Intergenerational comparison of perceptions of Europe and European values in Post-Soviet countries

The post-communist transition in Europe is one of the most significant and complex transformations of modern times. The countries of the region have previously been extremely diverse in their history, politics, culture, ideologies and value systems relating to social class, gender, confessional and ethnocultural characteristics. In the 30 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, each of the former Soviet republics has experienced its own path of socio-economic and political transformation. The upheavals of this period have actualized the reactions to instability in the economic, political, and ideological spheres, including the processes of non-radicalism. The diversity of transition trajectories, the large-scale social and cultural transformations that accompanied political, economic and institutional shifts have led to further heterogeneity between and within post-Soviet states. The project aims at a comparative analysis of the interpretation of Europe and «European values» in the intergenerational and intercountry dimensions in the context of the socio-cultural consequences of the change of the political and economic regime.

Following W. Schwartz, researchers present values as motivational principles of organization of individual perception, thinking and activity. The study focuses on the differences between generations in and within post-communist States. The focus is on two generations: those born in the 1970s and those who grew up during the political transition in the late and post-Soviet Union; those born in the 1990s and early 2000s, the so-called millennials.

The project aims to identify the value base and assess the degree of intergenerational cultural continuity in relation to the population of post-Soviet countries to Europe, the individual and collective future and socially vulnerable groups. The study is based on a series of semi-structured interviews and a semantic differential technique. Based on the results of the interview, representations of citizens of post-Soviet countries about Europe and Europeans and subjective meanings of values will be explicated; values attributed by citizens of post-Soviet countries to residents of their country and European states will be analyzed; semantic categories that form an affectively charged space of perception of values by citizens of post-Soviet countries have been identified and the value-oriented semantic spaces of citizens of post-Soviet countries have been reconstructed, to assess the extent to which post-Soviet citizens perceive similarities in their values and those of Europeans.

The project is organized jointly with the American University in Central Asia (AUCA), Bishkek, and the National University of Uzbekistan named after Mirzo Ulugbek, Tashkent, and L.N. Gumilyov Eurasian National University, Nur-Sultan (Astana).