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TWO questions

Sociology

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TWO questions. ONE question from each section/discipline. All questions carry equal marks. Your answers should not exceed the 2000-word limit, i.e. 1000 words per question. Please note that if you select more than one question from a section/discipline, only the first question will be marked. If you fail to select a question from a discipline, your score for that section will be 0. Referencing instructions Do not use footnotes and do not include bibliographies. It will sometimes be useful to refer to scholars by name, and if you wish to refer to a specific publication, simply insert a surname, perhaps with a short title and date reference, into the body of your text. Short references of this kind are particularly important if referencing images or quoting directly from a text. Examples: “Recently, historians have argued that cotton was an important factor (Kimberley, 2018)”. “As Onodera argued in her Strange Currency (2010), paper money began to circulate routinely after 1770 in this colony.” “as Millar argues in The Emperor in the Roman World.” (Robson 2019: fig. 4) 1. History a. What was the relative role of structural and agentive causes in the 1989 revolutions across Central and Eastern Europe? b. Why were young people central to both the functioning and collapse of socialist regimes across Central and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union? c. How would you assess the uses and abuses of social memory after the fall of communism in Central and Eastern Europe? d. What role has media played in the national, regional and global construction of 1989? 2. Economics a. Did the collapse of Communist regimes in 1989 lead to an actual decline in living standards in early 1990s in Central and Eastern Europe – or was it all a mirage of statistical mismeasurement and misreporting of both pre-1989 and post-1989 conditions? b. In looking at the political, institutional and economic ramifications of privatization, how were the challenges of privatizing small businesses different from privatizing large-scale enterprises in post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe and how did that affect the success of small vs large privatization policies? c. What were the positive and the negative consequences of the opening up of Central and East European economies to globalization since 1989? Do the positive ones outweigh the negative ones or vice versa? Why? d. “The main benefit from joining the EU was the incentive to undertake substantial institutional reform while applying for membership.” Is this a plausible assessment of how the Central and Eastern European countries, who joined the EU in 2004 and 2007, were affected by the whole process of “returning to Europe”?