At the End of the Post-Communist Transformation? Normalization or Imagining Utopia? Larry Ray UNIVERSITY OF KENT, UK Abstract This article reviews the implications of the collapse of Communism in Europe for some themes in recent social theory. It was often assumed that 1989 was part of a global process of normalization and routinization of social life that had been left behind earlier utopian hopes. Nothing that utopia is open to various interpretations, including utopias of the everyday, this article suggests, first that there were utopian dimensions to 1989, and, second, that these hopes continue to influence contemporary social and political develop- ments. The continuing role of substantive utopian expectations is illustrated with reference to the politics of lustration in Poland and the rise of nation- alist parties in Hungary. This analysis is placed in the context of the already apparent impact of the global economic crisis in post-communist countries. It concludes that the unevenness and diversity of the post-1989 world elude overly generalized attempts at theorization and demand more nuanced analyses. Key words ■ crisis ■ Hungary ■ Poland ■ post-communism ■ social theory ■ utopias Revolutions of 1989 and Sociology The Revolutions of 1989 transformed the political, intellectual and economic character of the world, yet there has been sparse sociological reflection on their implications for sociology itself or for theories of social transformation. Indeed, no sooner had the walls fallen than a process of normalization and ‘business as usual’ was underway in much social analysis. Sociological theory rather busied itself with the various post-Marxist ‘turns’ that were underway, notably the global, cultural and postmodern ones, into which the post-communist phenom- enon was often uneasily inserted (Ray, 1997). Two related themes of the responses to 1989 were ‘return’ and ‘normalization’, and the idea that central Europe was European Journal of Social Theory 12(3): 321–336 Copyright © 2009 Sage Publications: Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC www.sagepublications.com DOI: 10.1177/1368431009337349