Building Democracy and Civil Society East of the Elbe: Essays in Honour of Edmund Mokrzycki (Contemporary Russia and Eastern Europe)

Building Democracy and Civil Society East of the Elbe

This book explores the idea of democracy and civil society and how democracy is being implemented in Eastern Central Europe. The implosion of the Soviet empire 15 years ago and the new wave of democratization opened a new field of inquiry. Scholars, who had failed to anticipate the transitions, were faced with the frustrating task of understanding the difficulties of applying existing models of political democracy and practice in different national cultures. The wide-ranging debate on the transition became focused on a conceptual battle, the question of how to define “civil society.” Because totalitarian systems shun self-organization, real existing civil societies were in short supply East of the Elbe, and their emergence took complex and puzzling forms, which varied with political culture, and reflected the imprint of the historical past. This book relates the concept of civil society and developments in Eastern Central Europe to a wider theoretical and historical frame, and makes international comparisons where appropriate. It covers a huge variety of aspects of civil society, and examines the difficulties of establishing a political culture of accountability and trust. It assesses the problems and prospects for the transformation processes in Eastern and Central Europe and what we can learn for the future. Sven Eliaeson is Professor of Sociology at the Centre for Social Studies in Warsaw. His main area of interest is the classics of social science, and his publications include Max Weber’s Methodologies: Interpretation and Critique (Polity Press, 2002). He has also published edited volumes on the Norwegian secession from Sweden and Nordic security policy.

Routledge contemporary Russia and Eastern Europe series

1 Liberal Nationalism in Central Europe Stefan Auer 2 Civil-Military Relations in Russia and Eastern Europe David J. Betz 3 The Extreme Nationalist Threat in Russia The growing influence of Western rightist ideas Thomas Parland 4 Economic Development in Tatarstan Global markets and a Russian region Leo McCann 5 Adapting to Russia’s New Labour Market Gender and employment strategy Edited by Sarah Ashwin 6 Building Democracy and Civil Society East of the Elbe Essays in honour of Edmund Mokrzycki Edited by Sven Eliaeson

Building Democracy and Civil Society East of the Elbe Essays in honour of Edmund Mokrzycki

Edited by Sven Eliaeson

First published 2006 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2006 Selection and editorial matter, Sven Eliaeson; individual chapters, the contributors

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006.

“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN10: 0-415-36809-X (hbk) ISBN10: 0-203-02783-3 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-36809-4 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-02783-7 (ebk)

Contents

List of figures List of tables Notes on contributors Foreword by George Soros Acknowledgments

1 Introduction

ix x xiii xxi xxiv

1

SVEN ELIAESON

PART I

Perspectives on civil society 2 Civil society: notes on the revival of a concept

15 17

SVEN REICHARDT

3 Civil society and its discontents: reflections on the North American experience

29

LAWRENCE A. SCAFF

4 Comments on Reichardt and Scaff

40

ˇ I MUSIL JIR

PART II

The political sociology of civil society in transitional societies 5 Democracy, inequality and state crisis GEORGE KOLANKIEWICZ

45 47

vi

Contents

6 State–society relations: a comparison of six post-communist countries

61

SALLY N. CUMMINGS AND OLE NØRGAARD

7 The middle class in transition from communism to capitalist society

87

HENRYK DOMANSKI

8 Transforming leviathan in South Eastern Europe: implications for social policy

105

NIKOLAI GENOV

9

Bringing “class” and “interest group” back in: Edmund Mokrzycki on civil society

119

S I D O N I A J E˛ D R Z E J E W S K A

10 Explaining the transformation from state socialism: revolution, class and elites

125

DAVID LANE

11 The climate of globalization: glocalization, civil identity, and theories of difference

145

WOLFGANG NATTER

12 Is there an organisational base for civil society in Central Eastern Europe? Social and economic potentials of civil society organisations in CEE after 1989

163

S L A W O M I R N A L E˛ C Z A N D J E R Z Y B A R T K O W S K I

13 Weber, Eastern Europe, and civil society

196

CHRISTOPHER ADAIR-TOTEFF

PART III

The perils of transitology: the role of intellectuals

203

14 How to be a sociologist and a humanist: sociology as a vocation in liquid-modern times

205

ZYGMUNT BAUMAN

Contents vii 15 Hidden actors, overlooked dimensions and blind intellectuals: nine paradoxes that account for institutionally entrenched ignorance

226

ANDRZEJ ZYBERTOWICZ

16 The enchantment of the social

238

RADOSLAW SOJAK

17 Was “real existing socialism” merely a premature form of rule by experts?

248

STEPHEN P. TURNER

PART IV

Comparative perspectives

263

18 Democratic consolidation in third wave democracies

265

AXEL HADENIUS

19 Building post-communist states: political corruption and strategies of party formation in Estonia and Latvia

288

LI BENNICH-BJÖRKMAN

20 Similarities and differences in the social reality and sociological analysis of Russia compared with Poland and Hungary

306

HELMUT STEINER

21 Third-way politics, sceptical voters, insecure societies

325

CHRISTOPHER G. A. BRYANT

22 National myths, pro-socialist capitalism, and the old and new mythmakers

341

JOANNA KURCZEWSKA

23 Civil society: the concept and the European level HARTMUT KAELBLE

360

viii

Contents

PART V

Democracy East of the Elbe: problems and prospects

367

24 Institutional modernization: a third stage of Polish transformation

369

LENA KOLARSKA-BOBINSKA

25 Threats to democracy: on some Polish paradoxes

379

ANDRZEJ RYCHARD

26 Building civil society and democracy East of the Elbe: problems and prospects

382

KRISTIAN GERNER

27 Democracy, memory and forgiving: paradoxes of dealing with the past in post-communist transitional societies – the Polish case

395

MAREK ZIÓLKOWSKI

Index

403

Figures

6.1 8.1 8.2 10.1 10.2 12.1 12.2

12.3

12.4

12.5 12.6 12.7

20.1 24.1

Categories of states (ideal types) Poverty perceived as a very serious societal problem, by country Right direction of the country’s development Transformation of state socialism: the Western consensus Transition from state socialism to capitalism: a class based interpretation Number of associations in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland, 1989–2001 Voluntary work in CSOs compared to (as a percentage of) non-agricultural employment in a given country or region, ca. 1995 Membership in at least one organization and membership in the subgroups, percentage of adult population declaring the membership Non-profit sector employment as a percentage of hired non-agricultural employment in CEE countries and in other regions, ca. 1995 Distribution of non-profit sector paid workforce in fields of the sector’s activity in CEE and EU, 1995 Sources of non-profit sector revenue in CEE countries and in other regions, ca. 1995 Employment in non-profit sector compared to (as a percentage of) employment in public sector in CEE countries and in other regions, ca. 1995 The main line of causality in the state socialist system Opinions about the Sejm

63 113 114 131 139 166

172

174

177 178 180

182 308 374

Tables

6.1 6.2

6.3 6.4

6.5

6.6 6.7

6.8

6.9

6.10 6.11 6.12

Responses to question 45: “What role should the public primarily play in politics and government?” Responses to question 28: “Do you believe that decisions are improved when concerned interests are incorporated or heard in the process of formulation?” Responses to question 27 about lobbying. Percent responding “agree” to the following statements. Responses to question 41: “To what extent do you agree with the following proposition?: To ensure compliance in the process of implementation, it is better when organizations, private business or other concerned interests assist in formulating the implementation design.” Responses to question 4: “If you needed external advice, whom would you prefer to rely on, or have you relied on to get the information you need?” Responses to question 54: “Which other country in the world do you think your country resembles most in ten years?” Responses to question 7: “In your own ministry, is/was it common practice that ministerial officials have close working relationships with significant organizations (business, NGO, or state) within the field of the ministry?” Responses to question 26: “Do civil servants in your ministry have close working relationships with major interest organizations within the ministry’s resort?” Responses to question 28a: “In which form is/was the concerned interests incorporated or consulted in the process of formulation?” Responses to question 22: “How do interest groups seek influence on lawmaking?” Responses to question 54: “Which other country in the world do you think your country resembles most? (at present)” Responses to question 49: “Do you agree that misuse of status positions is common in the politics of your country?”

68

69 69

70

71 72

73

73

74 75 75 76

Tables xi 6.13

Responses to question 50: “At which level of government do you think that the phenomenon of misuse is most common?” Percent responding “common” to the following levels 6.14 Responses to question 42: “To what extent do you agree with the following proposition? There are cases when powerful state and non-state actors (companies or individuals) can escape regulatory measures. Please evaluate the above statement in the case of the following actors.” Percent responding “strongly agree” or “agree” 6.15 Responses to question 53: “In your opinion, what are the main cause(s) of corruption in the state administration? (please rank these options, if possible).” 6.16 Responses to question 23 about the effects of external influence. Percent responding “agree” to the following statements. 7.1 Changes in socio-occupational structure in Poland (1982–2002) 8.1 Decline of welfare indicators in South East European societies, 1989 to 1999 8.2 Indicators for employment and labour markets in South East European societies 12.1 Social base of Civil Society Organisations (membership and volunteering rates), ca. 1999 12.2 Members in at least one organisation as a percentage of adult population by country/region, ca. 1999 12.3 Volunteers (doing unpaid voluntary work) in at least one organisation (or activity) of a given type as a percent of adult population by country/region, ca. 1999 12.4 Members in at least one organisation (or activity) of a given type by country/region, 1990–99 12.5 Proportion of the number of volunteers to the number of members in CSOs, in CEE and in other regions, 1990–99 12A1 Social base of Civil Society Organisations (membership and volunteering), according to the type of organisation, by country/region, ca. 1999 12A2 Membership dynamics according to the type of organisation, by country/region, 1990–99 20.1 Socio-Economic Indicators 20.2 Growth of Private Small-Scale Industry and Private Retail Trading in Hungary 20.3 Growth of the so-called cooperative sector in the Soviet Union (percent) 20.4 A research agenda for a neoclassical sociology of comparative capitalism

76

77

78

78 93 109 109 168 170

171 173 177

208–9 210–11 311 311 311 318

xii 20.5 20.6 24.1 24.2 24.3

Tables Radical change and three elites: elite of transition, elite of transformation and elites of consolidation Russian business elite 1999 by economic sector and age-group (in percent) Attitude to the principles of the democratic system (in percent) Level of satisfaction with the functioning of democracy (in percent) Evaluation of performance of EU and Polish institutions

320–1 322 373 373 377

Contributors

Christopher Adair-Toteff was born in 1950. He received his PhD in philosophy from the University of South Florida. From 1994 to 2001 he was a professor of philosophy at the American University in Bulgaria. From 2002–03 he was Visiting Associate Professor of Philosophy at Mississippi State University. He has published on many aspects of post-Kantian philosophy and has written a number of articles on Weber, Toennies, Simmel, and Vahinger. He is working on a book on the Southwest school of Neo-Kantianism. Jerzy Bartkowski, is in the Political Sociology Section, Institute of Sociology, University of Warsaw. He obtained his PhD from Warsaw University in 1990 on “Career’s Patterns of Local Elites.” His areas of interest are local politics, electoral behavior and political participation. His main publications include Strategies of Local Authorities, 1990 (in Polish); Career’s Patterns of Local Elites, 1991 (in Polish); and Local Elites in Poland 1965–1995, 1996 (in Polish). Zygmunt Bauman was born in Poznan in 1925, and is now Professor in sociology at Warsaw University and Leeds, UK. Zygmunt has numerous publications on the human condition in post-modernity, including Liquid Modernity (2001), Liquid Love (2003), Liquid Life (2005). Li Bennich-Björkman is an associate professor in political science at the University of Uppsala. She received her doctorate from the same university in 1991. She has since published a monography in English on the sociology of science and the preconditions for institutional creativity in 1998. In 2002, another volume, only available in Swedish, on the preconditions for institutional change and school integration, appeared. For the past ten years, Li Bennich-Björkman has been preoccupied by issues of political culture, political change and development in the Baltic states. Christopher G. A. Bryant is a graduate of Leicester and Southampton Universities. He has been Professor of Sociology at Salford University since 1982. The last of his three authored books is Practical Sociology: Postempiricism and the Reconstruction of Theory and Application (Polity, 1995) and the last of his six co-edited books is The Contemporary Giddens (Palgrave, 2001). He

xiv Contributors first met Edmund Mokrzycki in 1970 and their collaboration included two coedited books, The New Great Transformation? (Routledge, 1994) and Democracy, Civil Society and Pluralism in Comparative Perspective (IFiS, 1995), and a visiting professorship at the CEU, Warsaw, 1996–99. He is currently writing a book on the Nations of Britain. Sally N. Cummings is Lecturer in Politics at the University of Edinburgh, UK. She is the author of The Dynamics of Centre-Periphery Relations in Kazakhstan (Brookings Institution and Royal Institute of International Affairs, 2000), editor of Power and Change in Central Asia (Routledge, 2002) and co-editor of Kosovo: Perceptions of War and its Aftermath (Continuum, 2002). Henryk Domanski was born in 1952, and obtained his PhD in 1983; habilitation in 1987. He is Professor of Sociology since 1991, and, since July 2000, Director of the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFiS) in Warsaw, and Head of Department of Social Structure Research and Department of Studies on Methods and Techniques of Sociological Research in IFiS. His main field of interests are studies on social stratification and mobility and the methodology of social research. He has authored 22 books (mostly in Polish), primarily on labour market segmentation, inequality of sex, comparative social stratification and methodology of social research. Among his most important publications are: Prestige (1999), Social Hierarchies in Poland in the 1990s (2000), On the Verge of Convergence. Social Stratification in Eastern Europe (2000), Women on the Polish Labour Market (2001) – the latter two edited by the Central European University Press, The Polish Middle Class (2002), Poverty and Social Stratification in Eastern Europe (2002). Sven Eliaeson (born 1948) got his PhD from Uppsala University (1982). Present position: Professor in sociology at the Centre for Social Studies in Warsaw. Docent in political science at Stockholm University since 1996. Numerous research sojourns at American and German universities. Main area of interest: the classics of social science. He has recently published Max Weber’s Methodologies. Interpretation and Critique (Polity Press, 2002). Has also published edited volumes on the Norwegian secessions from Sweden and Nordic security policy. Nikolai Genov is Professor of Sociology at the Free University in Berlin. He received his Dr.phil. from the University of Leipzig (Germany) in 1975, and Dr.sc. from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in 1986. His research fields include social theory, social change and development, perception, assessment and management of social risks. He has authored and edited 38 books and about 250 articles published in 24 countries. Recent book publications include Managing Transformations in Eastern Europe (Paris and Sofia: UNESCO/MOST and REGLO, 1999); Unemployment. Risks and Reactions (editor, Paris and Sofia: UNESCO/MOST and Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation,

Contributors xv 1999); Labour Markets and Unemployment in Southeastern Europe (editor, Berlin: WZB, 2000); Social Sciences in Southeastern Europe (co-editor, Paris and Bonn: ISSC and IZ (2002); Advances in Sociological Knowledge (editor, Paris: ISSC, 2002). He has been visiting scholar and lecturer at Free University and Humboldt University (Berlin, Germany), Moscow University (Russia), University of California (Berkeley, USA), Korea University (Seoul, Korea), University of Lund (Sweden), Central European University (Warsaw), National Council of Research (Rome, Italy), among others. He has been International Consulting Editor of American Journal of Sociology, member of the Editorial Board of Current Sociology, member of the Board of Directors of the European Coordination Centre for Research and Documentation in the Social Sciences (the Vienna Centre), Vice-President of the Intergovernmental Committee of the UNESCO Programme Management of Social Transformations, and coordinator of scientific projects of UNESCO, UNDP, ILO, the European Union and other organizations. Currently he is VicePresident of the International Social Science Council, Paris and Director of the UNESCO-ISSC International Summer School Comparative Research in the Social Sciences. Kristian Gerner is Professor of History, University of Lund, Sweden. In 1994–2002 he was professor of East European Culture and History, University of Uppsala Sweden. He has been guest researcher at the Swedish Institute for International Affairs in 1982 and 1985. In 1988–89 he was a member of the research group “Approaching Eastern Europe” at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies in Wassenaar. Publications include The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the Postwar Era (Gower, 1985), Ideology and Rationality in the Soviet Model. A Legacy for Gorbachev (1989) and The Baltic States and the End of the Soviet Empire, 1993 (both with Stefan Hedlund, Routledge) and in Swedish, Central Europe. A History (Natur och Kultur, 1997) and The Mediterranean of the North. The Baltic Region: History, Myth, Project (with Klas-Göran Karlsson and Anders Hammarlund, Natur och Kultur, 2002). Axel Hadenius (born 1945) is professor of Political Science at Lund University since 2006, and has his PhD from Uppsala University. His publications include Democracy and Development (Cambridge University Press, 1992), Democracy’s Victory and Crisis (editor, Cambridge University Press, 1997), and Institutions and Democratic Citizenship (Oxford University Press, 2001). Sidonia Je˛drzejewska has an MA in sociology (1999) of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan (Poland), and is a PhD candidate at Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. Doctoral dissertation on New Regionalism and Civil Society. Hartmut Kaelble (born in 1940, in Göppingen, Germany). PhD-dissertation 1966. Habilitation at Freie Universitaet, Berlin, 1971. Professor for social history at the Humboldt University, Berlin, since 1991. Research fields:

xvi Contributors Comparative social history of Europe, history of European integration, European identity and European public sphere. Major publications: Europäer über Europa. Das europäische Selbstverständigung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 2001). Wege zur Demokratie. Von der Fransösichen Revolution zur Europäischen Union (München: DVS, 2001). George Kolankiewicz is Professor of Sociology with special reference to Central Europe, and since 2001 the Director of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at University College London. Born in 1946 he was educated in England, graduating with a First class honours in Sociology from the University of Leeds and a PhD from the University of Essex where he lectured before coming to SSEES/UCL in 1999. Most of his articles and books refer to the politics and society of Poland and the region, and he has broadcast and lectured on related topics over the years. Some of the committees on which he served included ESCOR at the Department for International Development under whose auspices (and previously the Know How Fund) he carried out a considerable amount of social development work in Poland, Romania and the Baltic States. In 1986–87 he spent a year in Washington DC as a Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars at the Smithsonian Institution and has also held British Academy and Leverhulme Fellowships. Lena Kolarska-Bobinska is director of the Institute for Public Affairs, an independent non-partisan public policy think-tank, conducting research as well as societal analysis and presenting policy recommendations. Professor Lena Kolarska-Bobinska is a graduate from the Department of Sociology at the Warsaw University. In 1970–91 she was working at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the Polish Academy of Sciences. From 1991 until 1997 she was director of the Public Opinion Research Center, Poland’s biggest public opinion survey institute. In 1993 she became Titular Professor. She is an author of over 150 publications, books and articles, a senior lecturer at universities in Poland and abroad. Professor Lena Kolarska-Bobinska is a member of many Polish and international associations and advisory boards, i.e. of the Polish President’s Reflection Group and of the Socio-Economic Strategy Committee – Advisory Board of the Prime Minister as well as a member of the Advisory Group dealing with “Social Sciences and Humanities in the European Research Area” in the European Commission. Joanna Kurczewska, born in Warsaw, is a sociologist and historian of ideas, and professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, The Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw. Lecturer at Graduate School for Social Research, Polish Academy of Sciences, and at Warsaw University. PhD 1978, habilitation 1990, and full professor 2001. Some recent non-Polish publications: “Frühe polnische Nationalismus und die Frauenthematik,” in: Geschlecht und Nationalismus in Mittel- und Ost-Europa (Verlag Osnabruck, 2000, pp. 49–77); “Issues of National Identity: Poland,” in Transitional Soci-

Contributors xvii eties in Comparison: East-Central Europe versus Taiwan (Taipei-Berlin, 2000); “F. Znaniecki and His Lessons for Central and Eastern Europe,” in Florian Znaniecki’s Sociological Theory and the Challenges of 21st Century (Frankfurt a/M Peter Lang, 2000, pp. 201–25); “Local Civil Societies in the Nineties: A Diagnosis,” in: Polish Sociological Review, No 3/2002, pp. 297–31; “What Is Likely to Happen to Polish Collective Consciousness After Accession to the European Union?,” Polish Sociological Review, No. 1/2003, pp. 83–93. At present she is Chief Editor of Polish Sociological Review and on the editorial board of Polish Foreign Affairs, Etyka. David Lane is Senior Research Associate, supported by the Leverhulme Foundation, currently researching the relationship of class to the process of transformation in Russia and Ukraine. Educated at Birmingham and Oxford Universities, he has taught at Essex University and Birmingham University where he was Professor of Sociology. His most recent books include: The Legacy of State Socialism (Editor and contributor, Maryland and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002); Russian Banking: Evolution, Problems and Prospects (Editor and contributor, Edward Elgar, 2002); and The Political Economy of Russian Oil (Editor and contributor, Maryland and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999, 225pp., with Cameron Ross): The Transition from Communism to Capitalism (St Martin’s Press, 1999, 258pp. Japanese translation, 2001); The Rise and Fall of State Socialism (Polity, 1996, 223pp. Russian Edition in press). Jir˘i Musil is professor of Sociology and Demography at Charles University in Prague. In the years 1989–90 he served as director of the renewed Institute of Sociology of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, and from 1990–93 he was Academic Director of the Central European University in Prague. Until 2003 he was teaching at CEU in Budapest and Warsaw. He is member of Academia Europea, World Academy of Art and Sciences, and Academia Scientiarum et Artium Europaea. In the years 1999–2001 he was President of European Sociological Association. He is author and editor of 13 books. The main fields of his interests are urban and political sociology, problems of nationalism. Slawomir Nale˛cz was born in 1970, graduated from the Institute of Sociology, Warsaw University, 1994, and is a researcher at the Nonprofit Organizations Research Unit, Institute of Political Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences. He completed his PhD, Social Impact of the Nonprofit Sector in III Republic of Poland in 2005 and is Lecturer at Collegium Civitas. Areas of Interest: Civil Society, Nonprofit Sector. Main publication: “Associational Capacity” in: The Future of Civil Society in Central Europe Making Central European Nonprofit Organizations Work (editors A. Zimmer and E. Priller forthcoming). Wolfgang Natter is Director, Alliance of Social, Political, Ethical and Cultural Thought, and Professor in the Department of Political Science, Virginia Tech

xviii Contributors University. He is founding director of the University of Kentucky’s Committee on Social Theory and founding co-director of the International Social Theory Consortium, and co-director of the Center for Democratic Planning and Participatory Research. Recent books include Objectivity and its Other (co-editor, 1996), The Social and Political Body (co-editor, 1996) and Literature at War, 1914–1940: Representing the ‘Time of Greatness’ in Germany (1999). Ongoing research on space and social theory, critical political geography, globalization “from above” and “from below.” Ole Nørgaard is Professor of comparative politics at the University of Aarhus. He is author of numerous articles and books on post-Soviet politics and economics. His recent works include The Baltic States after Independence, 2nd edn (Edward Elgar, 1999) and Economic Institutions and Economic Reform: A Comparative Analysis of Post-communist Countries (Edward Elgar, 2000). Sven Reichardt was born in Bremen, Germany, in 1967. He is Associate Professor of history at the University of Konstanz He studied history, political science, psychology and Italian studies in Hamburg and at the Free University Berlin. In 2000 he completed his PhD at the Free University Berlin. He has been a Research Fellow at the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB) in the Working Group “Civil Society from the Perspectives of Historical Social Sciences.” He is author of Faschistische Kampfbünde. Gewalt und Gemeinschaft im italienischen Squadrismus und in der deutschen SA (Cologne: Böhlau, 2002). Andrzej Rychard has an MA from the University of Warsaw, Department of Sociology, 1974; a PhD in Humanities, Polish Academy of Sciences, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, 1977; habilitation 1987; docent 1989; professor 1993. Research interests include sociology of politics, economic sociology, sociology of institutions, sociology of post-communist transitions. He is Director of Centre for Social Studies in Warsaw and Director for GSSR (Graduate School for Social Research) at IFiS PAN. He was Head of the Sociology Department, Central European University, Warsaw, 2002–03 and Director, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences, 1991–2000. He has been visiting scholar at Indiana University and The University of Chicago. Lawrence A. Scaff, born 1942, is Professor of Political Science and Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Wayne State University, Detroit. He has published extensively in social theory and political thought, including the book Fleeing the Iron Cage: Culture, Politics, and Modernity in the Thought of Max Weber. He received his PhD in Political Science from the University of California in Berkeley in 1971. Radoslaw Sojak, was born 1975, and obtained a PhD, Institute of Sociology at Nicholas Copernicus University: main fields of interest include sociology of science and knowledge and social theory. Radoslaw has an MA in sociology in 1998; PhD in sociology 2002. Major publications: two books forthcoming

Contributors xix (both in Polish) – Anthropological Paradox: Sociology of Knowledge as a Perspective in Social Theory and Reality Lost: On the Social Construction of the Unknown. George Soros, Hungarian born American philantropist. Founder of The Open Society Foundation and the Central European University. Born in Budapest, Hungary on August 12, 1930. He survived the Nazi occupation of Budapest and left communist Hungary in 1947 for England, where he graduated from the London School of Economics. While a student at LSE, Mr Soros became familiar with the work of the philosopher Karl Popper, who had a profound influence on his thinking and later on his professional and philanthropic activities. In 1956 Mr Soros moved to the United States, where he began to accumulate a large fortune through an international investment fund he founded and managed. Today he is Chairman of Soros Fund Management LLC. Mr Soros has been active as a philanthropist since 1979, when he began providing funds to help black students attend Capetown University in apartheid South Africa. Today he is Chairman of the Open Society Institute and the founder of a network of philanthropic organizations active in more than 50 countries in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the United States. These foundations are dedicated to building and maintaining the infrastructure and institutions of an open society. In 1992, Mr Soros founded the Central European University, with its primary campus in Budapest. He is the author of eight books including The Bubble of American Supremacy (PublicAffairs January 2004); George Soros on Globalization (2002); The Alchemy of Finance (1987); Opening the Soviet System (1990); Underwriting Democracy (1991); Soros on Soros: Staying Ahead of the Curve (1995); The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered (1998); and Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism (2000). His articles and essays on politics, society, and economics regularly appear in major newspapers and magazines around the world. Helmut Steiner, was born 1936, in Christofhammer (today in the Czech republic). He obtained his PhD in 1963, at Humboldt University, Berlin; habilitation, 1977, at Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR, Berlin. Professor in sociology (1979). Academy research until 1991. Recurrent visiting scholar at WZB since 1990. Member of the Leibniz-society. He has many publications on intellectual history and on Russian affairs. Among his books are Wissenschaftliches Schöpfentum und Schulen in der Wissenschaf (Berlin, 1977) and Russland – Wohin? Russland aus der Sicht russischer Soziologen (edited together with W. A. Jadow, Berlin, 1999). Stephen P. Turner (born 1951) is Graduate Research Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of South Florida, Tampa. His PhD is from the University of Missouri. His dissertation was published as Sociological Explanation as Translation. He is the author of a number of books in the history of social science, philosophy of social science, and social

xx

Contributors and political theory, including Max Weber: The Lawyer as Social Thinker and Max Weber and the Dispute Over Reason and Value: A Study in Philosophy, Ethics, and Politics (both with Regis Factor); The Impossible Science: An Institutional Analysis of American Sociology (with Jonathan Turner); The Search for a Methodology of Social Science: Durkheim, Weber, and the Nineteenth Century Problem of Cause, Probability, and Action. His most recent book is Liberal Democracy 3.0: Civil Society in an Age of Experts.

Marek Ziólkowski was born in 1949 and obtained a PhD from Lódz University in 1974. He is Professor of Sociology, Institute of Sociology, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland and Warsaw School of Social Psychology and Institute of Political Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw. His major books include Linguistic Differentiation and Social Structure (1976) (with A. Piotrowski); Knowledge, Individual, Society. An Essay in the Sociology of Knowledge (1989); Mentality of Poles (1991) (with J. Koralewicz); Changes of Interests and Values of the Polish Society (2002); L’interactionnisme symbolique, PUR Rennes (1994, 1997) (with J. M. De Queiroz). Andrzej Zybertowicz was born in Bydgoszcz, Poland, in 1954. He obtained a PhD, Adam Mickiewicz University Poznan, 1985; habilitation, 1997 Warsaw University. He is professor of sociology at the Nicolaus Copernicus University Torun, since 1999. Research fields include sociology of knowledge; social theory; sociology of covert action. Major publications: Przemoc i poznanie: Studium z nie-klasycznej socjologii wiedzy (Violence and Cognition: An Exercise in Non-Classical Sociology of Knowledge) (Torun: UMK 1995); Privatizing the Police-State: The Case of Poland (London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press 2000, co-authored with Maria Los).

Foreword George Soros

Two important considerations played a crucial role in the decision to move the Sociology Department of the Central European University to Warsaw: one was the important professional tradition of Polish sociology, the other the presence of excellent and devoted scholars like Edmund Mokrzycki. Poland had a unique situation at the eve of the political changes. Sociology, which had been either banned or marginalized during the decades of Communist rule in large parts of East and Central Europe, could flourish and produce internationally acclaimed results in Poland. At the end of the 1940s, sociology, critical social science, became stigmatized in the Communist world and replaced by impoverished, dogmatic, vulgar Marxism, a pseudo-science, called “scientific socialism.” Poland alone was capable of continuing an important scholarly tradition and producing internationally accepted scholars of Edmund Mokrzycki’s caliber. Edmund Mokrzycki once wrote that perhaps “the Eastern Europeans have been unlucky with the timing of the change.” Perhaps he was right, but the changes were perfectly timed for him. In Edmund Mokrzycki, the momentous political and social changes found a sensitive and well-prepared analyst who was capable of understanding, commenting upon the political processes and interpreting the “great transformation.” He was not a transitologist, as he clearly understood that the seemingly neutral, descriptive notion of transition hides unidirectional teleological constructs, like a transition to Western-type capitalism. He was not only sensitive but a modest scholar as well, who knew that it was not possible to foresee the exact direction of the changes. He did not pretend that he had the foreknowledge that would have allowed him to hypothesize the certain outcome, the end-result of the social, political and economic transformation. This is the reason why he decided to reach back to an unfashionable author, to an unfashionable book – which I myself was able to make good use of in my latest book – to the unfashionable notions of Karl Polanyi’s Great Transformation. Transformation, unlike transition, does not presuppose a necessary and single, ideologically given, outcome as a result of social, political and economic changes. The scholar, by analyzing the transformation, focuses on the process, rather than on the end-state. In The New Great Transformation?, a book he

xxii Foreword co-edited with Christopher Bryant, Edmund Mokrzycki quoted Polanyi in the introduction: “The idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surrounding into a wilderness. Inevitably society took measures to protect itself, but whatever measures it took impaired the self-regulation of the market, disorganized industrial life, and thus endangered society in yet another way.” Economic liberalism, wrote Mokrzycki – and this is what I call “market fundamentalism” – had to be counterbalanced by social protection. I have expressed similar views in my latest article, published in the New Republic. It was not easy at the beginning of the changes to be cautious, to remember the necessity of social intervention. This was the time when everybody tried hard to get rid of all kinds of social protection and state intervention, when the task seemed to be to get rid of the remnant of the omnipotent Communist state. This was the time when the hopes for the “withering away of the state” fueled the optimism of freedom without social responsibility, freedom without obedience to the law. The lessons learned from the tragic consequences of a weak state ruled by oligarchs in Russia clearly show that Edmund Mokrzycki was right. Professor Mokrzycki did not hide where he stood. Immediately after the fall of Communism, in the atmosphere of uncritical acceptance of the idea of market fundamentalism, he had the courage to state: “It is difficult, if not impossible for a social and political scientist to refrain from criticism of a doctrine which disregards social, cultural and historical factors.” He was an adherent of more gradual changes, which might cause less social suffering, which might mitigate the negative social consequences of the transformation. In this he once more followed Polanyi, who in his Great Transformation asked the question: “Why should the ultimate victory of a trend be taken as a proof of the ineffectiveness of the efforts to slow down the process?” Polanyi, with enviable modesty, tried to answer his question: The rate of change is often of no less importance than the direction of the change itself; but while the latter frequently does not depend upon our volition, it is the rate at which we allow change to take place which may well depend upon us . . . For at this rate, mainly, depending on whether the dispossessed could adjust themselves to altered conditions without fatally damaging their subsistence, human and economic, physical and moral; whether they would find new employment in the fields of opportunity indirectly connected with the change. The answer depends in every case on the relative rates of change and adjustment. The usual “long-term” considerations of economic theory are inadmissible; . . . “long-term” considerations are meaningless. If the immediate effect of a change is deleterious, then, until proof to the contrary, the final effect is deleterious. Edmund Mokrzycki did not cite these lines from Polanyi’s book. But he

Foreword xxiii warned that “In the context of rapidly rising unemployment . . . state health and welfare services which cannot cope . . . the governments of East-Central Europe will have to search for new balances between economic liberalism and social protection appropriate to each of their countries . . . Transformative economics cannot succeed so long as it is a project devised by technical experts and imposed on a population there to be manipulated for its own good.” We should feel fortunate that this modest and serious scholar was with us during this long and historically crucial decade. We should remember Edmund Mokrzycki’s responsible and cautionary words, and take them seriously.

Acknowledgments

Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB), Central European University in Budapest (CEU), Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun (UMK), The Institute for Philosophy and Sociology at the Polish Academy of Science in Warsaw, and the Polish State Committee for Scientific Research, have all generously contributed to bringing about this publication and the symposium it builds on.

1

Introduction Sven Eliaeson

The Berlin wall came down in 1989. This unexpected event as well as the rapid Soviet implosion, and the – after all, it should be emphasized – relatively peaceful ensuing secessions, taught us that prediction is not the strong side of scholarly endeavours in history and sociology; it came as a surprise to most historians and social scientists, with few exceptions.1 The decomposition of the Soviet empire is the first time in world history in which an empire leaves the scene without any preceding lost wars, which makes the Russian experience unique. The communist collapse is, however, nevertheless indicative of a more general proposition, namely – again – that modern societies cannot rely on merely ideological legitimacy, with preserved stability. This is in fact recurrently confirmed, ever since the short reign of Savonarola in Florence, in the 1490s. In the 1990s, transitology emerged as a transdisciplinary endeavour with policy implications, trying to deal with the social engineering of market- and civil societies East of the Elbe, when the old “command economies” were to be replaced by more competitive alternatives, better aligned to a globalized economy. Today the concept of transformation is replacing transition, in order to avoid the teleological character of the former term, with its Western bias.2 If, for instance, the new central Asiatic states were to develop into Modernity they would do better to acknowledge their own traditions and cultural heritage, rather than try to implement foreign models. In a country such as Kyrgyzstan that would mean profiting also from the communist heritage; as a full-scale early experiment in expert rule and as a secularizing remedy against the inherent antiModernity elements in Islamic culture. There are multiple roads to Modernity and “East of the Elbe” is a broad concept, with a huge variety of cultures and infrastructures. There are a number of mixed experiences to relate to, both concerning the actual development of liberal democracy and economic growth, as well as the role and responsibility of the intellectuals in these processes.3 As one might expect, some countries are more successful than others. This opens scope for chasing the explanatory “independent variable” by means of comparative research. The development leading to the German reunification and – in effect – the

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real end of the Second World War, with its ensuing occupation of Central Europe, and, moreover, the final end of the Westphalian era,4 started in Poland, with the visit by the pope Jan Pawel II back in 1979 and the independent trade union Solidarity becoming a popular mass movement – the snowball put in motion by Lech Wale˛sa. The events demonstrated that ideological legitimacy is fragile and vulnerable, when the system cannot deliver. Nikita Khrushchev in the early 1960s reportedly told his colleagues in the Soviet Politbureau that it was high time to prepare for the fading away of the state, which Lenin once had called for. Around 1980 was mentioned as an appropriate time horizon. A date should be fixed for the abolition of apartment rents, the introduction of free meals for everybody, zero tariffs for public transportation, the abolition of income taxes, reduction of working hours to 35 hours a week and a minimum wage for all working people. This is the only occasion a leader in the communist world has come up with such a bold suggestion, the fulfilment of a true communist communion and the abolition of the state. There is an “Augustinian” element in Communism, aspiring to realize Utopia on Earth, but normally for ever postponed, with a moving time horizon. After Khruschchev’s fall from power we heard no more about plans to put the withering away of the state on the agenda again. “Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element. Public life gradually falls asleep, a few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless experience direct and rule. Among them, in reality, only a dozen outstanding heads do the leading and an elite of the working class is invited from time to time to meetings where they are to applaud the speeches of the leaders, and to approve proposed resolutions unanimously – at bottom, then, a clique affair – a dictatorship, to be sure, not the dictatorship of the proletariat but only the dictatorship of a handful of politicians, that is a dictatorship in the bourgeois sense, in the sense of the rule of the Jacobins” is a long and prophetic quotation from – not Max Weber, as one might be tempted to assume, but – Rosa Luxemburg, together with Karl Liebknecht the founder of the German communist party.5 A democracy without a civic “republican” creed is merely an empty shell, form without content, for social engineering “from above”, expert rule in the spirit of Saint-Simon/Comte. The reborn concept of “civil society” has been pivotal for more than a decade, when discussing the special features of political culture and also regions East of the Elbe. It is new wine in old skins, and the concept has been hijacked for various purposes. Despite the real and ideological denotations of the concept of “civil society”, basic confusion about the meaning and implications of the concept remains. Mostly the Mafia is excluded and stamp collectors included, as well as bowling clubs. Concepts actually form not only our perception of social reality but to some extent social reality as such. Thus, social science tends to become a battle-

Introduction 3 field for the launching and interpretation and counter launching and counter interpretation of concepts. “What is civil society?” must be one of the most frequent titles for book chapters and articles during the last decade. To Hegel, it meant the public sphere at large, subordinated to the state, while in modern welfare state research it rather refers to something small scale with visible responsibilities and interpersonal links for social control: the parish, village or even family (household), or Gemeinschaft rather than Gesellschaft, to invoke Tönnies’s classic terminology.6 In Poland both magnitudes might be viable, since the Polish nation survived because the Catholic Church substituted for a legitimate national state structure. Yet, the social movement of Solidarity is sometimes spoken of as the beginning of civil society in Poland; civil society understood as popular protest movements and civil disobedience. This is a bit remote, compared with the original meaning in the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment “Four stages”-thinkers. The American notion has been inspired by diverse sources, such as Greek Antiquity, Samuel Pufendorf, as well as by Habermas (Alan Wolfe, 1989) – and American pragmatist philosophy. Here the relationship to communitarianism becomes an issue. There are reasons to scrutinize the “communitarian” notion of civil society, how parties and civil associations on the sub-state level might be understood as part of an intermediary structure in the process of democratization, increased democratic participation. There is something lacking in a democracy implemented “from above” by a strong state. At the same time protest movements as such are “negative” politics, articulating problems rather than tackling them. How is the lacuna to be filled: by more liberal constitutionalism, interpersonal trust, and/or various civil associations (NGOs)? Or what . . .? Trust and game theory combined might provide one end of the stick to pick up.7 What is slowly eroding West of the Elbe is now being built East of the Elbe. There is no necessary contradiction involved, from a perspective of historical relativism. If the political parties did not exist we would have to reinvent them, or some similar intermediary structure between the people and the legislature. In the USA the political parties as such have for long been without power, yet filling their basic function well in election times, in what appears as a well functioning democracy, or at least constitutional order, on the local level, albeit more or less crippled on the national level, quite in line with the hegemonic creed (American Exceptionalism, as described by S. M. Lipset, 1996). In countries such as Germany and Sweden, party membership has dropped dramatically over the last decade and the big parties are “under fire” for oligarchic tendencies (we need only to mention Richard von Weizsäcker and Wilhelm Hennis and their criticism of Parteiverdrossenheit).8 The degree of organization is still fairly high but often “petrified” and centralized interest organizations have a “top-heavy” bureaucracy, almost having become cogs in the state apparatus. In post-Enlightenment Modernity the incommensurability of ultimate values is a painful insight, “the seamy side of scientific value relativism” (Arnold Brecht, 1959). Yet, the value deficit in increasingly fragmentarized societies must find remedies or substitutes, a basic problem area of democratic society. In

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most places around the globe Democracy has replaced Christianity or various totalitarian ideologies as the common value community (“overideology”), although with a variety of transitional arrangements. Already de Tocqueville was painfully aware of a totalitarian element in mass democracy, which is moreover verified in the Soviet experiment (and previously in the French Revolution in Robespierre’s Rousseau-inspired “Stalinism”). Yet some common “body of beliefs” (Edward Shils) or “community of assumptions” (Amitai Etzioni, 1993) constituting a basic consensus is required for civil society and a smoothly functioning civic culture. Often these common values are embodied in religious traditions, as a medium for legitimacy, like the heritage of the Orthodox church in the Russian state today, which is at least posing as “democratic”. An efficient legal system is just as functional for commercial life as rules of the game are for playing soccer or cricket, but strengthened by some belief system, about “right” and “wrong” (“or the realities these concepts are supposed to cover”, as Scandinavian legal positivists would have it). Fictitious or not, law requires notions of justice as “oil in the machinery”, as useful “social fictions”. Today, democratic values are in most parts of the world more marketable for this purpose than theocratic, elitist, or ideological ones, although the elitist challenge is virulent. Not the least the sudden collapse of the DDR-regime shows the weakness of pure ideological legitimacy. “Talibans” are not lock-stepping with the famous iron cage of rationality, to use Weber’s mistranslated metaphor for the squirrel’s wheel of irreversible Modernity; they are today pre-Modern and backward-oriented. But how to reconcile the autonomy of science/expertise and democratic accountability is by nature increasingly difficult – an “iceberg”.9 There are obstacles along the routes to a democratic culture. Trust in just institutions is crucial in order to bring about a democratic ambience, something that requires trustworthy institutions. Democracy (i.e. pluralism, polyarchy and open society) is a plant to water every day and constantly under threat also West of the Elbe, from uncontrolled experts, “iron triangles”, oligarchic tendencies, etc.10 Yet the legitimacy of any stable order has many sources, including the individual, thus creating a tension between utilitarian “free riders” and the civility and citizen creed that makes society hang together and “tick”. Mancur Olson’s theories about collective versus individual rationality have a high explanatory relevance in cases where special interest organizations have become negativists, with regard to infrastructural reforms and realignment.11 The new post-Communist nations East of the Elbe have been victims of invading Western intellectuals, trying to export shock therapy of a utilitarian liberal kind – or various notions of “real existing” civil society. In Northwestern Europe, social engineering peaked between the 1930s and 1960s, when contacts between power and intellectuals were still intense12 and with a considerable personal overlap; a number of scholars were making double careers. The intellectuals – domestic and foreign – form a pivotal stratum with an ambiguous role in relation to the political power.13 Russia as a comparative case appears as crucial, for a number of reasons. Russia has twice been the victim of full scale social experiments, trying to

Introduction 5 implement ideological visions of, first, collectivism and state interventionism as well as a rather extreme form of liberal market orientation in the early 1990s. From a traditional Russian perspective both communism as well as liberal capitalism must appear as foreign penetration, violating a domestic legacy with deep roots. However, the mir- and semstvo-tradition of local participation never promoted innovation and development. Private ownership is crucial for economic development14 and somehow the collectivist communist notion found fertile soil in the traditions among the Russian peasantry. The rural Russian communities might have provided a democratic grass root institution but did not stimulate progress and modernizing initiatives. One lacuna was (lack of) the notion of private ownership.15 The Russian situation remains not only momentous but also opaque. In media reports we read time and again about the (economic) clouds over Moscow now finally gradually evaporating. However, most scholars express deep pessimism, due to the lack of civil society and intermediary structures. Democracy is merely a “theatre” with weak popular support, albeit necessary to satisfy the creditors and secure foreign investments and World Bank loans. Others say that selfinitiated grass root-activities are really emerging, in places, with “neighbourhood crime-watch”, etc. However, the capital that escapes Russia probably outnumbers the inflow several times.16 Putin’s plebiscitary leadership might answer to the demands and expectations in Russia today. It is hardly a stable democracy yet, although the new Russian constitution appears as something that democracy or at least a functional constitutional order could “grow into”. The same could, however, have been said about the German Weimar republic.17 In 1993, the Russian president somewhat paradoxically made a coup d’état against parliamentarian constitutionalism, in order to avoid a “reverse shift” away from democracy. It is time for a retrospective evaluation of post-1989 events. What are the obstacles against and prospects for Russian plebiscitary rule resulting in a polyarchy and legal order with calculability and respect for individual rights, with citizens instead of subjects and a functioning legal system? What risks are there for a “reverse shift” (which to some extent has already occurred, with a “shorter leash” on the few independent media that still exist)? Russia was never a Rechtsstaat, and democracy has a bad name (compare demokrad and dermokrat).18 No real stable party system is in sight, although there is a certain calculability, some options for rational choice for the electorate, compared to let’s say Ukraine or Armenia.19 Yet one might say that there are many alternatives but few choices. However, a rich variety of disparate political groups is rather typical of post-revolutionary countries in the early stages, when political opinion formation has not as yet crystallized. Historically, a certain “overkill” in party supply is natural and due to a Darwinian selection process. The Russian experience from a comparative perspective provides fuel for historical “long lines”, also involving cultural (religious) factors, such as the famous and very momentous “1054–divide”, when the churches finally separated. The importance of this cultural divide is illustrated by the fact that all ten

