. Visitors were meant to "suffer" all kinds of humiliations and arbitrary judgements based on absurd rules. And eventually, to experience the "depths of Europe" first-hand."

Luchezar Boyadjiev: Overlapping Identities, 1998
http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors2/boyadjievtext3.html

Coming back to possible joint ventures with the “new federal states,” some initiatives dwindled because the themes endorsed by tranzit were unlikely to be of interest “over there,” as the same Dresden colleague once surmised. This supposition is corroborated by the observation that, in the wake of the revolutions of 1989, the former Communist Bloc became fragmented from the perspective of art and cultural history. If so, this fragmentation contributes to the multiplication of post-transformation narratives: the GDR and the Soviet Union came to form their own research fields, while the countries in between still remain fairly invisible to international scholarship. At the same time, a formerly dormant cross-regional interest in the contemporary art production of neighbouring countries has started to gradually develop in the past ten-fifteen years. I want to suggest that this new dynamic of cultural exchange was partly the result of the initiatives of Soros and especially the ERSTE Foundations, aiming to facilitate a shared understanding of the present, growing out of the experience of the recent past. At the same time, they also branded East-Central and Southeastern European art on the international market and in the professional community. The former East Germany has been largely left out of this new regionalism and, consequently, the art of the GDR remains largely unknown to specialists of Eastern Europe and beyond. The new federal states and post-socialist Eastern Europe are seldom viewed in the same conceptual framework: after all, East Germans did not return to the “West” as citizens of a post-communist state, but as members of a new Germany.

Beáta Hock: Evolving networks: International sponsors of postsocialist art scenes, Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, (2023) 95-108, DOI: 10.1080/25739638.2023.2182507

"The parliamentary commission, originally established in the autumn of 1990 to investigate the circumstances of the police crackdown on Národní třída, became a completely autonomous body that held its own press conferences, interrogated, announced the names of collaborators, and also established the convention that cooperation with the Secret Police could be recognized by the presence of a person’s name in the registry of associations. When it came to lustration of elected members of parliament, there was discussion about “the purity of our ranks” or “an ulcer from which all the pus has not yet drained”. Jan Sokol compared screening/lustration to an antibiotic, which is used against staphylococcus even it can damage the physiological intestinal microflora. Finally, several names of deputies who refused to resign quietly were read out in the plenary session on live television. It didnt matter that other names were added later and many of the accused won their lustration trials. "Screen or you will be screened!" was the imperative of the time. In October 1991, a lustration law which the government had submitted to the Federal Assembly was approved, but the parliament changed its proposal practically beyond recognition. It expanded the number of affected positions and, above all, excluded all examination of actual cooperation and any appeal instance; it once again relied solely on the entry in the register of unions. Nevertheless, of all lustration certificates issued in the nineties, only five percent found cooperation. It seems that most of the conscious informants didnt applied for high positions in the state administration, and rather prospered in the unregulated sphere of private enterprise.

Adéla Gjuričová: Historizace devadesátých let. in Host 2018, Téma Devadesátky.