In narratives of communist Europe after 1968, the ‘social contract’ thesis has long been the dominant explanatory device for explaining the remarkable stability and longevity of authoritarian regimes until 1989. The contract refers to a quid pro quo between regimes and the public: political acquiescence in the public sphere in exchange for non-interference in the private sphere, and a package of state-subsidized social benefits and comforts from healthcare to consumer goods, including items previously relegated to the realm of irrational or decadent desires. Scholars have focused, in particular, on consumption and the ways it offered regimes an alternative to democratization and mass terror but also generated forms of consumer-citizenship in the process.

Yet the idea of the ‘social contract’ has gone curiously undertheorized (and its parallels with Western Europe largely unexplored). To what extent did the practical functioning of the social contract transform or modify certain patterns of governance within socialism? What did the social contract –and new ideas of ‘quality of life’ and ‘wellbeing’ – mean to ordinary people? How did the public’s interactions with the state go beyond a dichotomy of care and coercion? And what has the tendency to focus on consumption left out or obscured?

This panel highlights new attention to the environment, social sciences, and legal mechanisms by historians of late socialism in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Poland.

Focusing on Czechoslovakia, Julia Mead analyzes the ramifications of the great January 1979 Central European blizzard in politics and everyday life. To conserve energy, state planners closed schools and factories, limited TV programming, and restricted heating of public and private buildings to 16°C (61°F). Despite the enormous strain on energy infrastructure, Mead argues that the socialist state was able to create the conditions of possibility for most citizens to remember the 1979 freeze as a time of leisure, not deprivation, through the provision of universal shelter and imperfect but effective energy rationing. Alexander Langstaff charts the global rise of the Social Indicators movement across the Iron Curtain in socialist Czechoslovakia and Poland during the early 1970s, culminating in the failed effort to build a “National Happiness Index”. Langstaff shows how new social accounting metrics, which used non-economic subjective data to measure development, were intended to promote regimes by making state social investment statistically visible to the public but threatened to open a pandora’s box of questions about state planning. In 1970s East Germany, José Luis Aguilar López-Barajas explores how ordinary people appropriated the “social contract” and used legal mechanisms to demand better state-sponsored tourism. If holidays and tourism were key elements of the social contract and citizens claimed them through formal channels, the state had to respond, increasing holiday expenditure to improve services despite poor financial performance. Aguilar argues this dynamic reshaped the governance of late socialist East Germany, as the government prioritized fulfilling these demands to uphold the social contract, a decision that ultimately contributed to its economic collapse in the 1980s.