6 Sven Eliaeson new countries to enter the EU in May 2004 are from West of that divide. To the East, civility and civic culture and participation in associational life is significantly lower, as is economic activity. Russia has a strong historical identity as the Third Rome or New Jerusalem, carrying the legacy of the Orthodox Byzantine empire. South-East European states such as Romania and Bulgaria are – in contrast to Russia – expected to enter the EU in the next wave. There is a risk that Russia will become the “identity giving other” for Europe.20 “Post 1989” has ceased to be a recent concept; rather it is now turning into “recent history”. It is unclear if the reunification of Germany and the implosion of the Soviet Union means the end of history or the return of history; confusingly there are numerous indications for both interpretations. The many secessions and nation-buildings demonstrate the power of old forces in history. Liberal constitutionalism has been victorious to death and has few articulate enemies, in sharp contrast to the situation in the twentieth century, with many cases of weak democracies in which the dominant political actors were opposed to the very system (cases such as the German Weimar-Republic and France after World War 2). Fascism is the great loser of the twentieth century and we can no longer speak of a hostile environment to democracy. Instead we speak about the democratic deficit and appoint parliamentary investigations (Norway and Sweden) trying to locate the elusive power in society. Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the former Estonian secretary of state for foreign affairs, hit the nail on the head in his Humboldt speech several years ago, with his statement that there is an increasing feeling of uneasiness over rule for the people by the people having been replaced by the rule by experts over things, a core formulation alluding to a famous formulation by Friedrich Engels.21 What are the main obstacles to the pursuit of successful transitions/transformations to pluralist democracy (or polyarchy)? How are corruption and “rent seeking” to be purged from public institutions? What is the role of “civil society” in such endeavours? Such questions should be addressed from a comparative perspective. The metaphoric use of East of the Elbe is an allusion to Max Weber, who dedicated lots of time, especially in the 1890s and the years 1905 and 1917, to transitological problems, in his case mainly concerning rural sociology and constitutionalism, respectively. In his lecture for Austrian officers on “Socialism” from 1918 he warns of the perils of a system in which both the means of administration and the means of production are concentrated in the same hands. He also had a famous quarrel with Joseph Schumpeter in a Viennese coffee house, on Bolshevik Russia as a full scale experiment in modernization.22 Other works by Weber have relevance, one needs only to mention his typology of legitimate rule, especially charismatic legitimation.23 This does not exhaust the topic. His main work is his comparative sociology of religion. Although Weber’s own problem was to explain the uniqueness of Western capitalist take-off and Modernization, parts of his work nevertheless are highly suggestive for recent theories about “Multiple Modernities” (Eisenstadt, 2000; Wittrock, 2000).24 Even if

Introduction 7 Western rationality conquered the world in a short time; today we have several routes to Modernity.25 Other classic authors with a high omnipresence in the transactions of the Mokrzycki-Symposium were, among others, Karl Polanyi and Stanislaw Ossowski, the former an important source of inspiration for Mokrzycki and the latter his teacher. Zygmunt Bauman in his eloquent keynote speech on the responsibility of intellectuals extensively elaborated on Ossowski’s crucial role for the development of Polish sociology. Bauman made a case for humanistic sociology, invoking also the case of Otto Neurath, whose special combination of “scientism” (extreme unified science) and ethical socialism remains of perennial interest. This is not the place to account for all contributions, since it was a tight programme with some 20 presentations. However, it deserves mentioning that Nikolai Genov widened the scope to the countries on South-East Balkans, often overlooked, but with similar predicaments and soon lining up for EU-accession. A critical evaluation of transitology “in retrospect” and the responsibility of intellectuals are the two main perennial themes. This makes the symposium volume into a significant contribution to nation-building – and an epitaph for transitology. Both the meaning of civil society and comparative area studies “East of the Elbe” are well-trodden paths and not exactly virgin fields of inquiry. However, the entrance of ten new countries into the EU calls for longer historical perspectives on the period of transitions between 1989 and 2004. Moreover, independent of new and old challenges, transformations have taken place. Problems of identity and sociological structure, of a weak emerging middle class with new consumer patterns and expectations, of attitudes of trust – or distrust – in institutions, also cases concerning (lack of) reconciliation, among and within nations, etc, are prevailing research agendas, ever new case-studies enriching our “mapping” of the territory for policy formation. In the Polish case a low level equilibrium is forecasted by pessimists, while independent economists predict that Poland will have reached the EU-average in terms of GNP per capita within 15–20 years from now.26 High unemployment at a rate of almost 20 per cent is alarming and a fertile soil for social unrest, but both Sweden and the USA went through the great depression in the 1930s with much higher unemployment rates without eruptions or breakdowns. Everybody knows that the Polish peasants are the losers, and their children are now educating themselves to become, for instance, computer specialists. The peasants are entering Europe for their children’s sake and one cannot expect a lot of enthusiasm; rather a certain stoic quietism. Transitional countries were invaded by Western scholars after the events 1989 and 1991, sometimes “rebels in search of a cause” (to allude to a James Dean movie), in the wake of an almost total failure to forecast Die Wende, and not accountable for the effects of their “free advice”. The very concept of transition has an obvious teleological bias, implying a defined goal, a model path to the Blühende Landschaften Chancellor Kohl promised his new citizens after the reunification. Maybe events would have taken other turns if the East of the

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Elbe-implosion had not coincided with a peak for the revival of ahistorical market liberalism. This is one of the points made by the late Professor Mokrzycki himself in his most recent works, that the timing was bad for a smooth transition, with a number of rather extreme Hayek-liberals attaining leading positions. The transformation now left many disappointed, since their welfare rather contracted, which somehow tainted the fruits of freedom. It is sometimes forgotten that the communist states were – sort of – welfare states (no unemployment and lots of public services, like Kindergarten, etc, a top heavy bureaucratic order à la Diocletian, with little space for the innovations and initiatives – and personal accountability – that economic growth requires). However, this sort of full-scale experiment in social engineering did not become a “starter”, at least not in Europe (it was invoked as a model in, for instance, some African and Asiatic states, with rather modest success). The risk for “reverse shifts” is limited, partly because of the accommodation and merger between old and new elites in a rather un-egalitarian society, generating low trust and little civic culture. But the underdeveloped middle class cannot become the seedbed for entrepreneurial enthusiasm or democratic civic culture, as long as it is “under construction”, by means of education and other forms of social engineering. Yet, as Napoleon I remarked in a famous letter to his brother Jérome in Westphalia: once the peoples of Europe have enjoyed the advantages of liberal constitutionalism, equal opportunities, and an efficient legal system, there is no way back to the old regime (which does not exclude attempts though, recalling the historical success of the Metternich system to maintain feudal forms of government until 1918 – and the efficiency of the legal system is a matter of degree, both in Poland and in Southern Italy).27 Besides, the old elite has little of such ambitions, since its members got their “fair share” in the privatization process, and in addition it has a long tradition and experience of party organization and interest articulation, while ad hoc mass movements such as the Polish Solidarity are doomed to split up into conflicting special interests. The theoretical relevance of Mancur Olson’s theories is important to keep in mind, since his works offer a perspective on neo-corporatist roadblocks to growth and prosperity.28 The missing middle class is a lacuna hard to fill in some countries East of the Elbe, and the difficulties of the new “democracies in transformation” to deliver what they seemed to promise make for “asocial or disloyal, un-solidaristic, familism”,29 which makes sense from the point of view of individual but not collective rationality, since the society as a whole needs inducements to trust and calculability, in order to promote economic growth. One characteristic of the symposium was the mixture of scholars, transcending both disciplinary and national borders. This also signifies that East of the Elbe-problems now increasingly become pan-European concerns. Any attempt to connect past and the future now will have to realize that the old Westphalian balance of power after the 30-years war between the great European powers has reached the final end of the road in Europe. This also suggests that problems of civility and democracy, often scrutinized in terms of the so-called democratic deficit, East of the Elbe and West of the 1054 divide are shared with nations

Introduction 9 30

West of the Elbe. This perspective is invoked in several contributions to this volume. One could dramatize and say that West of the Elbe there is a legitimacy crisis for the representative system and new forms of accountability are slowly developing, when cross-border contacts between social movements increase and gradually find their forms, etc, while East of the Elbe there is a certain legitimacy crisis for the liberal democratic system as such, partly because of the accommodations between old and new elites that take place in peaceful transformations, in contrast to cases of bloody revolutions. This paradoxically consolidates the new order – yet leaves a lacuna to be filled. The process of igniting virtues of civility is a main theme in the political sociology of transformations. “Who cares?” or sometimes “nobody cares” is a frequent comment East of the Elbe, to explain to Western foreigners various “irregularities” in social and commercial life, such as municipal offices being closed when it is posted on the door that they should be open, etc, and similar absurdities, unthinkable in countries with a high everyday rationality. This is where civil society enters as an opaque concept, with persuasive elements. It is a new-old concept, so to speak. In some Western welfare states the concept re-entered the scene in the early 1990s, manifesting a neo-liberal reaction against state interventionism, be it in the form of French state socialism or the “Swedish model”. In this context it invoked an almost apolitical idyllic local democracy of US-American/Ancient Greek/Swiss-kind. In Soviet-dominated East of the Elbe-satellites, as a contrast, it referred to a citizen orientation among dissidents building pluralist democratic cultures “out of the ashes”, in societies with a relatively thin stratum of intelligentsia and nomenklatura and a traditional lethargic life-style among the “masses” of peasants and workers – and very little in between. Already Goethe noted that: “Law givers or revolutionaries who promise equality and liberty at the same time are either Utopian dreamers or charlatans”. So here is an inherent goal-conflict that is a lesson to learn in the new democracies – and from which different lessons will be learned in open plural societies (polyarchies). There might still be moss-grown anti-pluralist notions – Utopian illusions or “wishful thinking” – that there is one way to organize society, better than other ways. As Pufendorf noted about religious conflicts: it is good to be able to accommodate alternative perspectives into the same “civil society”.31 The “secular religions”, ideologies, of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been more intolerant. It seems, as implied in Hartmut Kaelble’s contribution, to be easier to say what “civil society” is not, thus defining it in negative terms. It is not a “top down” endeavour. There is little space for the state in a civil society/citizen oriented order. That concept formation reflects ideological policy formation battles calls for caution, “shark pills” against uncontrolled value intrusion. The concept of civil society is not instrumental for analytical or taxonomical purposes, but obviously has the “clout” to generate elucidating debates. Mokrzycki felt in his late writings that transitology was affected by Western teleology and failed to realize that Poland was not really the West, yet not quite

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similar to the East either. One might suggest that Poland’s situation, in its search for secure identity, is not unlike the German Sonderweg 150 years ago, as a link between Western civilization and more anti-Modernist authoritarian ways. It is a common mistake to mix up democratic and economic transformation; easily done since the processes tend to go hand in hand. However, even if the historical co-variation between market liberalism and pluralist democracy is very high it must be pointed out both that the market as such is, in principle, something other than democracy, as a mechanism outside the scope of political decision making and increasingly so, due to globalization factors, and that the relationship between democracy and economic growth is complex. Edmund Mokrzycki and Chris Bryant made a point of Karl Polanyi’s relative neglect of democracy.32 Today one might note that Shanghai and Singapore are widely regarded as the most vibrant locations for entrepreneurial competitiveness, at the cutting edge, yet are hardly models for democracy. Nevertheless democracy and prosperity as a general trend seemingly appear hand in hand all over the world; recent developments in Taiwan and Botswana,33 among other places, indicate this. There is a reverse correlation, a point made, by among others, Etzioni,34 namely that the downfall of authoritarian regimes is often followed by asocial behaviour, chaos and miserable life conditions, which is a natural consequence of the striving of authoritarian regimes to crush independent civil associations and exercise total state control. The citizens simply don’t know how to fill the vacuum and are easy prey for street demagogues and mob psychology. This predicament could be seen both in recent events in Iraq but also in the disorientation of refuges from such regimes as North Korea. A certain turmoil in postrevolutionary party- and interest-group formation is, in any case, historical normality. As Lord Dahrendorf once remarked, the bankruptcy of the communist system did not bring modern Western capitalism, but an open society and an open future. This volume does not invoke the global scope. Hopefully it at least contributes to making us confused on a higher level of problem awareness. And it hopefully provides much fuel for thought about how to catch the independent variable. Conceptual clarity provides a good start. Edmund Mokrzycki was a “committed but sceptical sociological realist” – and a philosopher of science as well. This volume is in his honour.

Notes 1 One notable exception is Randall Collins (1986), who had forecasted the Soviet implosion, although misdated. 2 One example is the AUCA-conference in Bishkek, June 2003, dealing with Transformations and Interventions (Website: http://uk.geocities.com/bishkekconference/ bsc.html). Most theories of Modernization have a certain ethnocentric teleological bias, be it those of Max Weber, Talcott Parsons, W. W. Rostow or Stein Rokkan. 3 In some countries, such as the Czech Republic, intellectuals even got elected to

Introduction 11

4

5

6 7 8 9

10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17

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responsible political positions, which has been less common ever since some historians (e.g. Thiers) became nation-building founding fathers in the nineteenth century. However, the merger or fusion between political power and intellectuals of the early welfare state period between the world wars stands out as an exception. Meaning a definite end of the so-called European concert, between the major power states. The Danish prime minister’s “new era”-speech in December 2002, upon the event of inviting ten more countries to join the EU is indicative. As a historian, one might of course argue that the Westphalian era in a stricter sense ended in 1806 or in 1945. But the allusion is nevertheless rather unequivocal. The narrative of the Khrushchev-suggestion is taken from the Swedish diplomat Gunnar Hägglöf’s book Sovjet-Ryssland, i går, i dag, i morgon (“Soviet-Russia, yesterday, today, tomorrow”, Stockholm: Norstedt, 1979, p. 65). The quotation from Rosa Luxemburg is found on pp. 37–8 in Op. Cit., the original source forwarded to me by Helmut Steiner: Rosa Luxemburg: “Zur russischen Revolution” (written in 1918 in prison in Breslau/Wroclaw) in: Gesammelte Werke. Bd. 4: August 1914–Januar 1919 [Berlin, Dietz Verlag 1974], p. 362). Rather confusingly the latest English translation of Tönnies’s classical work, however, is Community and Civil Society, illustrating the problem. I have the famous “prisoners’ dilemma” in mind. In several articles, for instance Die Zeit, Nr 17, 19. April 2001, p. 9, Wilhelm Hennis: “Deutschland’s untertänige Justiz. Die Kohl-Affäre: Die Bürger sollen sich schriftlich beim Generalstaatsanwalt in Köln beschweren”. Sweden might provide an example. There was a referendum in 1955 about driving on the left or on the right, and the traditional driving on the left was supported by 80 per cent of voters; 12 years later we drove on the right, just like most other countries. I am personally glad that there was no referendum on daylight saving time. There are “new” difficulties making global warming, the dangers of nuclear energy and the perils of new DNA-techniques objects for democratic decisions, as compared to the happy days when the left–right continuum and distribution policy were dominant dimensions in a more lucid political game. The basis for conceptualization of this is found in Ostrogorsky–Weber–Michels, anticipating themes we find also in the Ilves Humboldt-speech (see below) and Stephen P. Turner’s recent Liberal Democracy 3.0. Which goes for Poland and Germany, countries where labour market organizations seemingly suffer from the “Dinosaur-syndrome”, a certain backward looking nostalgia that easily becomes an impediment to economic growth, while yet in good harmony with traditional functionalist democratic theory, in which the task of special interest precisely is to articulate interests, while the political parties should aggregate them into a process that in the end results in policy-decisions. Eyerman, Ron: “Rationalizing Intellectuals”, Theory and Society, 14 (1985), pp. 777–808. Ivan Szelenyi has done significant work on this and The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power has appeared in several languages. See for instance Richard Pipes (1999). See also Karl-Ludwig Ay (2002), on the concept of obscina. This is for natural reasons an estimate that it is not possible to verify, but builds on conversations with British scholars (e.g. Simon Clarke) specialized in the region and its economy. For instance the constitutional court reportedly enjoys a relatively high degree of confidence among Russians, according to recent surveys, if surveys – by James Gibson and others – are to be believed. The comparison with Germany in the 1920s should not be stretched, because of some much discussed flaws in the Weimar constitution. Russian “game with words”, at the cost of democracy, due to a similarity between words for theft and shit.

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19 More than in some states and less than in others. This is of course a truism. The Polish party system, although in legitimation crises due to corruption scandals and low electoral turnout – is fairly recognizable, while one of the latest Ukrainian elections resulted in a total exchange of parties in the parliament, which in addition does not function at all, since less than the required number of members for legislative decisions show up. Also, in stable democracies such as Sweden, rational choice for voters is a tricky business. If I, as a Swede, prefer social democratic minority governments – historically a very successful alternative in Sweden – it is difficult to figure out how to vote. Yet voting as such is an act of legitimation. See IESS (1968) entry “Elections”. 20 Although such a risk is modified by the fact that Russia for long periods has been a pretty normal participant in the “European concert”, especially in the eighteenth century. Russian diplomacy is one reason why Germany’s delayed nation building did not have its driving force in the German heartland of Thuringia and Saxony. Both points about Russian identity, Byzantium or European great power state, are made repeatedly by the Finnish historian Matti Klinge. “The identity giving other” sounds sinister in the wake of S. P. Huntington’s dark visions. But in fact America for two centuries served in this role, with a number of travel diaries from Europeans in the USA; one only need mention de Tocqueville, Knut Hamsun and Count Keyserling – and a lot of trans-Atlantic cross-fertilization; to only mention the cases of Samuel Pufendorf, and Thomas Paine and Gunnar Myrdal. 21 Toomas Hendrik Ilves: “Constructing a New Europe”, delivered at Humboldt University, Berlin 5 February 2001 (easily available via Google.de). 22 The diplomat Felix Somary writes about this incident in his memoirs. 23 Although it is a modern form of fabricated or synthetic charisma, rather than a genuine one, which was a rare phenomenon already in Weber’s days. Weber has a present day relevance in several fields of politics East of the Elbe. Zdzislaw Krasnode˛bski bears witness to Weber’s omnipresence in Polish academia during the days of martial law, in an article in Berliner Journal für Soziologie, 3/95 (“Max Weber und Osteuropa”, pp. 367–78), mentioning the sociology of religion and the typology of ethics; Krasnode˛bski himself focusing more on political geography and the concept of Central Europe, pioneered by Weber’s close friend Friedrich Naumann. 24 Weber’s studies of various world religions can well be seen as an application of J. S. Mill’s methodological canons, the methods of similarity and difference. Compare Weber’s famous letter to von Below, where he states that he has to study all cities in order to be able to suggest what is peculiar to Western Medieval cities. 25 Of course there are useful passages also in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, which is a quarry where everybody can find something to relate to. Weber writes about Vergesellschaftigung and associations in a way that any scholar of civil society might find interesting. 26 Estimates among economists vary though, from 15 years to 60 years. 27 As Andrzej Rychard (1998, p. 31) writes about “the law operating in the economic sphere”: “This level of intermediary institutions is relatively poorly advanced; the rules are unclear and frequently changing. They are more subject to the political game than a constraint of this game” (Ibid.). 28 The two most relevant of his works are The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965) and The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). He has also published on affairs east of the Elbe in recent years. 29 A concept with a long history; often Banfield is mentioned as a pioneer. 30 They are of course also shared with nations east of the famous 1054-divide, but not on the agenda to the same extent.

Introduction 13 31 It is arguable that Samuel Pufendorf is the first classic author in a civil society-tradition. His work De Officio Hominis (Pufendorf, 1673) is one of the most widespread and influential works in political philosophy of all categories; the most recent translation into English was published in Cambridge, UK, in 1991, with an introduction by James Tully, On the Duty of Man and Citizen, Cambridge University Press, 1991, in Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought). There are very many editions of this book and reprints in many languages. 32 Christopher G. A. Bryant and Edmund Mokrzycki: “Introduction. Theorizing the Changes in East-Central Europe”, pp. 1–13, in Bryant & Mokrzycki (eds): The New Great Transformation? Change and Continuity in East-Central Europe (London: Routledge, 1994), esp. p. 5. 33 See in particular Gylfason (1998) Understanding Economic Growth (Stockholm: SNS, 1998). 34 In his intervention at the Coninx-roundtable at Humboldt university, Berlin, 7 January 2004.

Bibliography Ay, K. L. (2002) “On Some observations of Max Weber”, in S. Eliaeson and H. Löden (eds) Nordisk Säkerhetspolitik inför Nya Utmaningar (Nordic Security Policy Facing New Challenges) (Stockholm: Carlsson), pp. 84–95. Banfield, E. C. (1967) The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (New York: Free Press). Bryant, C. G. A. and Mokrzycki, E. (1994) “Introduction. Theorizing the Changes in East-Central Europe”, in C. Bryant and E. Mokrzycki (eds) The New Great Transformation? Change and Continuity in East-Central Europe (London: Routledge), pp. 1–13, esp. p. 5. Collins, R. (1986) Weberian Sociological Theory (Cambridge University Press). Eisenstadt, S. N. (2000) “Multiple Modernities”, Dædalus, Winter, pp. 1–29. Eyerman, R. (1985) “Rationalizing Intellectuals”, Theory and Society, 14, pp. 777–808. Gylfason, T. (1998) Understanding Economic Growth (Stockholm: SNS). Hennis, W. (2001) “Deutschland’s untertänige Justiz. Die Kohl-Affäre: Die Bürger sollen sich schriftlich beim Generalstaatsanwalt in Köln beschweren”. Die Zeit, Nr 17, 19. April, 2001. p. 9. Hägglöf, G. (1979). Sovjet-Ryssland. I går, i dag, i morgon (Soviet-Russia. Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow) (Stockholm: Norstedt). Ilves, T. H. (2001) “Constructing a New Europe”, speech delivered at Humboldt University, Berlin, 5 February 2001 (easily available via Google.de). International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (IESS) (1968) (New York: Macmillan). Konrad, G. and Szelenyi, I. (1979) The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power (New York & Brighton, UK: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich & Harvester). (German original: Die Intelligenz auf dem Weg zur Klassenmacht, 1978, Frankfurt/M). Krasnode˛bski, Z. (1995) “Max Weber und Osteuropa”, Berliner Journal für Soziologie, 3/95, pp. 367–78. Lipset, S. M. (1996) American Exceptionalism (New York: W.W. Norton & Co.). Luxemburg, R. (1974) “Zur russischen Revolution” (written in 1918 in prison in Breslau/Wroclaw) in: Gesammelte Werke. Bd. 4: August 1914–Januar 1919 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag), p. 362. Olson, M. (1965) The Logic of Collective Action: Public goods and the theory of groups (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press).

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Olson, M. (1982) The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities (New Haven: Yale University Press). Pipes, R. (1999) Property and Freedom (New York: Alfred A. Knopf). Pufendorf, S. (1673) De Officio Hominis (Lund: Vitus Haberegger). Latest English edition: On the Duty of Man and Citizen (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991, with an introduction by James Tully). Somary, F. (1959) Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben (Zürich: Manesse Verlag). Turner, S. P. (2003) Liberal Democracy 3.0 (London: Sage). Tönnies, F. (2001 [1887]) Community and Civil Society (Cambridge University Press). Weber, M. (1989 [1895]) “The National State and Economic Policy” (Der Nationalstaat und die Volkswirtschaftspolitik), in K. Tribe (ed.) Reading Weber (London: Routledge), pp. 188–209. Weber, M. Letter to Below of June 1914, in Weber (1988) pp. 21–2. Weber, M. (1998) The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations. Transl. by F. I. Night (London: Verso). Wittrock, B. (2000) “Modernity: one, none or many? European origins and modernity as a global condition”, Dædalus, Winter, pp. 31–60. Wolfe, A. (1989) Whose Keeper? Social Science and Moral Obligation (Berkeley: University of California Press).

Part I

Perspectives on civil society

2

Civil society Notes on the revival of a concept Sven Reichardt

The modern notion of “civil society” originates with the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, where the term was very closely connected with the expressions “civil” and “civilizing” on the one hand, and with free, independent and selfreliant individuals on the other. During the second half of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century “civil society” was a concept critical of the state, often with an anti-absolutist thrust. It was closely connected to a realm of freedom and expressed the self-confidence of a well-educated and relatively small elite (cf. Kaviraj and Khilnani, 2001, pp. 39–104; Ehrenberg, 1999, pp. 83–169; Hodgkinson and Foley, 2003, pp. 19–75). During the nineteenth century, the circle of people fighting for freedom, education and self-organization was steadily expanding, from political groupings and interest groups in the early nineteenth century to the mass of leisure clubs and life-style societies in the middle and late nineteenth century. Even before political democracy was fully established, a flourishing landscape of voluntary associations already existed (cf. Bermeo and Nord, 2000; Jessen et al., 2004, pp. 45–114, 327–69). Nearly at the same time – around the last third of the nineteenth century – civil society ceased to be a central concept, as it became increasingly connected with the sphere of needs and labour, including the economy and excluding the state. The normative implications it entailed were viewed far more critically since its talk of universal rights remained oblivious to inequalities in gender, class, and race. In the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, there was a relative calm surrounding the debate on the definition and meaning of “civil society”. The renaissance of the concept in the twentieth century began in the 1970s and 1980s in Central–Eastern Europe and Latin America. Again, as in the eighteenth century, the concept it expressed was targeted against the state, expressing freedom and the wish for self-organization beyond the totalitarian or dictatorial state. Some of the central figures who defined the central-eastern European understanding of civil society were European dissidents such as Václav Havel, György Konrád or Adam Michnik. For Havel, civil society is a call for “living within the truth” with oneself and with tolerance towards others: a vision of society that is not just independent from the state but actually opposed to it. For

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Konrad “antipolitics” is the “ethos of civil society, and civil society is the antithesis of military society”. Civil society means a self-defence and island of Utopia against a greedy socialist state – and it is more a political than a scientific concept. For Konrad it is a term that circumscribes a certain style of living and is deeply entangled in the everyday life of the eastern-European dissident. A humanistic anti-statism, the strong emphasis on the social-ethical imperative of actions, with its values of tolerance, pluralism, autonomy, dignity, subtle irony and self-development were central features of Eastern Europe’s understanding of civil society (Havel, 1985; Konrad, 1984; cf. also Keane, 2000). This was much more the case in central-eastern Europe, whereas it was weaker in south-eastern Europe, although on the other hand the debate in central-eastern Europe did not attribute as central a role to the market and economic affairs for civil society. Economic matters were mostly left aside. But even the development in central-eastern Europe wasn’t consistent. Although the Polish experience was a model for the Hungarian dissidents – the historical parallels between the two civil societies weakened in the 1950s. The Hungarian economic development was much better, the protests diminished and were not supported by the church in a way comparable to the Polish case, whereas the Polish development was characterized by permanent protest circles involving massive mobilizations and aided by the Catholic Church (Mansfeldová and Szabó, 2000, pp. 95–8; Ekiert and Kubik, 1999, pp. 21–46). In Latin America too, the term has been used since the early 1970s, linked with a political struggle against military dictatorships. For the Brazilians, “Sociedade civil” primarily conveyed a non-military world – in the words of Francisco Weffort: “We want a civil society, we need it to defend ourselves from the monstrous State in front of us” (Weffort, 1989, p. 349). The reception in Latin America was based mainly on Gramsci’s model of civil society and combined with social movements and/or unions aimed at transforming capitalist class conditions. Even today, after the historical period of the military dictatorships in Latin America, the term is still connected with decoupling from the state, with support from the Catholic Church and a critical, investigative journalism (cf. Olvera, 1999; Leiva and Pagden, 2001; Stephan, 1985). Recently in the western world, new social movements have adopted the term “civil society” in the field of practical politics, frequently employing it as an expression against an overbearing capitalism. The “anti-globalization movement”, with organizations like “ATTAC”, for example, shows that the logic of the market with its orientation towards individual profit, competition and struggle is not completely compatible with the logic of civil society and its principles of cooperation and conflict, discourse and arguing. On the other hand banks and corporations try to revitalize community life, voluntary associations and civic education projects, and in doing so they use the language of civil society. It is a highly debated question if the totalizing logic of the commodity form threatens to fuse public and private and to destroy the moral basis of modern societies. The concept experienced a revival during the 1980s and 1990s in the post-

Civil society: the revival of a concept 19 industrialized and democratic western societies, with four different and sometimes interrelated scientific variants becoming established: first, a communitarian model placing voluntary associations, with their function of socializing and building solidarity, at the heart of a civil society where the formal legal principles upon which these associations and communities rest are of less interest than the notions of the “good life” anchored in their life worlds. The wideranging polymorph group of researchers supporting this view extends from Alasdair MacIntyre via Michael Walzer and Amitai Etzioni to Robert Putnam; however, nearly all of these communitarians can be understood as neoTocquevilleians. All of them are interested in the socializing effects of associations, and how social networks produce social capital and trust (Edwards et al., 2001; Wolin, 2001). In a programmatic essay on civil society, Michael Walzer calls for people to associate voluntarily, communicate with one another and, for the sake of sociability, form and re-form all sorts of groups. Human beings are social beings, he argues, and a “good life” involves creating a “setting of settings” that can make a creative and self-determined life possible (Walzer, 1991, p. 298; Walzer, 1992, p. 79). There are obvious implications in this communitarian demand for teamwork and communication, for willingness to take on commitment and responsibility, in a modernity that is individualized and atomized by mobility. On the one hand, broad-based civic participation in politics prevents political decision-making from being restricted to a professional or semi-professional elite. It is a culture of personal responsibility for society, achieved by the largest possible degree of political participation and community formation. On the other hand, the communitarian appeal does not allow particular types of community formation to be either justifiably excluded or described as alien to civil society. As Michael Walzer put it: “ ‘Join the associations of your choice’ is not a slogan to rally political militants. And yet that is what civil society requires: men and women actively engaged”. But voluntary engagement alone can hardly be a guarantee of civilized behaviour. A civil society constructed of networked associations, in Walzer’s sense, is not automatically one where, as he puts it, “the stakes are lower, where, in principle at least, coercion is used only to keep the peace” (Walzer, 1991, pp. 300, 303). Voluntary associations are not necessarily “schools of democracy” or synonymous with civil integration and the capacity to compromise and civil integration.1 Second: another closely connected version of civil society focuses on the differentiations in democratic theory associated with the notion of civil society. Civil society, in this view, is a concept that “generates reflection” for the liberal democracies (Schmalz-Bruns, 1994).2 Civil society as a “radical democratic concept” (Rödel et al., 1989) refers to the project of an autonomous society of citizens, organizing itself and constituting itself, with all its members participating equally in power. In difference to the communitarian model, this view is more interested in political participation than in socializing effects or in the establishing of solidarity structures of communities. Benjamin Barber’s concept “strong democracy” creates a model for active participatory politics, in which the participation of “the Other” determines the identity of the democratic citizens

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(Barber, 1984). In contrast to the liberal conception of civil society, the accent here lies less on negative freedom – constitutionally-fostered and protected opportunities for development – than on active participation by citizens through grass-roots democracy. A crucial aspect is the critique of democratic deficits in the procedures of representative democracy. “Elitist democracy” has, claim the critics, become implausible, bureaucratically petrified, and the law is insufficiently mediated by the idea of democratic self-determination. In this perspective, more effective opportunities to participate can be expected from civil society’s “expansion of democratic participatory rights” and the “radicalization of participatory democracy”. Democracy thus requires different forums, ones that can take on the societal functions of signalling, problematizing and thematizing (Schmalz-Bruns, 1994, pp. 26, 28). The problem here is how a democratically expanded model of civil society can achieve a balance between the normative orientations and the greatest possible degree of democratic participation. Third: at the heart of the liberal version of civil society, according to Ralf Dahrendorf, stands liberty and the “existence of autonomous, that is, not state or otherwise centrally-managed organisations” (Dahrendorf, 1991, p. 262), which safeguard the diversity, autonomy, civil rights and publicity of civil society. This version of coexistence in civil society, however, also accentuates individual citizens’ reason, their social and moral competence, which, above and beyond the state’s coercive integration, independently contributes – even if it is out of pure self-interest – to the underlying conditions for the existence of community (Dahrendorf, 1994, pp. 67–73). Liberalism presents – almost like Immanuel Kant 200 years earlier – the central elements of a civil society as upbringing and education, together with the provision of public forums and arenas for the diversity of opinions and interests. However, a basically moral attitude, an appropriate sense of reality, the peaceable habitus and the citizen’s civility are not free from social preconditions; they cannot be viewed in purely individual terms but always have a social trajectory. Civil society thus needs institutions that can provide socially marginalized groups with a minimum degree of economic and cultural integration. And furthermore, the limits to the call for tolerance are found at the point where the proponent of an opposing opinion is regarded as an enemy. The end of the line is reached where tolerance itself endangers tolerance: “Tolerance does not have to tolerate intolerance – in fact it must not do so” (Splett, 1990, p. 107). Here, the values of freedom furnish their own limitations, a process not free of contradiction. There are problems raised by a notion that people can be educated for peacefulness and civic courage (Nothelle-Wildfeuer, 1999, pp. 334–5; Münkler, 1993, p. 14). For one thing, it is unclear what form such an education might take. The more the discourse of virtue takes flight into an imprecise formula of commitment to an unspecified “common good”, the more inevitable will be the call for politics to intervene in individual life plans. And once that border is crossed, as Max Horkheimer showed as early as 1936, such appeals can tip over into the suppression of wishes for freedom and emancipatory needs (Horkheimer, 1968). Fourth: in Jürgen Habermas’s discourse-theory approach, civil society is the

Civil society: the revival of a concept 21 social space in which communicative action takes its most distinct shape. Noncoercive discourse and open discussion form the core of Habermas’s notion of civil society. A key role is played by associations that arise relatively spontaneously and work within the institutional order of the public sphere. Communicative action and rational argument inside interlinked and competing public spheres generate civil society – a civil society here understood as a pluralist and free community of communication. The lifeworld is structured as civil society, with the institutions of civil society indirectly contributing to the solution of problems of general interest in a way that is not “power-ridden” (vermachtet) but operates through observation and reflection (Habermas, 1996, p. 366). In Habermas’ view, civil society does not coalesce into a central authority that controls and regulates all the social spheres. Instead, it is a deliberative, “bargaining” society, combining the liberal view of the legal protection of free citizens with the republican view of active participation in the mediated shaping of institutions and laws. The close ties between lifeworld and public sphere are central to this concept of civil society. The communicative network is intrinsic to a view of civil society as self-reflective and tied to communicative processes (Habermas, 1987, pp. 548–93).3 For Habermas, civil society’s unity and cohesion is generated via controversy and understanding-oriented action. Civil society consists of spontaneously arising, intermediate, autonomous and voluntary associations that are allowed entry into the lifeworld, turning to the political public sphere in egalitarian and open organizational forms and amplifying its volume. In Habermas’s opinion, it is only in a free political culture, an already rationalized lifeworld where civil society’s actors struggle for influence but not for political control, that we can genuinely speak of civil society. This view prompts some questions: does communicative action with its highly conditioned premises – the absence of power, domination, unreason and time pressure – constitute an analytically fruitful and realistic definition of the space of civil society? And since civil society is intimately connected to the mass-mediated public sphere, will this not, in fact, turn out to exert a stronger influence on the logic of civil society? (Habermas, 1987, pp. 369–452).

Some conclusions The history of the concept shows how this prismatic and polymorphic term reflects a wide variety of historical societies and how the term’s meaning is embedded in historical developments. Instead of a static concept, “civil society” should be seen as a concept in flux with changing meanings, norms, actors and adversaries (Kumar, 1993). From the very start, civil society was a normative concept with universalist claims and an exclusive reality (social, ethnic or gender). To understand the attractiveness of the concept it is crucial to know against whom or what it was vectored – whether against fanaticism and barbarism, a profit-orientated economy, a clientelistic private sphere or a power-ridden state. Today the term is often connected with political programs: against individualization and

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atomization (communitarians), against an international turbo-capitalism (antiglobalization movement), against a too provident and strong welfare state (neoliberals), against the petrification of parliamentary organizations (radical democrats), against a hypertrophy of the state and an uncontrolled market competition (social democrats), against the totalitarian state (east-European dissidents) or against corrupt states (parts of East Asia and Latin America). The historical overview reveals how the contra-terms against the project civil society have changed over time and space and how they are embedded in specific historical constellations. Civil societies must be able to pursue a variety of interests and, furthermore, there is no such thing as a civil society without some conflict and inequality. Here, the logic of consensus and unity is less important than the regulation of conflicts through an orientation to compromise and negotiation on the part of civil society actors. The civil society approach is sensible to questions of culture and can show – in Randall Collins’s words – how “stratification and organization are grounded in the interaction of everyday life” (Collins, 1990, p. 72; cf. also Rössel, 1999). Research on civil society implies a study of those rituals that explain stratification and conflict as well as cultural and social integration. Rituals of interaction and their allocation in time and space are of special importance for our knowledge about different kinds and qualities of civil societies. The question of the circumstances under which civil mobilization fosters a more or less democratic outcome is still unresolved. On the one hand a vital civil society is a precondition of effective democratic government, yet, on the other, a flourishing associational life does not necessarily provide a support for democracy. Energies generated by civic activism do not of necessity feed into a politics of toleration and inclusion but may just as well be utilized for repressive ends. Civic mobilization is also capable of fragmenting societies into different pillars or milieus (cf. Berman, 1997; Reichardt, 2004). Civil societies need a free, pluralistic and democratic press and a media system that is relatively independent from commercial interests and state censorship (Keane, 1998). One of the most important fields in historical research explores the communicative nature and the publicness of civil society, asking, for example: is it a warning system for the democratic process? Is it characterized by discursive communication? How did the idea of “public reason” develop? (Trentmann, 2000, pp. 24–8). Every civil society is grounded on a certain degree of self-government, discipline and communication. Instead of a naïve understanding of civil society as a highly normative utopia, it should be seen as a sphere or realm with powerrelations. Civil society links power, communication and governmental virtues in a certain way – it is the room where societal norms were formed, educated and cultivated. It is the room for the negotiation and struggle of societal consensus and the construction of responsible social beings. Civil society means governing by community and this is not possible without permanent conditioning, power strategies and informal governance structures (Foucault, 2004, pp. 406–30; cf. also Burchell et al., 1991; Dean, 1999; Gosewinkel and Reichardt, 2004).

Civil society: the revival of a concept 23 Nearly all writers on this concept accentuate the opposition between state and civil society. The worldwide celebration of civil society today is a predictable by-product of the widespread disenchantment with the state in the west and the fight against corrupt and authoritarian states in East Asia or Latin America. Civil society is an expression of the liberal scepticism about an all-powerful and moral indifferent bureaucracy that regulates societies along the line of selforientated and autistic orderliness. Although totalitarian states destroy civil societies, civil societies nevertheless need formal and legal guarantees or at least state toleration. Civil societies prosper best when they are connected with a protective, redistributive and conflict-mediating democratic state under the rule of law.

A preliminary circumscription of the concept “civil society” The concept of civil society has been used to describe the relationship of individual autonomy to communal solidarity, with a view to the common good. Many scholars have characterized civil societies by free, autonomous citizens who are politically and socially engaged and come together voluntarily in associations located between the state, the market and the private sphere. From the perspective of civil society, a social space of agents with their own partial public spheres and types of community formation occurs as an autonomous sphere of political and social action. The idea of civil society raises fundamental questions about social and political responsibility, legitimation and integration. The notion of civil society often refers to a political pledge with normative ideas of freedom, civility, individual and collective commitment to the common good, tolerance and peacefulness. In many of its versions, the thrust of the concept fluctuates between political demand and societal analysis; as a 1995 dictionary of politics notes, it is “a variously defined term from political philosophy to describe both actual and desirable states of the order of political rule” (Schmidt, 1995, p. 1096). Civil society can be conceptualized in two ways. The first – with reference to Hegel – focuses on its spatial representation: here civil society is an intermediate social space between the state, the economy and the private sphere. Linked to these three spheres by manifold relationships and interactions, it can still be distinguished as a relatively independent space. Certainly, civil society’s space is not empty of relations of power and domination; it is confronted with processes of capitalization and commercialization, and is densely enmeshed with the private sphere (for example through the family). Nevertheless, the space of civil society is characterized by a particularly high degree of self-organization that is not profit-oriented and addresses itself to the public sphere. The voluntary political engagement and self-government of civil society actors is of particular relevance here. The second approach to the concept of civil society focuses on action, applying the term “civil society” to a pattern of collective action and behaviour. This is the independent action of historical actors oriented towards the public sphere,

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reciprocal “recognition of the other” (Honneth, 1992) and a willingness to take on broader responsibility over and above particularist interests. Central to this view is the “civility” of such action, understood as communicative orientation, non-violence and tolerance and the “self-discipline” and “self-government” of the modern Self. In the course of history, a variety of adjectives, such as “courteous”, “decent” or “orderly”, were assigned to these dialogical virtues, naming both the value horizon of the historical actors and the necessary resources of their behaviour. Examples of the latter might be relative freedom from social ties and societal constraints, or social discipline and self-management. This conceptualization of civil society can be called Zivilgesellschaftlichkeit, which is characterized by a particular way of dealing with difference and distinction, where the identity of civil society’s actors lies along a sliding scale of inclusion and exclusion. Zivilgesellschaftlichkeit implies the experience of the other, an experience regarded as a challenge to learn. This embraces a way of dealing with conflicts that is reasonable with willingness to compromise, but does not imply a blanket requirement of consensus that prevents affiliations of interest and readiness for conflict (Kocka, 2004, pp. 32–3). It has sometimes been suggested that the dimension based on the logic of action and that based on the logic of spheres should be interrelated (Kocka, 2000, p. 26), drawing out a tension between the norms of civil society and the history of the social space of “real civil societies”. According to Jeffrey Alexander we have to recognize on the one hand the “relative autonomy that exists between civil society and other kinds of social spheres” and on the other hand the “historically distinctive sets of interpersonal practices like civility, equality, criticism, and respect” of civil society as a “solidary sphere”. One way to connect both approaches is to analyse the “symbolic codes” of the historical actors of the civil society (Alexander, 1998, pp. 7, 12). This kind of dual conception is also proposed by Helmut Dubiel (1994, p. 94), who undertakes to measure the distance between civil society’s repertoire of norms and the “institutional reality” of historical civil societies. The historian Frank Trentmann (2000, p. 8), in turn, suggests that the “procedural nature of civil society” throughout history should be studied. John Keane – like Keith Tester – finds on the one hand that the “various negative tendencies of civil society” are crucial to analysis and, on the other, that the process of civilization itself should be seen as a historical project incapable of completion (Keane, 1996, p. 14; Tester, 1992, pp. 9–10, 74). Several empirical studies have taken up this topic of ambivalence, and have related normative postulations to the formally defined social space of civil society (cf. Heins, 2002). Here, the ways people behave towards each other raise questions of social space, of where such forms of behaviour are located and to what they refer, i.e. which concrete social fields. Posing these questions entails defining and classifying civil societies according to their historical relationship with the practice of violence and the degree of their compliance with normative horizons. Civil society should be understood as the sphere where unequal histor-

Civil society: the revival of a concept 25 ical actors negotiate and struggle about societal norms and hegemonic values, where they talk about conditions and limits of solidarity and identity. Civil societies have to deal with a multiplicity of conflicts, opposing life plans, diverging interests and contested viewpoints. Often, thinking on civil society overemphasizes discursive and associative elements. Instead of unnecessarily stressing those forms of action that are understanding-oriented and cooperative, we should rather understand civil society as a conflictual arena for the self-organization and articulation of social groups. The logic of consensus and unity is less important than the regulation of conflicts through first, an orientation to compromise, second, discursive negotiations on the part of civil society actors and third – if the selfgovernment of the modern and disciplined Self is not hermetically closed – the connection with a protective (violence), redistributive (social inequality) and conflict-mediating democratic state under the rule of law.

Notes 1 Walzer himself elsewhere widened his perspective, integrating Ernest Gellner’s figure of the “modular man”. Gellner’s term refers to the flexible and tolerant modes of behaviour shown by people who are capable of both joining and leaving a range of different associations, without binding themselves through and through Gellner, (1994, pp. 97–108; Walzer, 1992, 1997, pp. 171–96). Cf. for a critical view of the Neo-Tocquevillians: Ahrne (1998, pp. 89–91); Edwards et al. (2001); Jessen et al. (2004, pp. 11–13). 2 Cf. also Schmalz-Bruns (1995); Dubiel (1994, p. 94); Klein (2001, pp. 14, 26, 359–76). 3 Extensive description and classification: Cohen and Arato (1992, pp. 201–55); Klein (2001, pp. 315–39).

Bibliography Ahrne, G. (1998) “Civil society and uncivil organisations”, in J. C. Alexander (ed.) Real Civil Societies: Dilemmas of Institutionalization (London: Sage), pp. 84–95. Alexander, J. C. (1998) “Introduction. Civil society I, II, III: constructing an empirical concept from normative controversies and historical transformations”, in J. C. Alexander (ed.) Real Civil Societies: The Dilemmas of Institutionalization (London: Sage), pp. 1–19. Barber, B. (1984) Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (Berkeley: University of California Press). Berman, S. (1997) “Civil society and the collapse of the Weimar republic”, World Politics 49 (3), pp. 401–29. Bermeo, N. G. and Nord, P. (eds) (2000) Civil Society Before Democracy: Lessons from Nineteenth-Century Europe (Lanham, Boulder, New York and Oxford: Rowman Littlefield). Burchell, G., Gordon C. and Miller, P. (eds) (1991) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Cohen, J. and Arato, A. (1992) Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press). Collins, R. (1990) “Conflict theory and the advance of macro-historical sociology”, in G.

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Ritzer (ed.) Frontiers of Social Theory: The New Syntheses (New York: Columbia University Press), pp. 68–87. Dahrendorf, R. (1991) “Die gefährdete Civil Society”, in K. Michalski (ed.) Europa und die Civil Society: Castelgandolfo-Gespräche 1989 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta), pp. 247–63. Dahrendorf, R. (1994) Der moderne soziale Konflikt: Essay zur Politik der Freiheit (Munich: DVA). Dean, M. (1999) Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: Sage). Dubiel, H. (1994) “Metamorphosen der Zivilgesellschaft I. Selbstbegrenzung und reflexive Modernisierung”, in H. Dubiel (ed.) Ungewißheit und Politik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp), pp. 67–105. Edwards, B., Foley, M. W. and Diani, M. (eds) (2001) Beyond Tocqueville: Civil Society and the Social Capital Debate in Comparative Perspective (Hanover and London: University Press of New England). Ehrenberg, J. (1999) Civil Society: The Critical History of an Idea (New York and London: New York University Press). Ekiert, G. and Kubik, J. (1999) Rebellious Civil Society: Popular Protest and Democratic Consolidation in Poland, 1989–1993 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press). Foucault, M. (2004) Geschichte der Gouvernementalität II: Die Geburt der Biopolitik. Vorlesung am Collège de France 1978–1979, translated by Jürgen Schröder (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp), pp. 399–434. Gellner, E. (1994) Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and its Rivals (London: Hamish Hamilton). Gosewinkel, D. and Reichardt, S. (eds) (2004) Ambivalenzen der Zivilgesellschaft: Gegenbegriffe, Gewalt und Macht (Berlin: WZB-discussion paper). Habermas, J. (1987) Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, vol. 2, 4th edn (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp). Habermas, J. (1996) Between Facts and Norms, translated by William Rehg (Cambridge: Polity Press). Havel, V. (1985) The Power of the Powerless: Citizens against The State in CentralEastern Europe, edited by John Keane, introduction by Steven Lukes (London: Hutchinson). Heins, V. (2002) Das Andere der Zivilgesellschaft: Zur Archäologie eines Begriffs (Bielefeld: transcript). Honneth, A. (1992) Kampf um Anerkennung: Zur moralischen Grammatik sozialer Konflikte (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp). Horkheimer, M. (1968) “Egoismus und Freiheitsbewegung” (1936), in A. Schmidt (ed.) Kritische Theorie, vol. 2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp). Hodgkinson, V. and Foley M. W. (eds) (2003) The Civil Society Reader (Hanover/London: University Press of New England). Jessen, R., Reichardt, S. and Klein, A. (eds) (2004) Zivilgesellschaft als Geschichte: Studien zum 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden: VS-Verlag). Kaviraj, S. and Khilnani, S. (eds) (2001) Civil Society: History and Possibilities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Keane, J. (1998) The Media and Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, reprinted version). Keane, J. (1996) Reflections on Violence (London and New York: Verso). Keane, J. (2000) Vaclav Havel: A Political Tragedy in Six Acts (London: Bloomsbury). Klein, A. (2001) Der Diskurs der Zivilgesellschaft: Politische Kontexte und demokratietheoretische Bezüge der neueren Begriffsverwendung (Opladen: Leske ⫹ Budrich). Kocka, J. (2000) “Zivilgesellschaft als historisches Problem und Versprechen”, in M.

Civil society: the revival of a concept 27 Hildermeier, J. Kocka and C. Conrad (eds) Europäische Zivilgesellschaft in Ost und West: Begriff, Geschichte, Chancen (Frankfurt and New York: Campus), pp. 13–39. Kocka, J. (2004) “Zivilgesellschaft in historischer Perspektive”, in R. Jessen, S. Reichardt and A. Klein (eds) Zivilgesellschaft als Geschichte: Studien zum 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden: VS-Verlag), pp. 29–42. Konrad, G. (1984) Antipolitics (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). Kumar, K. (1993) “Civil society. An inquiry into the usefulness of an historical term”, British Journal of Sociology, 44, pp. 375–95. Leiva, L. C. and Pagden, A. (2001) “Civil society and the fate of the modern republics of Latin America”, in S. Kaviraj and S. Khilnani (eds) Civil Society: History and Possibilities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 179–203. Mansfeldová, Z. and Szabó, M. (2000) “Zivilgesellschaft im Transformationsprozeß OstMitteleuropas: Ungarn, Polen und die Tschechoslowakei”, in W. Merkel (ed.) Systemwechsel 5. Zivilgesellschaft und Transformation (Opladen: Leske ⫹ Budrich), pp. 89–114. Münkler, H. (1993) Zivilgesellschaft und Bürgertugend. Bedürfen demokratisch verfasste Gemeinwesen einer sozio-moralischen Fundierung? Antrittsvorlesung 10. Mai 1993, Humboldt University Berlin. Public Readings, Issue 23. Nothelle-Wildfeuer, U. (1999) Soziale Gerechtigkeit und Zivilgesellschaft (Paderborn: Schöningh). Olvera, A. J. (ed.) (1999) La Sociedad Civil: De la teoría a la realidad (México: El Colegio de México). Reichardt, S. (2004) “Selbstorganisation und Zivilgesellschaft: Soziale Assoziationen und politische Mobilisierung in der deutschen und italienischen Zwischenkriegszeit”, in R. Jessen, S. Reichardt and A. Klein (eds) Zivilgesellschaft als Geschichte: Studien zum 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden: VS-Verlag), pp. 219–38. Rödel, U., Frankenberg, G. and Dubiel, H. (1989) Die demokratische Frage (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp). Rössel, J. (1999) “Konflikttheorie und Interaktionsrituale. Randall Collins’ Mikrofundierung der Konflikttheorie”, Zeitschrift für Soziologie 28, pp. 23–43. Schmalz-Bruns, R. (1994) “Zivile Gesellschaft und reflexive Demokratie”, Forschungsjournal Neue Soziale Bewegungen, 7 (1), pp. 18–33. Schmalz-Bruns, R. (1995) Reflexive Demokratie: Die demokratische Transformation moderner Politik (Baden-Baden: Nomos). Schmidt, M. G. (1995) Wörterbuch zur Politik (Stuttgart: Kröner). Senghaas, D. (1995) “Hexagon-Variationen. Zivilisierte Konfliktbearbeitung trotz Fundamentalpolitisierung”, in W. Goldschmidt and T. Mies (eds) Zivile Gesellschaft und zivilisatorischer Prozeß (Hamburg: Meiner), pp. 113–28. Splett, J. (1990) “Der mündige Wähler. Christlich-philosophische Erwägungen”, Stimmen der Zeit, 208, pp. 83–112. Stephan, A. (1985) “State power and the strength of civil society in the southern cone of Latin America”, in P. B. Evans, (ed.) Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 317–43. Tester, K. (1992) Civil Society (London and New York): Routledge. Trentmann, F. (ed.) (2000) Paradoxes of Civil Society: New Perspectives on Modern German and British History (New York and Oxford: Berghahn). Walzer, M. (1991) “The Idea of Civil Society”, Dissent, Spring 1991, pp. 293–304. Walzer, M. (1992) Zivile Gesellschaft und amerikanische Demokratie (Berlin: Rotbuch). Walzer, M. (1997) On Toleration (New Haven and London: Yale University Press).

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Weffort, F. (1989) “Why Democracy?”, in A. Stepan (ed.) Democratizing Brazil: Problems of Transition and Consolidation (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 327–50. Wolin, S. S. (2001) Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and a Theoretical Life (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press).

3

Civil society and its discontents Reflections on the North American experience Lawrence A. Scaff

I investigate two connected sets of issues: on the theoretical plane the discussion of civil society occasioned by the continuing debates about the quality and substance of civic life in the modern liberal-democratic polity, and in the world of practice and “real existing” civil society, the problems characteristically faced in a major urban setting – in this case, the place of my current involvements, Detroit, Michigan – as citizens work to re-establish a vital urban and civic life. My comments are directed to the North American context and thus may appear “local,” as they must be, but I believe they will also find resonance “globally” among the issues that societies confront elsewhere as efforts are made to understand the nature of civil society and to design programs for action that revitalize its institutions. This kind of investigation, both theoretical and applied, is important for tracing the conceptual history and validity of civil society as a general phenomenon in modern societies everywhere.

Civil society in the civic republic I want to begin with the “theoretical” issues, and I propose to do so by juxtaposing two influential positions from the last decade: those articulated by Michael Sandel and John Rawls. Sandel’s main work, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (1996), is intended as a statement about a public philosophy that is implicit, though often unrecognized, in practices and institutions in the United States. Public philosophy can be called “civic republicanism,” and like virtually every reference to civic life and civil society in the American context it draws upon Alexis de Tocqueville’s summation of the American experience. In Sandel’s words, the republican politics Tocqueville describes is more clamorous than consensual. It does not despise differentiation. Instead of collapsing the space between persons, it fills this space with public institutions that gather people together in various capacities, that both separate and relate them. These institutions include the townships, schools, religions, and virtue-sustaining occupations that form the “character of mind” and “habits of the heart” a democratic republic requires. Whatever their more particular purposes,

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Lawrence A. Scaff these agencies of civic education inculcate the habit of attending to public things. And yet given their multiplicity, they prevent public life from dissolving into an undifferentiated whole. (Sandel, 1996, pp. 320–1)

Stated more briefly; it is in the nature of civil society to be conflictual, not consensual. Civil society does not represent a close-knit community, but rather a form of association that enlists those public engagements and interests that are characteristic of a complex, diverse and contentious political and social life. This is a strong and representative Tocquevillean conception of what Sandel means by civil society in American public life. It underscores not simply the importance of a shared civic culture, but the inclusion of conflict, risk, uncertainty, plurality and diversity in the politics of civil society and the kind of overarching consensus that protects civic freedom. The language chosen in such a characterization also makes clear that the operation of so-called “agencies of civic education” is a necessary condition for any effective practice of civic republicanism. But the challenge hidden in this formulation of the public philosophy has to do with its contents or its substantive import: what is the actual subject matter or the substance of those conversations that sustain public dialogue and fill the important space provided by public and civic institutions? Sandel is concerned about our capacity and willingness to discuss questions we may have forgotten how to ask, namely: What economic arrangements are hospitable to self-government? How might our political discourse engage rather than avoid the moral and religious convictions people bring to the public realm? And how might the public life of a pluralist society cultivate in citizens the expansive selfunderstandings that civic engagement requires? (Sandel, 1996, pp. 6–7) To raise such questions implies that not only issues concerning our material well-being are properly part of our political discourse, but so are matters of deep moral and religious import. In this view, discussing our most important convictions contributes to the formation of our identity. The notion of an “expansive self-understanding” even suggests a certain kind of person or “self” whose identity is embedded importantly in the particular, historically and socially conditioned engagements of civic life – the kind of “self” the Canadian political philosopher Charles Taylor has attempted to delineate in his work (see Taylor, 1989). It points to much more than an identity reflected in abstract rights of citizenship. Now, Sandel is concerned about the kind of answer to such questions that insists on a “neutral framework” or a minimalist, procedural mechanism that reserves matters of deep moral or religious conviction for the private realm, not for the public life of civil society. For him this answer is the one given by “pro-

Civil society and its discontents 31 cedural liberalism” or the “procedural republic,” and it is expressed in an especially potent form in the writings of John Rawls.

Civil society in the procedural republic In Political Liberalism, Rawls sets forth a view of the constitutional liberaldemocratic political order that takes as its central theoretical challenge the construction of a convincing answer to a single question: “How is it possible for there to exist over time a just and stable society of free and equal citizens, who remain profoundly divided by reasonable religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines” (Rawls, 1993, p. 4)? Insisting that we address the most difficult case, Rawls wants to remind us that such doctrines – moral, religious, or philosophical – are truly comprehensive and are incompatible in the sense that we might think of opposed and irreconcilable Weltanschauungen. They express the potential for latent social conflict rooted in widely-recognized sources of differentiation: religion, culture, language, race, ethnicity, gender, socio-economic inequality, ideology. Nevertheless, within the scope of theoretical reflection about constitutional orders the differences among comprehensive doctrines must be “reasonable,” that is, they must reflect what Rawls calls an “overlapping consensus” about the order itself and the rules or procedures that govern it. Within the bounds of reasonableness, Rawls is of course aware of various answers to his question: civil religion, a civic culture characterized by trust, the institutions of civil society, and the one he wants to pursue himself – a constitutional regime based on procedural justice, its legitimacy resting on legality. To see the implications of Rawls’ quest we must note two important features of his thought. First, he claims that comprehensive doctrines are articulated not in public institutions accessible to all on the basis of shared political membership, as Tocqueville and Sandel would have it, but rather in civil society understood in the following way: Comprehensive doctrines of all kinds – religious, philosophical, and moral – belong to what we may call the “background culture” of civil society. This is the culture of the social, not of the political. It is the culture of daily life, of its many associations: churches and universities, learned and scientific societies, and clubs and teams, to mention a few. (Rawls, 1993 p. 14) In this formulation a somewhat surprising dualism therefore appears, introducing a tension between the social and the political. Thus, Rawls must concede a paradoxical conclusion: the social discourse occurring in the associations of civil society can only be “public” with respect to the members of the particular association, but must be “nonpublic with respect to political society and to citizens generally” (Rawls, 1993, p. 220).1 Second, when it comes to public-political discourse he argues for a direct

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relationship between the conflicts apparent in any civil society, so defined, and abstract thought. “The work of abstraction,” he writes, is not gratuitous: not abstraction for abstraction’s sake. Rather, it is a way of continuing public discussion when shared understandings of lesser generality have broken down. We should be prepared to find that the deeper the conflict, the higher the level of abstraction to which we must ascend to get a clear and uncluttered view of its roots. Since the conflicts in the democratic tradition about the nature of toleration and the basis of cooperation for a footing of equality have been persistent, we may suppose they are deep. Therefore, to connect these conflicts with the familiar and basic, we look to the fundamental ideas implicit in the public political culture . . . (Rawls, 1993, pp. 45–6) In these few lines Rawls provides a concise defense of his approach to political questions, an approach that yields a telling formula: the deeper and more persistent the conflicts in civil society that we experience, the higher and more insistent the level of abstraction we must use to address those conflicts. The higher the level of abstraction, the more detached and, therefore, the clearer the view. Conflict and abstract thought are thus reciprocally related. And in this formulation abstract thought consists of a careful specification of legal rules and procedures. The procedural republic is a legalistic republic, and legalism is as characteristic of it as proceduralism. This relationship between conflict and theory can lead to paradoxical results: for in societies characterized by high levels of conflict, we would thus expect to find high levels of abstract legalistic reasoning applied to those conflicts. Or in democratic societies, where conflict is typically endemic, though institutionally constrained, we would expect abstract or idealized conceptions to predominate in public debate. Of course we might be able to investigate this claim empirically. But in such an environment our thought could lose all practicality as particular judgments and issues of policy are obscured amidst the fog of abstractions. Moreover, such a view defies our experience that persistent conflict is best negotiated by becoming as clear as possible about the concrete details and the particulars of disagreement. Rawls wants to hedge against such lines of reasoning, however, by inserting a conception of “reasonableness” and the kind of limited conflict contained within a public–political culture. But these conceptions also presuppose what he sets out to demonstrate in the general defense of political liberalism.

Encumbered or unencumbered citizens? Sandel’s views then focus directly on Rawls’ rights-oriented liberalism that “defends the priority of the right over the good” and offers a procedural republicanism which holds that “government should be neutral among competing conceptions of the good life” (Sandel, 1994, pp. 1766, 1770). The categories of

Civil society and its discontents 33 Sandel’s reply are instructive, for his argument takes issue both with the kind of abstraction that Rawls claims for his thought and the effort to avoid controversies about the nature of the self and to rule out or severely limit contentious discussion of comprehensive moral and religious doctrines. In his words, Rawls’s “political liberalism refuses to take sides in the moral and religious controversies that arise from comprehensive doctrines, including controversies about conceptions of the self.” In addition, it “insists on bracketing our comprehensive moral and religious ideals for political purposes, and on separating our political from our personal identities” (Sandel, 1994, pp. 1771, 1777). The result, Sandel concludes, is a curiously abstract, unattached, neutral, asocial and unhistorical conception of “persons as free and independent selves, unencumbered by moral or civic ties” (Sandel, 1996, p. 6). In its application to modern liberal-democratic politics this conception, he maintains, has come to dominate and impoverish our ideas about persons, citizens, and public life. Sandel is concerned about the way the conception of the self is separated from the actual socio-historical sources of the self’s identity. His entire argument revolves around a juxtaposition on the one side of the “unencumbered self” and the “proceduralism” and “instrumental” orientation of Rawls’s standard account, and on the other side the contrasting “encumbered” self of the civic republican tradition that he wants to retrieve. The former is criticized as a distancing, differentiated, alienated, experimental, negative model of the self, whereas the latter is defended as anchored in space and time, positively weighted with the bonds of obligation, duty and civic responsibility. The quality of a person at stake in this distinction “is the disposition to see and bear one’s life circumstance as a reflectively situated being – claimed by the history that implicates me in a particular life, but self-conscious of its particularity, and so alive to other ways, wider horizons” (Sandel, 1996, p. 16).2 For Sandel, precisely this disposition is missing from Rawls’s “unencumbered self.” The road to reconciliation for Sandel thus leads through a substantively rich tradition of thought about citizenship, political education and self-rule. In place of Rawls’s defense of abstraction, his analytic strategy is thus to rely on historical argument, examples drawn from policy debates, and an understanding of actual constitutional decisions and precedents. The resulting thick texture of narration is designed to show that the most “promising basis for a democratic politics . . . is a revitalized civic life nourished in the more particular communities we inhabit” (Sandel, 1996, p. 346).3 The difficulty for the encumbered self, however, is that it can also be oppressed and subjugated, self-silenced by the strictures of particular institutionalized arrangements. Indeed, there is a lengthy American tradition that identifies “community” in the abstract and “embedded” relations of any kind with the absence of freedom, whether civic or individual. One attraction of Rawlsian proceduralism is precisely its provision for individual liberty, protection against harmful norms and practices, or defense, even, of a kind of liberating and contentious individuality. Perhaps the only way to avoid both the procedural alternative and the problem of oppression is to conceive of civil society as necessarily

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the sphere of voluntary association, as distinct from “community” and in opposition to it.4 To say this much is to insist that citizens must be able to choose, defend, modify or jettison the “encumbrances” that accumulate over time and form the substance of the civic republic.

Two conceptions of civil society We can sum up the disagreement between Sandel and Rawls by subsuming it within the opposition between substantive rationality and formal rationality. The contrast leads to two rival conceptions of civil society: the “communitarian” conception of civil society as consisting of agencies of civic education engaged in public discussion of fundamental, comprehensive political and moral questions, and the “liberal” conception of civil society as consisting of the nonpublic, social expression of comprehensive doctrines hedged in by formal rules.5 The crucial point to the analytical distinction is that political institutions relate to the former as the expression of substantive civic norms and practices, to the latter as the arbiter of conflict through the use of formal rules and procedures. For the former “civic republican” conception, “the political” includes, or is continuous with, civil society. For the latter “liberal” conception politics is separated from the contentiousness of discourse in civil society. The distinction is important and makes a difference because, for the former, discussion of those basic and potentially dangerous “comprehensive doctrines” is essential to the expanded view of the political sphere and the demands of informed citizenship, while for the latter such discussion is best constrained by rules, rights and procedures that are themselves the ingredients of citizenship. Is it possible to adjudicate this theoretical disagreement? Are the categories of the distinction mutually exclusive? What can we consider in the political and social world that might help us to assess these two versions of civil society, citizenship and political institutions, or help us to apply the competing versions in instructive ways?

The workings of “real existing” civil society I would like to suggest that both of these conceptions of civil society have important things to say to us. Consider one example among many: the Motor City – Detroit, Michigan – is usually taken as the example of failed urbanism, failed industrialization, imploded modernity, and the collapse of civil society however it might be conceived. It is a metropolis and metropolitan region marked by sharp differences and inequalities, divided racially and ethnically. Its social environment is characterized by extremes in wealth, education, and the vast array of other public services and goods, such as health care, jobs, security, transportation, and the like. There are numerous reasons for this state of affairs. One of the most interesting “local” reasons is the legacy of “Fordism,” which meant not only the mechanization of production, but also a certain kind of mechanization of urban life.

Civil society and its discontents 35 The model for the metropolis was the single family home with unattached garage, supported by the automobile, which was in turn supported by a network of thoroughfares and freeways. Economic interests and the resulting low population density worked against efficient mass transportation, while individual mobility maximized unimpeded movement. The model could be replicated and extended indefinitely, assuming a benign topography. If any kind of social problem emerged – racial and ethnic tensions, crime, declining schools – the response was growth beyond the urban area, creating suburbs and new edge cities, hollowing out the core of the metropolis. The racially charged insurrection of 1967 has left a majority black city surrounded by white suburbs and edge cities, with a few pockets of ethnic communities, such as the largest concentrated Arabic-speaking population outside the Middle East – all on an important international border, supporting the highest volume of trade in North America. We have seen these kinds of forces at work in most North American cities and now in European cities as well. As the center of the automotive industry and culture, global in its reach nowadays, the Detroit metropolitan region presents an especially striking example of pressures on civil society. Consider the municipality of Hamtramck, a separate administrative unit within the city of Detroit, bounded by Daimler-Chrysler, General Motors, and automotive supplier plants, home more than 60 years ago to a majority immigrant Polish population of about 50,000. Today, total population has shrunk by about 50 percent, a quarter of which have Polish ancestry. The other large ethnic groups are now African American, Arab American, and Asian in roughly equal proportions. The sizeable majority of occupations are still in the blue collar or service sector, with median family income a very modest $27,000, compared with a national figure of $43,000. A declining tax base has left the city administration hovering on the edge of bankruptcy, schools in disrepair, neighborhoods neglected, commercial enterprises closing down, and vital social and community services underfunded and overburdened. One of the main reasons for the disruption of Hamtramck is industry itself, the construction of large automated plants, employing fewer and fewer workers, encroaching on neighborhoods and bulldozing residential areas, always in the name of contributing to civil society through the production of wealth. The choice to resist this intrusion, to remain one of those “encumbered” individuals whose engagement is defined by local associations and particular ties to family, neighborhood, church, workplace, sports club and the like, is a choice for a certain kind of citizenship. Some Polish residents still make this choice, but most do not, relocating and sometimes refashioning elsewhere the agencies of civic education. The contrast could not be more starkly drawn: two competing views of social goods and the requirements of a prosperous and free civil society, the one concrete and associational, the other detached from any particular society and replicable anywhere. In light of what we might call the “fluctuations of social capital” (Grant, 2001) in this and similar situations, one might wonder what it is that holds such communities together. Why not periodic and repeated violent breakdowns fueled

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by racial discrimination, ethnic grievances and economic inequalities of the kind Detroit experienced 35 years ago? There are two basic answers to this question. The first is found most obviously in the politics of community organizing and the groups formed in the institutions of civil society that are dedicated to social concerns and political action. There is good evidence that organizational activity in particular local settings promotes the kind of civil society deTocqueville had in mind (Sabl, 2002), and the experience of metropolitan Detroit seems to bear this out. Considering the most disadvantaged African American communities, for example, it is clear that through the black churches clergy and congregations engage in the kind of activism that the civic republic would predict and want to promote (see Brown and Hartfield, 2001; Elshtain, 2001). Moreover, this kind of engagement is historically conditioned, embedded in the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the continuing struggle for racial justice that brought clergy and congregations into the political process. Importantly, the church in this case is essentially a voluntary association, a “sect” organized around a calling and a testing of conviction and belief, and not a compulsory organization. In many ways it is the model for all voluntary associations, performing precisely those functions of representation that liberal-democratic theory would applaud. Second, one of the most interesting aspects of civil society in the American setting is that the constitutional legal tradition created important complexities across the political order, as close observers since de Tocqueville have invariably noticed. As a recent scholar has remarked, “The Constitution itself performed some of the roles of civil society. Most obviously, it restrained the government” (Tushnet, 2002, pp. 359–60) – in the US Constitution with First Amendment protections, the separation of powers, and federalism as the most obvious examples. For instance, state governments could be viewed as “institutions of civil society” with respect to the national government, with the complex and overlapping array of local political and administrative jurisdictions performing the same function with respect to the states and the federal level. The same can be said for the federal system in Canada as it has evolved to its present form. What this means is that civil society as it really exists can be not only institutionalized in the voluntary associational life of the “civic republic,” but it can also be constitutionalized in the political practices of the “procedural republic.” Voluntarism and federalism are the key elements, and in municipalities like Hamtramck they can become the mechanisms for overcoming a fragmented civil society and incorporating conflict in the political process. There is every reason to expect similar outcomes in other political contexts.

Conclusion: civil society and global forces If we accept the attractiveness of this applied synthesis of contrasting conceptions, then we must still face up to two related questions: are particular political identities and the sources of support for civil society compromised by their confrontation everywhere with the forces of the transnational market and globaliza-

Civil society and its discontents 37 tion? Are the forms of community organizing and the constitutional provisions just described merely an illustration of the old thesis of “American exceptionalism,” that is, the view that civil society is made possible by peculiar and unique socio-historical features of the American experience? My own view is that the thesis of American exceptionalism is increasingly wearing thin in an age when two challenges seem to confront national and local communities everywhere: the challenge of devising political institutions that stand a chance of directing or even influencing the irreversible process of globalization, which arguably has been underway at least since the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, and the challenge of cultivating the civic identities embedded in a vibrant civil society that are required to support and maintain those institutions. An apparently unique tradition of “voluntarism” or of “federalism” may provide a valuable resource in the constructive formation of civil society. But that is not to say that functionally equivalent modes of civic engagement are impossible to develop in societies committed to what I have identified as the project of self-government that is essential to the liberal-democratic order. One shared difficulty in responding to these challenges is that historical retrieval of institutional arrangements and civic identities is generally inadequate to the task. This is the case not only in Central and Eastern Europe, but in North American as well. Such retrieval is often only a reminder of traditions and forms of embedded relations or legal arrangements (even notions as straightforward as the “rule of law”) that we might be able to locate and excavate, given committed initiatives and appropriate conditions in civil society. Today, however, the actually existing economic and political forces affecting civil society often seem to point in a different direction. These forces are always global in some measure, rather than entirely singular and local. They threaten everywhere to provoke the reactions of traditionalism, fundamentalism or the reversion to plain formlessness and anomie. Furthermore, it seems clear that the traditional answer provided by the “cosmopolitan ideal” of citizenship, so characteristic of the nineteenth century, will no longer be able to sustain a vital public philosophy for the twenty-first century. One important reason for this state of affairs is that the particular communities and attachments that make up civil society and form political identities have increasingly staked a claim on our conceptions of citizenship and civil life. In this situation, the most appropriate point to emphasize is that selfgovernment will become a reality and will seem most capable of meeting the challenges posed to it when citizenship is encouraged to form across many local and particular sites of civic engagement, and political authority becomes responsive to civil society. The arguments and cases examined in this paper suggest at least possible opportunities to engage new forms of citizenship, and thereby to enrich the narrative substance and resources of civic life.

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Notes 1 Charney (1998) offers a qualified defense of the Rawlsian distinction between public and nonpublic spheres, although in the end with a reformulation of the notion of “comprehensive doctrines.” 2 Charles Taylor (1989, esp. ch. 25) also offers a powerful defense of the “encumbered” self and the search for what he calls “constitutive goods,” although in language unlike Sandel’s that emphasizes the expressive possibilities in aesthetic experience. 3 I read Habermas’s (1995) commentary on Rawls’s arguments in Political Liberalism as an effort, like Sandel’s, to criticize “proceduralism” and defend substantive principles of democratic governance, though on quite different theoretical grounds. 4 The most recent English translation of Ferdinand Tönnies’s classic work, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, renders the title “Community and Civil Society” rather than “Community and Society,” a linguistic change that suggests the dichotomous relationship. Using the language of social theory, the dichotomy can be explicated in terms of Parsonian “pattern variables:” particularism versus universalism, specificity versus diffuseness, affectivity versus affective neutrality, ascription versus achievement, and a collectivity-orientation versus a self-orientation. One should point out, however, that for neither Sandel nor Rawls is civil society to be confused with community or Gemeinschaft. On the contrary, its norms and action orientations are those of “society” or Gesellschaft, using the classic terminology of social theory. For this reason, to label Sandel’s position “communitarian” can be quite misleading, especially outside the North American context. 5 Foley and Edwards (1996) also distinguish between two contrasting versions of civil society, but focus instead on its function: either emphasizing the capacity of associational life to encourage civility in a democratic polity, or emphasizing the ability of associational life to resist authoritarian rule. I assume both of these functions can be performed within the framework of each of the rival conceptions of civil society.

References Brown, R. E. and Hartfield, C. (2001) “The black church culture and politics in the City of Detroit.” Wayne State University, Center for Urban Studies. Working Paper Series, No. 5 (October). Charney, E. (1998) “Political liberalism, deliberative democracy, and the public sphere,” American Political Science Review, 92 (1) (March), pp. 97–110. Elshtain, J. B. (2001) “Civil society, religion, and the formation of citizens,” in D. Ravitch and J. P. Viteritti (eds) Making Good Citizens: Education and Civil Society (New Haven: Yale University Press), pp. 263–78. Foley, M. A. and Edwards, B. (1996) “The paradox of civil society,” Journal of Democracy, 7 (3), pp. 38–52. Grant, G. (2001) “Fluctuations of social capital in an urban neighborhood,” in D. Ravitch and J. P. Viteritti (eds) Making Good Citizens: Education and Civil Society (New Haven: Yale University Press), pp. 96–121. Habermas, J. (1995) “Reconciliation through the public use of reason: remarks on John Rawls’s political liberalism,” The Journal of Philosophy, 92 (3) (March), pp. 109–31. Rawls, J. (1993) Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press). Sandel, M. (1994) “Political liberalism,” Harvard Law Review, 107, pp. 1765–94. Sandel, M. (1996) Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press).

Civil society and its discontents 39 Sabl, A. (2002) “Community organizing as Tocquevillean politics: the art, practices, and ethos of association,” American Journal of Political Science, 46 (1) (January), pp. 1–19. Taylor, C. (1989) Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). Tushnet, M. (2002) “Race, state, market, and civil society in constitutional history,” in S. F. VanBurkleo et al. (eds) Constitutionalism and American Culture: Writing the New Constitutional History (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press), pp. 35–98.

4

Comments on Reichardt and Scaff Jir˘i Musil

I shall try to confront the Western conceptions of civil society with the experience of renewing civil society in one post-communist country, in this case the Czech Republic. I shall draw on my own experience with the activities of one of the most important civic initiatives, “Impulse 99”, and the discussion that went on around civil society in the Czech environment during the 1990s. It is clearly impossible for me to go into detail here and I must limit myself to commenting on only the main results of this confrontation. Nevertheless, I hope that a description of the role of civil society in two different settings will contribute to enriching our understanding of the concept of civil society. I should like to comment on them in the following sequence: first, the study written by Sven Reichardt, “Notes on the Revival of a Concept”, second, the paper by Lawrence A. Scaff, “The Communitarian Critique of Liberal Civil Society: Reflections on the North American Debate”. The first papers are analytical and are concerned with conceptual issues, and they are interrelated. In stressing the theoretical and historical aspects of civil society as developed in the West, these papers allow me to make a comparison between Western concepts and the recent endeavour to revive the idea of civil society in a post-communist country, specifically in the Czech Republic. I am sure we all very much appreciate Sven Reichardt’s clarity, and the rich content and systematic approach applied in his notes – which are definitely something more than merely notes. I learned a great deal from reading the text, and his paper inspired me to compare the Western models of civil society with those that have been recently developed in my country. I found particularly interesting the stress he put on the “prismatic and polymorphic” nature of the term civil society, and on the fact that the term civil society “is embedded in historical developments”. The analytical and historical approach he has taken enables him to speak about typologies of civil societies and about “different degrees of civil societies”. By linking the historical study of civil societies to an analytical approach, Reichardt is able to indicate five systematic features of the term civil society as used in different historical and socio-cultural contexts. These are so instructive that I think we should briefly recall them here. First, civil society was and is a normative concept with universalist claims. Second, civil society must be able to pursue a variety of interests and this means that civil society reacts to

Comments on Reichardt and Scaff 41 conflicts and inequality. Third, a “vital civil society is a precondition of effective democratic government” but on the other hand “a flourishing associational life does not necessarily provide a support for democracy”. Fourth, an important element of civil society is public communication, where the stress is laid on the “publicness of civil society”. Reichardt’s description of the third feature of civil society in particular offers outstanding insight. He avoids the naïve interpretation of civil society as a solely unifying social mechanism. Society in general can be pathological, and its elements – such as civil society, for example – can function as disintegrating forces. In our times, with the presence of internationally organised crime, terrorism, mafias etc., we understand this point very well. Like Ernest Gellner in Conditions of Liberty. Civil Society and its Rivals, Reichardt is describing the renaissance of the concept in the 1970s and the 1980s in Central Europe, but to the modern roots of the concept he has also added the civic movements against authoritarian states in East Asia and Latin America. We, who come from East-Central Europe, very much appreciate the fact that he has also stressed Latin America as a region of civil-society revival. It helps one to avoid some of the parochial views regarding the modern roots of the idea. And again, like Gellner, Reichardt is convinced that there is relatively little mystery behind the reason that the concept of civil society was reinvented in Central Europe and Latin America. Authoritarian states destroy spontaneous political and social life; the advocates of civil society fought against such types of state by stressing “humanistic antistatism” or by applying the idea of “nonpolitical politics” or a “parallel polis”, as did the Czech dissidents (Václav Havel, Václav Benda). In reference to the above I could also imagine a kind of “non-humanistic anti-statism”. Of more importance, however, is the fact that for some supporters of civil society – many of whom were Western observers – the need to build good democratic states in the post-communist societies was a low priority. Nevertheless, for those who live in the post-communist societies, understanding the significant and positive role of a good democratic state, rule of law, and a well-functioning bureaucracy, etc, ranks among the more important lessons drawn from the societal transformations in East-Central Europe after 1989. Some Western supporters of the concept of civil society wrongly assumed that the ordinary people – demos – in the former communist states had retained and maintained democratic and liberal virtues, attitudes and behavioural patterns throughout the whole period of the dictatorial regimes. However, this is an unrealistic assumption. First of all, many of the Central European countries, even before the communists took power, had never experienced any genuinely liberal, democratic regime. The liberal tradition was weak even before the Second World War, and that already weak tradition was virtually destroyed entirely by the communist regimes established after 1945. The concept of civil society was revived and cultivated in these countries mainly by dissident urban intellectuals, students, and, in Poland, by a trade-union movement. For the masses of people, the concept of civil society before 1989 was unknown, and it had no mobilising effect on them. Reichardt is fully aware of these “specific

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historical constellations”, and he critically mentions the fact that the dissident humanistic antistatists did not attribute an important role to the market and economic institutions in creating a civil society in post-communist countries. But it seems to me that even he, in looking at the role of the concept of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe, has to some extent retained the perspective of Western academic literature. In this context I should say that I also have objections to those authors who assume that the “logic of the market with its orientation towards individual profit, competition and struggle is not completely compatible with the logic of civil society . . .”. I should point out that these words are not Sven Reichardt’s; they are from a text he has quoted, published by a German organisation called “attac”. But here again I see a trap in underestimating the East European experience of the second half of twentieth century. I think that Ernest Gellner was much closer to being right when, on the contrary, he stressed the existence of the market economy as a conditio sine qua non of a functioning civil society. I think that without difficulty I could rephrase the above-mentioned quote from “attac” to read as follows: “the logic of central planning with its stress on tuning the economic processes by administrative decisions, is not completely compatible with the logic of civil society . . .”. It would seem that in our discussions of civil society we often find ourselves in a difficulty brought on by the overly general definitions and statements that refer to it, which are more an expression of some ideological intentions than of any empirical observations or historical analyses. I must stress that regardless of how favourably I feel towards the intentions expressed in the term civil society, I am simply a bit afraid of its blurred and fuzzy uses. Taking a critical but instructive approach, Reichardt’s paper shows us the diversity of ways in which the term is used. I shall return to his four variants of civil society as interpreted in democratic Western societies when I come to comment on the Czech situation. The paper of Lawrence A. Scaff has an interesting structure. It starts with a discussion of theoretical works written by Michael Sandel, John Rawls and Charles Taylor, and then continues with a fascinating description of the workings of “really existing” civil society, in this case, the city of Detroit, Michigan. The author himself feels that his “comments are likely to sound North American and ‘local’, as they must be, but”, he goes on to say, “I believe they may find some resonance among the issues that we confront elsewhere on a ‘global’ scale . . .”. The paper is indeed a good reflection of the North American discussion between communitarians and traditional liberals, but it also documents the plurality of meanings assigned to the concept civil society, as well as the specificity of North American society in general. The paper facilitates a better understanding of the specific American approaches to the concept of civil society, for example, in the view of “civic republicanism” or Tocquevillian philosophy. Lawrence Scaff also shows us how important the concept of community is in American thought and how it differs from the European interpretation. When reading American social and political studies on communities, Europeans often have the feeling that, in the United States, communities to a large extent served

Comments on Reichardt and Scaff 43 as substitutes for the function of the state. European, and especially Central European, experience was different. In Europe, a more centralised political organisation of society rendered the nature and quality of the state more important in public discourse. Liberals in Central Europe were even a bit afraid of the term community. Community, or in German Gemeinschaft, was the term used to describe a social organisation of traditional societies, with strong social controls, an emphasis on common values, ascribed social status, and a hierarchical social structure. In European thought, to consider community to be the basis of civil society is something exceptional, and it seems that only some German authors have followed the communitarian example. I have to admit that Scaff’s careful and unquestionably good presentation of the American discussion between Sandel and Rawls did not stir a deep interest on my part. This is undoubtedly a problem that stems from my socialisation in a Central European culture. In this culture, the subtle issues of expansive self-understanding, the unencumbered self (Sandel) visà-vis proceduralism and instrumental orientation (Rawls), are not as pressing as in a society where the majority of people accept the existing political order. Most Central European generations have been through the experience of split societies, with (the coexistence of) two, or of parallel, societies – one described as official, and the other considered to be the real one. This of course is something different from a pluralistic, diversified, but nonetheless integrated society. In our societies, given their past, the issues of civil society simply have other dimensions. I very much liked the last part of the paper where the author tries to explain what holds American communities, such as Detroit, together during deep economic and social difficulties. Undoubtedly the two answers given by Lawrence Scaff are important: i.e. first, the politics of organising a community, and second, the existence of groups dedicated to social concerns on the one hand and the “existence of the constitutional legal tradition”, which “created important complexities across the political order” on the other hand. I would add – as an observer – to this, a kind of loyalty to the basic values of American society, i.e. to the core values in Edward Shils terms. Let me now turn to the second part of my comments. After 1989 the new Czech state went through several political crises. One of the most severe – in addition to the crisis which led to the division of Czechoslovakia – was the one that started in 1997. It was linked to economic difficulties resulting from an improper form of privatisation, i.e. from voucher privatisation. Other phenomena that contributed to bring about this crisis included the “tunnelling” of privatised firms, the financial scandals of some political parties, and the loss of citizens’ confidence in government and parliament. Many citizens became politically disillusioned and began to be apathetic. A group of intellectuals, journalists, scientists, economists and students, as well as other citizens, reacted to this situation by founding various civic initiatives and associations, the most influential of which were “Thank you, please leave” and “Impulse 99”. Obviously, the emergence of all these initiatives was not accidental – it reflected the fact that many people began to feel that they were unable to have an influence on public matters, and that the important matters were being

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decided behind the doors of the secretariats of the political parties, whose financing moreover completely lacked transparency. “Impulse 99” – which I took part in founding – dealt with three clusters of problems. The first cluster was concerned with basic issues of democracy, with the relationship between politics and the economy, and politics and ethics. The second was a critique of contemporary Czech political culture, especially the lack of cooperation, the prevailing distrust among politicians, and the lack of willingness to address the country’s strategic issues. The third cluster of “Impulse 99” activities was concerned with topical political issues such as the decentralisation of public administration, regional self-government, fiscal policy, etc. The general public was mainly interested in the critical statements the initiative put together dealing with contemporary Czech political culture. Conversely, the amount of interest in the discourse on basic questions of democracy was rather low. From the very beginning I had the impression that the activities of “Impulse 99” were too broad and diffuse. It seems that the viable and successful civic movements and associations are those that are able to find out and properly define important, long-term and widely felt problems and plights. There must always be a strong and specific cause, such as, for example, the environmental crisis, gender issues, racial discrimination, or the curtailment of human rights. “Impulse 99”, in my opinion, lacked any such cause. Participation in “Impulse 99”, and in the discussions on civil society in the Czech Republic, has enabled me to make a comparison of the empirical reality of Czech civil society and the theoretical concepts developed in Western countries. Here I use Sven Reichardt’s typology. According to Reichardt we can distinguish four meanings of the term civil society: (1) the communitarian model, stressing the socialising effects of voluntary organisations, which form the core of civil society and help to foster a “good life”; (2) civil society is a kind of regulative mechanism and generates new ideas for a grass-roots type of democracy; (3) the liberal concept of civil society, with the stress on the existence of autonomous, nongovernmental organisations, which ensure plurality, autonomy, publicity and civil rights in society at large; (4) Jürgen Habermas’s, and his pupils’, discourse-theory approach, that is, “civil society is the social space in which communicative action takes its most distinct shape. Non-coercive discourse and open debate form the core of Habermas’s notion of civil society” (Reichardt). If one looks at the Czech civic initiatives, reads the Czech theoretical studies, and studies the data on the structure of non-governmental organisations, it becomes obvious that by civil society the Czechs mean mainly the space of autonomous non-governmental organisations, that is, the liberal conception, and to some extent also the Habermasian discourse-theory approach, i.e. the fourth type. The communitarian and regulative grass-roots democracy conceptions of civil society have as yet no appeal for Czech society. The neo-Tocquevillian approach remains alien to them. I think that all this is mainly the effect of Czech historical experience over the past 50 years. This once again proves Reichardt’s thesis that the meaning of the concept of civil society is deeply “embedded in historical developments”.

Part II

The political sociology of civil society in transitional societies

5

Democracy, inequality and state crisis George Kolankiewicz

Democracy in the doldrums There is a clear dissatisfaction with the quality of democracy in contemporary Eastern Europe in general and Poland in particular. A casual glance at the Candidate Countries Eurobarometer Report for 20031 shows that 75 per cent of Poles were dissatisfied with the workings of their democratic system. This return was well above the 64 per cent average for other new EU-countries as well as for old members of the EU (65 per cent). For fledgling democracies the fact that this dissatisfaction is increasing is a cause for concern, and for Poland with the highest level of increase particularly so. This situation is further compounded by the high level of mistrust of political parties (83 per cent) where only Bulgaria compares, and the enormous growth in distrust of parliament (⫹13 on the year) which compares badly to an average increase in trust of legislatures across the region. The manner in which the legal system has likewise dropped down in the trust ratings in Poland again compared to a generalised increase elsewhere points to what politicians and commentators have now come to call a crisis of the Polish state.2 The fact that the definition of democracy has expanded to include all the values of a good society – the rule of law, an active civil society, strong individual rights and indeed a guardianship of meritocracy etc, may contribute to this dissatisfaction especially when the perception of widespread corruption within the body politic comes to corrode the value of democracy. It is of course possible to ask whether perhaps too much is being asked of the state, politicians and citizens alike – a level of responsiveness, of moral rectitude and altruism impossible to obtain and in fact unrealistic in its demands as well as a level of rational engagement and participation which is rooted in a misconception of the reality of western democracies. The dissatisfaction with democracy “as is” in Poland currently characterises about two thirds of the population. This is roughly the same proportion that believes that democracy is still superior to other forms of government.3 Thus, the dissonance is particularly grave given that a strongly held ideal appears to have been quickly and constantly undermined in practice by successive governments. According to CBOS (Public Opinion Research Centre) studies of public opinion it is usually two years after the election of a new government that the latter’s standing begins to rapidly decline.

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However, in March 2002, one year after the elections, the disillusionment set in earlier than usual and continued to plummet with only the prospect of EU accession on 1 May 2004 and the insistence of the president that there should be no changes that rock the ship of state staving off a broader crisis and early elections. As to why the disapproval emerged so quickly, this is probably due to the recognition that expectations for improved governance had now exhausted their existing options (when does government turnover stop being turnover?) a matter not helped by the generally accepted poor performance of the SLD-PSL (Democratic Left Alliance-Polish Peasant Party) coalition government. The collapse of this coalition in March 2003 would have done little to raise the standing of the government given the suspicion as to the reasons for the move towards another minority government in Poland. A flurry of ongoing corruption scandals, which appear to be graver in Poland than in neighbouring countries have added to this feeling of malaise. The geography of corruption cases appears to stretch across the country (who had heard of Starachowice before the Jagiello scandal?) and is being discovered in all spheres of public activity. The sense of frustration is therefore all the greater as witnessed by the high proportion, some 42 per cent, who could now envisage a government produced by means other than elections. This makes the mobilising slogan of the “new populists” attacking the whole political class, whether SLD or Solidarity-led, all the more comprehensible. As it happens, more contemplative writers are also being forced to question the credentials of the existing political elites and attendant political parties and indeed of the Third Republic itself and are casting around for alternatives, however bizarre.4 The calls for civic disobedience in response to the nonfulfilment on the part of the government of its part of the implicit social compact come not just from the street. Indeed, when serious political commentators suggest the non-payment of income tax and TV licence fees until the lines of public accountability on the part of the political class as a whole become more apparent, then it is evident that the overload of corruption cases, overt political capitalism and cronyism is reaching its limit.5 It is possible to understand some of the causes of this heightened sense of inwardly aimed reflexive criticism. The absence of the UW (Freedom Union) as the party often seen as somehow entrusted with the guardianship of the democratic ethos in parliamentary life may be a small factor. They were the conscience of the political class and, although the Law and Justice party briefly took over part of this mantle, its brief was more anti-corruption than democratic probity. The fact that these came together just when Jan Rokita of the Citizens’ Platform (PO) Party came onto the political arena is part of the politics of chance. With the demise of the UW, democracy as a value was demonstrably and quickly (and inevitably) replaced by the rough and tumble of electoral politics. That the UW remains an outlier in electoral opinion polls despite not being represented in parliament points to the enduring appeal of this ethos. The suspicion is that too many public institutions inhabiting the very heart of the state have been set up to share the spoils of electoral victory rather then to

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the serve the public. Political parties had come to be seen as large concerns oriented towards placing their apparatchiks, in this case the ex-communists (although not exclusively as the AWS (Solidarity Electoral Action) government clearly showed) in positions of power and high income. The perceived tendency to state capture has been intensified by the sheer numbers of such ex-apparatchiks who re-emerged more visibly and more forcibly and in greater numbers with the SLD victory of 2001. The desperate attempts at cleansing the party initiated in 2002 by the SLD leadership very much in the mode of “verification” characteristic of the communist period have done little or nothing to dilute the jaundiced view of politics. The enormous electoral superiority of the SLD has dissipated to an extent that few could have anticipated and have served to shape the political opportunities of the centre-right. The growth in standing of the Citizens’ Platform (PO) under Donald Tusk, which now leads the polls knocking the SLD off prime position for the first time in five years is in part a consequence of the vehement questioning by Jan Rokita in the Sejm Commission as well as the alacrity with which the PO dealt with the evidence of corruption within the ranks of its Warsaw party organisation. His ability, almost single-handedly, to take over the law and order mantle from the PiS and catapult his party into contention for power in 2004 is a symptom of the depth of the corruption malaise. This has temporarily put to rest disquiet over the apparent tendency towards oligarchy with little or no political competition, but the expectations of the PO could be equally demanding. Whether this re-choreographing of the political stage serves to inject credibility into what has come to be termed “façade-democracy” remains to be seen.7 There is little doubt that such “ritual democracy” has been exploited and manipulated by the networks of interests that have become established since 1989 and which appear concerned either to limit the emergence of genuinely counterelites or to set up bolt holes at home or abroad for when they leave power.8 Obviously the sense of widespread corruption, of clientilism and of the existence of semi-covert networks rooted in past associations, which not only effect the central and local political establishment but has more recently taken on an EU dimension,9 contributes to a fracturing of the already tenuous ties of legitimacy between these transition elites and their societal supporters.10 Thus, it is essential at this stage to interrogate why the sense of crisis in the state has taken such a hold since it can inform the remainder of the discussion around the role of social inequality, civic engagement and democracy itself in this crisis.

The crisis of the state During 2003, the impact of the Rywin affair11 acted as a golden bullet for understanding the nature of elite power and it also uncovered some of the workings of the post-communist state. Polish public opinion in a remarkable display of political maturity held out little hope (72 per cent) that the final report of the Parliamentary Investigative Commission, which at times had held over 60 per cent of the population enthralled through its televised proceedings, would reveal who was behind the corrupt offers allegedly coming from Lew Rywin to Adam

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Michnik and the Agora corporation. However, over 50 per cent did feel that the workings of the Commission had broadened their knowledge of the workings of the State and a clear majority felt it was a good thing that the Commission had been set up.12 Of course it was disconcerting that 60 per cent of the same respondents likewise felt that for all its achievements the Commission did not represent a breakthrough in the fight with corruption. However, the exposure of the existence of such more or less formal groups such as “Ordynacka”, apparently exercising power behind the scenes (not to mention the mechanics of law making in this case over the mass media bill), confirmed the views about façade democracy and also pointed to the power of the press and other media in acting as an unelected opposition, when the postSolidarity rights and indeed the new populists had so clearly failed. For this exposure – indeed, muck raking activity in the best sense of that word – as in other parts of the region such as Lithuania, the press which still functions largely under a 1982 Press Law came under sustained attack from the political and legal establishment. Nevertheless, the EU Monitoring Report mentioned above did not pull its punches when it quoted and concurred in a Council of Europe evaluation report “that corruption (in Poland) threatens to undermine the functioning of many public spheres”. Another indirect measure of popular dissatisfaction and its sources within the new order comes through retrospective “nostalgia studies”. Although not of much value in themselves as policy pointers, they do provide a barometer of validation of the new post-1989 order. An appreciable 21 per cent of the population appear to feel that there ought not to have been systemic change in 1989 (as expected older, less educated unskilled workers and peasant farmers) but this is only part of the story. Other CBOS studies find as many as 45 per cent who believe that the previous economic system was better than the present one. This response reflects the sentiments of that proportion of the population who have fared badly under the transformation, who find the levels of economic inequality, the demands and insecurity of choice and personal responsibility in a market society too great to handle. However, when all is said and done, perhaps most tellingly nearly 70 per cent believed that the current faults of the system are due to incomplete transformation, both political as well as economic. This must be a late vindication of the Balcerowicz position. Intriguingly this view is more strongly held by those working in the state sector rather than the private sphere. Likewise the support for the “premature consolidation” thesis is evident, and the belief that a variety of pathologies have emerged due to the ability of the political class to stall the reforms in their own interest finds powerful confirmation.13 However, once again despite these evaluations pointing to a legitimation of the principles of “shock therapy” there is a further aspect of these opinion studies that erodes some of this nascent legitimacy. Namely 87 per cent of Poles believe that the economy was ill served by privatisation, a key platform of 1989 reforms, since state assets were sold too cheaply and only served to line the pockets of swindlers, state apparatchiks and foreign interests.14 Thus, in a manner of speaking, corruption

Democracy, inequality and state crisis 51 was in at the birth of Polish democracy. The end effect was that Poland had fared less well than Hungary and the Czech Republic. That there is also a concomitant legitimacy deficit for the democratic order is not in doubt. Democracy as a value has seen support drop from 70 per cent in 1990 to 60 per cent in 2002. That the wife of the current president without any overt indication of political experience or ambitions should emerge as a serious candidate to replace her husband in the 2005 presidential elections is enough evidence for some to underline the depth of this crisis in political culture. Popular opinion, running in the same vein, likewise demands the exchange of the whole political class, and new elections are seen as largely irrelevant because respondents see real power as being exercised outside of elected bodies. Only 50 per cent of Poles felt any elected bodies rather than corrupt cliques, business interests or mafias actually ran the country – in fact, 9 per cent felt that no one was running the country. The lack of a political feel-good factor, which should have been expected with the unquestioned growth in the standard of living of the vast majority of Poles must be put down to this democratic deficit. Calls for a Church-led moral revival, for a new Solidarity, all point to the desperation that lies not far below the surface. Developing this theme it is evident that the definition of democracy is now intimately bound up with the prevalence of corruption. CBOS studies have clearly indicated that “equality before the law” is the prime attribute of democracy identified by the population but it is only eighth in terms of delivery by the state. This dissonance is redolent of possible interpretations. But such divergence between democracy and its delivery has been mentioned above and is now clearly tied to corruption and the “untouchable” and unaccountable status of those who perpetrate it. The second attribute of the democratic order is its selection of the best politicians to serve the nation and this is even further down the list of achievements (eighteenth) and a clear confirmation of the inability of the system to produce an acceptable political class. The absence of the feel-good factor from economic growth is further explained by the fact that democracy is critically also about “an equal start for children” or meritocracy and such values as care for the poor and proper provision of health care and cultural goods. Thus, corruption and social inequality are closely implicated in the non-achievement of the democratic ethos. That democracy comes to be associated with anti-corruption, the rule of law and key redistributive and egalitarian policies has had implications for the SLD, the dominant single party of the post-communist period. As a consequence, the SLD has suffered because it took on not only the guise of the social democratic redistributors but also the democratic and therefore anti-corruption champion. When the “social” failed through increased poverty and inequality and democracy became more embattled than ever through corruption of the state, so the core identity of the SLD fell apart. Alongside this perceived crisis is the spectacle of a burgeoning state that has doubled in size since 198915 and is still not delivering. Of course it can be argued that there is evident state overload in terms of expectations that are

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rooted in a redistributive past as well as in a liberal market present. This comes at a time when civic activism, which could have come to the rescue of the state, is low, crushed by the demands of everyday market adaptations and thus the emphasis on trust, always a shorthand for reduced activism, becomes greater and is all the more likely to fall short! This is accompanied by an anti-state reflex that has an eminent history in Poland where, as in the West, it faces problems of delivery coupled with the demands for impartiality and efficiency, which often deflect such delivery. The post Communist state, it can be argued, has not been able to handle output legitimacy as well as it has been able to parade input procedures in democratic consolidation. However, the prevalence of corruption, whether moral panic or real processes, does make the acceptability of market-generated social inequality more difficult to sustain. Of course, if it is incomplete marketisation that is the perceived cause then inequality is about pathological transition and not the fault of the market per se. Nevertheless, there is little doubt that the following discussion on civic engagement, inequality and the post-Communist legitimation discourse must be read off against the backdrop of the deep state crisis presented above.

Addressing social inequality It is not surprising therefore that the growing prevalence and depth of social inequality appears to have become the lynchpin around which democracy has been questioned. The transformation according to Ryszard Bugaj had become pervaded by a “culture of inequality” not rooted in any ethical foundations. There exists a dramatic divergence between the universalised beliefs of what is just and correct and the real rules of economic and public life.16 The state had come to be seen as simply organising a free-for-all, rather than building the basis of national endeavour and solidaristic action. Most importantly, the political process was seen as the façade mentioned above behind which an oligarchic system was being constructed for the purpose of exploiting citizens. Tellingly, the democratic system appears to have evolved in order to protect the interests of an increasingly coherent and self-recruiting political class rather than responding to the interests of the newly differentiated society. Whether Poland’s 100,000 earning millionaires are simply part of the growth of the capitalist system or a symptom of an unacceptable level of inequality is not the point. It is the fact that social inequality suffers a supreme deficit of legitimacy, which in turn is corrosive of democratic sentiment. Undoubtedly, most Poles have benefited from the years of consumer boom and market choice. The growth in consumer durables, housing, cars and the other marks of affluence is unquestionable. That it has left an increasingly visible minority outside the generalised well-being is equally undoubted but there appears to have been little of the feel-good factor or any societal gratitude for such increases in living

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standards. However, what is seen as important is not more data on equality but “the style of our discussions on Polish reality”.18 This immediately raises the question of how and by whom this inequality is to be interrogated and discussed. Those that are offended by the shortcomings of democracy in the face of socially offensive inequalities are many. Obviously the “intelligentsia” desperately searching for a role as it is displaced by the burgeoning middle class is a candidate for such a function. Its sense of social conscience, of mission and service to the nation, however, may not be enough to counteract the partition of the country by the supermarkets and breweries. Democracy has therefore to shift into another gear, from designer democracy to “deliberative” democracy providing voice, public fora and egalitarian engagement as to the nature of Poland’s inequality. It can no longer be taken for granted, or dismissed as a necessary appendage to the market but discussed in its own terms against Poland’s realities. The politics of the common good must re-emerge once again and the authorities are required to confront inequality if only to counteract the slide to disorder. As in discussions in the West, the notion of redistribution has to become acceptable and no longer labelled with its communist past.

Social inequality and civil society However, some other points need to be cleared up. Rightly, the Polish transition, if it has been marked out by anything then it is by its civil society, whatever its current state. From Solidarnosc, as civil society writ large to the “third sector” as its post-communist emanation, civil society is generally perceived as integrative, based on horizontal association and expanding the realm of freedom. However, Michael Walzer has cogently argued that civil society contains another dimension, that of competition, over power and influence, over resources, over membership, attributes that are as important as its concern for coexistence and tolerance.19 More pertinently, civil society has a tendency to be captured by the educated middle class who are more vocal and thus may contribute to marginalisation and disenfranchisement of the less articulate and those devoid of social capital. Rather than the constructed identities, which come with association and over which they have ownership, the less organised accept imposed identities,20 which in turn limit their power of self-organisation and their voice. Networks, the basis of civil society, require resources to produce more effective associations and these, by definition, the excluded tend to lack. In the Polish case the third sector is dominated by powerful NGOs with 2 per cent controlling 60 per cent of resources in 1998. There exists a strong tendency towards the formation of oligarchic structures, political clientilism and control by ex-nomenklatura and other well-organised groups. Competition between NGOs,21 the manifestation of civil society, is stimulated by the instrumental treatment of civil society by the political class. This is not synonymous with the need for state regulation, which Walzer calls for in order to mitigate the stratifying effects of civil society as well as the need to regulate conflict. The abuse of civil society by the political elites is brought about by the weak establishment of civic structures. It is compounded

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by a civil service still prone to removal after elections and indeed unwilling to co-operate with NGOs as well as by a police and judiciary only now beginning to grow in public esteem.22 Coupled with the decline in social activism on the part of the population, these negative aspects of civil society are likely to intensify. The impact of this decline in activism on the pervasiveness of social trust has been noted and indeed there are real concerns over the low levels of readiness on the part of Poles to co-operate with each other (outside the realm of familism – moral or otherwise which of course mutates all too readily into corruption) over the longer term rather than one-off reciprocity.23 At the most basic level, household self help amongst the population also carries stratifying effects and compound inequalities. Thus, white collar households are not only more likely to come to each other’s assistance but they also tend to be more socially exclusive in the assistance they proffer.24 If left to their own devices micro as well as mezzo levels of social capital tend to contribute to the stratifying effects of civil society. It is of course civil society that provides citizenship with the associational life that brings it alive for “the citizen outside of his or her associations, is a lonely and insubstantial figure, without political influence”.25 Rights of whatever kind are passive without the dynamism of associational life. Educational rights without PTAs, Teachers Unions, Student Organisations, Boards of Governors, Churches and clubs, mean very little. Thus, the two have to be treated simultaneously and no more so than when examining their joint and, indeed often mutually reinforcing, contribution to the creation and reproduction of social inequality. However, if the state as the purveyor of these rights is likewise seen to be pathological and indeed corrupt then the core of citizenship is affected.

Citizenship and the legitimation of social inequality I have argued elsewhere for the need to examine the manner in which citizenship has served to contribute to the legitimation of social inequality in transformation Poland.26 The fact that the transition elites were accorded legitimacy on account as it were, always made the legitimation process that much more necessary both for the elites in question as well as for the outcome of their neoliberal policies. There is considerable evidence that the legitimacy deficit for social inequality in Poland is considerable and that the market and state will be some time in overcoming this shortfall.27 An important factor in this process is the manner in which what T. H. Marshall termed the “superstructure of legitimate expectations” develops, namely the qualitative element that encapsulates these rights and which is part of the process of building civic culture.28 Any study of material aspirations and expectations indicates that there exists a considerable inflation of such expectations. For example, what in the view of the unemployed and farmers represents a medium level of income in fact exceeds the real income of the most enterprising. Coupled with the experience of genuine deprivation amongst nearly 75 per cent of the population, this inflation

Democracy, inequality and state crisis 55 of expectations makes the legitimation of any attendant inequality that much more challenging.29 When the inequality is shot through with the taint of corruption not just in state responsibilities but also in the functioning of the market order, then the legitimation project becomes seriously challenged. The ideal of citizenship and the rights that underpin it in the West has been a historical process and one drawn out over centuries. In Poland, the process has been severely conflated and only the scantiest of blueprints is available. Poland witnessed a simultaneous re-construction and redefinition and indeed imposition of civil, political and social rights rather than the accretion of rights over a longer historical trajectory. This exercise in civic construction was carried out in the context of rampant consumerism and globalisation and makes any outcome in terms of their configuration much more difficult to predict and therefore the class abatement function of citizenship all the more difficult to manage. The very fluidity of citizenship as it faces trans-national referents and de-territorialisation is impossible to address here, suffice to say that it further undermines the elements of nation–state loyalty which is at the heart of citizenship and which makes inequality acceptable. The intensification of the critique of social inequality seems to indicate that social citizenship is failing in its key role as the “architect of legitimate inequality”. More disconcertingly, its class abatement function appears to be quite limited given the growing social unrest often couched in proto-class terms. The “real time constraints” of the transformation have produced a moral lag where the ethical underpinnings to the emerging social order are weaker than might be expected. Political and civil rights, rather than contributing to the process of legitimation, are to all intents and purposes undermining it as witnessed by the above-mentioned low esteem granted to the political class and to political institutions. The resonance of populist rhetoric and the saliency of its discourse are in part due to the erosion of the appeal of political freedoms. Nostalgia for the economic system of communism and the rejection of the market is partly a biproduct of the incompleteness of the transformation but also part of the overall legitimacy deficit. It has to be appreciated therefore that the connectedness of citizenship rights and market-generated inequalities cannot be assumed sui generis to evolve its own legitimacy. In the West, the democratic process provided an arena in which the two were discussed. All the more so in transition democracies, where rights and resources, of citizenship and the market, requires that those most involved and affected by both processes can deliberate their outcomes.

Deliberating social inequality The argument of this paper is that the principles of deliberative democracy generally associated with the debate around multiculturalism and diversity need to be applied to those divisions, both social and economic, being generated in Poland today. If citizenship rights are to perform their functions in the face of burgeoning market inequalities then they have to be injected with the legitimacy

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that only democratic deliberation can provide. Deliberation per se is all the more essential given the accelerated nature of social change attendant on democratisation. John Dryzek has argued cogently for the discourses of civic engagement necessary to instil a democracy that is both substantive and authentic. Deliberation retains a transformative power “which induces individuals to reflect upon their own interests and how they might be reconciled with the interests of others”.30 He draws attention to the need for discursive legitimacy, which is achieved “to the extent that collective outcomes are responsive to the balance of competing discourses in the public sphere”.31 This in turn requires the contestation of discourses, and quoting Benhabib on anonymous public conversation. It is apparent that the public sphere is, or should comprise, a constellation of discourses, which are storylines combining opinions on facts and values. When this public discourse is distorted through concerns over corruption then an extraneous element is brought in which confuses this discursive event. It is possible to argue that the bipolar political scene in Poland since 1989 contributed to a deficit in deliberation. The political discourses and political perspectives were uni-dimensional and it was not until the advent of populist rhetoric and the guarded approval it received that this became apparent. Too much “political voice” had been ignored in the stand-off between postCommunists and Solidarity. One of the reasons for the support accorded to such organs as Radio Maryja is that it appeared to listen to the old, the poor, the abandoned and not be unnerved by the resonance of marginalised voices.32 It is clear that another phase is called for in the “negotiated revolution” – that between the elites and society. The fact that 59 per cent of Poles believe that trade unions should have greater influence on government is suggestive of the extent of the underrepresented nature of Polish society. However, the fact that most Poles believed that none of the current trade unions represented their interests highlighted just how unrepresentative it had become.33 In tackling this populism, both sides of the political class have been compelled to adopt a new realism. Arguments now have to be grounded in the everyday misconceptions of the rank-and-file, which have been fed by the promises and illusions of successive governments, and contributed to the over-developed aspirations mentioned above.34 Of course, this voice of the marginalised does not only need to be heard but has to be mediated, converted and indeed translated through the deliberative process. In this context “deliberation” has an affinity to the nature of politics as practised. Edmund Mokrzycki drew attention to the peculiar nature of what he termed Poland’s “negotiated democracy” caused by the coexistence of two political processes, both caused by underdeveloped citizenship. On the one hand there is the typical feature of new democracies rooted in poorly developed civic structures, where governments are elected to rule and manage (dobry gospodarz) in a one-off contract at the ballot box, which has little political follow up. The unseemly distribution of power and positions after each change of government hardly served to provide a view of the democratic process as being concerned with policies, programmes and indeed continued participation. On the other

Democracy, inequality and state crisis 57 hand, a legacy of the old political system has been that key interest groups do have access to the powers that be and in a negotiating process can influence policies, temporarily defusing social conflicts. In both cases, negotiation and mediation between the sides in a conflict can take on the appearance of deliberation. The role of opinion polls and the mass media, who participate in this process, substitute for government policy and the law and there is little concern for the power of the ballot box.35 The passage from the politics of the socialist redistributive economy based around Mokrzycki’s “negotiated democracy” to those of market-based political pluralism embedded in civic society, involves a fundamental change to the process of deliberation. It demands a shift in emphasis from competitive to deliberative politics, from what Kymlicka has called “vote centric” to “talk centric” democracy, voice over votes. Politicians have to engage in public reasonableness, to listen and engage the views of the submerged majority, to practise the politics of persuasion rather than those of manipulation.36 Paradoxically, the crisis of the state, faced as it is by charges of inherent corruption, has made this deliberation more likely: the Sejm Investigative Commission is just such a terrain for deliberation – a public forum where voice is divorced from vote. This approach borrowed from the political sociology of multiculturalism recognises that Poland’s greatest challenge consists of the manner whereby longstanding patterns of structural inequality are now being combined to new forms of exclusion to create a genuine problem of representation for certain social groups. It recognises that procedural fairness rooted in one person one vote and interest group pluralism is insufficient to guarantee fair outcomes. Here, it could be argued, enhanced representation needs to be brought to bear and a situation created where institutions for fair representation have to be designed, which do not undermine the infant liberal democracy. Such bodies as the Tri-partite Commission, the Ombudsman and the Constitutional Tribunal provide some of the space for just such representation but clearly are still restrictive. Republican thought argues that “interactive deliberation by individuals in a public sphere of action and debate is the key process through which transformation occurs and the public interest is defined”.37 Once again the unintended outcome of corruption investigations carried out by the Polish parliament as well as the mass media is the creation of venues for such interactive deliberation. This approach argues for the contestation of common goals within an expanded public realm of deliberation so that different and unheard voices can be heard on issues of common concern. It requires respect and reciprocity and calls for articulation of good reasons. Any moral conflict that this entails need not lead to deliberative agreement but to understanding. Such reiterated deliberation informed by a discourse, which is real as well as participatory, does not require consensus as to its outcome. However, it goes beyond mere rights since it guarantees public forums, educates in deliberation and seeks to counterbalance the inequalities that marginalised groups bring to participation in public life – this is not so much a marketplace as a welfare space of ideas.38 The emphasis is as much on the manner in which voices are heard as on the simple fact of their

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being articulated since this contributes to the iterative process of legitimation. That the voice of the populist parties has declined since the Investigative Commissions provides support for this view. The exposure of corruption within the state and government provides a voice to those who feel that their life chances are being diminished by such practices. Whether this is the case or not is immaterial since transparency is the giving of voice. In making reference to the need for public space for such deliberation it is difficult not to be reminded of Bauman’s strictures on the passing of arenas for the exercise of horizontal justice, of public spaces both virtual and real where norms could be debated, values confronted and negotiated39 in fact where a public could be re-constructed through interaction with the private. Other narratives and competing (indeed, submerged) discourses would be integrated through inclusive deliberation and, most importantly in the Polish case, would import the authenticity associated with the private realm into the public and thus lend it some of its legitimacy. Importantly, deliberation theorists insist that the “distribution of power does not shape the chances to contribute to the deliberation”. In this way, the public interest would be viewed from the standpoint of the marginalised groups providing a step towards what Williams called the “politics of perspective”.40

Bridging the gap In a very perceptive examination of Poland’s political sphere, Andrzej Rychard expanded the notion of Mokrzycki’s “negotiated democracy”. He also drew attention to the two spheres or levels at which politics is exercised in contemporary Poland. The first is the plane of party politics at all levels rooted in Poland’s bi-polar divisions. It is imbued with the moral and normative and in thus made legitimate. The second dimension is permeated by pragmatic interests, the realm of the everyday rather than the ceremonial, the social divisions rather ideological symbols. Since it is rooted in what Max Weber would have termed factual power, it lacks legitimacy per se. It nonetheless connects the realm of the real to that of the ideal. Whereas the first shaped the initial stages of Poland’s political transformation, the second, where the consumer has more autonomy than the citizen, defines the current stage of political development.41 Rychard suggests what shape the nature of the relationship between the two levels might take and indeed whether the departure of Solidarity might indicate the disappearance of this divide and its conflation. Pushing the analytical distinction further it is possible to suggest that deliberative democracy provides the connection between the level of interests and that of their legitimate representation. Thus, when Rychard notes that new entrants into political life tend to invigorate the relationship between the two levels, insofar as they connect them through overt and active political deliberation, populist politicians do just that. Engaging or indeed deliberating with their agenda is the stuff of politics. Conversely, if the two levels remain unconnected or bound by opaque ties then the social divisions that should be represented and articu-

Democracy, inequality and state crisis 59 lated in the active sphere of political legitimation remain frustrated and unvoiced. If the social inequalities that underpin these social divisions and therefore the politics of the second level are deliberated in arenas of ceremonial politics then they in turn come to be cloaked with the mantle of legitimacy and find the “legible symbols which would make them transparent and socially justified”.42 This is one of the challenges of civic construction in Poland today.

Notes 1 Candidate Countries Eurobarometer 2003.2 – Annex Tables 1.4–1.16. 2 The fact that the President himself at the end of October 2003 hosted a seminar under that title points to the common currency of this term. 3 Akceptacja demokracji i zasie˛g postaw antydemokratycznych w Polsce. CBOS 63/2002. 4 A colourful account is provided by S. Sierakowski “Elity nie chca˛ demokracji” Gazeta Wyborcza 2/9/02. 5 Marcin Krol “Czas obywatelskiego nieposluszenstwa?” Rzeczpospolita 1/03/03. 6 W. Surazska “Dlugie cienie PRL” Rzeczpospolita 4/3/03. 7 Pawel Spiewak “Koniec zludzen” Rzeczpospolita 23/1/03. 8 A. Zybertowicz “Demokracja w sieci” Rzeczpospolita 5/3/03. 9 Comprehensive Monitoring Report on Poland’s Preparation for Membership, October 2003. This stated “there has been very little progress in combating corruption and the existing perception has been born out in various high profile cases”. 10 F. Frydrykiewicz “Urze˛dnicy lepsi od radnych” Rzeczpospolita 5/9/02. 11 For an introduction see Jan Skórzynski: “System Rywina czyli druga strona III Rzeczypospolitej” Rzeczpospolita 2003. 12 “Komisja odkrywa prawd¸e o panstwie” Rzeczpospolita 27/10/03. 13 See the work of Andrzej Rychard and others quoted in G. Kolankiewicz “Towards a Sociology of Transition Rights, Resources and Social Integration in Poland”. SSEES Occasional Papers, No. 48 2000. 14 P. Jablonski “Balast niedokonczonych reform” Rzeczpospolita 14/10/03. 15 A. Blaszczak “Nasze Drogie panstwo” Rzeczpospolita 27/10/03. 16 Ryszard Bugaj “Polska po przejsciach” Rzeczpospolita 24/8/02. 17 CBOS Posiadanie dóbr trwalego uzytku 120/02. 18 Janusz Lewandowski “Teraz Polska po PR” Rzeczpospolita 31/08/02. 19 M. Walzer (2002) “Equality and Civil Society” in S. Chambers and W. Kymlicka (ed.) Alternative Conceptions of Civil Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press), p. 38. 20 P. Glinski (2002) “Podstawowe slabosci – niektóre sukcesy trzeciego sektora”, in P. Glinski et al. (eds) Samoorganizacja spoleczenstwa polskiego: trzeci sektor. IFiS PAN, p. 248. 21 B. Lewenstein “Lokalne I ponadlokalne uwarunkowanie rozwoju funduszy lokalnych”, in P. Glinski loc. cit. p. 209. 22 J. Ostalowski Klejenie trzeciego sektora Rzeczpospolita 23/09/02. 23 CBOS 40/2002. 24 J. Sikorska (1998) Konsumpcja. Warunki, Zroznicowanie, Strategie. IFiS PAN, pp. 130–9. 25 M. Walzer loc. cit. p. 43. 26 G. Kolankiewicz Towards a Sociology of Transition. Op. cit. 27 W. Morawski (2001) Socjologia Ekonomiczna PWN, p. 307. 28 T. H. Marshall (1963) Sociology at the Crossroads (Heinemann), p. 108. 29 Aspiracje finansowe i deprywacje potrzeb polaków. CBOS 1/2002.

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30 J. Dryzek (2000) “The Real World of Civic Republicanism: Making Democracy Work in Poland and the Czech Republic” Europe-Asia Studies, September, p. 4. 31 J. Dryzek (2000) “Deliberative economy and discursive legitimacy.” Paper presented for conference “Deliberating about Deliberative democracy” University of Texas, Austin, 4–6 February. 32 K. Ginter Kociol garnkowi i przygania Rzeczpospolita 17/09/02. 33 Samoobrona lepsza od OPZZ i S. Rzeczpospolita 4/09/02. 34 J. Majcherek “Wa˛tpliwa alternatywa” Rzeczpospolita 10/08/02. 35 E. Mokrzycki (2002) “Demokracja negocjacyjna” in E. Mokrzycki, A. Rychard and A. Zybertowicz Utracona Dynamika. O Niedojrzalosci Polskiej Demokracji. IFiS PAN, pp. 140–1. 36 W. Kymlicka and W. Norman (eds) (2000) Citizenship in Diverse Societies (Oxford University Press). 37 I. Honohan (2000) “Dealing with Difference: The Republican public-private distinction”, In M. Baghramian and A. Ingram (eds) Pluralism: The Philosophy and Politics of Diversity (Routledge), p. 166. 38 Ibid. p. 170. 39 Z. Bauman (1998) Globalization: The Human Consequences (Polity), p. 25. 40 Melissa S. Williams (1998) Voice, Trust and Memory. Marginalised Groups and the Failings of Liberal Representation (Princeton: Princeton University Press), p. 140. 41 A. Rychard “Polityka i spoleczenstwo w Polsce: ewolucja porza˛dku instytucjalnego” in E. Mokrzycki et al. (eds) loc. cit. pp. 164–6. 42 A. Rychard Ibid. p. 168.

6

State–society relations A comparison of six post-communist countries Sally N. Cummings and Ole Nørgaard

Introduction The purpose of this article is to make a preliminary inquiry into the nature of state–society relations and how they affect the role that state administrations play in post-communist reconstructions. The picture and arguments presented are based on the insights obtained from a survey of centrally placed government executives in six countries: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, representing different starting points, trajectories and experiences of post-Communist developments. The basic assumption is that states have an important role to play in post-communist development, that this role to a large extent is decided by the way states interact with society and that the perceptions and identity of executives lie at the core of that relationship.1 In this ambition we continue the work done by the numerous scholars who, before and after the communist transformation, have attempted to “bring the state back in,” in reaction to the neo-liberal glorification of the market as the ultimate solution to development and transformation problems. The “statist” line of research deals with the ability of state institutions to respond to and integrate political demands, mediate conflicts and build popular legitimacy while maintaining their autonomy and capacity to govern. It was initiated in the 1970s, when Neorealists argued that the state as the central actor has high autonomy, in contrasted to liberals who saw the state’s autonomy constrained by interdependence and nonstate actors (e.g. Keohane and Nye, 1977; Rosenau, 1980; Gilpin, 1975; Krasner, 1978, 1984; Waltz, 1979). Scholars in sociology and comparative political economy in the 1980s echoed this state debate. Theda Skocpol’s seminal States and Social Revolutions (1979) was followed by the co-edited Bringing the State Back In (Evans et al., 1979). Here, the state is viewed as an autonomous actor over domestic society and largely as a reactor to international forces. These “statists” argued that the key to successful economic performance was strong “developmental” states with high autonomy and bureaucratic “proactivism,” with the East Asian economies used as cases (Amsden, 1989; Johnson, 1982; Wade, 1990). In recent years there has been what Hobson (2000) has usefully termed a “second state debate.” These theorists propose that state power derives from the extent to which states are embedded in society (e.g. Mann, 1993;

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Evans, 1995; Weiss and Hobson, 1995; Weiss, 1998; Leftwich, 1995). State–society relations are regarded here not as zero, but positive sum, usefully conceptualized by the notion of “mutual embeddedness.” Through broadly based interactions with civil society the state will, allegedly, enhance its capacities to design and implement feasible and viable developmental policies. The same line of argument about state–society relations guides Stark and Bruszt’s (1998) book on post-Communist development in Central Europe. Building on the insights of these contributions, we reflect on what determines post-Communist states’ relative ability to “deliver development” (Morgan, 1996) (in less modernized countries) and remedy distortions (in post-Communist countries). Section 2 develops the concepts and analytical categories that will serve as the conceptual building blocks in the empirical analytical part of the paper. Section 3 presents the data and method while Section 4 presents the results from the survey on the six countries on three aspects: role perceptions of executives and the scope and character of state–society relations. Section 5, finally, makes a first attempt to reflect on and explain the observed variation.

The analytical model The analysis presented below rests on three sets of assumptions and related concepts: that the character of the state administration’s relations to society matters for the capacity of the state to handle the political and economic transformation, that these relations in turn are influenced by the role perceptions and identities of civil servants and, finally, that no model of state–society relation ex ante is superior to any other. Categorizing states Comparison presumes categorization, and the criteria that constitute the categories predetermine the causal patterns. In the present context we categorize states according to the character of interaction between state and society. In the literature this rather simple categorization has given birth to an infinite number of “state types,” where process is often mixed with substance and description with normative analyses. States have been categorized according to their political place in the international system (for example, pariah states), their relationship to the economy (rentier/predatory, captured or corporate) or their relationship to the polity, i.e. regime type (the most common democratic, authoritarian, sultanistic, totalitarian; for regime typologies. Overall states have often been termed “weak” or “strong” (Weiss, 1998). For the present purpose (role models of individual executives) we have, however, chosen a basic typology, borrowing in particular from Pereira et al. (1993: 113ff) but also considering the classical typologies of Linz (1993), Diamond (1999), Evans (1997), Morgan (1996), Weiss (1998), Kjær and Hansen (2002), Dryzek and Holmes (2002) and the recent critical appraisal of Jreisat (2002, pp. 17–18).

State–society relations 63 This criterion for categorization leaves us with three (ideal) state types, as described in Figure 6.1. Figure 6.1 describes three ideal types, one where the state is dominant, one where society is dominant and one where there is interaction and interdependence. The figure has two levels of analysis: first a descriptive level where we may observe the relationship; and a second, interpretative, level where we may decide the underlying political nature of this relationship. For that purpose we need substantive analyses taking into consideration also the broader character of the societal context. There is also a (not so clear-cut) distinction between categories that we would describe as democratic and non-democratic. In particular, we decouple the concepts of participation and democracy. Participation is, in the present understanding, simply the efforts of ordinary people or organized interests in any type of political system to influence the action of rulers. Democracy adds to participation an institutionalized respect for civil and political liberties, making it possible for all individuals and organized interests to articulate political demands and participate in decision-making. Following these observations, we distinguish between three categories of descriptive and six categories of substantial state–society relationship. The descriptive categories of state–society interaction (statist, instrumental and interdependent) are what we learn from observing the scope and direction of interaction between the state and organizations. The substantial (interpretative) categories are what we arrive at during our own contextualized understanding of the character of these linkages, whether democratic (neo-liberal, popular or corporate) or non-democratic (totalitarian, captured or predator state). The neo-liberal model epitomizes the economist’s ideal state, where decisions may be taken by democratic procedures, but once decided on, they The autonomous state

The instrumental state

The interdependent state

Society

Society

Society

The statist model

The societal model

The interdependent model

Democracy

neo-liberal

popular

corporative

Non-democracy

totalitarian

captured

(captured)

Predator

(predator)

Figure 6.1 Categories of states (ideal types).

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will be implemented through a top down process. The mirror image is the totalitarian statist model (non-democratic ideal type) representing the state mechanisms that characterized the Communist region before the changes. In these systems the state had as its declared objective to transform all aspects of societal life according to the ideological (Leninist) blueprint. The popular state is the ideal type democracy, where openness, resources and participation go hand in hand at all levels and all stages of government. In its ideal type democratic version we are here dealing with the popular state (participatory state) epitomized for example in Przeworski’s ideas of concertation at all levels (Pereira et al., 1993). The corporatist state implies that selected organized structures of society are given independent tasks in design and implementation of policies.2 This is the “embedded state” or “governed interdependence” as described and analyzed for example by Peter Evans and Linda Weiss. In a democratic (or democratizing) system a popular or corporatist interdependent state may, however, have different meanings. First, it may be a developmental state if it manages to institutionalize representation of societal interests in policy design and implementation but does not allow specific interests to dominate the policy process. “Embeddedness” may, however, decay into capture of the state and government (or parts of it) by particularistic interests (elites or societal groups) (Schleifer and Vishny, 1999), thus approaching the negative version of the instrumental state (the captured state in brackets) or to a predator (or semipredator) state, indicating the predominant feature of the state. Correspondingly, we may also find cases where the relationship decays into a predator state, where statist elites use (part of) the state administration for their own purposes. We also argue that governmental integration or embeddedness (“international embeddedness”) in the international system offers a parallel range of prospects and dangers.3 On the one hand, may “international embeddedness” provide the informational, political and financial resources that are necessary for the government to perform adequately under the new conditions? On the other hand, does international integration or embeddedness pose a risk of international “clientistic capture” or “elite capture” (World Bank, 1997, p. 80ff), if the domestic policy process becomes subjugated to the agendas of international organizations or foreign powers not reflecting local concerns? Role perception and identity of officials We perceive organizational and institutional arrangements as normative systems “that are supposed to structure the occasion for evoking one identity or another” (Egerbjerg, 1999, p. 459) These arrangements may then be categorized according to the (descriptive) categories in the previous section. Civil servants will, accordingly, categorize themselves as either cogwheels in a top-down “implementation machine,” as loyal servants in a bottom-up popular democracy or as active (developmental) officials in the interdependent state. To which extent this self-categorization can be seen as a “role” or identities is impossible to decide on the basis of the present data. Hence, the two concepts will be used inter-

State–society relations 65 changeably. The features of the incumbent systems may guide us to what we may expect from the public officials we survey. The totalitarian statist model was that of the (non-democratic ideal type) state machines that characterized the region before the changes. In this system, decision-making was centralized, political loyalty had a high priority and strict ideological control was exercised over personnel and decisions (Scootla and Roots, 1999, p. 28). The official role perception of bureaucrats was equated with commitment to and implementation of the official ideology (Randma, 2001, p. 42f). Public administration remained what has been termed “a policy implementation machine” (UNDP, 2001, p. 2). In this system there was no place for interaction with organizations in civil society, who where rather seen as additional cogwheels in the implementation machine. We may therefore hypothesize that the mental legacies of this traditional system makes executives hang on to their traditional habits of one-way communication, commands and controls in the relationship to organizations in society (Gozman and Etkind, 1992). In reality, however, the totalitarian states may have been more embedded in society than was propagated by the official ideology and many officials came out of communism as captives of particular interests, rather than ideal type totalitarian bureaucrats (Stark and Bruszt, 1998, p. 191). In these cases the official would either have been corrupted or pinched between official ideologies, his own beliefs – and how everyday life forced him to behave. In these cases he would be exposed to particularism and illicit practices, as described in the next section. It is also a relational concept, in relation to which the capacity of the (descriptive) categories to meet the needs of society can only be determined within the context of a given country (and international system). A dominant state (totalitarian or even predatory) may, with hindsight, have proven to be the most effective agency to manage reactionary forces, mobilize the population around common goals and generate the investment resources needed for modernization.4 Or if a state’s political capabilities (the links to society) are few (for one reason or another) and if technical and administrative capacities are in short supply, a limited liberal state will obviously work better than an interactive, corporatist or popular state that stretches its tasks beyond capabilities.5 The same argument may apply to societies dominated by strong particularistic interest groups (for example ethnic) or with legacies that expose parts of the state administration to sectoral capture, as was the case in a number of post-Communist countries. In these cases a liberal autonomous state that matches tasks to capabilities and escapes capture will obviously fare better. In contrast, if the problem is that groups within the state exploit society for their benefit, a popular democracy may be the only way to limit the power and privileges of the groups aligned with the predator state.

Data and method The data presented below are the outcome of surveys conducted in six different post-communist countries: Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Hungary, Kazakhstan and

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Kyrgyzstan. In all cases the ambition has been to reach a subset of executive officials of high standing placed as high as possible in the administrative hierarchies in core agencies, taking into account the constitutional and administrative structure and what were considered to become ministries in the individual country. By core agencies we mean (1) that they are particularly exposed to interaction with organizations in civil society or to the international community, and thus to positive or negative embeddedness and/or (2) at the centre of decision making in a government. We recognize, following Aberbach and Rockman (1987, p. 483), that this rough functional comparability “could mean that we are comparing a different breed of officials altogether.” However, as with Aberbach and Rockman we take comfort in the observation that although politically appointed officials (ministers) in our survey show differences from senior officials (for example in their political preferences), they are very similar on some core issues where national differences proved important, for example in their attitude to political inclusion. The surveys were conducted on the basis of a standardized questionnaire supplemented by a number of open questions subsequently reported to us by the interviewers. The use of responses from the survey in the narrow analyses and comparisons of state capacities is based on three assumptions: 1

2

3

That our respondents “know the truth.” Our choice of high ranking officials (ministers, department heads) in core administrations is based on the expectation that they are in a privileged position to know about structures, processes and power in government. Still, we are of course exposed to all the weaknesses of the “reputational method.”6 That our respondents are telling the truth (about how “things really are”) or that there is a systematic deviation from the truth among all sectors and countries. We here assume that if they provide honest answers (compared to other sources of information) in relation to sensitive questions (for example corruption), they will also be honest in relation to less sensitive issues. Based on these criteria our responses seem reliable. We also assume that the subset of respondents (or the answers they are providing) represents a critical case subset (and not a sample) for the answers we would obtain if we asked the total population of government officials. If, for example, we had found no allegations about corruption in the ministry of foreign trade in Latvia (which we certainly did) we would not expect corruption to be an issue in other and less exposed agencies.

Owing to the small (and varied numbers of) N and the level of measurement there are limitations as to what kinds of statistical analyses can be made. The results are presented in simple percentages, and the observed bivariate differences tested for significance. However, we are not dealing with representative samples, but critical subsets. The observed differences should therefore be interpreted in this context. Taking this into account, the small Ns involved indicate

State–society relations 67 that the bivariate significance values presented should be perceived as conservative estimates.

Empirical results on state–society relations In this section we present the empirical results on both the role perceptions/ identity and the perceived and actual state–society relations of the interviewed officials in the six countries. Role perception/identity of officials A first observation is that the data do not lend support to our expectation that high ranking officials are still locked in the mentality of the totalitarian bureaucrat who sees his or her primary task only as that of a technical implementor of government policies. This role perception was expressed by only a few respondents when asked if officials interacted with civil society: “There was no motivation for that. Ministerial officials have an opinion that their knowledge is greater,” “It makes public officers’ life more complicated”. Public officers selfdefense function works: if there are some relations it means the bigger number of the alternatives, which means that public officer has to defend his project (Latvia). Still, the majority see themselves as developmental bureaucrats who want the public engaged in participatory structures (Table 6.1). Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan have a larger share of officials who prefer to keep the public at arm’s length. In a Baltic/Central European context it is also remarkable that Lithuanian officials seem more reluctant toward popular democracy than officials in other countries in the region. However, what the respondents mean by social inclusion in policy making becomes clearer when we look at Table 6.2, which in a more narrow sense asks about the inclusion of organized interests in decision-making. The high percentage of confirmative answers is exemplified by statements like: “Mutual exchange of information is always useful, result will be effective legislation” (Estonia). “Interest groups are competent in their field, officials often are not” (Estonia). “I always listened to various opinions, yet the decision was taken by the Minister and frequently it differed from those opinions” (Latvia). “When discussing a democratic decision, everybody should partake, but those who are empowered to do so shall take the decision itself”; “It is important to meet and hear the business and private sector as well” (Hungary). “A comparison of the different points of views on the issue, results in the most realistic state policy” (Kazakhstan). “When preparing a bill, the ministry itself is not able to comprise all opinions, therefore it is necessary to take into account the opinion of all parts in order to find a compromise for the benefit of the society” (Kyrgyzstan). Remarkable here is only the perception of Lithuanian officials. In contrast to their more reluctant attitude to the active inclusion of the public in policy making (the popular state) they are almost unanimous in the approval of

Table 6.1 Responses to question 45: “What role should the public primarily play in politics and government?” Estonia

Latvia

The public should become actively engaged in parties, associations, local government, etc. in order to gain greater influence on politics

74.0

75.5

67.9

72.7

57.1

63.9

The public should take an interest in politics and communicate their views to the representatives

20.0

18.4

17.0

6.1

25.0

30.6

The public should elect representatives and let them run the country Total (percent) Total (N)

Lithuania

Hungary

Kazakhstan

Kyrgyzstan*

6.0

6.1

15.1

21.2

17.9

47.2

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

50

49

53

33

28

36

*Kyrgyzstan (multiple answers): Percent responding “agree” to the statements.

State–society relations 69 Table 6.2 Responses to question 28: “Do you believe that decisions are improved when concerned interests are incorporated or heard in the process of formulation?” Estonia

Latvia

Yes, mostly Yes, sometimes No, worse

84.0 14.0 2.0

81.3 16.7 2.1

94.2 5.8 –

93.9 6.1 –

73.3 26.7 –

71.1 26.3 2.6

Total (percent)

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

50

48

52

33

30

38

Total (N)

Lithuania

Hungary

Kazakhstan

Kyrgyzstan

organized interests. This picture probably reflects the continuation of a deeprooted corporatist relationship between ministries and large industrial and economic groupings. The pattern is finally replicated in the attitude to lobbying as a legitimate part of the policy process, where the approval rate (for lobbyism as an information mechanism) is lower in Central Asia (and Hungary). The suspicious attitude to lobbyism was further boosted when we asked about the attitude to lobbyism as a way of building support. Different officials demonstrated different understandings of the term “lobbying.” Here the negative attitude to lobbyism reaches out to countries where the risk of state capture seems highest (Table 6.3). These attitudes are also reflected in the open comments: “Contacts are important in terms of information but a ministry has the duty to estimate them critically and to maintain objectivity” (Estonia); “It is worth listening to all sides always, but the decision is still made by me” (Latvia); “Lobbying is positive because you get the support from the industrial branches” (Latvia); “In nowadays Lithuania, lobbyism makes up 30 percent, while corruption makes up 70 Table 6.3 Responses to question 27 about lobbying. Percent responding “agree” to the following statements. (Multiple answers) Estonia Latvia Lithuania Hungary Kazakhstan Kyrgyzstan Lobbying is positive because it provides the information you need to make the right decision

88.01* 73.8

Lobbying is positive because you get support from the concerned groups 70.0

45.5

88.62**

60.0

50.03***

66.7

27.5

60.0

33.3

36.8

Notes * Estonian proportion is different from the proportion in Kazakhstan at the 0.05 level (2-tailed). ** Lithuanian proportion is different from the proportion in Kazakhstan at the 0.05 level (2-tailed). *** Kazakh proportion is different from the proportion in Estonia and Lithuania at the 0.05 level (2tailed).

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percent,” “Lobbyism in the world is open. Here, it is closed, unclear and not transparent. Everybody acts as if they make efforts for the common good of Lithuania, but really their lobbyism resembles corruption” (Lithuania); “Lobbying is natural – it does not equal corruption. Everyone tries to represent their interests, but the responsibility is of those who make the decision” (Hungary); “Lobbying is as a whole positive, if it is carried out disregarding the interests of only a narrow circle of people,” “Lobbying has a negative influence. It means involving foreign forces into different processes” (Kazakhstan); “The parliament often lobbies the interests of prominent businessmen. They pursue their own interests, not the interests of the state. A. Akaev lobbied the interests of the people, and a proposal on placing military bases on the territory of the Kyrgyz Republic was submitted to the parliament. That was in the interest of the state” (Kyrgyzstan). The “transmission belt” approach to organization as a legacy of the old system is further sustained when the officials are asked about the role of organized interests in implementation. The highest score is here reached in the Central Asian Countries and in Lithuania, while the more modernized countries have a more realistic approach to the kind of influence that may arise from implementation in a less regulated environment (Table 6.4). “Rural development is not possible without massive involvement of agrarian companies, which should solve those issues. Lithuania is quite behindhand with this matter. Laws do not contain references to financial resources and delegating of tasks (dissimilarly from Denmark)” (Lithuania); “It would be best to give everything into the hands of private entrepreneurs, but it would be too difficult to prepare and control” (Hungary); “It is always necessary. For example, in the Issyk-Kul County, we co-operate with ‘aksakals’ [village elders] and civil unions (NGO); we consult academic specialist and political actors” (Kyrgyzstan). Table 6.4 Responses to question 41: “To what extent do you agree with the following proposition? To ensure compliance in the process of implementation, it is better when organizations, private business or other concerned interests assist in formulating the implementation design” Estonia Latvia Lithuania Hungary Kazakhstan Kyrgyzstan Strongly agree/agree Disagree/strongly disagree Do not know Total (percent) Total (N)

82.0a

60.0

81.1b

50.0c

90.0d

86.1

14.0 4.0

38.0 2.0

16.9 1.9

40.7 9.4

10.0 –

11.1 2.8

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

50

50

53

32

30

36

Notes a Estonian proportion is different from the proportion in Hungary at the 0.10 level (2-tailed). b Lithuanian proportion is different from the proportion in Hungary at the 0.10 level (2-tailed). c Hungarian proportion is different from the proportion in Kazakhstan at the 0.05 level (2-tailed) and the proportions in Estonia and Lithuania at the 0.10 level (2-tailed). d Kazakh proportion is different from the proportion in Hungary at the 0.05 level (2-tailed).

State–society relations 71 Table 6.5 Responses to question 4: “If you needed external advice, whom would you prefer to rely on, or have you relied on to get the information you need?” Observations in percent. (Multiple answers) Estonia Latvia Lithuania Hungary Kazakhstan Kyrgyzstan Political advisors Political parties Academic specialists NGO specialists

26.0 44.0b 72.0 44.0

38.0 24.0 72.0 40.0

28.3 7.5c 86.8e 49.1g

24.2 50.0d 79.4 48.5

23.3 60.0 10.0h

30.6 11.1 44.4f 36.1

Notes a Small N in many cells. b Estonian proportion is different from the proportion in Lithuania at the 0.05 level (2-tailed). c Lithuanian proportion is different from the proportion in Estonia at the 0.05 level (2-tailed) and different from the proportion in Hungary at the 0.05 level (2-tailed). d Hungarian proportion is different from the proportion in Lithuania at the 0.05 level (2-tailed). e Lithuanian proportion is different from the proportion in Kyrgyzstan at the 0.05 level (2-tailed). f Kyrgyz proportion is different from the proportion in Lithuania at the 0.05 level (2-tailed). g Lithuanian proportion is different from the proportion in Kazakhstan at the 0.05 level (2-tailed). h Kazakh proportion is different from the proportion in Lithuania at the 0.05 level (2-tailed).

Still another issue relates to the technical capacity of the administrations. Who do officials turn to when they need advice? (see Table 6.5) The survey here demonstrates that in all countries academics are the major source of external advice. This is a trend that may reflect a situation where inadequately staffed and trained administrations “contract out” most policy development work to experts and deal mainly with “translating” developed concepts into draft legislation (UNDP, 2001). There are, however, also large differences between the countries, reflecting the political environment in which the officials find themselves. NGO specialists can of course only be active in countries where a viable NGO sector exists, and party experts are only important in countries with effective party systems. It is only surprising to find that party experts play a very minor role in Lithuania, where the common wisdom is that the party system is much consolidated. Finally we asked officials about how they see their own role in the future; in this context operationalized as to which other country they expect that their own will compare with in ten years time (Table 6.6). First, the responses demonstrate a clear regional pattern, where a majority of officials in the European countries all identify their future role with Western democracies and a majority (significantly largest in Lithuania) foresees that they will maintain a Central European identity. Second, the data also demonstrate the ambiguous identities of officials in the two Central Asian States. Identities are here fragmented between post-Soviet, Central and Eastern Europe, NIC and West-European (especially in Kyrgyzstan) identities. If we summarize the evidence in Tables 6.1 through 6.6, a key observation is that our hypothesis about the endurance of the totalitarian, statist bureaucrat does not hold. The majority of the officials we interviewed in all six countries hold the identity of what we have termed a corporatist or even popular oriented

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Table 6.6 Responses to question 54: “Which other country in the world do you think your country resembles most in ten years?” Estonia Latvia Lithuania Hungary Kazakhstan Kyrgyzstan Russia and other CIS countries A developing country Central and Eastern Europe South East Asia Other newly industrialized countries A Western democracy Total (percent) Total (N)

– –

– –

– –

27.3 4.5

26.3 15.8

8.9 –

37.8 –

10.7 –

22.7 9.1

10.5 10.5

– 91.1

2.2 60.0

– 89.3

18.2 18.2

10.5 26.3

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

45

45

28

22

19

bureaucrat, who thinks that participation of the organized interests (and in the abstract also the broad public) in decision-making and implementation will improve policies. Within this overall observation, however, there are variations that in general reflect our expectations about the imprints of the past and of reform policies since independence: popular participation is less popular in the less reformed countries of central Asia – and in Lithuania who, together with Hungary, has the highest endorsement rate of organized interests. The latter pattern reflects the endurance of state-industry links from the communist system. This would also explain the reluctant attitude to lobbying as a way to obtain political support, because lobbying is often the strategy of those newly formed interests (business and other) who did not have a stake in the previous corporate system. The exception here is Estonia (and to a lesser extent Hungary), indicating that some officials in these countries are leaning toward an identity of the liberal state’s insulated official. Perceived state–society relations One thing is how a state’s officials want relations to civil society to be. It is quite another thing how they perceive that they really are. Overall, there is seemingly a relatively high consistency between role perceptions and the perceived reality of our respondents. The developmental identities that were reflected in the previous sections are repeated in answers to questions about how relations between ministries and society actually are, as a comparison between Tables 6.2 and 6.7 will demonstrate. In addition the open comments illustrate the positive (but only gradually consolidating) interaction with organized interests (Table 6.8): “There were a lot of co-work with NGOs and a special commission was formed” (Estonia); “Close working relationship just started to be established” (Latvia); “There were almost no known organizations: trade unions were only creating, as well as employer

State–society relations 73 Table 6.7 Responses to question 7: “In your own ministry, is/was it common practice that ministerial officials have close working relationships with significant organizations (business, NGO, or state) within the field of the ministry?” Estonia Yes No Total (percent)

Latvia

44.9* 55.1

80.0** 20.0

Lithuania

Hungary

90.2** 9.8

81.8** 18.2

Kazakhstan 89.7** 10.3

Kyrgyzstan 86.5** 13.5

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

49

50

51

33

29

37

Total (N)

Notes *Estonian proportion is different from all of the other countries at the 0.05 level (2-tailed). **All of these countries are different from the proportion in Estonia at the 0.05 level (2-tailed).

organizations,” “Confederation of Industrialists, two business associations – if problems with excise on beer or oil products occurred, we usually discussed with interested organizations from that field” (Lithuania); “The ministry makes joint commissions, expert and working groups on issues concerning the development of trade and industry, and it draws into these business specialists, NGO and others.” (Kyrgyzstan). However, three pecularities need to be emphasized. First, in Estonia the actual participation of organizations in decision making is significantly lower than the more participatory officials deem optimal, reflecting the gradual emergence of an organizational sector in a society where the previous linkages had Table 6.8 Responses to question 26: “Do civil servants in your ministry have close working relationships with major interest organizations within the ministry’s resort?”

Yes, most of the time Yes, but only concerning important issues No Total (percent) Total (N)

Estonia

Latvia

Lithuania

Hungary

Kazakhstan

Kyrgyzstan

24.0a

25.0b

53.7

67.6c

36.7

58.3

56.0 20.0

39.6 35.4d

41.5 4.9e

29.4 2.9f

50.0 13.3

30.6 11.1

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

50

48

41

34

30

36

Notes a Estonian proportion is different from the proportion in Hungary at the 0.05 level (2-tailed). b Latvian proportion is different from the proportion in Hungary at the 0.05 level (2-tailed). c Hungarian proportion is different from the proportion in Estonia and Latvia at the 0.05 level (2tailed). d Latvian proportion is different from the proportion in Lithuania and Hungary at the 0.05 level (2tailed). e Lithuanian proportion is different from the proportion in Latvia at the 0.05 level (2-tailed). f Hungarian proportion is different from the proportion in Latvia at the 0.05 level (2-tailed).

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Table 6.9 Responses to question 28a: “In which form is/was the concerned interests incorporated or consulted in the process of formulation?” Estonia Latvia Lithuania Hungary Kazakhstan Kyrgyzstan Institutional forum for discussion and cooperation Institutional forums on ad hoc basis Informal forums depending on character of the case Total (percent) Total (N)

89.3a

30.0b

68.8c

7.1d

66.7e

9.4f

3.6

3.3

21.9

100.0

100.0

100.0

28

30

32

Notes a Hungarian proportion is different from the proportion in Kazakhstan at the 0.05 level (2-tailed). b Kazakh proportion is different from the proportion in Hungary and Kyrgyzstan at the 0.05 level (2-tailed). c Kyrgyz proportion is different from the proportion in Kazakhstan at the 0.05 level (2-tailed). d Hungarian proportion is different from the proportion in Kazakhstan at the 0.05 level (2-tailed). e Kazakh proportion is different from the proportion in Hungary and Kyrgyzstan at the 0.05 level (2-tailed). f Kyrgyz proportion is different from the proportion in Kazakhstan at the 0.05 level (2-tailed).

been broken by a radical reform strategy: “Organizations were not formed in those days,” was a statement repeated a number of times. Second, and in contrast, in Central Asia participation by organized interests is higher than the respondents wanted. Their experience seems to imply that less than actual participation of organized interests would improve policies. Third, in all countries but Hungary, Lithuania and Kyrgyzstan, participation of organized interests is described more as an ad hoc instrument (used by government) than a permanent institutional feature. An identical picture is reflected in Table 6.9 (where we lack data for the Baltic States), which illustrates the predominance of institutionalized participation in Hungary and Kyrgyzstan while inclusion is on a more ad hoc basis in Kazakhstan. Table 6.10 shows the results of a survey among heads of parliamentary committees about the preferred ways in which interests groups should act (again excluding the Baltic States). The table further illustrates the importance assigned by interest groups to ministries as channels of influence. However, it also illustrates the importance of parties in the consolidated party system of Hungary and the continuing importance of personal connections, in particular in Kyrgyzstan. Finally, we may compare their anticipated (awaited) future regional identity (Table 6.6) with how they actually compare their country in its present state with other systems or regions (Table 6.11). These comparative identities are shown in

State–society relations 75 Table 6.10 Responses to question P22: “How do interest groups seek influence on lawmaking?”* Hungary Parliament They contact the ministries They contact the committee They contact the Presidential Administration They use personal channels and connections They contact party/faction leadership Other Total (percent)

Kazakhstan Parliament

32.5 8.1

Kyrgyzstan Parliament

30.8 25.3

23.2 13.9

17.9

21.9

23.6

26.0

39.1

35.8 –

–

100.0

1.9

100.0

100.0

Note * Weighted average: ranked as most important counted as 1, second as
, third as
.

Table 6.11 Responses to question 54: “ Which other country in the world do you think your country resembles most? (at present)” Estonia Latvia Lithuania Hungary Kazakhstan Kyrgyzstan Russia and other CIS countries A developing country Central and Eastern Europe South East Asia Other newly industrialized countries A Western democracy Total (percent) Total (N)

– –

–

2.1

– –

52.4 14.3

46.2 34.6

88.9 –

89.4 –

50.0 –

4.8 19.0

– –

– 8.5

– 50.0

9.5 –

15.4 3.8

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

45

47

28

21

26

4.4 6.7

Table 6.6, indicating that the two Baltic states for which we have data still have a Central European identity, that Hungary is evenly split between a Central European and a Western identity, and that officials in Central Asia predominantly see themselves as part of the post-Soviet CIS region. In this picture it is Estonia and Hungary who have the furthest to go from where they see themselves (as Central Europeans) to where they want to be (West Europeans), while Lithuania still remains more anchored in a Central European identity. In Central Asia it is difficult to say anything other than noting that many of our respondents want to escape their present identification with the CIS countries to become something else.

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Table 6.12 Responses to question 49: “Do you agree that misuse of status positions is common in the politics of your country?” Estonia Latvia Lithuania Hungary Kyrgyzstan Kazakhstan Strongly agree/agree Disagree/strongly disagree Do not know Total (percent) Total (N)

28.0a

72.6b

79.6c

38.2d

67.6

70.0 2.0

25.5 2.0

16.3 4.1

58.8 2.9

32.4 –

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

50

51

49

34

37

Notes a Estonian proportion is different from the proportion in Latvia and Lithuania at the 0.05 (2-tailed). b Latvian proportion is different from the proportion in Estonia and Hungary at the 0.05 (2-tailed). c Lithuanian proportion is different from the proportion in Estonia and Hungary at the 0.05 (2-tailed). d Hungarian proportion is different from the proportion in Latvia and Lithuania at the 0.05 (2-tailed).

level level level level

Table 6.13 Responses to question 50: “At which level of government do you think that the phenomenon of misuse is most common?” Percent responding “common” to the following levels Estonia Latvia Lithuania Hungary Kazakhstan Kyrgyzstan Top level 30.0 Intermediate level 38.0 Lower level officials 18.0 Parliament 4.0

37.8 55.1 49.0 32.7

43.4 60.4 50.9 54.7

28.6 57.1 25.0 7.1

65.0 43.3 86.7 73.3

34.3 48.6 34.3 34.3

Character of state–society relationships We then proceeded to look at the ability of the state to make and implement decisions without concessions to special groups but taking into account only the general societal needs of the country. We may, however, also approach the question from the opposite angle, inferring that if a state has “good governance” relations with society it will not permit privileged treatment of individuals or organizations, and employees in state institutions will be prone to granting such privileges for personal gain. From this perspective, we asked a number of questions about corruption and regulatory effectiveness in the six countries. First we asked the officials how they assess the independence of their colleagues from the special interests they deal with in their everyday work. As depicted in Table 6.12, a high proportion of our respondents expect their colleagues to be disposed to misusing their position. Only in Estonia and Hungary does a majority reject the claim that their colleagues are corrupt. When

State–society relations 77 asked about the level at which corruption was most common (this question was also asked in Kazakhstan) in the high corruption countries (Latvia, Lithuania and Kyrgyzstan), misuse is reported to be concentrated at the intermediate administrative level, while Kazakh officials see misuse concentrated at the highest government levels (Table 6.13). That the states also have very weak enforcement powers is shown in Table 6.14, where officials in all countries agree that it is possible for major actors to escape regulatory measures. A few interesting observations are immediately possible. First, factor analyses of the Estonian and Hungarian responses show that we are here dealing with only one dimension, probably weakness of the regulatory system. It seems fair to conclude that this observation also applies to Latvia and Lithuania where we only have summary observations that do not differentiate between different actors. In the case of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan the picture is more complex, and not only the weakness of the regulatory system but also the different positions of strong actors play a role. These different causes of regulatory escape were illustrated in remarks by our respondents: “Regulatory measures are escaped in all levels, also from Consumer Protection Act and Free Competition Act” (Estonia); “Weak points of laws are being used, with the help from lawyers and large amounts of money” (Lithuania); “The examples are those things that give chance for exception (the little gates). The political relationship is important” (Hungary); “Business actors constantly break the laws”; “There are many decrees (ukazy) and laws on licence to secure transparency, and still, local agencies of individual enterprises break the law, and they strengthen their own power and source of income. Private enterprises are synonymous with the presence of contraband” (Kyrgyzstan). We also asked about perceived causes of corruption (Tables 6.15). Whereas too low salaries and low morality of civil servants (and the obvious trade-offs between the two) came out on top in all countries, the legacies of the Soviet Table 6.14 Responses to question 42: “To what extent do you agree with the following proposition? There are cases when powerful state and non-state actors (companies or individuals) can escape regulatory measures. Please evaluate the above statement in the case of the following actors.” Percent responding “strongly agree” or “agree” Estonia Latvia* Lithuania* Hungary Kazakhstan Kyrgyzstan Individuals 66.0a Interest organizations 68.0c Business actors 72.0 Non-state actors*

67.6 56.3 59.4 60.0

33.3b 30.0d 70.0

75.0 50.0 55.2

48.1

Notes * Latvia and Lithuania: only answers for one common category “non-state actors.” The respondents were not asked to evaluate in the case of the above mentioned actors. a Estonian proportion is different from the proportion in Kazakhstan at the 0.10 level (2-tailed). b Kazakh proportion is different from the proportion in Estonia at the 0.10 level (2-tailed). c Estonian proportion is different from the proportion in Kazakhstan at the 0.05 level (2-tailed). d Kazakh proportion is different from the proportion in Estonia at the 0.05 level (2-tailed).

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Table 6.15 Responses to question 53: “In your opinion, what are the main cause(s) of corruption in the state administration? (please rank these options, if possible).”* Observations in percent Estonia Latvia Lithuania Hungary Kazakhstan Kyrgyzstan Too low salaries Low moral quality of civil servants Legacy of the soviet system Illegal organization (mafia) Other Total (percent)

21.8

37.0

17.3

42.5

35.2

53.2

45.9

26.2

40.2

30.9

21.3

27.9

17.6

14.1

18.1

17.4

27.9

3.1

10.8 3.9

8.5 14.1

12.3 12.1

1.0 8.2

14.9 0.6

6.2 9.6

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

Note * Index: Weighted average: ranked most important counted as 1, second as
, third as 1.

Table 6.16 Responses to question 23 about the effects of external influence. Percent responding “agree” to the following statements. (Multiple answers)

Always/most cases Rarely/never

Estonia

Latvia

Lithuania

Hungary

Kazakhstan

Kyrgyzstan

91.4a 18.6

95.6b 4.4

76.9c 23.1

54.1d 45.9

33.3e 66.7

85.8f 14.2

Notes a Estonian proportion is different from the proportion in Kazakhstan at the 0.05 level (2-tailed). b Latvian proportion is different from the proportion in Kazakhstan and Hungary at the 0.05 level (2-tailed). c Lithuanian proportion is different from the proportion in Kazakhstan at the 0.05 level (2-tailed). d Hungarian proportion is different from the proportion in Latvia at the 0.05 level (2-tailed). e Kazakh proportion is different from the proportion in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Kyrgyzstan at the 0.05 level (2-tailed). f Kyrgyz proportion is different from the proportion in Kazakhstan at the 0.05 level (2-tailed).

system were only referred to as an important factor in Kazakhstan. In addition, shortcomings of the legal system are considered an important cause of corruption, as only respondents in Estonia and, with a smaller margin, in Kazakhstan see present laws as sufficient for combating corruption. Few of the interviewees attribute organized crime as a cause of corruption, while the position of regional and clan interests is seen as a major problem in both Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Finally, we asked how the officials viewed the role of foreign actors in the country (Table 6.16). The table shows a distinct reverse correlation between the size of the country (in geographical and economic terms) and the popularity of foreign actors, although we also found in the countries where positive treatments predominated, both more positive and more ambivalent positions. In addition, the very low popularity of foreign actors in Kazakhstan is notable: “It was not influence; it

State–society relations 79 was more like getting advice” (Estonia); “Western actors have positive influence, Russian actors negative,” “It may be unpleasant to admit but this influence has secured the fact that changes of the social, economic, political system cannot be turned back” (Latvia); “We have been learning everything. During two years all the documents for the IMF and other organizations have been prepared with the cooperation of them,” “The goal for all the foreign or international organizations with no exception was wrecking Lithuanian agricultural production as soon as possible. Its level has decreased several times, during the past several years, and now it is as long back as it was in 1930” (Lithuania); “In many cases the positive and negative effects neutralized each other. These things are natural, but they didn’t influence my decisions” (Hungary); “Almost every foreign company come here in order to make extra profit, they are not interested in the health, education and the future of the nation, although they give ‘donations’ and then boast of it.” “The foreign organizations pursue their own interests under cover of worrying and supporting developing countries” (Kazakhstan); “A positive effect. International organizations have a lot of experience with work in our field; e.g. they give money to improve education, and concerning legislation – The Convention on Children’s Rights” (Kyrgyzstan). Summarizing these responses we may conclude that whereas the previous section showed that most countries are characterized by corporate structures that connect the state administration with civil society, the data from this section suggest that these bonds, rather than a positive interaction, in many cases reflect a negative version of the corporatist potentials of a developmental state, either captured (as for example Latvia) or semi-predatory (Kazakhstan).

Conclusions We have focused on three aspects of state–society relations: the ideas about state–society relations among our respondents, in particular how they see their own role and how they see the scope and character of these relations. Our preconception that role perceptions/identities would still be tainted by ideas and practices of the incumbent regime, picturing either a top-down, hierarchical relation between state organizations and civil society (the autonomous state) did not hold. The large majority of the interviewed officials identified with what we termed “the interdependent state,” preferring to collaborate with institutions and organizations in civil society in policy making and implementation, seeing this as the best way to produce good and feasible policies. A few variations between the involved countries could, however, be observed. First, in Estonia the interdependent role perception of the officials was in stark contrast to a very limited inclusion of organized interests in civil society. Second, in Central Asia we have the opposite picture: the role society plays in policymaking is greater than is deemed positive. These negative responses indicate that some of our respondents realize the potentially negative function of societal participation (state capture, corruption or, alternatively, the existence of a predator state bent on protecting its privileges). Finally, while interest organizations

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had close and mostly institutionalized relations with the ministries in Lithuania, Hungary and Kyrgyzstan, their role was more restricted and regulated by the ministries in Estonia, Latvia and Kazakhstan. Hence, it is only in the first group that involvement of interest groups is habitual and institutionalized, while the state in the second group is relatively insulated and only occasionally includes external actors in decision making. In accordance with the initial classification we may thus hypothesize Lithuania and Hungary as real interdependent states where the role perceptions of officials correspond to how relations to civil society really are, with Kyrgyzstan also favouring relations with society but viewing itself as captured. Estonia and Latvia in their practice lean more towards the insulated state, which presents a potential conflict with the role perceptions of the officials. In Kazakhstan we saw the opposite picture when officials described a higher level of interaction than preferred. Perceived corruption (misuse of position) was used as a proxy for the relative autonomy of the states vis-à-vis the institutions and organizations with whom they interact. The empirical result here showed that perceived corruption was on a very high level in all countries (about 70 percent) except in Hungary (38 percent) and Estonia (28 percent). How do we explain these patterns, and what do the causal models in turn tell us about how to organize states in post-communist states, if they are to solve their present tasks? The answer to these questions of course necessitate that we eventually include more cases and expose them to broader statistical and contextual analysis. Here we only provide three comparative observations about how we believe that four interconnected sets of factors may explain the observed variances between the country-cases and (we assume) the eventual variation in the outcomes of political and economic transformation: the nature of society; the nature of ownership transformation between communism and post-Communism, geopolitics and overall reform strategy. One example is the difference we can observe between Estonia and Kyrgyzstan. They are both small countries, characterized by close informal relationships and networks, features that they, as mentioned by Randma (2001), overlap to a large extent with attributes of developing countries. Both counties have also pursued a rapid (big bang) political and economic transition strategy, and in the mid-1990s they both stood out as reform champions of their respective regions. At the same time, our data show that they differ significantly on two aspects: on the interaction with civil society, which is very limited in Estonia, and on the degree of corruption, which is also much lower in Estonia. They also differ on eventual economic and political outcomes, with Estonia as a continuing success story, on the verge of EU membership, while Kyrgyzstan has decayed into a near economic collapse accompanied by an increasingly authoritarian rule. The relatively low development of Kyrgyzstan with very strong regional and tribal bonds that reinforce the close network of a small country may partly explain the differences. The Kyrgyz state appears captured by these interests. However, the Estonians’ intentional seclusion of the state administration from societal inputs – partly an outcome of the radical neo-liberal economic reform strategy, partly a

State–society relations 81 means to exclude ethnic Russians from influence – also provides an important explanation. The insulated state seems here to have been well suited to the initial conditions that characterized many of the post-Soviet republics. The last phase of Soviet power had, in many regions, witnessed the development of a state corporatist system where the huge enterprises dominated sectoral policy making and were stronger than the corresponding ministries. The insulated state (and neo-liberal economic policies) was here the obvious way to break those links and form the basis of effective democratic governance.7 The different international environments must be considered. The European Union put very strict “adaptational pressures on domestic structures in the membership states” (Olsen, 1995). The three Baltic States and Hungary all belong to this group, while the two Central Asian states only face the much more diffuse demands from international organizations and bilateral partners. A second example is the comparison between the two gradual and middle sized reformers, Lithuania and Hungary. Both have experienced a much more gradual development, where previous structures have survived the systemic changes and both have been approved for EU membership. In Lithuania, these close corporate links were maintained during the gradual systemic changes, where previous power holders (the communist nomenklatura) were transformed into the new political and economic elite, maintaining the traditional organizational bonds (Nørgaard and Johannsen, 1999), and eventually producing a very high level of perceived corruption. The result became relatively ineffective state–society relations with high levels of perceived corruption. This corporate type of governance seems to have fared much better in Hungary, which also has a historically formed tradition of consensual policy making (Agh, 2001). One explanation for this may be the more developed and mature democracy in Hungary working as a check on embedded corporate bonds. Judging from these cases, a mature, liberal and pluralist democracy may be a precondition if the corporative development state is to prove effective in post-communist systems. A third example is our two Central Asian states. Our results here have shown that there is a strikingly more negative attitude to foreign influence in Kazakhstan than in Kyrgyzstan, that societal participation is more regularized in Kyrgyzstan than in Kazakhstan, and that participation in Kyrgyzstan takes the form of personalized channels of influence, expressed through clan or regional interests, where people seem more likely than in Kazakhstan to use personal connections to obtain influence. These observations indicate that Kyrgyzstan’s state appears captured by both domestic and international forces, while Kazakhstan’s enjoys a relative domestic and international autonomy. This may be partly explained by the role played by extractive industries in shaping the nature of the Kazakh state. Kazakhstan’s natural wealth meant that, already by 1997, the republic had become the primary post-Soviet recipient of per capita foreign investment, and by 2002 had earned the title of a “market economy.” By contrast, Kyrgyzstan had become the primary post-Soviet recipient of per capita international aid during the 1990s, and is beholden to the goodwill of the international community for the continuation of this aid. The political and economic

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liberalization programs of the two states are also a factor. Kazakhstan decided at an early stage to control political and economic liberalization, compared to Kyrgyzstan’s rapid decision to do both, and this decision is likely to have subjected the state to capture by empowered social forces.

Appendix: about the surveys In Latvia the survey was conducted in association with Ilze Ostrovska, Riga, and it comprises interviews with 51 former and current ministers in core Latvian ministries. The interviews were made in the beginning of 2000 (Pilot project). In Lithuania the survey was conducted together with Dalius Norkunas, Vilnius, during the autumn of 2000. This survey comprises interviews with 53 former and current ministers from core ministries. During the spring of 2001 surveys were carried out in Estonia and Hungary. The Estonian survey was conducted by Saar Poll Ltd, Tallinn, and the sample of respondents is 50 former and current ministers of core ministries. The Hungarian survey has a sample of 35 interviews with ministers from core ministries and 15 interviews with chairmen of core parliamentary committees, conducted in collaboration with the department of politics at the Department of Political Science, Budapest University of Economics. The last two surveys (in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan) were conducted between November 2001 and April 2002. In Kazakhstan the survey was conducted by Komkon-2 Eurasia Research Institute, Almaty. This survey comprises altogether 55 centrally placed decision makers in core ministries (30) and core parliamentary committees (25). In Kyrgyzstan the survey was conducted in association with the National Academy of Sciences. The sample of respondents is 17 chairmen of core parliamentary committees and altogether 38 centrally placed decision makers in core ministries (15), the Prime Minister’s office (15) and the Presidential Administration (8).

Notes 1

It is an integral part of the DEMSTAR program (DEMocracy, the STate and Administrative Reforms), dealing with states and state capacities in post-communist and developing countries. A part of this program focuses on core political and administrative institutions (ministries) where we so far have conducted structured interviews with 50–70 centrally placed politicians and executives in six countries and have initiated a new round of interviews in six countries. Eventually, we intend to cover most of the post-communist countries, excluding Russia which deserves a comparative analysis of its own. The DEMSTAR Project is financed by grants from the Danish Social Sciences Research Council and The Aarhus University Research Foundation. 2 Leftwich has offered a more comprehensive definition of the development state as a relatively autonomous state apparatus that incorporates a developmental elite (often around a charismatic personality), and is based on a competent and insulated bureaucracy in a society with a weak and subordinated civil society and the capacity to manage effectively local and foreign economic interests applying a varying balance of repression, legitimacy and performance, which appears to succeed by offering a trade-off between such repression as may exist and the delivery of regular improvements in material circumstances (Leftwich, 2000, pp. 154–9).

State–society relations 83 3

4

5 6

7

We have previously made an attempt to estimate “international embeddedness” in alternative modes by construction of an International Integration Index (Triple I), measuring the extent to which newly independent states manage to integrate into the international system. See Chapter 1 in Nørgaard and Lars Johannsen (1999). Whether the human cost associated with the totalitarian state can be morally defended is a separate issue we do not deal with in this context. See also, Przeworki and Limongo (1993), Nørgaard (2000) applying different methodologies in the discussion about linkages between regime form and development. This was one more pragmatic argument among those who favoured state retrenchment in the post-communist states: the state administration simply did not possess the internal resources needed for a more activist strategy. As summarized by Putnam (1976, pp. 16–17), such weaknesses may arise if the informants have no access to inside information, or if the knowledge is limited to a particular sphere of public affairs, because they may then “innocently purvey a distorted picture of power relations. Moreover, informants are often more confused than social scientists about what power is and who has it. More cautious reputational analysts ask their informants only about influence relations they have personally witnessed, but the reconstruction of overall patterns of power from a myriad of such individual reports remains a terrifically complex task.” Bennich-Björkman (2002) provides a process analyses of how this insulated state came about.

Bibliography Aberbach, J. D. and Rockman, B. A. (1987) “Comparative administration. Methods, muddles and models,” Administration and Society, 18 (4), pp. 473–506. Agh, A. (2001) Understanding Politics in Hungary. DEMSTAR Research Report No. 2. Published at www.demstar.dk/html/politics.htm. Ágh, A. (1997) “Actors of systemic change: the political context of public sector reform in central Europe,” Discussion Paper No. 19. Budapest: European Center for Comparative Government and Public Policy. Amsden, A. H. (1989) Asia’s Next Giant: South Korea and Late Industrialization (New York: Oxford University Press). Bekke, H. A. G. M., Perry, J. L. and Toonen, T. A. J. (1996) Civil Service Systems in Comparative Perspective (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press). Bennich-Björkman, L. (2002) Explaining State Capture in the Post-Communist Countries: a Case Study of Estonia and Latvia. Paper presented at XIII Nordic Political Science Joint Sessions of Workshop. Blyth, M. (2000) The great transformations: the rise and decline of embedded liberalism. Unpublished PhD, Thesis, Columbia University. Blyth, M. (2001) “The transformation of the Swedish model. Economic ideas, distributional conflict, and institutional change,” World Politics, 54, pp. 1–26. Craib, I. (1998) Experiencing Identity (London: Sage Publications). Cummings, S. N. (2001) Power and Change in Central Asia (London: Routledge). Diamond, L. (1999) Developing Democracy. Toward Consolidation (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press). Dryzek, J. S. and Holmes, L. (2002) Post-communist Democratization. Political Discourses across Thirteen Countries (Cambridge University Press). Egerbjerg, M. (1999) “Transcending intergovernmentalism? Identity and role perceptions

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of national officials in EU decision-making,” Journal of European Public Policy, 6 (3), pp. 456–74. Evans, P. (1995) Embedded Autonomy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Evans, P. (1997) “The eclipse of the state? Reflections on stateness in an era of globalization,” World Politics, 50 (1), pp. 62–87. Evans, P. R., Rueschemeyer, D. R. and Skocpol, T. (1979) Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Eyal, G. (2000) “Anti-politics and the spirit of capitalism: dissidents, monetarists, and the Czech transition to capitalism,” Theory and Society, 29, pp. 249–92. Galligan, D. and Smilov, D. (eds) (1999) Administrative Law in Central and Eastern Europe, 1996–1998 (Budapest: Central European University). Gilpin, R. G. (1975) U.S. Power and the Multinational Corporation (New York: Basic Books). Gozman, L. and Etkind, A. (1992) The Psychology of Post-totalitarianism in Russia (Great Britain: The Centre for Research into Communist Economies). Hall, P. A. (ed.) (1989) The Political Power of Economic Ideas: Keynesianism Across Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Hay, C. (2001) “The ‘crisis’ of Keynesianism and the rise of neo-liberalism in Britain: an ideational institutionalist approach,” in J. L. Campbell and O. K. Pedersen (eds) The Second Movement in Institutional Analysis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hay, C. 2002. Political Analysis (Basingstoke: Palgrave). Hesse, J. J. (1993) “From transformation to modernization,” in J. J. Hesse (ed.) Administrative Transformation in Central and Eastern Europe (Oxford: Blackwell). Hobson, J. M. (2000) The State and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Horváth, T. (ed.) (2000) Decentralization: Experiments and Reforms – Local Governments in Central and Eastern Europe (Budapest: Local Government and Public Service Reform Initiative (Login)). Jreisat, J. E. (2002) Comparative Public Administration and Policy (Cambridge, MA: Westview). Jreisat, J. E. (2001) “The organizational perspective in comparative and development administration,” in A. Farazmand (ed.) Handbook of Comparative and Development Public Administration (New York: Marcel Dekker). Johnson, C. (1982) MITI and the Japanese Miracle (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Keohane, R. O. and Nye, J. S. (1977) Power and Interdependence (Boston: Little, Brown & Co). Kjær, M. and Hansen, O. H. (2002) Conceptualizing State Capacity. DEMSTAR Research Report No. 6, April 2002 (http://www.demstar.dk/papers/ConceptualizingStateCapacity.pdf). König, K. (1992) “The transformation of a ‘real socialist’ administrative system into a conventional western European system,” International Review of Administrative Sciences, 58 (7). Krasner, S. D. (1978) Defending the National Interest (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Krasner, S. D. (1984) “Approaches to the state: alternative conceptions and historical dynamics,” Comparative Politics, 16, pp. 223–46. Leftwich, A. (1995) “Bringing politics back in: towards a model of the developmental state,” The Journal of Developmental Studies, 31, pp. 400–27. Leftwich, A. (2000) States of Development (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press).

State–society relations 85 Linz, J. J. (1993) The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Crisis, Breakdown and Reequilibration (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press). Linz, J. J. and Stepan, A. (1996) Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press). Mann, M. (1993) The Sources of Social Power. Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). March, J. G. and Olsen, J. P. (1995) Democratic Governance (New York: The Free Press). Monroe, K. R. (2001) “Morality and a sense of self: the importance of identity and categorization for moral action,” American Journal of Political Science, 45 (3), pp. 491–507. Morgan, E. P. (1996) “Civil service systems in developing countries,” in H. A. G. M. Bekke, L. P. Jamenes and T. A. J. Toonen (eds) Civil Service Systems in Comparative Perspective (Bloomington, Indiana University Press), pp. 227–46. Nelson, J. M. (1987) “Political participation,” in M. Weiner and S. P. Huntington (eds) Understanding Political Development (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications). Nord, W. A. and Fox, S. (1996) “The individual in organizational studies,” in S. R. Clegg, C. Hardy and W. R. Nord (eds) Handbook of Organization (London: Sage), pp. 148–70. Nørgaard, O. (2000) Economic Institutions and Democratic Reform (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar). Nørgaard, O. and Johannsen, L. with Skak, M. and Sørensen, R. H. (1999) The Baltic States after Independence, 2nd edn (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar). Nunberg, B. (1999) The State After Communism: Administrative Transitions in Central and Eastern Europe (Washington, DC: The World Bank). Nunberg, B. (2000) Ready for Europe: Public Administration Reform and European Union Accession in Central and Eastern Europe (Washington, DC: The World Bank). Olcott, M. B. (2002) Kazakhstan: Unfulfilled Promise (Washington, DC: The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace). Olsen, J. (1995) Europeanization and Nation-State Dynamics. Working paper no. 9 (March. Oslo: ARENA). Peters, B. G. (1996) “Theory and Methodology,” in H. A. G. Bekke, M. L. P. Jamenes and T. A. J. Toonen (eds) Civil Service Systems in Comparative Perspective (Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis), pp. 13–41. Pereira, L., Maravall J. and Przeworski, A. (1993) Economic Reforms in New Democracies. A Social-democratic Approach (Cambridge University Press). Prezeworki, A. and Limongo (1993) “Political regimes and economic growth,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 7 (3), pp. 51–69. Putnam, R. (1976) The Comparative Study of Political Elites (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall). Randma, T. (2001) “A small civil service in transition: the case of Estonia,” Public Administration and Development, 21, pp. 41–51. Risse, T., Cowles, M. and Carporaso, J. (eds) (2001) Europeanization and Domestic Change (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press). Rose, R. (1991) “Comparing forms of comparative analysis,” Political Studies, 39, pp. 446–62. Rosenau, J. N. (1980) The Study of Global Interdependence (London: Frances Pinter). Stark, D. and Bruszt, L. (1998) Post-Socialist Pathways Transforming Politics and Property in East Central Europe (Cambridge University Press).

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Schleifer, A. and Vishny, R. W. (1999) The Grabbing Hand. Government Pathologies and their Cures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Schleifer, A. and Treisman, D. (2000) Without a Map (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press). Skocpol, T. (1979) States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Skocpol, T. (1985) “Bringing the state back in: strategies of analyses in current research,” in P. R. Evans, D. R. Ruesch and T. Skocpol (eds) Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Solnick, S. L. (1998) Stealing the State. Control and Collapse in Soviet Institutions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Scootla, G. and Roots, H. (1999) “The civil service in the Republic of Estonia,” in T. Verheijen with A. Kotcheegura (eds) Civil Service Systems in Central and Eastern Europe (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar), pp. 235–66. Steen, A. (1994) “Confidence in institutions in post-communist countries: the case of the Baltic states,” Working Paper 12 (Oslo: Department of Political Science, University of Oslo). UNDP (2001) Rebuilding State Structures: Methods and Approaches. The Trials and Tribulations of Post-Communist Countries (New York: UNDP). UNDP Regional Report (1997) The Shrinking State: Governance and Human Development in Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States (New York: UNDP). Wade, R. (1990) Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asian Industrialisation (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Waltz, K. N. (1979) Man, The State and War (New York: Columbia University Press). Weiss, L. (1998) The Myth of the Powerless State. Governing the Economy in a Global Era (Oxford: Polity Press). Weiss, L. and Hobson, J. M. (1995) States and Economic Development: A Comparative Historical Analysis (Cambridge: Polity). World Bank (1997) The State in a Developing World, World Development Report 1997 (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

7

The middle class in transition from communism to capitalist society Henryk Domanski

The formation of “new classes” in Poland may offer some yardsticks of progress on the route to market society. One of these may be the “formation of the middle class”. I am going to answer the following question: to what extent did Poland approach Western countries in the last decade? Based on systematic analysis of data from national samples I will attempt to prove four theses. First, as regards categories that are candidates to transform into middle class, I will show that Polish higher managers, intelligentsia and owners mostly meet the same criteria as the Western middle class with respect to level of education, occupational position and incomes. Second, I put forward the thesis that in the 1990s Poland systematically (although at a slow pace) moved forward on this route, which results mainly from modernization of occupational structure, growing consumption and living standards. Third, I will indicate that some orientations and values – like self-reliance – commonly attributed to the middle class, have not necessarily followed changes in the structural underpinnings of market society. What changed in orientations seemed to be enforced by objective requirements and constraints. Finally, I point out that the Polish middle class will emerge not as an exact copy but as a modified version of the Western original – affected by economic context and cultural tradition. The ideal citizen for the bulk of the middle class was naturally capitalist, and the ideal a class society based on capital and competition. The crux of the middle class lies in the property. People who become owners – of firm, economic capital, or rare and hardly accessible qualifications – themselves change in that they become more individualistically oriented, self-reliant, and look forward with greater confidence in their efforts. There is nothing more convincing – as regards motivation to hard work, and making investments in one’s own self – than the vision of betterment of material position and a growing bank account. Possessing marketable property, such as ownership of a firm or superior skills, distinguishes the middle class from the manual workers. On the other hand, the middle class differs from the upper class in that its members operate their property themselves. Owners feel free and behave in different ways from nonowners, in that they are self-disciplined, and support the stability of the political and economic order.

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The second determinant of membership of the middle class is a relatively high standard of living. Historians argue that, in the British, case one of the most significant distinctions between the middle class and lower classes was created in 1792 when William Pitt imposed a special tax on incomes to help pay for the war against the French. For Britons to levy a tax was a symbol of the capacity of the middle classes to bear the costs of running the nation. This action stimulated the development of a middle-class consciousness; members of the middle classes gained more right to claim prestige than before; the possibility of paying taxes confirmed and gave social sanction to the citizenship of the middle classes. The natural question emerges: where is the borderline above which material standard of living became indicative of membership of the middle classes? Certainly, it will vary depending on the level of economic development. Let us compare Poland with the United States where, in 1990, 59 per cent of families owned a house and, in 1998, 54 per cent had two cars (Hacker, 1998, p. 61). In the communist period, the Polish intelligentsia had to cope with the hardships of daily life. Its material conditions were several times lower in standard compared with those of American society. In the command economy, the intelligentsia had no chance to attain the middle class status although it performed approximately the same occupational roles as the American professions, and was located more or less in the same place in the stratificational ladder. Certainly, disparities in incomes and the material standard of living coexist with notable differences in the conditions of work between the manual and nonmanual categories. The third attribute of the middle class resides in its members’ distinctive occupational positions. Students of social stratification regard occupation as the best single indicator of “social class”. For example, Giddens (1973) emphasized that the division of labour exerts one of the most significant influences on the formation of classes within the modern industrial order. Western middle classes are composed of two big segments: non-manual workers and proprietors – people running small and medium-sized businesses. In numerical terms, the middle class, as identified in terms of occupations, includes no less than 50–60 per cent of the total population and is continuously increasing. Fourth, the middle classes tend to be marked by a specific outlook, set of orientations, and lifestyle. Our images of the middle classes appear very often to be frozen in the world of Edwardian England, when the middle class reached its apotheosis as the backbone of the nation. Although many authors proclaimed it to be dying, and many other criticized it for such vicious features as egoism, possessive individualism, and so on, the middle class still represents mostly approved patterns of life among a variety of other patterns. Individuals originating in the lower classes seek to find themselves in the middle class – it remains a visible symbol of welfare, equal opportunities, commonly desired harmony, and success. Looking from the most general point of view, the middle class used to be seen as a factor of stability in Western societies undergoing constant change and various turmoils. On the one hand, one cannot suspect its members of destructive tendencies in taking radically leftist positions; on the other hand, membership in middle class tends to be open – the middle class appears as an

Transition from communism to capitalism 89 importer of the most talented individuals from the manual class, and an exporter of its elite to the upper class. One cannot accuse it of attempts to preserve its relatively higher position – this gains the class more sympathy than elicited by the upper reaches. The development of the Western middle class resulted from a combination of various processes ingrained in the capitalist market. It was the middle classes who expanded national wealth, improved standards of living, created demand and invested their surplus wealth. Polish society is still far behind – however, in transformation to the capitalist society we are pushed to aim for this model. Below, I will try to show what we have succeeded in adapting from the West after several years of transition, what we have missed and what were the main obstacles we encountered on the way to middle class society.

Directions of changes Let us begin from sociological reflection. In 1975, Margaret Thatcher – probably the most aggressive representative of the interests of the British middle classes in the twentieth century – took over leadership of the Conservative Party. Four years later she became Prime Minister – her political programme from the very beginning bluntly aimed at recovery of the “spirit of capitalism”, emphasizing individualism, self-reliance and an ideology of success. It was also in the 1970s that a couple of enthusiasts of the free economy in Poland attempted to promote ideas of economic liberalism under the communist regime. These allegedly idealistic visions of the political dissidents – at the time – came to the fore after the collapse of the communist system. However, what distinguished post-communist transformation to a capitalist system from the classical, British path to a market economy, was that in Poland and other EastEuropean societies, capitalism was created from above. Political elites turned out to be lonely leaders of the capitalist transformation. The first postcommunist government, led by Tadeusz Mazowiecki, with a relatively strong representation of liberals, was a classical example of “designed capitalism” – which was installed rather than evolved in a natural way (Offe, 1996; Stark, 1992). Let us turn to hard data to shed some light on Poland’s adjustments to these changes during the first decade of transition. Statistics and results of sociological research allow us to answer some basic questions as regards development of the middle class – or to put it more realistically – some elements of a comprehensive syndrome, which relates to the “middle classness”. These crucial questions concern the directions of changes in occupational structure, the dynamics and intensity of development of private property, and the extent to which these processes were paralleled by an increase in standard of living. Development of private property is well documented by the growth of the category of owners. In the 1990s, substantial progress was made. According to sociological surveys based on national random samples, the percentage of owners (outside agriculture) rose in the period 1989–99 from 3.5 to 6.6 of the

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total of the actively employed. These figures are based on respondents’ reports, coming from national samples, where respondents were asked whether they own a firm (“yes” or “no”). One should emphasize both the growing size of this category and the rapid pace of that growth. Although the proportion at 6.6 per cent is still low compared with Western countries, one can see that in the 1990s this category doubled in size, which indicates a significant step forward. Let us remember that in the most developed capitalist societies the category of owners accounts for about 10–15 per cent of the total labour force. For example, in the United Kingdom, the proportion stood at 8 per cent, in the United States at 9 per cent, but in Italy it reached 22.2 per cent (Wright, 1996, pp. 124–7). In brief, in the last several years the distinction between owners and the propertyless grew in importance and now more closely approximates Western standards of a middle class society. Peoples’ Poland (i.e. Polska Ludowa) was the only communist country that avoided massive collectivization in agriculture. This helps us to understand why, in post-communist Poland, expansion of the private sector had to be slower than in neighbouring countries, which did not have landed estates at the start. Despite this, Central Statistical Office data show that the category of people working in the private sector (both employees and owners, including peasants) increased from 45.1 per cent of the total in 1990 to 70.2 per cent in 1998. Employment in the state sector accounted for an ever-decreasing share, falling to 29.8 per cent in 1998 (Rocznik Statystyczny, 1999, p. 100). Of all state enterprises registered in 1990, 70 per cent had fallen under various programmes of privatization until 1998. The rise of the private sector was accompanied by the rise of investments. While, in 1995, the private sector took 44.2 per cent of the total value of investments, in 1997 its share increased to 55.8 per cent. These processes created solid underpinnings for the formation of the “old middle class”. What seems to be almost neglected by Marx is non-material property in the sense of intellectual capital, professional expertise, and managerial skills – all capacities that can be exchanged on the labour market for rewards such as incomes, authority, or high occupational prestige. Cross-time analyses of the survey data from Poland confirm the growing role of this kind of property in the 1990s. This growth may be demonstrated by comparison of the strength of the effect of educational capital on access to managerial positions and incomes. It should be borne in mind that if indeed any upheaval in the stratification system in Poland took place, it occurred in mechanisms of distribution of incomes. I determined the strength of these relationships within the regression model, with strictly comparable data coming from national samples taken between 1982 and 1998. I regressed individual incomes against education and managerial positions controlling for several variables for the consecutive points of time (see Domanski, 2001). Education was coded in terms of a series of dummy variables, and managerial position was a dichotomic (zero-one) variable with all managers assigned 1 (otherwise 0). Control variables included social origin, sex, age and other characteristics, which could be assumed to differentiate incomes. Comparison across time can reveal whether education and managerial positions really

Transition from communism to capitalism 91 mattered more in the 1990s than in the command economy; to put it in general terms, how far distribution of incomes responded to systemic changes. What analyses of these data show was a growing association between education and incomes. Three important conclusions may be drawn. First, it showed that higher education always paid relatively better in Poland than graduation from lower levels. This pattern was visible even in 1982 – it is worthwhile to note that the rule of rewarding people more for higher education was put in this year to a tough test by the so-called “small reform” of the economic system. As introduced by the communist authorities one month after the imposition of martial law in Poland, the “small reform” resulted in a dramatic reversal of the hierarchy of incomes. For the first (and only) time in the history of communist Poland, manual workers on average received higher wages than the non-manual categories. The return on higher education was lowest in 1982, nevertheless, the functional prerequisites of social stratification did overcome this reversal in subsequent years. The second conclusion concerns the direction of change. Since 1982, higher education has translated into increasingly higher earnings. In the problematic year of 1982, the net premium for higher education stood at 16 per cent; compared with incomes of individuals with uncompleted higher education. In 1987, the premium for higher (relative to uncompleted higher) education amounted to 18 per cent, in 1992 – to 28 per cent, and in 1998 it reached 27 per cent. There is another proof that education differentiates incomes more and more over time. If one compares the distance between the incomes of the best and worst paid educational categories, this gap can be seen to have widened. In 1982, higher education brought a net advantage of 14 per cent relative to the average incomes, whereas graduating from elementary schools meant a loss of 10 per cent. The gap between extremes totalled 24 percentage points. In 1987, it increased to 41 per cent and in the 1990s, it rose further, reaching 69 points in 1998. My third conclusion refers to the growing role of managerial positions. As far as supervisory roles reflect managerial skills and responsibility, the net effect of this variable on incomes is one important aspect of meritocratic distribution. In 1998 it was much more profitable to hold a supervisory position than in the past. Net increments for holding supervisory positions (which in my data was a broadly defined category, ranging from foreman to minister) were 37 per cent. One can regard this as the price for organizational skills, the ability to make binding decisions and all individual investments as well as costs resulting from being a supervisor. Its market value significantly grew in the 1990s, which may reflect the implementation of modern organizations in Poland. To conclude: it was less harmful to boost the incomes of the supervisory staff than to underpay them. According to prevailing theoretical positions – clearly confirmed by a number of empirical findings – changes going on in social stratification are reflected by changes in occupational structure. In case of Poland, one can precisely determine whether there was a growing pool of candidates to the middle class and

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contrariwise, whether the number of positions identified with lower classes declined. According to Gustav Schmoller (1897), who for the first time made the distinction between “old” and “new” middle classes, the former being composed of merchants, shopkeepers, craftsman and all other owners of firms – the historical roots of this segment go back to the middle ages. The “new middle class”, though, which was persuasively depicted by C. W. Mills (1951) and David Lockwood (1958), includes a spectrum of non-manual categories ranging from managers and professionals, through lower white collar workers, and service and sales workers. This broad category emerged much later and even at the fin de siècle, when Schmoller wrote Was verstehen wir unter dem Mittelstand?, one could hardly predict that the new middle class would become the most numerous segment of the labour force. In Western countries the middle classes rose swiftly on the eve of the twentieth century; then in the coming decades, they overran – in numerical terms – the working class categories and farmers, and in about the 1970s their relative share in the occupational structure exceeded 50 per cent. The most expansive occupational groups within this diverse and complex category proved to be lawyers, medical doctors, engineers, university teachers, managers, and executives located on the highest, most responsible and functionally indispensable positions. Let us turn to Poland. Table 7.1 presents changes in occupational distributions across 14 basic socio-occupational strata. The data come from national surveys carried out on random samples in the period 1982–2002 according to comparable designs. One technical remark should be made that, as the surveys of 1994–99 were conducted on relatively small samples, analyses for this period were carried out with merged data sets in order to make estimations more valid. I merged data from two consecutive years of the Polish General Social Survey in 1994 and 1995. Similarly, for 1998 and 1999, I merged data sets from two surveys conducted by the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Where should we expect to find the middle class in the occupational structure? According to commonly shared definitions they should be, first of all, located among the highest supervisory levels and professionals. These in the Polish context are directors of firms (and managerial staff), and non-technical and technical intelligentsia (engineers). Mills (1951) went further to include in the middle class incumbents of relatively simple, routinely performed and less complex jobs, which compose the lower non-manual categories. Theories of modernization say that requirements of economic development enforce replacement of these categories by professional and managerial positions. We will check whether in the trajectory of Polish transformation this prediction is borne out. Finally, one should not be surprised if we also find a growing number of owners given that development of private property was a phenomenon underlying formation of the capitalist order. Bearing these predictions in mind, let us examine the occupational changes. The categorization presented in Table 7.1 may be regarded as the ground plan of the class structure – it seems that only some figures in there will be welcomed

Transition from communism to capitalism 93 Table 7.1 Changes in socio-occupational structure in Poland (1982–2002) Occupational categories Managers, higher administrative officials Non-technical intelligentsia Technical intelligentsia Technicians Administrative staff of medium Size Clerical workers Owners Sales and service Manual supervisors Skilled workers Unskilled workers in production Unskilled workers in services Agricultural workers Farmers Total

1982

1987

1994/95

1998/99

0.9

1.8

1.6

1.0

3.2 3.1 7.0

3.3 2.6 6.2

3.2 2.7 4.6

4.5 2.4 6.0

9.6 5.0 1.6 6.4 2.1 25.7

10.7 4.6 3.6 7.7 2.3 26.3

9.5 3.9 6.2 10.6 1.8 27.4

11.2 3.5 6.6 10.3 1.9 24.8

5.8

5.7

7.0

7.2

4.3 1.8 23.5

3.9 1.5 19.8

6.0 2.0 13.4

6.4 2.1 12.2

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

by enthusiasts for the middle classes. In the second half of the 1990s it was the proportions of managers and non-technical intelligentsia that rapidly rose. The latter category, which includes lawyers, medical doctors, academicians, high school teachers, economists, journalists, artists, etc., stood at 3.2–3.3 per cent in 1982–95. By 1999, it amounted to 4.5 per cent; however, at the turn of the twenty-first century the proportion fell to 3.9 per cent. At the same time, the percentage of managerial staff rose from 1 to 2.4 per cent. Apparently, percentages of engineers declined. They evidently did not qualify for the name of dynamic forces of the occupational structure. All in all, both categories of intelligentsia, managers and administrative officials accounted for much the same share of the total actively employed in 1987 and in 2000. Of profound importance was that this unexpected trend was also exhibited in other post-communist societies. Analyses of cross-national data from 1993 revealed that categories of higher professionals and managers also underwent a relative decrease at the time in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia and Russia (Domanski, 2000, pp. 17–20). This interesting downturn may be interpreted in many ways. The optimistic explanation is the functionalistic one, that relative decline reflects only some transitory regress, which may be attributed to reduced demand for highly-qualified technical cadres employed in traditional sectors of manufacturing. It may well be that these categories were rendered redundant, and could not be absorbed by the emerging capitalist market and so surpluses of the labour force created by the extensively oriented communist economy still prevail.

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Our principal question asks whether occupational structure approaches in its shape the typical, middle class pattern. Enduring developments should be then: a growing number of managers and professions, declining proportions of the working class categories, and a certain increase in clerical staff – all of these accompanied by small percentages of agricultural categories, which in developed Western societies, do not exceed 4–8 per cent. This scenario was realized only to some extent in Poland, paralleling the development of the capitalist economy. The switch, which had begun already in the late 1980s, gained momentum after the start of the market-oriented reforms. The core of the dynamics of the socio-occupational structure resided in the category of owners. The percentage of private entrepreneurs grew fourfold, reaching 6.6 per cent in 1998/99, then the share declined slightly. The second most expansive socio-occupational strata, after owners, were service and sales workers such as: shop assistants, sales demonstrators, telephonists, post office clerks, personnel in the catering business, gas-station attendants, etc.; their relative share in the total labour force grew from 6.4 per cent to 12.3 per cent. It should be mentioned that women were overrepresented in this category – as in all societies – which may be interesting from the perspective of feminization of the occupational structure. A distinctive feature of the Polish occupational system turns out to be the extremely large proportion of skilled workers: in 2002, skilled workers accounted for 22.4 per cent of the workforce, clearly dominating in numerical size. Looking from the perspective of modernization theory, skilled workers constitute for social planners a nightmare and a visible remnant of the planned economy, which by no means fits contemporary demands. They exist as a by-product of the former system, which prompted development of vocational schooling in order to satisfy the needs of extensive industrialization. Private farming appeared in the second place in the ranking of “bad remnants”, despite an apparent tendency to decline. One can see that, in the case of Polish peasants, the real breakthrough was made in the first years of the development of the market economy when their relative proportions decreased from 23.5 to 12.2 per cent; still they remain quite a stronghold of traditionalistic attitudes. The third largest occupational segment comprises administrative and nonmanual workers of the medium level of the occupational hierarchy: these are accountants, nurses, and lower managers who accounted for 9–13 per cent of the total labour force with a certain tendency to increase. The proportion of routine clerical workers, ranked the lowest among the non-manual segment (i.e. file clerks, cashiers in banks, secretaries, stenographers) fell in 2002 to 4.1 per cent. The category of technicians, although undergoing broad fluctuations, did not shift in the occupational hierarchy to a significant degree. The period was full of contradictions and paradoxes; it shows that the share of unskilled workers in production and services, who – according to modernization theory – were doomed to extinction, displayed in the 1990s a slight, but steady rise. Summing up, the overall picture of changes in occupational structure presents a complicated image to observers. In some crucial areas structural underpinnings of stagnation and traditional orientations remained prominent. The dynamics of

Transition from communism to capitalism 95 occupational changes in Poland did not straightforwardly conform to patterns of modernization; however, one cannot deny that it was going on. The most positive sign was a relative growth in numbers of managers and non-technical intelligentsia which reflect – as one may presume – emerging new professions in marketing, banking, insurance, advertisement, consulting and finances. Only in the 1940s was American society freed from the disastrous vision of the Great Crisis. The post-war economic boom allowed them to enjoy material prosperity. It reached Western European societies in the 1950s. History will remember Harold Macmillan’s famous claim that “You have never had it so good” – made in a speech given in 1957 in Bedford, in which he summarized reasons for a third consecutive electoral victory for the Conservative party. The living standard in the United Kingdom had significantly improved, the economy had performed better and better, and the Conservatives could seek to persuade the British people that they should support their rule since this party remained the only credible spokesman of the middle classes. In 1950, according to national accounts, GDP per capita in Poland was about that of Spain. However, while in Poland it rose in the period 1955–88 from USD755 to USD1860, in Spain it increased from USD561 to USD7740 – several times more. Starting to make adjustments to the market economy in the 1990s, Poland faced typical experiences – including a drop in output (and hence in consumption) – but in the following years of reforms the economy recovered. Recovery stimulated the growth of real incomes: according to statistics from the Central Statistical Office, until 1993 real incomes continuously declined, and still in 1993 they dropped (relative to 1992) by 2.9 per cent; obviously this was by no means reflected in a decline of the standard of living – one should keep in mind, that in the communist system, possibilities for spending money on consumer goods were severely restricted. From 1994, a reversal of these downgrading tendencies took place: real incomes grew for the first time, compared with 1993, beginning a period of long awaited breakthrough in the material conditions of life. Growing prosperity gained momentum in 1996 when the annual rate of increase in incomes reached 8.9 per cent. The second half of the 1990 witnessed a continuation of this growth although at a slower pace. In 1997, real incomes grew by 6.9 and in 1998 by 4.9 percentage points. Not unexpectedly, improvement in the well-being of Poles was translated into growing consumption. Individual consumption, as measured in terms of expenditures, underwent systematic growth amounting to 8.3 per cent at its peak in 1996; in 1997 it increased by 6.9 and in 1999 by 6.4 per cent. In the words of specialists in this area, such as Robert Skidelsky (1999), and economic experts, like Geoffrey Sachs (1993), Poland became a leader of capitalist transformation, overtaking the Czech Republic, Hungary, and all other post-communist countries. Prosperity had many faces. Let us illustrate the general direction of the changes using the dynamics of GDP per capita, which used to be a good summary indicator of well-being. In 1990, e.g. in the outset of the transformation, GDP per capita stood in Poland at USD1547, and until 1999 it

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increased 2.4 times, to reach USD3702. If looked at from the perspective of pace of changes it was a substantial step forward. This may be neatly captured by comparison with dynamics of GDP in Norway, Switzerland and the United States, which occupied the top positions in the ranking of the most developed economies. The gap between the GDPs of these three countries and Poland was reduced at least twofold. While, in 1990, GDP in the Switzerland was 21.7 times higher (33.6/1.5 thousands US dollars), in 1999 it was 9.6 times higher. In the case of Norway and the United States these ratios declined in Poland’s favour from 17.6:1 to 9.5:1 and from 14.6:1 to 7.9:1. The momentous events of the 1990s, which brought rising affluence, were interwoven with growing inequalities. It was a deeply attractive period for managers, the intelligentsia and some owners, however what could not be disguised was that relative economic position of the working class and farmers, taken overall, worsened in the social pecking order. This periodic boom cemented underpinnings for middle class society as far as it found echoes in material betterment for the average Pole. Once again one can turn to survey data – comparison across time of selected indicators of wellbeing, such as ownership of a car or household utensils, unambiguously show that material conditions substantially improved. Whereas in 1987 only 29 per cent of households owned a colour TV set, 11 years later this figure rose to 90 per cent, and, by 1998, the percentage of households with satellite TV sets increased to 19 per cent. A quite new element of standard of living was the personal computer, which was found among 14 per cent of households in 1998 in comparison to 1 per cent in 1987. At the same time the relative proportion of owners of video cameras increased from 2 per cent to 7 per cent. In the 1980s one item completely lacking was the mobile phone, which in the 1990s spread out among all social categories, from managers to peasants. In 1998, automatic washing machines were possessed by 69 per cent of families, refrigerators by 97 per cent, and cars by 53 per cent. There was almost a twofold increase in the percentage of car owners – from 27 per cent in 1987 – and Poland moved into the third place in Europe for car sales, selling 638,000 new cars in 1999. Certainly, these progressive tendencies were triggered by rising incomes and the universal drive – human nature – to satisfy consumption needs when it appears that one could afford to meet them. People sought compensation for decades of living in hardship under the command economy. For economists, the order of the day became “macro-economic stabilization” and “structural adjustment”, which were translated into the stifling of inflation and the cutting back of subsidies to deficit sectors. Polish governments were able to cease financing their deficits by printing money, able to curb inflation and balancing the budget. One of the pillars of sustained growth was expected to be the privatization of state firms; from this point of view the policy of governments only partially succeeded and the same was true for the subsidy of traditional industries. What was later referred to as the “shock therapy” did not consist only of one master move, consisting of the liberalization of prices and the stabilization of the Polish zloty, but also of a long-term strategy implemented by the government of Tadeusz

Transition from communism to capitalism 97 Mazowiecki with as much determination as the proponents of a liberal economy could show. They remembered Machiavelli’s advice that all difficult decisions should be made at the start of reform, without delay – then one should patiently wait for their fruits. Bearing all these circumstances in mind one can sum up the first stage of social transformation in Poland. What seems instructive is a comparison with Western societies, going back to the time when they entered the era of abundance during post-war reconstruction, a time of economic boom and the operation of the Marshall plan. At the same time, Polish society underwent extensive industrialization, which turned out to be the most “heroic” period of the communist rule. And after five decades of enforced stagnation, we are, according to all accounts, slowly approaching Western-like standards of living. Further modernization of the social structure and a breaking down of traditional habits are still required. While serious structural blockages in job opportunities for the managerial and professional “salariat” have increased, recent years have witnessed a serious growth in wealth and consumption, and after 50 years the average Pole now receives something more attractive than the increments in the number of locomotives offered by Gomulka, Gierek et al.

Style Shock therapies fulfil their role if they induce a reorientation of attitudes and lifestyle according to the designed pattern. This sounds like an axiom and any predictions concerning development of the Polish middle class have to be made with caution. First of all, material upgrading will not automatically create the desired orientations and life goals. Paths leading to middle class are not easy to follow and can be compared to efforts to intrude into intellectual discussion, made by representatives of the lower classes. Social systems behave like individuals, who are not immediately admissible to “better circles”. It is difficult to measure the extent of formation of the “middle classes” in the Polish case. This question was not researched under the communist rule, which means that we cannot determine the situation in the past, before the collapse of the former system. One can give only a diagnosis of the current state as a starting point in reflection on adaptation of the Western patterns. Step into any house in the land and it does not take long to establish its occupants’ class. Operationalization of this tenet in empirical terms implies that it is in the privacy of their homes that people show their social position most clearly. In the United Kingdom at the turn of the twentieth century, more than 75 per cent of the population lived in their own houses with almost 50 per cent of working class families being home owners, which undoubtedly was an outstanding feature of this society in the contemporary world (Saunders, 1990). Yet, apart from the ownership itself, a principal factor is also the elevations of the homes – this differs between classes. The middle classes do not, on the whole, have plastic gnomes or other decorative ornaments in their front gardens, nor fancy name signs outside their houses. As Bradley (1982) pointed out, the

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everyday sights and sounds of home life give a good indication of the various level of “middle classness”. According to his observations, the strains of BBC Radio Three are a sure sign of an upper middle-class home just as the sound of Mantovani suggests lower “middle classness”. Indeed, also in Poland, owning a modern apartment, or a house, becomes a good indicator of higher position. More and more young married couples originating from the intelligentsia and owners start their family life by buying up market houses. It does not suffice that you own your home. The W. Lloyd Warner (1949) group studying Yankee city, found that the social meaning of neighbourhoods was so important that people used street names to designate social classes. In capitalist societies each community has its own area where there is an especially heavy concentration of upper- and middle-class people. In their well-known study carried out in Bethnal Green, Young and Willmot (1957) established that in the area researched (which was, for London, typically working class), about 90 per cent of the representatives of the working class were born there and had other members of their family living nearby. Within the relatively homogeneous economic layer of residents, symbols of status reassert themselves and class distinctions begin to reappear. Still, up to now homeowners have been conducting battles to set themselves apart from their still-depressed lower-class neighbourhoods. In the 1990s we have been seeing the first signs of residential segregation in Polish cities. Warsaw has gained several islands for the elite, the suburb of Mie˛dzylesie became unsurpassed for prestige: in 2000 one square metre sold there for about $60 making it the most-prized home site at the time. However, a supreme achievement in luxurious living was Konstancin (on the south side of Warsaw). Konstancin was regarded as being as fashionable an address as you could have – moving to Konstancin represented an upgrade to the top of the social ranking and in the opinion of the higher circles “this was the highest point in the town”. Representatives of the intelligentsia who have lived for 20 years next door to plumbers and bricklayers, as most pre-1989 Poles did, and did not care to smell fried steak on the staircase, began to judge their neighbourhoods more carefully than before. And they strive, in their home-hopping, to upgrade themselves with each hop as far as they dare. Those who can pay the higher prices, tend to move out from the blighted, overcrowded areas where people from the lower classes are confined. The most-prized home sites face forests, tennis courts and recreation facilities; they are provided with a security service, and investment is made in paint and polish to maintain their status. The impact of these developments apparently tends to create many thousands of one-class communities, something unparalleled in our recent history. Those who could afford to buy homes and expensive flats became more credible partners for government, local authorities, the police, the judiciary, and banks. Owning your home will be a sure sign of membership of the lower order. Residents of more prestigious areas, when getting bank loans, are recognized as “better” in comparison with council tenants and people renting flats in ruined districts overpopulated by retirees, the poor, and all who had lost after the fall of the communist welfare system.

Transition from communism to capitalism 99 Recreation and other habits are yet other areas of life that reflect social distinctions. One should expect that in the 1990s class differences in lifestyle would be even more pronounced than before. The commonly held view is that the middle-class family will scrimp and save in order to be able to send its children to public school or to build up capital to pass on to them, while the working class family will spend all of its money as soon as the wage packet is brought home, on food, drink, consumer goods and entertainments. One way of establishing a man’s lifestyle patterns is to ask him the following question: “People spend their time in various ways. Tell me please, how frequently do you . . .?”. An interviewer then reads a list of 20 selected free time activities; the list includes: activity in a political party, activity in trade union, social activity for the sake of community and neighbourhood, just standing or sitting in front of the home, looking through windows, talking to neighbours, going dancing, solving crossword puzzles, sewing, looking through stock-exchange quotations, etc. This question was asked in a sociological survey carried out in 1998. Respondents were to assess whether they did these things “very frequently “, “rather frequently”, “rarely”, or “not at all” (Domanski, 2001). This survey has shown that definitely the prime form of recreation was watching TV. Forty-one per cent of adult Poles report that they “very frequently” spend their free time in front of TV sets. Major activities also included: tinkering (29 per cent), visiting family (19 per cent), and “some” hobby (12 per cent). Only 2 per cent admitted that they happen to monitor stock-exchange quotations, and 5 per cent pointed to activity in their professional bodies, which might be regarded as indicative of business thinking and formation of professional associations playing a vital role in the development of the upper-middle classes. According to expectations, persons looking at stock-exchange quotations were mostly recruited from managers (14 per cent), and activity in professional bodies was overrepresented among the non-technical intelligentsia (13 per cent); the latter category recognizing the central role of professional corporations as representing their collective interests. Nevertheless it was believed to have a strategic value only for 5 per cent for the total population of Poles. No analysis of the middle class would be complete without a consideration of matters of taste. Restaurant going comes from commercial greed to satisfy a need for luxury – it is not distributed equally by social classes. Data from our survey reveals that in 1998, 8.5 per cent of all adult Poles ate out in restaurants “at least some times yearly”.1 It most frequently occurred in the case of the intelligentsia (18.6 per cent), followed by owners, executives, managers and high officials in the state administration. These eating habits are something that middle classes are inclined to display. Skilled workers visited restaurants half as often compared with the intelligentsia. Note that it appeared to be a typically urban habit – as peasants (12.5 per cent of the total labour force at the time) did not have their meals in restaurants at all. In the eyes of the intelligentsia, restrained in its occupational activity by the tenets of the command economy, the business lunch was regarded as an institution that symbolized the West. The business lunch is a predominantly middle

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class activity. Actually, the same class-like pattern emerges in capitalist Poland. Generally, it was 3.8 per cent of representatives of Poles who acknowledged eating a business lunch at least “some times a year” (I still refer to the 1998 survey data). The restaurant turns out to be the place most frequently attended by managers and the non-technical intelligentsia (medical doctors, lawyers, scientists, secondary school teachers, specialist in marketing, artists, etc.), of whom 14–15 per cent used to take a business lunch at least “some times a year”. Owners were in the third place (12.2 per cent), followed by technical intelligentsia (mostly engineers) (9.4 per cent). Certainly, reports of going to restaurants for business could hardly be found among the responses of the working class, agricultural labourers and peasants. On the one hand, the business lunch is a kind of duty, which is built in to the occupational roles of the intelligentsia and managerial categories; on the other hand in Poland it also becomes a component of adaptation to Western patterns of occupational careers. Perhaps the most sensitive pointer to middle class status is health. The latest review of individuals’ orientations, produced by Antonina Ostrowska (1997), confirmed that the most eager to take care of their health are members of the top occupational categories. Such things as diet, intensive recreation and visits to doctors play a greater role in life strategies undertaken by people who know the market value of health and treat it as an investment that should bring returns. Good health is perceived by them as a precondition of successful coping with strain and of maintenance of high status. There is, in fact, strong factual evidence that these orientations are being more deeply understood in Poland, although Poles still lag behind Western societies. The most telling signs of growing implementation of orientations on health come from changes in the structure of the consumption of food. In the period 1989–95 consumption of beef (which is highly correlated with heart diseases) decreased by 46.6 per cent. Poles are tending to abandon beef in favour of fish and poultry. The Institute of Food and Feeding survey disclosed that chicken especially was eaten more and more (growth by 21.4 per cent). A the same time consumption of natural vegetable fat increased by 163.6 per cent, accompanied by increased spending on vegetables and fruit rather than on animal fat. Unfortunately we lack good comparable data concerning orientations on health. What one can do is limited to a snapshot based on cross-national research. Data from a national survey carried out in 1998 show that 37.4 per cent of the total population went to the dentist “at least once a year”, 34.4 per cent underwent periodical examination by a doctor, and only 4.6 per cent “drink juices and eat fresh fruit” (Domanski, 2000). Inhabitants of Poland generally preferred a diet of convenience and starchy food; they eat more carbohydrates, snack food and sweets, and tinned instead of fresh fruit. The Victorian middle classes took a leading role in sporting activities. It was only in the middle class societies that sport emerged and became regarded as a pleasure, a form of rest after the hardships of work and also as offering a proxy for success in life. In the complicated history of Peoples’ Poland, punctuated by political turning points, successive “openings” to Western culture were paral-

Transition from communism to capitalism 101 leled by periods of inflow of fashionable sporting activities. In the last wave of these, in the 1990s, growing sections of Polish society became enthusiasts for jogging, cycling and windsurfing, as rivals to the visits to tennis courts, which had gained widespread popularity as a form of recreation in the last decades of the former regime. In the 1998 survey, respondents were asked whether they happen in their free time to participate in various sporting activities. They were given a list of 11 items, which creates a certain spectrum, allowing us to assess the extent of westernization of lifestyle in this field. It appears that in the middle class society sport recreation was engaged in by a minority of Poles. In the light of our data, 21.9 per cent of respondents reported that they did not have time to participate in sport recreation, and in addition 32.8 per cent declared that they did not need to do so. As regards distribution of sporting activities among those who admitted participating in some of them, 3.7 per cent played tennis, 4.2 per cent skied, and 10.7 per cent went jogging. The most exclusive forms of recreation turn out to be golf (0.3 per cent), windsurfing (0.4 per cent), sailing (1.6 per cent) and riding horses (1.6 per cent). As far as patterns of inequality surrounding this kind of leisure are concerned, time, money and transport are likely to be effective barriers: always significant too is the question of desire. In the case of Poland the most active participants in exclusive sporting events were owners who clearly surpassed the next category, that of the non-technical intelligentsia. The representatives of the lower non-manual categories, namely technicians, administrative staff at the medium level, and sales and service personnel still rarely participated in sport. Sport remains an area inherently divided along class lines in that the working class categories, not to mention the peasants, are least likely to be participants of this leisure activity. Not surprisingly, also in Poland representatives of the lower strata are less stimulated to undertake healthy and “constructive” recreation and are less exposed to the sentiments of the “sporting code”.

Conclusion: what could not happen in the US? Undoubtedly, Polish society has made a step forward as regards the general standard of living. Such indicators of well-being as ownership of cars, houses and luxurious apartments provide people with the comfort of independence and release ambitions to seek a successful and creative life. Growing welfare and proprietorship have become passports to success even if, as in the case of possession of new houses, the real owner is the bank and one has to repay the mortgage. The phenomenon of the middle class resides in the enforcement of rationality, self-discipline, initiative, competitiveness and other virtues. These traits allow people to pride themselves and look with hope at their individual efforts. For these reasons the middle class remains an attractive symbol and creates mechanisms of commitment, which allow people to postpone instant gratification for more long-term benefits. For society it secures political stabilization and economic growth. It is probably unwise to generalize at great length about this slightly idealistic

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vision, which emerges in different ways. In Democracy in America de Tocqueville (1962) attempted to explain “why the Americans are often so restless although they are in the midst of their prosperity”. In answering this question he asserted that the chief reason was that they never stop thinking of the good things they have not got. The Americans, as de Tocqueville observed, were tormented by the shadowy suspicion that they may not have chosen the shortest route to get it. Assuming, in a hypothetical way, that one could transfer de Tocqueville (with his insight) to contemporary Poland, it seems unlikely that he would find signs of the “creative torment” that does not permit ambitious individuals stopping half way. To be a member of the middle class in Poland is to belong to the categories of higher managers, intelligentsia and owners on the small, or medium scale. Undoubtedly there are dynamic and self-reliant individuals but they are concentrated in the relatively small sector of the newest, profit-oriented firms in banking, marketing and advertising. An interesting illustration of the operation of “fervent spirit” in the Polish case is provided by the results of a survey carried out by Marcinkowski (1996) on a sample of business people. This study attempted to identify the syndrome of “creative torment” as defined in terms of “getting ahead”. Actually, intensive job mobility was the outstanding feature of the majority of businessmen investigated by him. They had already worked in many firms and 47 per cent of them had gained experience and training abroad. One cannot exaggerate the rise of the spirit of capitalism in Poland. The truth is that the rank-and-file are still only learning the rules of the market game. In the national sample, 2 per cent were stockowners and 2 per cent of Poles invested in insurance funds. These figures are not impressive. However, we should remember that keeping money in the bank is a much more secure strategy and that the ideology of Protestant Ethics classified risky investments as not among the virtues but among the vices. In his typology of the American middle class Max Lerner (1961) distinguished three categories using the criterion of different strategies of life. The first was that of the “routiners” who strictly obeyed the norms of their occupational roles, they stuck to the classical pattern of status-seekers and observed the codes of middle-class lifestyle. Commitment to these rules was imposed on them by structures and institutions, which do not permit free choices. The second category consisted of “individualists” – they basically differed from “routiners” in that they were really innovative in pursuit of their life goals. Routiners were very similar to “conformists” (the third category) who mostly departed from the classical pattern of the self-reliant entrepreneur. One may hypothesize that the routiners distinguished by Lerner resemble small and medium-scale owners in Poland. It was clearly displayed in an analysis of in-depth interviews carried out by Gardawski (2001) among owners that they tend to avoid risk, sticking actively to restricted niches of the economy, and preferring to take routine decisions instead of taking on the role of path-breaking innovator. Nothing suggests that, in the coming years, these routine orientations will be replaced by active attitudes based on thorough analyses of conjectural

Transition from communism to capitalism 103 trends and flexibility in responding to ups and downs on the market. This should not drive us to depression – it seems that all middle class societies remain rather in the realm of necessity rather than of free choices. Nobody is perfect, even enthusiasts of the middle classes are prone to unexpected failures. In 2000 the Polish parliament passed a bill concerning privatization of apartments owned by the state, by enterprises and, mostly, by co-operatives referred to as spóldzielnia in Poland. The bill assumed that the inhabitants of flats could buy them for relatively small, symbolic, prices, set at 3 per cent of their actual market value. The measure was preceded by a wide public discussion in which the major opponents of privatization were represented by specialists and experts in economics, most of whom admired the idea of the rise of the middle class in Poland. They argued that the inhabitants of the flats were by no means prepared to take on the role of owner, because they did not have the financial means to maintain the flats and – this was the most critical argument – they would not care about the property in future, since it was just offered to them without a need for hard work on their part. One can hardly imagine a public critique of this kind in the United States – nowhere is the notion of the middle class more evident. Any public expressions of doubt whether Americans are ready to deal with property acquisition itself, would amount to political suicide and negation of the logic of the system. This serves as a good illustration of the wide gap that we have to overcome on the road to a middle class society.

Note 1 The question was: “Do you have the custom to meet in restaurants with friends and acquaintances”.

References Bradley, I. (1982) The English Middle Classes Are Alive and Kicking (London: Collins). CBOS Report (1998) Opinie Polaków o wlasnej pracy (Opinions of Poles about their work) (Biuletyn z grudnia, Warszawa: Centrum Badania Opinii Spolecznej). Domanski, H. (2000) Hierarchie i bariery spoleczne w Polsce (Hierarchies and Social Barriers in Poland) (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Instytutu Spraw Publicznych). Domanski, H. (2001) “The rise of meritocracy in Poland”, Sisyphus. Social Studies, 15, pp. 115–46. Gardawski, J. (2001) Powracaja˛ca klasa (Returning Class) (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IFiS PAN). Giddens, A. (1973) Class Structure of the Advanced Societies (London: Hutchinson). Hacker, A. (1998) Who Has How Much and Why (New York: Simon & Schuster). Jasiecki, K. (2001) Elita prywatnego biznesu, Formowanie sie˛ nowych aktorów transformacji w Polsce (Business Elite. Formation of the new Actors of Transformation in Poland) (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IFiS PAN). Lerner, M. (1961) America as a Civilisation (New York: Simon & Schuster). Lockwood, D. (1958) The Blackcoated Worker (London: Unwin). Marcinkowski, A. (1996) Drobni przedsie˛biorcy i horyzonty kultury organizacyjnej

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(Small owners and horizons of organisational culture) in Marcinkowski, A. (ed.) Kapitalizm po polsku. Przedsie˛biorca, organizacja, kultura (Polish Capitalism. Entrepreneur, Organization, Culture) (Kraków). Mills, C. W. (1951) White Collars. The American Middle Classes (New York: Oxford University Press). Offe, C. (1985) Disorganized Capitalism (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press). Offe, C. (1996) Varieties of Transition. East European and East German Experience (Oxford: Polity Press). Ostrowska, A. (1997) Styl zycia a zdrowie (Lifestyle and Health) (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IFiS PAN). Pakulski, J. and Waters, M. (1996) The Death of Class (London: Sage). Rocznik Statystyczny (Statistical Yearbook) (1999) (Warszawa: Glówny Urza˛d Statystyczny). Sachs, G. (1993) Poland’s Jump to the Market (London: Unwin Hyman). Saunders, R. (1990) A Nation of Home Owners (London: Unwin Hyman). Schmoller, G. (1897) Was verstehen wir unter dem Mittelstand? (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht). Skidelsky, A. (1999) Swiat po komunizmie (World After Communism) (Warszawa: Znak). Stark, D. (1992) “The Great Transformation. Social Change in Eastern Europe”, Contemporary Sociology, 21. Tocqueville de, A. (1962) Democracy in America (New York: Harper & Row). Warner, W. L. et al. (1949) Democracy in Jonesville (New York: Harper & Brothers). Wright, E. O. (1996) “The continuing relevance of class analysis – comments”, Theory and Society, 25, pp. 693–716. Young, M. and Willmot, P. (1957) Family and Kinship in East London (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul).

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Transforming leviathan in South Eastern Europe Implications for social policy Nikolai Genov

A closer look at social development under transition reveals most common perceptions as sheer prejudice. The widely presumed collapse in living standards is not evident, and social expenditures – health care, education, and social transfers – have increased as a share of GDP. (Åslund, 2002, p. 345)

The problem A state’s social policy becomes the centre of hot debate when its functioning is reduced or put under pressure. Currently it seems that discussion on the topic is ranked high on the agenda worldwide. In Western Europe it is classified under the heading of necessary welfare state reforms. The core of the debates concerns the issue of competitiveness on the global markets. In reality however, the topic is much broader. It involves the necessary upgrading of organisational rationality, economic growth, human rights, and a wide range of other connected issues (Esping-Andersen, 2002). In the eastern part of the European continent, the same topic takes the lead in the context of profound and simultaneous changes in all action spheres of societies in the region. At the very core of these processes is the change of property rights. It occurs in a dynamic interaction with rapidly changing definitions as well as structures and patterns of functioning of state institutions (Genov, 1999). As a result, new forms of state-organised social solidarity develop. They vary widely from country to country since specific developmental paths and decisions mark the individual societal transformations. The ensuing divergence in development in Eastern European countries tends to run deeper and deeper. This tendency is particularly evident among former state socialist societies in South Eastern Europe. What are the determining factors of divergence in this sub-region? What are the prospects of improving the living conditions in this area by means of an efficient national social policy? The questions and the potential answers are not only relevant to science. They are simultaneously relevant to burning issues of current social policies in the sub-region. Nor does the topic only have local relevance.

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First, the questions and potential answers concern most traditional and new problems of social security, which require permanent testing of well-known and innovative institutional arrangements. Tests of this nature are taking place in various parts of the world. The results invite clarification in view of time and space as well as theoretical generalisations and in terms of “best practices”. Second, the tests nowadays take place under the conditions of a general uncertainty concerning the efficiency of welfare state models. This uncertainty is most pronounced in poor societies like those in South Eastern Europe, but it is deeply felt in advanced societies as well. Thus, together with considering substantial differences in local conditions, one may notice universal problems of the welfare state in all industrialised countries. Third, the sub-regional problems and processes in South Eastern Europe have an inherent component of continental relevance. Its geo-strategic importance has increased both as a result of the unresolved local problems of building nations as well as integrating societies in the Balkans as a consequence of the enlargement of the European Union to the South East. Fourth and last, but not least, are the current societal transformations in the sub-region, which put the human rights of millions of people at stake. Certainly, this is not the worst case of infringing the human rights of people with regard to personal security, job safety, earning a decent income, etc. in the world. However, each infringement of human rights is a social problem, which has both a local and a universal dimension. That is why the transformation of state organised solidarity in the South East European countries raises intensive challenges to the social sciences and to practical politics alike – and certainly not to the local politics in the sub-region alone. One can only understand the real complexity of the current problems by taking a historical approach because South East European societies are, as has been often claimed, concerned about their past almost to excess. However, more relevant in the given context is the experience of the state-socialist organisation of social policy, which strongly influences the development of modern social policy in this sub-region. During socialism, South Eastern European social policy was part of the centrally organised economic reproduction process. This type of state-organised social solidarity had its historical particularities. First, the main authority on social policy was the central political body, which was characterised by a strong ideological orientation and concentration of power. However, the real locus of implementation of social policy regarding kindergartens, organised holidays, distribution of dwellings, etc, was often the enterprises themselves. More precisely, the trades unions of the enterprises played an important role in managing social policy at the local level. Second, considering the real achievements in technological and economic development of South East European societies, their social policy before 1989 was clearly a generous one. For instance, the typical pensionable age was 55 years for women and 60 years for men. There also existed long maternity leave, subsidised holiday houses, sport activities, etc. Third, the social policy was utterly egalitarian. It was based on the assumption

Transforming leviathan in Europe 107 of equal access to equal quality of social services for everybody. As unrealistic as it might have been, this assumption had practical consequences with homogenising effects. Fourth, social policy of the former socialist states was also rigid since it had a rather limited range of personal options. Thus, it could not adequately react to the increasing social complexity and to the advancing individualisation of the already industrialised and urbanised societies in this subregion. More precisely, it did not properly reflect on the need to offer more freedom for individual initiatives and responsibility in the implementation of social policy. This organisation of social policy could only function under a protectionist umbrella provided by the state for the enterprises. The state was the major owner of productive assets, isolating the enterprises from market competition. This was immediately visible in the typical over-staffing of enterprises due to the ideologically guided state policy of full employment. The economic inefficiency of both organisational schemes was apparent long before the collapse of state socialism, since this kind of social policy undermined capital accumulation, technological innovation and thus the international competitiveness of Eastern European economies. The economic recession in the region during the 1980s verified this bitter truth. The radical privatisation and the crisis as a result of transformation made the continuation of this type of social policy in Eastern Europe practically impossible after 1989. Whatever complexity and practical difficulties might have been entailed, state-organised solidarity had to take place. In South Eastern Europe, the difficulties were and still are generally more intensive in comparison with the transformation processes in Central European societies. Besides the difficulties of the process itself, the transformation of societies in the sub-region was accompanied by the emergence of new states, wars, migration due to wars and international sanctions (Genov, 2000). In this context many illusions disappeared fast and gave way to sobering and painful experience. Impoverishment, cultural disorientation and organisational pathologies took the lead. It became clear that the expected new actors of a market economy and civil society were unable to play the role of functional equivalents of the social policy organised by the state. The effect is economic and social marginalisation of a wide strata in the South East European subregion and a tremendous rise in the need to support these groups. Therefore, the following burning question appears in all of these societies: how should stateorganised solidarity be re-shuffled in order to reduce the accumulated social tensions and prevent the accumulation of future tensions in basic social relations? The question should be specified in view of a series of theoretical Problemstellungen, which refer to major aspects of complex social processes and potentially might have far reaching practical implications. First of all, one may assume that the organised responsibility of the state for the social well-being of the citizens is a relatively new evolutionary achievement, which could either be facilitated by advancing rationalisation or overthrown by de-modernisation. What could or should be functional equivalents of state-organised solidarity

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under the new regional and national circumstances? The crucial issue concerns the implications of institutional changes for the interaction between economic processes and social policy. But there are rather important issues concerning motivation and changing cultural patterns. Thus, the questions under consideration touch upon fundamental issues concerning personal and institutional initiative and responsibility, justice and trust, stability and innovation in social life, etc. In order to approach them efficiently, they should be specified in view of problems and experiences of particular societies in the sub-region under scrutiny.

Divergences: causes and reasons The similarity of the most important pre-conditions of the societal transformations in Eastern Europe and the general features of rationalisation of social policies in the region notwithstanding, the intermediary results of the processes in individual societies are rather different. The best pre-conditions by far for implementing a successful social policy in South Eastern Europe existed in Slovenia. The main reason is the relative high level of the country’s GDP per capita in PPP terms. Its level at USD17,267 is higher than the GDP per capita in Greece, a member of the European Union.1 The second reason is the striking continuity of the country’s institutional structures and elites. This might be explained by the needs of national consolidation in the development of a sovereign statehood at the beginning of the 1990s as well as by specifics of the national culture and the geo-strategic location (Adam and Tomc, 1994). These factors determined the positive results of the Slovenian reform strategy of “small steps forward” in all action spheres, including social policy. In retrospect, the efficiency of this strategy should not be questioned as was the case during the first half of the 1990s. With the exception of basically privatised dental care, social services in the country are dominated by a well-functioning and state-organised solidarity. This holds true first of all for the pay-as-you-go system of pension insurance, although the option of private pension insurance is also available by law. Far reaching reforms of the pension system, like the increase in pensionable age, and reforms of health care are going to be implemented in the current decade.2 In comparison with Slovenia, all other post-socialist societies in South Eastern Europe are marked by continued economic and institutional crises. This becomes immediately evident from the change of two major welfare indicators in the sub-region under scrutiny during the 1990s (see Table 8.1). Given this background, the possibilities for a modern social policy are rather limited in most South East European countries, although in various formulations their new constitutions proclaim institutional arrangements of the welfare state. The limited capacities of this intention to materialise might, in addition, be illustrated by the level of their current employment rate in comparison to the situation in 1989 (100 per cent). Data about the average unemployment rate in 2001

Transforming leviathan in Europe 109 Table 8.1 Decline of welfare indicators in South East European societies, 1989 to 1999 Country

GDP per capita in 1999 (1989 ⫽ 100)

Real wage in 1999 (1989 ⫽ 100)

Albania Bosnia and Herzegovina Bulgaria Croatia FYR of Macedonia Romania Slovenia Yugoslavia

⫺9.2 NA ⫺27.6 ⫺18.7 ⫺31.2 ⫺22.0 ⫹9.7 ⫺59.1

⫺8.0 NA ⫺47.8 NA ⫺47.0 ⫺37.7 ⫺10.6 NA

Source: UNICEF (2001, pp. 10–11).

Table 8.2 Indicators for employment and labour markets in South East European societies Country

Employment 2001 (1989 ⫽ 100)

Registered unemployed 2001 (%)

Albania Bosnia and Herzegovina Bulgaria Croatia FYR of Macedonia Romania Slovenia Yugoslavia*

74.3 64.6 67.4 82.4 57.7 97.7 82.3 80.4

14.5 39.9 17.3 23.1 42.0 8.6 11.8 27.9

Source: United Nations (2002, p. 162f). Note: *Without Kosovo.

in the particular countries in the sub-region offer another line of comparison (see Table 8.2). Because of the recognised achievements of Slovenia during post-socialist transformation, the country was invited to become a full member of the European Union. Bulgaria and Romania follow the same path. However, they differ substantially from Slovenia in terms of their GDP per capita as well as in the general efficiency of the transformation processes. In both countries these processes were marked by institutional discontinuities, inadequate decisions and inconsistent implementation of reform measures. After a turbulent period of radically intended but only hesitantly implemented reforms, Bulgaria reached a deep and all-embracing crisis in 1997. The introduction of a currency board in the same year brought about monetary stability in the country and thus created the framework for modest economic growth. As a

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result, institutional reforms could be accelerated. However, the decline of the country’s economy was so great that it will still take years to return to the GDP level of 1989. The social and economic situation of the national society is marked by high unemployment, by the emigration of about 800,000 predominantly young and well-educated persons during the 1990s and by continuing organisational problems in privatisation. Given these conditions, the long-term reforms of social policy could only be carried out with tremendous effort. Nevertheless, one may be on sound ground when claiming that the institutional reform process has substantially moved forward. The introduction of the threepillar system in pension insurance (general state organised, additional state organised/personalised and private insurance) may already be regarded as a successful institutional innovation. This holds partially true for reforms in health care, where the balance of interests and institutional structures has not yet reached the point of relative stability. Financing is the most vulnerable issue of the reforms. There are permanent frictions in the implementation of institutional tasks, such as support of numerous unemployed, other socially weak groups, etc. Under the precarious conditions of widespread poverty, the social policy in the country mostly corresponds to the concept of risk management. The risks come about and reproduce themselves as a result of the mutual influence of negative demographic trends, high unemployment and a widespread shadow economy. Against this background, one may foresee lasting deficits of the National Insurance Institute. These deficits will contribute to the general instability of the state-organised social policy in the years to come. Even if the reforms were to be relatively successful in terms of institutional stability, the state institutions would provide the beneficiaries only with a minimal protection against social risks. More generous protection could be secured by private insurance, but there are only tiny segments of Bulgarian society who could afford this (Konstantinov et al., 2002, pp. 318f, 347f). Economic recession and high inflation rates have characterised the development of Romania in the second half of the 1990s. The result is the social and economic marginalisation of badly impoverished groups like pensioners, farmers, the unemployed, etc. Thus, the typical description of the current situation in the country is that of a “survival society”, in which the underdevelopment and the low standard of living are reproduced by the low productivity in the widespread shadow economy. Both the delay and the ambitions of the reforms in the country’s social policy are affected by this development (Pop, 2000). Step by step, the introduction of the three-pillar-system of pension insurance advocated by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund comes about. The establishment of National Health Insurance leads reforms in the health care system. These processes receive a strong impetus from the negotiations for membership of the European Union. As in Bulgaria, however, the lack of adequate financial resources is the most essential impediment to the reforms, which is difficult to cope with. Nevertheless, both countries have a clear perspective of participation in European integration. It gives orientation and conceptual frameworks needed for the reforms in social policy. Without the con-

Transforming leviathan in Europe 111 ceptual and legal framework of the acquis communautaire and the revised European Social Charter the reform process would be even more difficult. Croatia has a similar – although not yet institutionalised – European perspective. The hazards of a war-torn domestic economy and of an authoritarian regime for the most part belong to the past. What remains, however, is a very high level of unemployment, which makes social policy reforms rather difficult. Another stumbling block is the large number of war refugees and displaced persons, some 700,000, who still have to be properly accommodated and supported by the state-organised solidarity system. As seen from this point of view, Croatian society is marked by intensive social risks (Cˇaldarovic, 1995). The recently introduced reforms of health care insurance aim at reducing health care payments by employers. The guiding idea of the reforms is that, in this way, there would be more productive investments. In reality, the burden of health care payments has just been moved to the local governments and to the citizens, and this therefore raises questions about their efficiency and justice. Another set of open questions concerns the implemented and intended privatisation of health care facilities. The questions are focused on the efficiency of this organisational change: are privatised health care facilities really better managed and more efficient? How should cooperation between private and stateowned health care facilities be organised in order to avoid a far reaching differentiation in the quality of health services in accordance with the purchasing power of ill people? Similar problems characterise the reforms of the pension system as a result of mass unemployment, a shadow economy and inefficient institutions. More precisely, these problems accompany the introduction of the three-pillar system of pension insurance. Although the current situation with the reforms in social policy in Croatia seems to be marked by uncertainties, that country’s higher GDP and recent democratic turn might resolve accompanying problems more easily than in the poorer societies of Bulgaria and Romania. Some historical links and geo-strategic factors could also facilitate the adaptation of social policy in Croatia to Western European institutional patterns. Although international support for Macedonia comes from various sources, the prospect of Macedonia joining the European Union is rather distant. There are various reasons for this situation, but some of them undoubtedly have to do with the status of the economic reforms and the social policy in the country (Zelenkov, 1997). A share of 42 per cent registered unemployed among the ablebodied population in 2001 is definitely too high for a pay-as-you-go system of pension insurance to work properly. However, the country’s social policy reforms have not reached the point at which the introduction of another organisational scheme would be possible. The new forms of health care insurance have already taken their legal shape, but so far approximately one-fifth of the population has remained outside this insurance framework. The difficulties of the reform process are related to coping with the continuing tensions along ethnic divisions in the country. This is the main reason that it is difficult to foresee the shape of state-organised social policy. Among other things, there is a heavy dependency on the present and future presence of international peace keeping

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forces or, more precisely, on the capacities of the international community to secure their presence financially in the long run. In practical terms, Serbia and Montenegro are already two different states with distinct problems. For instance, the Serbian state has to cope with the rather complicated tasks of securing the day-to-day survival of some 700,000 refugees from Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. However, the two remaining parts of the post-Yugoslavian Federation also have one common feature: the precarious financial situation in both makes the implementation of reforms in social policy an extremely complicated and risky endeavour (Mitrovic, 1999). This is why the necessary reforms are at the centre of debates after the political changes in 2001. Nevertheless, the organisation of health care and of pension insurance essentially remains at the point it was at the end of the 1980s. But at that point the state budget was not as strained as it is now after the large expenditures on wars and on alleviating the social consequences of lost wars. The continuing domestic political instability can be attributed to factors precluding efficient decisionmaking and implementation of decisions in social policy. More specifically, in this respect one can only speculate about future developments in Montenegro. Although some trends are foreseeable after the formal dissolution of the second Yugoslavian state, it is still not clear whether Montenegro would be able to assert itself as a truly sovereign state – including in the field of modern social policy. Having just USD3506 of GDP in PPP terms, Albania in this respect ranks lower in international comparisons than a typical developing country such as, for example, Egypt, which has a GDP per capita of USD3635. It is obvious that a modern social policy that aims at quality could hardly be imaginable on such an economic basis. The survival of large segments of Albanian society is the result of transfer payments by more than 600,000 compatriots, who moved to work abroad during the 1990s. This type of GDP formation does not support the state-organised social solidarity system. That is why, some modest efforts notwithstanding, the major reforms of the pension system and the health care system are still on hold in the country. Last but not least, there are two state-like formations in South Eastern Europe, which properly might be defined as protectorates. The first one is Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is formally a state of good standing since it is fully recognised internationally. Actually, it consists of two autonomous statelike political entities. Moreover, political life in these entities is still very much under the influence of the same political forces, which drew the country into the bloody civil war during the first half of the 1990s. One could hardly imagine a common social policy in the country under such conditions. The decisive factor for some breakthroughs in this direction is the international financial support as well as the peace-keeping activity of the international community. How long this arrangement could be supported and what institutional solution might replace it is still an open issue, since the peace process will most probably take decades (Solioz, 2002). Among other things, this means that international financial support for developing modern social policy should be a matter of long-term planning in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Transforming leviathan in Europe 113 Although Kosovo already has its own government and local state institutions and could probably function better as an autonomous political entity than Bosnia and Herzegovina, the state-organised social policy in its territory is more a project than reality. Specialised state institutions of social policy need to be developed since Kosovo officially is still a province of Serbia, but in effect it is not. The crucial issue in this context yet again concerns the prospects and limitations of the international financial support to this project. The intensity of problems in the sub-regional situation thus outlined could, in addition, be clarified by referring to data from the comparative public opinion research. At first glance, there is a paradoxical situation reflected in both figures. According to criteria for membership of the European Union, Bulgaria is the best prepared candidate among the countries covered by the above study. In fact, the major reforms in social policy that are regarded as a pre-condition for membership have already been carried out in the country both in legal and institutional terms. At the same time, the risks of impoverishment are perceived precisely in this country in a most intensive way and the general direction of the country’s development is put into question in a particularly strong way. In contrast, the modernisation of social policy is still to be implemented in Kosovo as well as in Serbia and Montenegro. But it is exactly in these countries that the expectations for a better future are most intensive and positive attitude in the general direction of reforms is the strongest. The paradox is only on the surface, however. People in societies that have already carried out reforms of social policy also have the experience of their content and preliminary results. Obviously, this experience is sobering enough and does not allow over-optimistic judgements about the foreseeable future. As seen from this realistic point of view, some over-generalised conclusions

Serbia B&H-R. Srpska Croatia Kosovo Montenegro B&H-Federation FYR of Macedonia Romania Bulgaria 0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

Figure 8.1 Poverty perceived as a very serious societal problem (source: IDEA, 2002).

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Bulgaria FYR of Macedonia B&H-Federation B&H-R. Srpska Croatia Romania Montenegro Serbia Kosovo 0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

Figure 8.2 Right direction of the country’s development (source: IDEA, 2002).

concerning social development and social policy in Eastern Europe should be questioned. Contrary to fashionable assessments of the situation in transitional societies (see the quotation at the beginning), after 1989 the living standards collapsed in all South East European countries except Slovenia. In most cases, expenditures on health care and education declined in real terms. Social transfers unavoidably increased because of the widespread impoverishment and mass unemployment. This development invites theoretical analyses and conclusions.

The theoretical challenge Since the historical situation is clearly multidimensional, the theoretical reflection should cover its major components selectively. First, in South East Europe the rationalisation of the state-organised solidarity obviously comes about in a rather uneven manner with many deviations from the theoretically optimal path of development and – contrary to the statement at the beginning – at tremendous social costs. In addition, one may notice that evolutionary achievements of modern social policy pave their way in the sub-region, together with trends of de-modernisation. This is the case when the collapsed state social policy is being replaced by informal help. In fact, one could foresee this development since no modern social security system would be able to cope with the dramatic disparity between the fall in GDP and the increase in expenditures for support of the unemployed and other impoverished groups, as was the case in South Eastern Europe during the 1990s. Theoretically seen, one may call this effect a rationalisation trap because of the numerous efforts to manage the situation in the sub-region by developing and applying radical reforms without their backing with necessary resources.

Transforming leviathan in Europe 115 Second, under such precarious conditions the question arises with regard to possible and desirable functional equivalents of state-organised solidarity for preservation and reproduction of the human capital. Theoretically there are four options in this respect – market solutions (privatisation), development of civil society, family support and support by friends. At the very beginning of the reforms there were strong voices advocating radical privatisation of social services. This strategy could not be supported by the then declining and thereafter rather low purchasing power of the population in the sub-region. Moreover, the move toward a private system of social services for the few rich people and a public one for the overwhelming majority of poor people cannot be socially efficient in the long run. In addition, there is the problem that market-based social services typically refer to particularistic profit interests, while the state-organised social policy is basically oriented towards the preservation of the collective common good. The recently established structures of civil society (NGOs) undoubtedly contribute to the support of socially weak groups in the sub-region. However, their activities are mostly financed from abroad on a project basis. Social policy focusing on continuity and long-term effects cannot be developed on such an organisational and financial basis. Therefore, what seems to be most efficient as a functional equivalent to the state-organised social policy under these conditions is usually the support by family and friends. However, given the impoverishment of most households, this alternative to the state-organised social policy cannot be promising for financial reasons. Broadly seen, it leads to organisational forms of social support, which are typical for pre-industrial societies. The conclusion is therefore clear enough: no efficient social policy could be introduced and implemented in South Eastern Europe at present as a true alternative to state-organised social policy. Third, the major issue in the given context does not just concern the organisation of social policy itself. Much more relevant is the development of a mutual re-enforcement between social policy and economic policy. It is exactly in this area that the South East European societies face rather complicated dilemmas, as do all modern societies. Because of political considerations concerning the votes likely to be cast by numerous pensioners, the issue of the low level of pensions typically comes to the forefront of the debates on social policy. Then the debate usually moves to the much needed reforms of the pension system. There is no doubt that both issues are existentially relevant for millions of people in the subregion since the inherited pay-as-you-go pension system cannot function properly under the new conditions of private property, high unemployment and a large sector of informal economy. That is why the introduction of the two- or three-pillar system of pension insurance might be expected in Serbia, Montenegro and in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as it has already been introduced in some other countries in the subregion. However, this reform cannot by itself bring about economic growth or efficient reproduction of human capital – at least not to the extent that could be achieved by reforms in the education or health care systems or by active measures against unemployment. That is why the South East European societies still

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have seriously to rank the priorities of their social policy according to what is most promising and possible to achieve. This first of all holds true for countries where far-reaching reforms are yet to come. The problem is primarily one of decisions in the field of practical politics. However, well-founded selection among action alternatives and consideration of manifest or latent, short-term or long-term effects of political decision and action require intensive analytical work as well. Fourth, the financial provisions of the common good play the crucial role in the context of defining preferences in the field of state-organised social policy. Therefore, given the current strategic re-orientation of social policy, the issue of taxation is decisive for the success of the reforms. Here, two points deserve special attention. In the first place, taxation had in many cases just a symbolic relevance for households and corporate tax payers under state socialism. The expenditures of the state could be covered mostly by the incomes of the stateowned enterprises. The enterprises themselves typically had soft budgets since they could always reckon on state directed re-distribution of income from the successful to less successful enterprises. Such a system of collective irresponsibility in financing the common good is fully inadequate in a market economy. A new system of taxation had to be introduced together with profound reorganisation of the taxation offices. However, in most South East European societies the state administration was badly weakened precisely at the moment at which the taxation reforms had to be carried out. Owing to the widespread shadow economy in the sub-region, the collection of state taxes is still a difficult task. For long-term historical reasons, the taxation culture is utterly underdeveloped. This is the reason why in South East Europe state incomes are totally inadequate with regard to the needs of state-organised social policy based on a mix of solidarity and market principals. The resulting experience of low pensions, bad quality of health services, miserable unemployment benefits and a practically non-existent social housing system does not induce the impoverished tax payers to contribute to state-organised social solidarity. Fifth, under these circumstances of instability and low efficiency of state institutions it is also difficult to motivate large groups to rely on the private initiative in social insurance. For this reason the most widespread system is a mixed state-organised collection of taxes from salaries and wages. Part of the collected money is transferred to privately managed funds, which have the obligation to manage the tax payers’ money efficiently in accordance with market principles. Thus, it seems possible to develop and maintain a system of approximately inclusive pension and health care insurance. However, with regard to pension insurance this system places low income groups and especially the long-term unemployed potentially in a rather difficult predicament in the future. On the other side, in the area of health insurance the system puts the higher income groups under pressure to finance the medical services of groups with lower incomes. This increases the temptation among higher income groups to move radically in the direction of fully private medical and educational services. If consistently implemented, such a division between the medical and educational

Transforming leviathan in Europe 117 services for the rich and poor would have a profound impact on the efficiency of the social reproduction and eventually on the social integration of the societies in the sub-region. Sixth, this multidimensional problem cannot be simplistically reduced to the universal free rider dilemma. In reality, the crucial issue concerns the need to open a new stage in the rationalisation of state-organised solidarity in South Eastern Europe. Since privatisation is well advanced in the sub-region, the main task is to coordinate the mutual obligations of the state and of the private sector for designing and implementing an efficient social policy. At the same time, as a result of the democratic political reforms there are basically no legal or administrative obstacles in the way of the development of an active and responsible civil society. Now the question remains as to how the interaction between state institutions and civil society is organised in the most efficient way in order jointly to carry out a broadly defined social policy. To put it differently, the task is to develop a state that is free from excessive responsibilities towards the economy, culture, leisure, etc. It would be small in that sense. But it is simultaneously expected to be rather strong in terms of the efficiency of the services offered to society. In present-day South Eastern Europe, this task is not easy to perform. In the sub-region the state has been the major moving force in the delayed modernisation. This is why the state institutions traditionally perform a wide range of economic and political functions. This feature of the sub-regional development has made political clientelism a strong factor that hinders the rationalisation of state institutions and policies. In more specific terms, this effect finds its expression in the widespread approach of building political coalitions or coalitions between politics and economy in order to ascertain group interests at the expense of the common good. For its part, civil society is still too weak in the sub-region to be able to play the role of a respected partner of the state and of business actors or to be a corrective to their interplay. Moreover, even civil society itself expands in the tensions between the unrestricted search for profit by using illegitimate means and by thriving on the intensive confrontation between political forces that still have to learn the principles and mechanisms of the modern political game of the win-win situation. In spite of all these manifest and latent difficulties, in South Eastern Europe there is no alternative to rationalisation of state-organised solidarity. Both the local processes and the requirements of European integration exert a strong pressure in this direction. Mostly Slovenia, but also Bulgaria and Romania and also Croatia have to adjust the efficiency of their state administration to these requirements since this adjustment is regarded as a crucial pre-condition for membership of the European Union. The effect of the pressure is the launching of a new stage of reforms, focusing on the increase of procedural efficiency of the state administration. Since the enlargement of the European Union to the East will involve other states in the sub-region as well, one may expect that, in these cases, the rationalisation of state-organised solidarity will proceed in a faster and more efficient way. This should not mean that the process will be

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completed at a given point of time. The experience from Western European societies teaches that the rationalisation of state social policy is a permanent task and will remain so.

Notes 1 The data concerning GDP per capita in PPP terms comes from (UNDP, 2002, pp. 149–52). 2 For detailed information about recent developments of social policy in South Eastern Europe one may consult (Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (2001).

References Adam, F. and Tomc, G. (eds) (1994) Small Societies in Transition. The Case of Slovenia (Ljubljana: Slovene Sociological Association). Åslund, A. (2002) Building Capitalism. The Transformation of the former Soviet Bloc (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press). Cˇ aldarovic, O. (1995) Socjalna teorija i hazardni ˘z ivot: rizici i suvremeno druz˘ tvo (Social Theory and Hazardous Life: Risks and Contemporary Society) (Zagreb: Hrvatsko socioloz˘ ko druz˘ tvo). Esping-Andersen, G. (ed.) (2002) Why We Need a New Welfare State (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Friedrich E. S. (2001) Addressing Emergency: Welfare State Reform in South Eastern Europe (Belgrade). Genov, N. (1999) Managing Transformations in Eastern Europe (Paris und Sofia: UNESCO/MOST and REGLO). Genov, N. (ed.) (2000) Labour Markets and Unemployment in South-Eastern Europe (Berlin: WZB). Konstantinov, E., Schramm, J. and Fäth, W. (eds) (2002) Perspektivi za razz˘ iryavaneto an Evropeyskya sayus na Iztok (Prospects for Enlargement of the European Union to the East) (Sofia: Goreks Press). Mitrovic, L. (1999) Druz˘ tveni promene i akteri (Social Changes and Actors) (Niz˘ : Pravni fakultet). Pop, L. (2000) Poverty, Inequality and Social Protection (Bucharest: The Quality of Life Institute). Solioz, C. (2002) “Bosnien und Herzegowina zwischen Abhängigkeit und Selbstverantwortung”, Südosteuropa Mitteilungen, N 4, pp. 36–45. UNICEF (2001) A Decade of Transition (Florence: Innocenti Research Centre). United Nations (2002) Economic Survey of Europe (New York and Geneva: UNECE), No. 2. UNDP (2002) Human Development Report (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press). Zelenkov, B. (1997) Ekonomskata kriza i reformite vo Republika Makedonija (Economic Crisis and the Reforms in the Republic of Macedonia) (Skopje: Law Faculty, Makedonska rizniza).

9

Bringing “class” and “interest group” back in Edmund Mokrzycki on civil society Sidonia Je˛drzejewska

Evoking the heritage of the late Professor Edmund Mokrzycki from his book Unsentimental Balance (2001) is the aim of this chapter. In the book, published just after his death, he tackled the same problems that trouble the contributors to this volume. There, Mokrzycki offered some possible explanations, and often he asked new questions, which might be even more troubling. The contributions by George Kolankiewicz, Sally N. Cummings and Ole Nørgaard, Henryk Domanski and Nikolai Genov describe, analyse, and sometimes suggest improvements in the ways that the relations between state and (civil) society are shaped in the countries that go through (or endure, as some of the papers show) a systemic transition. Edmund Mokrzycki proposes the use of sociological concepts such as “class”, “social problems”, “social structure”, “understanding”, into the discourse on systemic transformation in Poland. Mokrzycki questions the very assumption of the successful creation of civil society in Poland and instead he traces the survival of the old interest structures and the continuation of the political life of real socialism. He dissects his doubt into several questions concerning the Polish society in its transition from real socialism to liberal democracy as well as from planned economy to capitalism. Mokrzycki writes that the development of every country has its own logic that can be modified by “revolutionary changes” and “great transformations”, but if the changes endanger the existing structure of interests, the changes will be “tamed”. This means that accommodation will take place and the old structures of interests will be re-established. Further systemic changes will require time and strong pressure from above. He criticises optimism within Polish sociology as being influenced by the charm of “transitology”, which has created an illusion that the way from socialism to capitalism and democracy would be an easy one. According to Mokrzycki this illusion is based on two false assumptions: 1 2

Social individualism (understanding group interest as a sum of interest of its individual members), Sociological universalism (“Poles are a nation as any other”).

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George Kolankiewicz proposes to apply the principles of deliberative democracy to Polish politics. He sees deliberative democracy as a way to represent the unheard voices and therefore to increase the legitimacy of everyday politics and at the same time to undermine populism. He points out the dissatisfaction with the quality of democracy in Poland. This dissatisfaction, combined with a disapproval of the present government creates a fertile ground for populists. However, according to Kolankiewicz it is not the poor performance of the political class, but rather inequality that is the main reason for questioning democracy. He emphasises the perceived dramatic divergence of what is just and what are the functioning rules of the game. Kolankiewicz identifies intelligentsia as the class that should fulfil a special function of safeguarding democracy by preventing increase in social inequalities. His call is based on a belief that the intelligentsia can (or rather should?) create “deliberative” democracy from which the public discourse on social inequality could start. Reading Kolankiewicz, the question arises whether the intelligentsia could and should promote the idea of redistribution in Poland. A second question is whether the perception of inequality is indeed as dramatic as Kolankiewicz claims. According to the extensive study by Jan Jerschina and his collaborators (1999) the Polish elites show very little support for egalitarianism, understood as approval of redistribution of wealth. On a scale from 5 to 25 (where 25 is the highest support and 5 the lowest) the average for the elites is 8 (p. 117). It is not surprising that the average for the whole of the Polish society is much higher, but still reaching only 15.1 (p. 163). As a basis for comparison, the average is 12.1 and 18.1 for the Bulgarian elites and the Bulgarian society respectively. Given the relatively high acceptance of inequality what should be the impetus of Polish deliberative democracy? Deliberative democracy, if at all accepted, would be instrumental rather than genuinely based on the existing attitudes of the elites. Or maybe the crisis of legitimacy of democracy has different origins, than the growing inequalities, such as perhaps the poor performance of the elites who are perceived to be corrupt and incompetent? Another point in Kolankiewicz’s chapter focuses on the demystification of “civil society”. He argues that civil society should not only be regarded as integrative but also as competitive. He underlines the receptiveness of Polish civil society to oligarchic tendencies and political clientelism, and he notes the fact that it is mainly controlled by ex-nomenklatura and other well-organised interest groups. More importantly, Kolankiewicz claims that the political class treats civil society rather instrumentally. It is worth noting an additional mechanism that functioned well in real socialism, namely what Mokrzycki describes as the state that ruled by the use of a system of privileges. The state was managing the economy and removing social tensions by granting privileges. The distribution of privileges became one of the main economic and social institutions in the country. It may be assumed that there is a parallel between this “managing by

Edmund Mokrzycki on civil society 121 granting privileges” and instrumentalisation of the civil society by the political class of today. Cummings and Nørgaard’s article is part of a large project on the state in post-communist countries and shifts the attention from the market to the state as the agent of development. The central question of the study is concerned with the relationship between state and society from the perspective of high officials. The problem belongs to the category of sociological problems which are seen as important but at the same time they are hard to operationalise empirically. The study focuses on the state–society relations and the capacities of states to deliver “good governance”. The chapter itself comprises two parts: a theoretical part that develops tools to measure the capacities of states, and an empirical part that applies those tools to the realities of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. An interesting question concerns the reliability of the statements given by the interviewed officials. To what extent can those statements be interpreted as internalised attitudes/values and to what extent should they rather be treated as a superficial adaptation to the expectations of the external actors. The officials might know how they should answer the questions to be compatible with the standards (those of the European Union, the World Bank etc). They might not believe in them or, even further, they might follow other standards in their every day service. The necessary data that could verify a hypothesis of that kind are hard to obtain but it is important to see the possibility of receiving severely biased information. Empirical studies on communist and post-communist societies reconstruct diverse strategies that individuals have developed and practised to cope with the double standards of their lives. Those strategies involved following different (often conflicting) values in different spheres of their lives, with a particularly clear-cut distinction between private and public. Andrzej Kojder (1999, p. 8) speaks of a “homo duplex” – a person that lives in cognitive, pragmatic and ideological dissonance. The reflections by Mokrzycki lead to a conclusion that those patterns of coping combined with continuation of group interest representation show astonishing survival skills. It might be the case that the officials function much better in a situation of high cognitive dissonance, as Cummings and Nørgaard assume. Nørgaard and Cummings picture the relations between the organised interests and the officials including density and tolerance of such relations. However, the study stimulates the reader’s imagination as far as the nature of those relations is concerned. To what extent can different interest groups within a country as well as between countries be treated as equal concerning the resources, they possess? Are there any privileged organised interests? Is it strength in federation or rather individualised access to those in power in the atomised landscape of organised interests?1 Henryk Domanski focuses on the creation of the middle class in Poland. He starts from a well-known thesis that the emergence of middle class is parallel to the emergence of the market society. He points out that Polish capitalism has

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been introduced as a project from above and he shows with the support of solid empirical findings that the Polish middle class will be rather a variation than a copy of its Western counterparts. Mokrzycki draws an interesting picture of the Polish intelligentsia as an outcome of the changes of the 19th century, which played a crucial role in the formation of the modern Polish state. The existence of the intelligentsia as a separate social class of “learned people” is a sign of the general backwardness of the Polish society where education has been a rare benefit. The lack of national independence of Polish state in the nineteenth century forced the Polish intelligentsia to take over the tasks normally carried out by the political class. It was also characterised by open recruitment and the principle of civil service. The communist regime saved this class and renamed it as the “working intelligentsia”. Mokrzycki asks the question whether the Polish intelligentsia can be transformed into the “knowledge class” of Western societies. Two empirical processes determine the situation of the intelligentsia: its impoverishment and demand for a highly qualified work force. This results in a migration from the public to the private sector. Particularly striking is the exit from academia, especially by young scholars. The intelligentsia as a social class does not express its group interests, but rather individuals choose their own exit options, strengthening other classes and generally transforming into a knowledge class. The intelligentsia and entrepreneurs remain at the margin of political life, while the old interest groups of industry and agriculture are much more successful in expressing their group interests. Domanski as well as Kolankiewicz underline the special role of that social class that is today interpreted as the middle class, or used to be called the “intelligentsia” in Polish sociology for decades. From Domanski’s text it may be concluded that we witness the transformation of the traditional intelligentsia into the middle class. The intelligentsia is of great interest for Mokrzycki as well, while he questions whether it constitutes a social class at all. Mokrzycki tackles a popular myth of the birth of the Polish middle class. At the bottom of this myth is the belief that with the introduction of the market mechanisms a “new middle class” will emerge out of different circles of the post-socialistic society. There is a consensus in sociology that the middle class is an economic, social and political foundation of modern capitalism. The “new middle class” is seen by East European neoliberals as a key to the future and is equated with the class of new owners and new entrepreneurs. It is not placed in the wider context of the social structure, moreover there is no place for peasants or for intelligentsia in it. The new middle class in Poland is very diverse and recruited from various classes. The question remains whether it really already does constitute a social class. Or is it rather a set of people with higher than average incomes and higher than average optimism? It is still education rather than membership of “new middle class” that correlates with support for “the Polish reform”. Instead of looking at the middle class in his analysis of the Polish society in the 1990s Edmund Mokrzycki focuses on different interest groups. He high-

Edmund Mokrzycki on civil society 123 lights the usurpation of the popular representation by groups fighting for very particular interests. He notes that the groups characterised by a high level of aggressiveness, egoism and ruthlessness enjoy the greatest success in achieving their aims. They are skilled in overcoming the formal rules of legal procedure in managing social dialogue and in gaining direct access to people in power. This mechanism of reaching consensus between the government and interest groups while disregarding the law and public interest is called by him “negotiated democracy”. Mokrzycki shows that the roots of the negotiated democracy go back to the practices of socialist Poland and in this regard he underlines the parallel between Wale˛sa and Lepper. Nikolai Genov’s paper introduces more policy-focused reflection in the discussion on the civil societies East of the Elbe. Genov, basing his argument on solid indicators, convinces the reader of the decrease in the quality of life in Southeast Europe. Recalling Kolankiewicz and his picture of the growth of material wealth in Poland, the immense diversity East of the Elbe becomes very evident. This diversity makes comparisons vague. Genov depicts social policy as floating within the triangle of the state, civil society and the private sphere. It may be concluded from his argument that in Southeast Europe social policy has moved much closer to the private sphere and shifted away from the state. It is not however getting much closer to civil society, which still seems to be rather insignificant in the region as far as the delivery of social provision is concerned. Additionally, Genov assumes that civil society cannot make up the shortcomings of the state; neither can the market. In the end the state cannot fully escape its responsibilities in the delivery of social policy even if in reality it does escape to a large extent. It is difficult to avoid a feeling of sadness after reading the four chapters; sadness over the failure of the state to deliver “good governance” and over the marginalisation of civil society. The contributions to this volume combined with reflections of Edmund Mokrzycki, as diverse as they are, teach the reader the clear lesson that there are no easy transplantations of the systemic solutions from the West to the East of the Elbe. What exists in the East may be a variation (middle class), an imitation (deliberative democracy) or a simulation (social policy) of its apparent counterpart in the West. In post-communist Europe the societies and states are diverse now just as they differed considerably in the past. This diversity not only renders any comparisons vague, but puts into question the “umbrella descriptions” and generalisations so favoured by outside observers. The papers demonstrate the difficulty in applying the concept of “civil society” to research on the transition societies. Both poles of the concept; the normative one – civil society as a quest for a good society and the descriptive one – civil society as associational life, are put to a harsh test. Mancur Olson ([1965] 1971) in his classical discussion of associations stated, contrary to the common sense belief in natural tendency of humans to act collectively, that people do not associate as long as they do not have incentives to do so.

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Edmund Mokrzycki reflected on the presence of those incentives in the transition of today. After reading Mokrzycki and the contributors to this volume it remains very doubtful where space for the civil society is to be found East of the Elbe if the public sphere is dominated by a weakly legitimised political class and egoistic interest groups.

Acknowledgements My thanks go to Sven Eliaeson for encouraging me to take part as a discussant in the Session and to Rusanna Gaber (WZB) for helpful comments.

Note 1 In the case of business associations at the beginning of the 1990s, an enormous number of them were established leading to an atomised and chaotic situation with plenty of small and few influential organisations. OECD Working papers. No 58. The Emergence of Business Associations and Chambers in the Economies in Transition: Examples from the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and the Slovak Republic (Paris: OECD, 1994).

References Jerschina, J. (1999) Postawy etatyzmu ekonomicznego, autorytaryzmu, nacjonalizmu i orientacje na przedsie˛biorczosc w Polsce na tle krajów Europy Srodkowej i Wschodniej. Elity i spoleczenstwa, in P. Sztompka (ed.) Imponderabilia wielkiej zmiany (Warszawa-Kraków: PWN), pp. 95–199. Kojder, A. (1999) Spojrzenie na przemiany ustrojowe w Polsce w latach 1989–1997, in Sztompka P. (ed.) Imponderabilia wielkiej zmiany (Warszawa-Kraków: PWN), pp. 3–32. Olson, M. (1971 [1965]) The Logic of the Collective Action (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). Mokrzycki, E. (2001) Bilans niesentymentalny [Unsentimental balance] (Warszawa: IFiS PAN).

10 Explaining the transformation from state socialism Revolution, class and elites David Lane

The transition from state socialism The unexpected, comprehensive yet uneven nature of the transformation of state socialism has led to intellectual disarray in the interpretation of the phenomenon. The dominant paradigm is that of institutional and actor oriented approaches, with political scientists being most concerned to explain the conditions in which stable democracies may arise. But writers are unclear as to whether transition or transformation constitutes reform, revolution, partial revolution or failed revolution, or even ‘system’s change’.1 One might distinguish five major forms of transformation, although the extent of each is problematic and varies between post-socialist states. They are: economically, a move from central control and state ownership to the market and private property; politically, a shift from a mono-party system to a more or less competitive pluralist one; a change in political identity – the formation of new states and a shift to a new international order; ideologically, a move to a global consumer-market culture; and socially, the formation of a different personality type, emphasising individual initiative and achievement. A feature of the transformation of the state socialist societies is that, in some countries, change along these various axes has been more or less simultaneous, whereas in other states, there has been an uneven, or even an absence of, transformation, leading some writers to talk of ‘rearrangements’, ‘recombinations’2 and transition ‘laggards’. Systemic breakdown followed by system transfer is the most usual explanation of the process of transition from communism in Eastern Europe. This view is clearly put by Kornai. ‘The socialist system was a brief interlude, a temporary aberration in the course of historical events . . . [T]here is no alternative to the “capitalist system”.3 State socialism had major systemic incompatibilities caused by the absence of both a market and a mechanism of conflict resolution . . . Because institutional arrangements deprive state socialism of the capacity to channel self-interested behavior into socially beneficial performance and condition its survival on the base of direct coercion, the whole concept of a politicoeconomic order is fundamentally flawed’.4 An implication of this position, taken by many transitologists, is that if the coercive powers of the totalitarian state are

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removed, a political and economic tabula rasa is revealed on which Western institutions may be freely constructed. The discourse of ‘system transfer’, rather than revolution, characterises this approach. It assumes that the legacy of previous regimes can be neutralised relatively quickly and that a move to markets and democracy can be ensured through the introduction of the appropriate institutional forms copied from Western practice coupled to positive political leadership.5 The carriers of these policies are elites implementing policies to move to Western type capitalism and democracy.6 The ‘system transfer’ position assumes that state socialism was a fundamentally defective system and that a neo-liberal policy of markets, private property and competition in economy and competitive polyarchy in the polity would be a strategy that would transform the ailing societies into prosperous democratic states. This approach does not need a revolutionary theory or revolutionary actors. As state socialism experienced spontaneous collapse, transitologists merely provide the appropriate Western institutions and processes. However, a wide range of authoritative commentators, ranging from Claus Offe to Leslie Holmes, insist that the post-communist countries have experienced a ‘comprehensive revolution’.7 A revolution, by definition, entails major changes along all or, at least, most of the five components of transformation defined above. This has been succinctly put by Louis Gottschalk for whom a revolution is a popular movement whereby a significant change in the structure of a nation or society is effected. Usually an overthrow of the existing government and the substitution by another comes early in such a movement and significant social and economic changes follow.8 Revolution is a process that occurs through time. It continues after the abrupt political change from which specific revolutions get their name. Holmes’s argument is that the former state socialist societies have moved from one-party systems with command economies to multiparty ones with ‘increasingly privatised and marketised economies’. The previous state ideology, he claims, ‘had in all cases been dismantled. By any definition all this represented a rapid and fundamental change of system, which is . . . the most basic and universal definition of . . . revolution’.9 Claus Offe muddies the water somewhat by claiming: ‘This upheaval is a revolution without a historical model and a revolution without a revolutionary theory’.10 The East European revolutions, he contends, lack aims, and any ‘prescriptive “ex-ante” revolutionary theory’.11 Jack A. Goldstone, like Holmes, conceives of the changes of 1989–91 as ‘a major revolution’.12 His discussion is in terms of collapse and dissolution of the Soviet regime (state breakdown) and the reconstitution of new states and their elite structure. However, it is only the nature of events that follow a regime collapse and a change of government that enables one to distinguish between a palace revolution, coup and revolution. While Valerie Bunce concedes that the Eastern European transitions ‘diverged from the historical norm’ (they were peaceful and the old elite survived), she rather hesitantly considers that they ‘would still seem to qualify as revolutionary events’.13 She points out that ‘like most revolutions, they origi-

Explaining the transformation 127 nated in a conjoined political and economic crisis that reflected in part the growing costs of the domestic structure of dictatorship; they produced a rapid collapse of the old economic, political and social order; they were characterised by deregulation of the system to the point where sovereignty became competitive; they involved mass mobilisation against the regime; and their end product was a new political and social and economic order (albeit in varying degrees, as with revolutions . . .)’.14 Bunce’s analysis departs considerably from that of Kornai and her account is in terms of ‘economic decline (and redistribution), the international system . . . mass protest, and, especially, nationalism loomed large in . . . the departure of socialist dictatorships from the European stage’. In addition, when considering the post-communist system, she also emphasises the ‘more fundamental’ factor of the socialist past in the process of democratisation.15 She argues that ‘the revolutions that brought down socialist dictatorships were remarkably similar to the classic revolutions of the past’.16 Writers such as North, Stark and Bruszt17 would contend, moreover, that surviving institutions limit and channel the activities of elites and thereby reduce the scope of change. This school focuses particularly on the ways in which postcommunist societies are transformed. Democracy may be crafted, but to be successful it must take account of the legacy of the past. For the path-dependent approach, values, beliefs and institutions from the old regime may be assets or liabilities to the formation of a new order. The fall of the old regime, therefore, involves changes in only a limited number of institutional sectors of society (such as the dominant communist Party), others continue more or less unchanged or are adapted and legitimated under new circumstances. Such writers take a more conservative view of the possible effects of ‘radical’ political change: while the formal institutions may be replaced, the expectations of people and the processes inherited from the past may either continue or be reconstituted.18 The institutional heritage is such that post-socialist societies are not in transition from one order to another but are ‘transformations – rearrangements, reconfigurations and recombinations that yield new interweavings of the multiple social logics that are a modern society’.19 What these writers want is a ‘bonding’ between regimes; the institutions of the old regime, ‘enable’ the new ones to be formed. Contrary to the analysis of Kornai, the previous institutions of state socialism influence the processes of transition that follow. As Bunce has put it, the conditions of collapse open up the political opportunity structure ‘to the possibility of large-scale change’,20 though the socialist legacy constrains the form that change may take. This more institutional scheme does not explain why the form of transition should have followed the path that it did. A transition which is ‘national in form’21 could adopt many different kinds of economic and political substance – reformed socialist/capitalist, autocratic/democratic – having the character of societies such as modern Iran, Yugoslavia, Japan, Turkey and Israel. In the accounts of transformation (and most emphasise endogenous changes) one has no indication of what interests are likely to pursue a policy of marketisation and

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privatisation – common features of all the post-communist societies. In contrast, one feature of the class paradigm is that it seeks to explain not only the reasons for revolution but also to define the class interests that promote and gain from it.

The traditional class approach The class paradigm has been given very little attention as an explanation of the collapse of state socialism and the transition to capitalism. I would define a social class as a group of people, sharing the same life chances, which are determined by their relationship to the market. Class has an economic quality, determined by ownership and control of property and/or individual skill assets. In summary: a social class is constituted from a group of people: 1 2 3 4

sharing a similar economic position, which determines their life chances, reproducing itself demographically, having an actual or latent awareness of their position (life chances and prospects for their achievement) and of those in other social classes, providing a basis for social and political action.22

Offe and Bunce, who define the transformation as a revolution, do not recognise class forces either as causes or consequences. It seems to be suggested that massive shifts in the ownership and legitimation of private property, the rise of a new configuration of politics both nationally and internationally, and a new political elite can take place without the involvement of class interests. The lack of any class analysis in these theoretical accounts may be partly explained by the decline of class analysis in scholarly activity in political science and sociology in the West and partly because of the peculiar social and political structure of state socialist society. Following the proclaimed decline of class with respect to advanced capitalism, a similar fate is declared for it in the East. Jan Pakulski and Malcolm Waters in The Death of Class deny its analytical role both under state socialism and in post-communist society. ‘. . . [P]ostcommunist politics cannot be usefully analyzed using the class paradigm’.23 Moreover, it is asserted that national and ethnic cleavages underpin political behaviour.24 Burton and Higley also contend that ‘a general shortcoming of class-centred structural frameworks is that classes and other large collectivities are never actors . . .’.25 It must be conceded that members of collectivities, classes and states, are divided over many issues. However, this criticism also applies to elites, nations and ethnic and gender groups, which are often put in the place of class politics. Dogan and Higley, for instance, define the tsarist ruling elite in Russia at the end of the eighteenth century to number 9000 men and the Germany political elite to be a ‘few thousand persons who head the major institutions, organisations and political movements’.26 Members of these ‘elites’ do not interact, do not form a social group and also may be said to be ‘never actors’. My own study of the Gorbachev political elite, narrowly defined (ironically, perhaps, defined by

Explaining the transformation 129 Higley and others as an example of elite unity – an ‘ideocratic elite’)27 found very considerable differences of opinion and action among its members. The concept of class and class identity is a wider one, it assumes that social and economic properties of class positions condition the interests of people in them. These interests define attitudes to other classes and to social change (class-based action). They also indicate levels of advantage and inequality (class-based inequalities) to other valued goods in society: income, power and prestige. Although not the principal focus of this paper, the ‘death’ of class by Pakulski and Waters, has been questioned even in the area of class and voting in democracies. It is claimed, for instance by Evans, that empirically ‘the thesis of a generalised decline in the class basis of voting in advanced industrial societies is, quite simply, wrong . . . [I]t might well be more plausibly to argue that class politics is actually increasing as the marketising of former-communist societies of Eastern Europe . . . display all of the signs of class-based political polarisation’.28 A class analysis is finding support in Eastern Europe and the countries of the former Soviet Union,29 where occupational position has been found to be highly correlated with people’s social self-assessment.30 The implications of transition recession (economic decline, unemployment) have also led to sharp rises in social tension and social protest,31 although studies of this phenomenon have not focused on a class dimension.32 Traditional Marxist class analysis, it is quite true, does not explain the transformation from state socialism. Alex Callinicos is one of the few Western writers to consider post-Soviet transformation from a Marxist standpoint and considers the ‘upheavals’ as ‘revolutions’ albeit political (rather than social and economic) ones. The transformation is considered to be a shift between two types of capitalism33 (state to multinational) and therefore is not an example of a revolution in an analytical sense. Writers such as Hillel Ticktin and the Critique school have a long history going back to Trotsky in predicting that the working class would be the bearers of any political transformation.34 But there is no evidence to substantiate this viewpoint in the history of the end of state socialism. (The only contender would be Solidarity in Poland, but this was a movement with much more than a working class basis.) As there was no ascendant working class in place that had to be reconciled to the capitalist system, this may explain why the movement for democracy has been relatively weak – in Rueschemeyer’s terms.35 One of the main reasons for this weakness suggested by analysts of Soviettype regimes is that the working class was atomised and was either voluntarily or forcibly co-opted into the regime. A second class contender, from the point of view of classical Marxism, is the bourgeoisie. As far as state socialist societies are concerned, the absence of a bourgeoisie in the sense of a property-owning class further appeared to challenge a class explanation of regime collapse and revolutionary change, or a possible counter-revolution. In the sense of a class with a consciousness of pecuniary interest based on the production of commodities through a market for profit, it did not exist under state socialism and was (and is) being created ‘from above’ in the period of transformation. It has not been identified in the late

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Soviet period as a significant impetus to reform.36 Ivan Szelenyi and his associates have identified ‘the technocracy’, ‘bureaucracy’ and intellectuals as actors in transition. However, these writers make it clear that they were not classes. What is striking about this school’s account is the absence of any empirical account of classes in post-communist society.37 In their discussion of ‘classes and elites’, Eyal et al. make clear that they are focusing on ‘intra class or more precisely inter-elite struggles’,38 the concern is on how different types of elites make classes and there is no analysis of class conflict or a revolutionary paradigm in this work. Indeed, they make it clear that post-communist society is ‘a unique social structure in which cultural capital is the main source of power, prestige and privilege . . . Possession of economic capital places actors only in the middle of the social hierarchy’.39 The account falls into an elitist interpretation (see below) rather than a class one. Although we shall return to an alternative view of class below, the scepticism about class analysis, even from a Leftist perspective, is understandable.

The elite approach The most pervasive analytical tool to analyse the dynamics of social and political change from state socialism to capitalism has been the elite paradigm, which features prominently in actor-directed theories. The political class is a social constituency from which the political elite is drawn. In summary, A political class is a group of people distinguished by: 1 2 3 4

the possession of actual or potential political power, a consciousness of its own political objectives, recruitment may be from the same or from different social classes, a unitary (strong boundaries of closure) or a divided (pluralistic) character.

For Mosca, the political class refers to: ‘all those groups which exercise political power or influence and are directly engaged in struggles for political leadership; . . . within the political class is a smaller group, the political elite, which comprises those individuals who actually exercise political power in a society at any given time.’40 Mosca allowed for new elites to arise and represent social interests and join the political elite. The political elite is the group that rules on behalf of the political class. In an article focused on Russia and Eastern Europe, Kullberg, Higley and Pakulski claim quite unambiguously that ‘the dynamics and trajectories of political change in post-communist countries can be explained almost entirely as a function of the structure and behaviour of elites’.41 Elites are generally considered to be expressions of either their own interest or those of national and ethnic cleavages which underpin political behaviour.42 At centre stage is the notion of a ‘nomenklatura elite’ popularised by Olga Kryshtanovskaya and Stephen White.43 The nomenklatura elite is held to derive its power from the apparat, essentially located in the previous Communist Party. What

Explaining the transformation 131 this theory does not tell us is why the ‘nomenklatura elite’ transformed itself into an ascendant elite seeking to change the parameters of the system of state socialism. I contend that the nomenklatura was much wider in scope than a political elite and was more like a ‘political class’ in Mosca’s terms. It contained many different interests, which were a consequence of the maturation of Soviet-type societies, these interests had different conceptions of the way in which reform should proceed.44 Hence, the conceptualisation of Higley and Pakulski45 which defines the state socialist ruling elite in terms of a high level of ideological consensus, conflates nominal consensus with actual dissensus. In my own study of members of the Gorbachev political elite, I asked respondents which country they would see as a model for Russia: of 116 members, the largest group placed China first (15), followed by Scandinavia (13), then Germany (12) and the USA (11). The majority (66) had no country model.46 Political elite analysis, moreover, is itself subject to considerable criticism. Elites are embedded in structures of power, and ruling or power elites are dependent on the support of interests that control strategic sectors and resources in society. The elite approach, as developed by Higley and associates, is more concerned with the conditions in which a stable elite consensus should emerge as a determinant of political stability, rather than an explanation of why capitalism should be built on the ashes of state socialism. It cannot be denied that the political elite played an important role in the transition process: as Goldstone puts it, ‘[A] state-centred view focusing on elite dynamics may provide a better explanation of how the revolutionary process began in the late 1980s’.47 The ruling elite secured consent and guided, as best it could, policy to develop capitalism and polyarchy. Understanding dynamics, however, does not explain goals. Class interests, I shall show, shaped the outlook of the political elite. Within state socialist societies, exogenous influences also sustained endogenous reform processes. A summary of the actor-led institutional approach as analysed above is given in Figure 10.1. The tensions between the various components of the model are listed under ‘contradictions’. A major one is between the institutional legacies of communism – the values of a state-led collectivist society and the ‘system transfer’ of neo-liberal values and institutions. Second, differences regarding policy Dependent variable: Democratic regime (principally) and/or Post-communist system Independent variables:

1 2 3 4

Elites (Higley, Goldstone) Crafted Institutions (Di Palma) Institutional legacies (Stark, Bunce) System transfer (Kornai)

Agents: Political elites, transitologists, international institutions and advisers Contradictions: Between institutional legacies and system transfer, between different elites.

Figure 10.1 Transformation of state socialism: the western consensus.

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exist between different components of the political and economic elites, particularly those who seek an accommodation in the global economy and an open market economy and those with a more statist, protectionist position.

A class explanation of the transition from communism to capitalism It must be conceded that traditional class analysis is inadequate as an approach to state socialist society and to explaining the post-communist transition. A paradigm of class has to take into account the ways in which life chances were structured under state socialism, and the global context in which class interests were and are located. Such interests, I shall argue, were a dynamic factor in transforming state socialism. Class interests defined State socialism was characterised by two major overlapping classes: one with administrative control of economic assets (an administrative class) and the other constituted of individuals with personal skill assets (an acquisition class). A third class, which does not concern us here, was the mass of the population engaged in manual and unskilled non-manual occupations. As these economies were subject to state organisation and were autarchic and (economically) independent from global capitalism, traditional class analysis of state socialism has ignored it as a determinant of class formation. I contend, however, that global capitalist class interests, through the global political class, had an effect on the collapse and the direction of transition. The administrative class was constituted of people with executive control of the means of production and the institutions of reproduction (such as education and science). Its elites were a major constituency of the Soviet Union’s political class, in Mosca’s sense of the term. The reform strategy of the administrative class changed over time depending on the political possibilities for change. Initially, it supported a move to a market within state socialism (in the USSR, Ligachev’s position). One of the most important implications of this viewpoint, I would suggest, is that the state would continue to own and control economic assets, and would have no interest in furthering representative (polyarchic type) institutions as they would challenge the hegemony of the state through demands for individual property rights and civil society. Coordination would be secured by the (renewed) state apparatuses and Communist-Party-led institutions. (China was a model of reform.) Other members of this class under state socialism shared a latent radicalism and would support opportunities, if they arose, for the extension of their administrative control of the means of production to its ownership. (These were the people who, in Szelenyi’s view, gained most from the transformation.) They were thus in support of the weakening of the Soviet state, particularly its centralised form of control and planning. (These were the people who, in my survey, cited above, regarded the USA as a model to strive for.) It

Explaining the transformation 133 was a latent ascendent class. If this class was latent, which group then precipitated radical reform? In the sense of having a mission and vision to change the parameters of society, the ascendent class, was the ‘acquisition’ class that was peculiar to state socialism. It was a social class distinguished by its actual and potential interest to enhance its position through the exploitation of individual ‘skill assets’ through a market system. Educational qualifications and occupational skills are the major distinguishing features of this class. In my own study of the biographies of 470 members of the political elite48 of the Russian Federation in post between 1991 and 1995, 35 per cent (133) had had no participation at all in the previous Soviet apparatuses of power (Party or state). Of these, the top three statuses held before the age of 30 were students (252 positions), professional posts (136 positions) and research and training (117 positions) – this group is illustrative of the ‘acquisition class’. Another group, which had 15 years and more work experience in the Party or state apparats, had quite a different work experience before the age of 30 – the top three occupational groupings were Party and Komsomol apparat, state apparat, and the third category were students, followed by industrial executives. This group I would see as illustrating the ‘administrative class’. Following Weber, members of the ‘intelligentsia’ as well as skilled workers were potentially privileged with respect to their market position. Under state socialism, moreover, they were disadvantaged in that they were dependent on the administrative class that controlled the market for labour (i.e. occupational mobility was not competitive and income differentials were administratively determined). In the 1980s, the intelligentsia was a stratum receptive to an alternative conception of socialism in its social democratic form (which in practice embraced many of the practices of contemporary capitalism), to a vision of a future different from that of their parents. As Millar concludes from a study of Soviet immigrants to the United States, ‘A long term trend toward [personal] privatisation is evident, which shows up not only in the evasion of mobilisation effort . . . but also in the economic realm. The study reaffirms the pervasiveness of illegal as well as private economic activity’.49 This study may be biased in its sample of Soviet people, but it includes people from what concerns us here – the acquisition class. Field studies conducted in 1991 confirm that, on the part of the intelligentsia in the post-communist countries, there was a significantly negative attitude to socialist principles and a positive attitude to capitalist ones (that is, opposition to income being determined by need rather than merit, government provision of employment, egalitarianism of income distribution, limits on earned income). One study shows that there was a ‘steady decline in support for socialist principles from those with low education to those with higher education. Across all the East European countries, the correlation coefficient between the socialism index [measuring socialist values] and education level is ⫺0.33. . . . [N]onegalitarian reforms are supported by the more highly educated minority in those societies, who, as it happens, also have the most to gain from such reforms’.50

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The reform strategy of the acquisition class was to support a change to a market system, it was less concerned with privatisation of state assets. This class supported representative political institutions as forms of coordination and civil society as a context for its own development. Gorbachev, himself, at least in the early years of reform, was an advocate of this position. The political opportunity structure The top political leadership was a crucial factor in defining the opportunity structure for the two classes – and this is why the study of the political elite is important. As long as the political leadership was adamant in maintaining the administrative, ideological and coercive components of the political system, the costs of opposition were too great for the rise of an ascendant class. In Eastern Europe, this had an international dimension, given the hegemony of the USSR. The reformist groups within the administrative class were content to press for a move to a limited market and producer cooperatives within the framework of state socialism. The hegemony of the Communist Party, state planning and state ownership of property would be maintained. This was the case in the USSR before Gorbachev (and has continued into the twenty-first century in China). The ruling elite under Gorbachev played a crucial role in leading the movement for radical reform and in doing so responded internally to, and cultivated, the acquisition class. Initially, it sought a move to the market within the context of a Communist Party-led political order, rather than a move to capitalism. It also responded to the exogenous transnational political class, discussed below. To secure support for change, the Gorbachev leadership shifted the political ballast within the political class from the administrative to the acquisition class. Gorbachev created conditions that widened considerably the political opportunity structure. This set off a tipping process whereby previously loyal ‘within system’ reformers felt able to shift their support to (and even advocate) radical market reform. Within the acquisition class were groups that now advocated not only a move to markets, but also the abolition of Soviet Party-State hegemony and the institution of republican and regional autonomy. Many members of the administrative class were in contradictory class positions. They occupied influential, secure and privileged positions in the ruling elites. But they also had the potential to an even more privileged economic class position if they could turn their administrative control into ownership of property and/or were able to valorise their administrative and executive capital through a market. Under Gorbachev, from 1987 (with the introduction of market forces and greater devolution of power to enterprises), members of management had already begun the process of ‘spontaneous’ privatisation and the transfer of company income to themselves. Gorbachev undermined the central and regional administration that weakened the loyalty of the administrative class. Later, with the consolidation of a market economy, the executive managerial class became the largest benefactor. When privatisation took place, it was well placed to turn control over the means of production into ownership of it. Ivan Szelenyi and

Explaining the transformation 135 associates, in their study of the post-communist elites, have demonstrated the importance of the technocratic-intellectual class approach to Eastern Europe, but not the USSR.51 The global dimension The ‘geographic diffusion of capitalism’ and the spread of capitalist world markets has been noted by Randall Collins,52 though he focuses on collapse prior to the period of transformation. Like many structural theorists, he ignores social agents, such as class actors. Scholars in international relations and political science have also acknowledged the importance of international factors. Michael Cox has noted the impact of America’s ‘strategic mission’ on Russia in the 1990s.53 Valerie Bunce54 in particular has recognised the importance of the international dimension in the transition process. She points out that ‘Gorbachev assumed that the resistance to reform was so substantial and the problems of Soviet socialism so considerable that the only solution was to build a domesticinternational coalition for reform that spanned the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and the West, and that involved a virtual revolution from above’.55 The destruction of socialism and the dissolution of the state, Bunce continues, involved a ‘transition from one international order to another’.56 Gorbachev’s acceptance of the reunification of Germany in February 1990, was hailed by George Bush as ‘a triumph for “Western values” ’.57 These writers, however, do not theorise their position in the context of a global capitalist class. Leslie Sklair has defined major components of a global system as: ‘in its economic space, transnational corporations, in the political sphere, the transnational capitalist class, and in the culture-ideology sphere, the culture-ideology of consumerism’.58 The consumption ethic For a considerable period of time before their disintegration, the culture ideology of consumerism influenced internal developments in the state socialist countries. From the time of Khrushchev’s speech in 1956 predicting catching-up and passing American standards of living, the population’s expectations rose: there was a development of a consumer mentality and a bourgeoisification of aspirations.59 In the early 1980s, a qualitative rise occurred in the levels of Western mass communications that directly and indirectly changed people’s perceptions of life in the West. Television became widespread and Western programmes became directly accessible in the German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and the Baltic areas, including Leningrad and Kaliningrad oblast; video recorders (brought from abroad or purchased in ‘dollar shops’) gave privileged access to members of the acquisition class to Western films – although on a small scale until the 1990s. Western ‘pop’ political culture was widely available through radio and gramophone records. More important, the Western consumer culture provided role models for those living in the work-

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oriented societies of the East. These developments were accompanied by a population more receptive to a move to a market economy – especially with the decline of growth rates in the planned economies of state socialism. These changes in public perception had important implications for the public ‘emulation’ of society models in the global media system. American consumer artefacts from jeans to jeeps upgraded the USA in the hierarchy of states and downgraded the USSR. The provision and development of a consumer market was a major component of Gorbachev’s policy of perestroika. The greater monetarisation of the economy, including incentives for work, would only have worked if there were goods and services to buy. As radical economic reformer Aganbegyan put it: ‘The whole transformation is directed towards fulfilling the needs of the consumer. The reform in prices, financing and banks; the shift from central supply to industry; the return, in the future to a convertible ruble; and all technical renovation and regeneration is directed towards this aim.’60 In the popular consciousness during the collapse of state socialism, there was a Messianic form of Cargo Cults – the boat of capitalism would return all that was taken away by the communists and lacking under socialism. As one member of the Russian Duma put it: ‘we should move to a socialism like that in Sweden, Austria, Finland, Norway, Holland, Spain, and Canada [sic], where workers were four to five times better off than in the USSR’.61 Modernisation through internationalisation had occurred to some extent before, but was greatly accelerated after, the fall of state socialism. The global political class While the culture-ideology of consumerism was taking grip, the transnational capitalist class had little presence in the USSR due to the autarchic nature of its state-owned economy. World system theorists such as Chase-Dunn62 as well as critical Marxists such as Binns, Cliff and Harman63 had discussed the role of the global economy in the USSR, but only identified indirect consequences for the Soviet system. (Penetration was greater in Eastern Europe and the consumer ethic of the West more intense.) The role of transnational corporations in the socialist countries was relatively small. Of some 100 applications for foreign direct investment in the Soviet Union in 1987, only three had been endorsed.64 A transnational capitalist class could not exist within the boundaries of the state socialist countries. The ‘spontaneous’ and later regularised privatisation, privileged local, not global capitals. As internal movers of transformation, the transnational corporations could not be said to have been influential. Indeed, it may be the case that capitals with a national or even regional dimension is a more important category in Russia as, with competition, they need to compete with the interests of global companies. Rather than a global capitalist class operating in the former communist countries, political alliances between internal political elites and external capitalist members of the global political class are crucial agents of change. By ‘global

Explaining the transformation 137 political class’ I refer to international actors who help to shape global economic and political policy. These include the heads of transnational corporations, chief executives of international economic and political organisations, leading professionals in non-government organisations with a global perspective, national politicians and executives with a globalising intent.65 Following the fall of state socialism, FDI rose considerably, by 1995 reaching in Russia $5.5 billion.66 Even by 1998, however, this was a small proportion of fixed capital formation (5 per cent in 1998, compared to 39 per cent in Latvia and 21 per cent in Hungary).67 The transnationality index of hosts’ countries, put Russia in 1998 low down the list with an index of 5, compared with Hungary’s 24 and China’s massive 53.9.68 After the collapse of the USSR, its new export orientated companies, such as Lukoil (now the largest Russian transnational company), have sought a global dimension, though their opportunities initially were limited. The Russian government under Yeltsin fixed a limit on foreign shares in Russian strategic companies (originally not more than 15 per cent of shares in Russia’s oil companies, for example, could be foreign owned) and the state in different forms owned (and still owns) a very large proportion of assets. Of the top 300 European companies, by value added, in 2001, Russia had only three (Sperbank, Gasprom and Lukoil)69 two of which were largely state owned and controlled and the government had a major stake in the third. Substantiating an interpretation of an international ‘political elite pact’ is difficult, not only are negotiations undertaken in secret, but also they lack legitimacy in public eyes. My reputational studies of the Soviet and Russian political elites under Gorbachev70 and Yeltsin71 confirm the perceived influence of the West. With respect to international policy, the extension of private ownership, and the move to the market, members of Gorbachev’s political elite considered the most important influence on the leadership was a ‘demonstration effect’ – ‘The need to show the West that Gorbachev was serious about economic reforms’. Direct influence of external people or institutions was ranked third.72 Under the Yeltsin political elite, foreign influences on the leadership on privatisation policy and the sequestration of the property of the CPSU were considered to be indirectly (demonstration effect) and directly (through foreign organisations or leaders) important. My study of the views of the Yeltsin elite, it is true, showed that the government executive members gave little credence to the influence of foreigners, although the rule-making and party groups did so. A similar result was found of elite views on those advocating the formation of a democratic and market system: the Yeltsin executive strongly denied Western influence, but the law-making and political party elite stressed the role of foreign influence.73 The Yeltsin government elite, of course, could not publicly acknowledge being under Western influence. Conditionality If we turn to the conditionality factor, there can be no doubt of the impact of the West in the transition process. These developments have a long history going

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back to the Helsinki agreements under Brezhnev, which conceded an area of individual rights that the West could monitor. Gorbachev’s attempt at detente with the West, his aim to return to Russia’s European home, led to the West imposing conditions: Helmut Kohl’s resolution that the German Democratic Republic came home first to the Federal Republic; Margaret Thatcher’s insistence on the introduction of real democracy in the shape of competitive Party elections as a condition for changing economic relations; and George Bush’s demand that the Berlin Wall be pulled down as a test of people’s commitment to socialism. Since the collapse of state socialism, the conditions placed on economic transition by international organisations (such as the IMF, OECD, European Union) have had a direct influence in adjusting internal policies to external demands. More specific conditions on the building of capitalism and its inclusion in the global order are to be found in the requirements of the IMF and other bodies, such as the Council of Europe and the European Union.74 The implantation of liberal economic and political democracy has been a major policy of the hegemonic Western powers. ‘Economic democracy’, envisaged in the Washington Consensus, involves individual rights to private property, privatisation of enterprises, deregulation, a weak non-distributive state, and an economy open to the global market.75 It is here that the global class interest is most visible as this policy precludes the development of other forms of national capitalism – social democratic and corporatist. In a global class context, as Sklair has put it: ‘[The] dominant ideology appears to be in a process of transformation from state interventionism to a neo-liberalism which privileges the unrestricted operation of the free market. This is the world-view that a country’s best interests are to be found in playing a full part in the accelerated growth of the global economy through unfettered competition by destroying old systems of tariff protection and labour regulation and forcing all firms and their workers to become internationally competitive. The neo-liberal dogma that this can only be fully achieved in an entirely market-driven system provides the economic theory for this strategy.’76 Loans from the IMF and other external agencies have been linked to conditionality in terms of increasing levels of privatisation and decline in government spending. For example, the IMF loan to Russia negotiated in April 1999 was conditional on acceptable changes taking place in fiscal, banking and structural areas.77 Michel Camdessus has defined these conditions to include a limited economic role for the state, further privatisation, integration into the global system, international standards of global governance and an effective system of taxation.78 In a nutshell, as Camdessus quotes President Yeltsin, ‘The motto of the [21st] century is competitiveness and integration into the global processes’.79 My own scheme of transition from state socialism to capitalism is summarised in Figure 10.2. Inputs defining the type and rate of change include the popular culture of consumerism, the role of Western interests, internal classes as well as (in the post-communist period) the legacy of state socialism. The major tensions that are defined under contradictions are between Western hegemony and the legacy of state socialism (as in Figure 10.1) and also between sections of

Explaining the transformation 139 Dependent variable: Joining Capitalism Independent variables:

1 2 3 4

Culture-ideology of consumerism Western political hegemony Internal acquisitive and administrative classes Legacy of state socialism

Agents: Internal political elites, global political class, international economic and political institutions Contradictions: Between the legacy of state socialism and Western political hegemony and between the acquistion and administrative classes.

Figure 10.2 Transition from state socialism to capitalism: a class-based interpretation.

the ascendant classes when in power between, for example, those with interests in domestic industry and markets and others with a global economic interest.

Conclusion Understanding transition and transformation of post-communist societies is compounded into explanations of society collapse, regime building (state and polyarchy) and revolutionary society shift (from state socialism to capitalism). Elite and actor-directed approaches distinguish important processes in the formation of new polyarchic societies. Global change and the institutional legacy of state socialism also point to major features which shape these developments. Such conditioning attributes explain the ambiguity over the extent of transformation and the use of ‘revolutionary’ and ‘recombination’ vocabularies. But these approaches do not consider the class forces underlying the shift from state socialism to capitalism and neither do the traditional social class oriented paradigms of system change and revolution. A revised social class paradigm is suggested. This involves two major internal classes, the dominant administrative class, and an acquisition class that provided the initial ballast for a move to markets. Both these classes were constituents of the political class under state socialism. The political leadership of Gorbachev weakened the administrative class and tipped the balance towards the acquisition class. Consequently, members of the administrative class realised a potential for ownership of material assets. Unlike in traditional class analysis of system change, the globalising tendencies of capitalism played a major role in the transformation of state socialism. The culture ideology of consumption emulated the West in the popular consciousness. But the transnational corporations did not play a direct part in the transformation. It is contended that a global political class acting through the hegemonic governments of the West and international organisations attempted to define the course of transition and supported the creation of capitalism and a bourgeois property owning class. It is here that contradictions limited the spread

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of global capitalism: disparities between the interests of local domestic and export industries and the legacy of state socialism, particularly the continued presence of state ownership. No dominant capitalist production system has been built. In this political and economic space is developing a chaotic social formation combining different production systems and containing elements of state economic control, national capitalism and global capitalism.

Notes 1 Klaus von Beyme claims that the ‘process of transformation was so unique that the old notions of revolution and reform tend to be inappropriate’. ‘System’s change’, he contends, lacks ‘the connotation of violence and civil war’, but recognises the farreaching change of politics, society and economics. Klaus von Beyme (1996), Transition to Democracy in Eastern Europe (New York: Macmillan), pp. 18, 19. 2 D. Stark and L. Bruszt (1998) Post Socialist Pathways (New York: Cambridge University Press), p. 7. 3 J. Kornai (1998) From Socialism to Capitalism (London: The Social Market Foundation), pp. 2, 40. 4 B. Kaminski (1991) The Collapse of State Socialism (Princeton University Press), pp. 3, 16. 5 See for example, D. Lipton and J. Sachs (1992) The strategy of transition, in D. Kennett and M. Lieberman (eds) Economic Transformation in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union (Fort Worth: the Dryden Press), pp. 350–4. Originally published as ‘Creating a Market Economy in Eastern Europe: The Case of Poland’, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, vol. 1, 1990 (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution). 6 A major focus for this school is the importance of elite unity, settlements and pacts see: M. G. Burton and J. Higley (1987) Elite settlements, American Sociological Review, 52, pp. 295–307 and J. Higley and M. G. Burton (1989) The elite variable in democratic transitions and breakdowns, ASR, 54, pp. 17–32. 7 L. Holmes (1998) Russia as a post-communist country, in G. Gill (ed.) Elites and Leadership in Russian Politics (Basingstoke: Macmillan and New York: St. Martin’s Press), pp. 167–70. 8 L. Gottschalk (1944) Causes of revolution, American Journal of Sociology, 50 (1), p. 4. 9 L. Holmes (1997) Post-Communism: An Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press), p. 131. Italics in original. 10 C. Offe (1991) Varieties of Transition (Cambridge: Polity Press), p. 30. 11 Offe, Ibid. p. 31. 12 J. A. Goldstone (1998) The Soviet Union: revolution and transformation, in M. Dogan and J. Higley (eds) Elites, Crises and the Origins of Regimes (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham), pp. 95–124, quotation p. 96. 13 V. Bunce (1999) Subversive Institutions (Cambridge University Press), p. 152. 14 Bunce, Ibid. p. 152. 15 Bunce, Ibid. p. 159. 16 Ibid. p. 155. 17 D. Stark and L. Bruszt (1998) Post Socialist Pathways (New York: Cambridge University Press), D. C. North (1999) Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (New York: Cambridge University Press). 18 A good example of this is Stark’s account of privatisation, see: D. Stark (1996) Recombinant property in east European capitalism, AJS, 101 (4), pp. 993–1027. 19 Stark and Bruszt, p. 7.

Explaining the transformation 141 20 Bunce, Ibid. p. 75. 21 Bunce, Subversive. p.155. 22 Ambiguity in the literature focuses around points 1 and 4. Many sociologists define class in terms of occupational position giving advantage/disadvantage and levels of inequality. Others, particularly Marx, Moore, Lipset, emphasise the ways in which classes make system and/or political change. 23 J. Pakulski and M. Waters (1996) The Death of Class (London and Thousand Oaks: Sage). See pp. 58–9 and 146–7. Quotation p. 146. 24 J. Pakulski and M. Waters, Ibid, p. 147. 25 M. Burton and J. Higley (1998) Political crises and elite settlements, in M. Dogan and J. Higley (eds) Elites, Crises and the Origins of Regimes (Rowman and Littlefield), p. 66. 26 M. Dogan and J. Higley, Elites, Crises and Regimes . . . loc. cit. p. 14. 27 J. Higley, J. Pakulski and W. Wesolowski (1998) Introduction: elite change and democratic regimes in Eastern Europe, in J. Higley, J. Pakulski and W. Wesolowski (eds) Postcommunist Elites and Democracy in Eastern Europe (Basingstoke: Macmillan), pp. 5–7. 28 G. Evans (1999) Class voting: from premature obituary to reasoned appraisal, in G. Evans (ed.) The End of Class Politics? (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 4 (Italics in the original). 29 See, for example, O. K. Kutsenko (2000) Obshchestvo neravnykh. Klassovy analiz neravenstv v sovremennom obshchestve. [A Society of Inequality: A Class Analysis of inequality in Contemporary Society] (Kharkov: Kharkov National University). O. K. Kutsenko (2002) Class formation process in Ukrainian society: the Post-Communist Dynamics, Sisyphus (Warsaw: Pan) Vol. 16. 30 See for example, R. G. Gromova (1997) Sotsial’naya stratifikatsiya v samootsenke rossiyan [Social Stratification in Self-Evaluation of Russians], Obshchestvennye nauki i sovremenost, no. 6, pp. 5–15. Data discussed here are based on longitudinal studies carried out by the polling organisation, VTsIOM. Dr Derczynski has also written on class identity in Poland, O stylach Zycia Polaków (1997). 31 E. I. Golovakha and N. V. Panina (1999) Potentsial protesta ukrainskogo obshchestva, Sotiologicheskie issledovaniya, no 10, pp. 31–40. 32 Golovakha and Panina, for example, point to the great potential for protest from government employees (both salaried, teachers, and wage workers in state owned factories) but have no class analysis. Support and opposition for further transition to a market economy are discussed but not linked to a social base. 33 A. Callinicos, (1991) The Revenge of History: Marxism and the East European Revolutions (Cambridge: Polity Press), p. 56. 34 In his essay on the working class, Hillel Ticktin (1992) claims that ‘The whole dynamic of the [Soviet] system is toward its own demise and overthrow by the workers.’ Origins of the Crisis in the USSR (New York and London: M.E. Sharpe), p. 67. 35 That is to interpret democracy as a social mechanism derived from the contradictions of capitalism particularly to give the subordinate class the possibility of a greater stake in society without a change of regime. D. Rueschemeyer, E. H. Stephens, J. D. Stephens (1992) Capitalist Development and Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press), esp. p. 300. 36 A. C. Janos (1991) Social science, communism and the dynamics of political change, World Politics 44 (1), pp. 81–112; R. Bova (1991) Political dynamics of the postcommunist transition, World Politics, 44 (1), pp. 113–39; M. Pei (1994) From Reform to Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). 37 Russia in transition is characterised as having ‘capitalists without capitalism’ and central Europe, ‘capitalism without capitalists’. G. Eyal, I. Szelenyi and E. Townsley (1990) Making Capitalism without Capitalists (London: Verso), p. 5. See also L. P.

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King (2002) Postcommunist divergence: a comparative analysis of the transition to capitalism in Poland and Russia, Studies in Comparative International Development, 37 (3). G. Eyal, I. Szelenyi and E. Townsley (1998) Making Capitalism without Capitalists (London: Verso), p. 18. Italics added. Making Capitalism . . . p. 6. T. Bottomore (1993) Elites and Society (2nd edn) (Routledge), p. 7. J. Kullberg, J. Higley and J. Pakulski (1998) Elites, institutions and democratisation in Russia and Eastern Europe, in G. Gill (ed.) Elites and Leadership in Russian Politics (Basingstoke: Macmillan and New York: St. Martin’s Press), p. 107. Pakulski and Waters, p. 147. O. Kryshtanovskaya and S. White (1996) From Soviet nomenklatura to Russian elite, Europe-Asia Studies, 48 (4). I have substantiated these points empirically elsewhere and only briefly summarise them here. See D. Lane and C. Ross (1999) The Transition from Communism to Capitalism (St Martin’s Press). J. Higley and J. Pakulski (1995) Elite transformation in Central and Eastern Europe, Australian Journal of Political Science, 30, pp. 1–29. For details see: D. Lane (1998) Elite cohesion and division: transition in Russia in J. Higley et al. (eds) Post Communist Elites and Democracy in Eastern Europe (Macmillan), p. 87. Goldstone in Dogan and Higley, loc. cit. p. 100. These were drawn from 176 Leaders in the Parliament of the Russian Republic (the Chair and Deputy Chairs of the Federation Council and State Duma, the leaders of factions and political groups, the chairs and deputy chairs of the standing committees and commissions), 108 executive posts in the Russian Federation Government, these were defined as Ministers, First Deputy Ministers and Deputy Ministers; 195 Regional political leaders, including heads of regional and republican administrations, chairs of the parliaments of regions and republics and presidential representatives (governors in the regions and republics). Data were collated and analysed on Paradox data base. J. R. Millar (1993) History, Method and the Problem of Bias, in F. J. Fleron and E. P. Hoffmann, Post Communist Studies and Political Science (Boulder and Oxford: Westview Press). D. S. Mason (1995) Attitudes toward the market and political participation in the postcommunist states, Slavic Review, 54 (2), pp. 393–5. Mason points out that, ‘. . . in many of these countries the new governments are dominated by the highly educated, because the revolutions swept into power intellectuals who had previously opposed the communist system.’. G. Eyal, I. Szenenyi and E. R. Townsley (1998) Making Capitalism without Capitalists: Class Formation and Elite Struggles in Post-Communist Central Europe (New York and London: Verso). R. Collins (1999) ‘Market dynamics and historical change’, in R. Collins, Macrohistory (Stanford: Stanford University Press), pp. 177–208, especially pp. 207–8. M. Cox (2002) ‘A Failed Crusade?’: The United States and Postcommunist Russia, in D. Lane (ed.) The Legacy of State Socialism and the Future of Transformation (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield). See also D. Lane (1996) The Rise and Fall of State Socialism (Polity), especially pp. 176–83. Bunce, Subversive, p. 62.. Bunce, Ibid, p. 156. Cited by R. L. Garthoff (1994) The Great Transition: American-Soviet Relations and the End of the Cold War (Washington, DC), p. 407. L. Sklair (1998) The Transnational capitalist class and global capitalism, Political Power and Social Theory, 12, p. 3.

Explaining the transformation 143 59 Studies of emigres, for example, showed a consistent pattern of changing support: in the 1980s, the young were much more critical of state socialism, whereas for the early post-war generation, youth had been more supportive. See J. R. Berliner (1993) The Harvard Project and the Soviet Interview Project, in F. J. Fleron Jr. and E. P. Hoffmann (eds) Post-Communist Studies and Political Science (Boulder and Oxford: Westview Press), pp. 177–82. 60 A. Agangegyan (1987) The Challenge: Economics of Perestroika (London: Hutchinson). 61 Speech of Ch. Aitmatov, Pervy s”ezd narodnykh deputatov SSSR:25maya- 9iyuaya 1989g (Moscow: izd. Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR), vol. 2, p. 290. I am indebted to Stephen White for finding the source of this speech for me. 62 C. Chase-Dunn (1982) Socialist States in the World System (Beverly Hills: Sage). 63 P. Binns, T. Cliff and C. Harman (1987) Russia: From Workers’ State to State Capitalism (London: Bookmarks Press) The argument adopted here is that the accumulation of capital in Russia is determined by the ‘competitive pressure of the world around it’. p. 91. 64 L. Sklair (2002) Globalisation: Capitalism and its Alternatives (Oxford), p. 225. 65 The World Economic Forum, might be considered the political elite of this political class. (In Davos in January 2000, the leaders of the world’s largest 1000 globalised companies and 33 national leaders assembled, including the President of the United States). See internet under www.weforum.org. 66 Data cited by Sklair, p. 228. 67 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (2000) World Investment Report 2000 (Geneva: United Nations), p. 68. 68 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (2001) World Investment Report 2001 (Geneva: United Nations), p. 18. 69 The Value Added Scoreboard (London: Department of Trade and Industry), p. 90. 70 Conducted in 1993, 116 members of the political elite in post between 1984 and 1991 were interviewed. These included members of the government elite holding the position of minister or equivalent and secretaries of the central committee of the CPSU and heads or deputy heads of its departments between 1985 and 1991. For details see: D. Lane (1996) ‘The Gorbachev revolution: the role of the political elite in regime disintegration’, Political Studies, XLIV, pp. 4–23. 71 Interviews carried out in spring and summer of 1994 with 100 of the Yeltsin elite drawn from the government of the Russian Federation, law makers from the Russian Duma, and leaders of parties or groups elected to the Russian parliament for details, see: D. Lane (1996) The transformation of Russia: the role of the political elite, Europe-Asia Studies, 48 (4), pp. 535–49. 72 See pp. 12–13. 73 See pp. 540–2. 74 European Union conditions are comprehensive and require great restructuring in the post-communist societies wishing to join. The acquis communautaire contains 31 chapters listing the laws, norms and standards of the EU. The general conditions specified by the European Union for future members to include: ‘Stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights and respect for and protection of minorities; The existence of a functioning market economy as well as the capacity to cope with competitive pressure and market forces within the Union; The ability to take on the obligations of membership including adherence to the aims of political, economic and monetary union. has created.’ The administrative and judicial structures of countries intending to join must be such that ‘European Community legislation transposed into national legislations [can be] implemented effectively.’

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European Union website: http://europa.eu.int/comm/enlargement/intro/criteria.htm# Accession criter. See J. Williamson (1990) What Washington means by policy reform, in J. Williamson (ed.) Latin American Adjustment: How Much Has Happened? (Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics), esp. pp. 8–17. L. Sklair (1998) The transnational capitalist class and global capitalism, Political Power and Social Theory, 12, p. 10. IMF website. Newsbrief No 99/21. April 28 1999. In Search of a Vision to Revitalize Reform. Address by Michel Camdessus, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, Russia, June 16, 1999. IMF website. Russia: 16 June 1999. President Yeltsin, cited in speech to St Petersburg Economic Forum, Ibid.

11 The climate of globalization Glocalization, civil identity, and theories of difference Wolfgang Natter

Introduction According to the Civil Society Internet Forum (www.civilsocietyinternetforum. org), civil society is a third sector of society alongside the state and the market. The values underlying civil society, the website continues, include freedom of association, freedom of expression, participatory democracy, and respect for diversity. A vigorous civil society, the statement concludes, is an important counter-balance to government and business. Further, the growing global integration of markets and coordination of governments creates the need for a corresponding global civil society. In its brevity, this statement aligns rather well with more expansive treatments of the range of issues given historical and geographical depth in current scholarly writing, reflected as well in the present volume. To be sure, the content of each primary term could and must be expanded, and, as I will argue, the need to reflect more fully on the interlinkage between the three sectors of society, which in most examples that come to mind surely do not operate completely independently. Further, an at least implicit presumption and affirmation of the universality of the key words might raise some eyebrows (Natter, 2003). Yet quite apart from the content exposed by the Forum, the very fact of its medial existence and organizational intent is of note for those of us reflecting upon the contemporary prospects of civil society in what in shorthand is referred to as “globalization.” The Forum seeks electronically to conjoin disparate organizations and individuals who are active in this third sector, and with the aim of fostering a network of locally grounded associations with a global outreach. This example, behind which stand many others of various scope and contents, reminds us that the bundle of associations, civic and otherwise, enveloped by the term globalization, has potentially profound implications for the contemporary restructuring of civil society, one in which both “the local” and “the global” are being reworked and rearticulated (see also Kidd et al., 2001; Routledge, 2003). There seem to be at least three sides to this coin. While flexible and ever more mobile global capital, along with partner institutions appear to be setting this agenda, recent years have also seen the emergence of a worldwide order of institutions that bear witness to what has been labeled grassroots globalization,

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or globalization from below (Appadurai, 1991; International Forum on Globalization, 2002). Further, as the example of the Forum illustrates, many civil society groups are in effect attempting to jump scale by seeking alliances between and outside of familiar regional or national borders. In this, they parallel the jumping of territorial scale by forms of capital that have sought to escape the harness of national regulation or otherwise tried to enhance their competitive advantage. At the same time, within a context set since the 1980s by structural devolution, the role of the local, not the central, state has acquired a significance that justifies the coinage of the term glocalization, as a way to capture a new scalar mediation between localities and ever more mobile corporate capital. To be sure, the weight of a large body of work would suggest that globalization is an almost inexorable process overwhelmingly being driven “from above,” empowered by technological innovation, the imperatives of economic integration, the fostering of export economies by the global financial institutions which came into place following the Bretton Woods accord and, in the cultural realm, an increasing homogenization of diversity. Nonetheless, while the material and ideological production of global space, with its de- and re-territorialization of the economy, governance structures and civil society plays a substantial role in the discursive emergence of “a new world order,” globalization “from below” points to an equally important challenge to inherited suturings of identities, place, and space. Both moments are uneven and cross-scalar and increasingly are not easily enframed within the boundaries previously secured by such concepts as community, region, or nation-state, or their analogue cultural identifications and civil identities (Slater, 1997; Routledge, 2003). Those who identify with the imperative of confronting the fundamentally non-democratic structures of decision making and their impacts embedded in a corporate model of globalization and its sustaining institutions, have, of necessity, pinned many of their hopes for change on the terrain of civil society. Conceptions of this terrain, in turn, have come to increasingly reflect a recognition of the need to understand the flows of resources between localities networked within and by “the global” as constitutive not only of a global economic space, but of a global civil society. My own empirical research on the topic has involved comparative work between parts of Appalachia and of Saxony (e.g. Leipzig, just barely west of the Elbe) in which I am interested in reflecting upon challenges and opportunities that may exist in supporting cross-scalar geographies of individuals and communities in developing civic practices that have materialized in sustaining global regionalism, glocalization and civic professionalism (Natter, 2002). In this chapter, however, attention will be directed to some debates that have been carried out more or less in theoretical terms that offer signposts and cautions regarding the prospects of civil society under present conditions. Above all, I wish to direct attention to the question of which discursive resources may exist within such notions as a sense of place, local autonomy, or community, that can be marshaled in defense of the third sector we call civil society, without their necessarily harboring either an exclusively local delimitation of their scope, or on the other hand, their being posited as points converging in neo-liberal global-

The climate of globalization 147 ism. Both moments, as will be suggested, harbor grave concerns for an extension of democratic civil society. The essay will therefore address: (a) the value of “the local” in the effort to “locate globalization,” (b) theorizations of civil identity and identification that call attention to the value of the concept of difference in avoiding certain fixations of identity and place, and (c) the possibilities and enabling limits that characterize efforts by CBOs (Community-based Organizations) and NGOs (Non Governmental Organizations) to foster democratic versions of civil society. I wish first to continue, however, with comments on one strand of “the spatial turn” as it has cropped up in economic theory. My reference will be to the use made of human–environmental relations as they are being factored in as a casual element in economic theory, specifically how a certain way of thinking about climate and the environment have converged (again) in some recent reflection on globalization and, as I will argue, civil society.

The climate of globalization Quite a number of commentators have been intoxicated by the promise of globalization in fostering or incarnating the imperative of universality via a process of economic integration, in whose wake, it is presumed, cultural integration will follow (Natter, 2003). These convergence models often resuscitate knowingly or not, dependency models generated in the 1970s (Ward, 1997). The argument was (is) that overarching processes and rationality of production in “the metropole” create an economic and political dependency in the colonies and in less developed countries, generating convergence in urban structures, social relations and behavior. As Ward notes, those inclined toward a convergence model either in a critical or affirmative mode, have shown relatively little interest in analyzing how those processes engage and interact in other peripheral and usually less developed countries, or, as a corollary, how the phenomenon of uneven development also effects peripheries within the heartland economies (see too Cox, 1997). Convergence, in sum, announces a sorting out in space of what will become centered or peripheral, while conceding a temporal lag in the process’s realization (manifested, critical geographers would insist, as uneven development). Somewhat surprisingly, in attempting to account for the persistence of variability within some convergence analysis offered by economists, geography and the environment have entered (again) as casual factors in explaining the persistence of center–periphery phenomena. One recent example of this trend is an essay that appeared in 2001 and subsequently received national attention via a television report aired on ABC News – one of the three major news networks in the US, on October 10, 2001 (displayed thereafter on the ABC website). Its finding may offer some comfort to those who otherwise shiver at the thought of winter. Scientists publishing in the Journal of Economic Growth, ABC reported, had determined that colder weather leads to better economies. The ABC report summarizes that economists have struggled for many years to explain why so

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much of world’s wealth is concentrated in countries located in temperate rather than tropical regions and many have suggested that weather must play a part. In pursuing this clue, the report makes no mention of the possible impact of the legacies of colonialism, the ruinous debts that “free trade” agreements between the global North and South have largely fostered in the post colonial South, nor the effect of policies of the IMF and the World Trade Organization in guiding the move away from self-reliant to export economies in dependent countries. The ABC report states instead that this is the first time that economic progress has been linked directly to frost. “What we are finding is a 1 to 2 percent per year difference in growth rate between temperate and tropical regions,” says the study’s author, William Masters. So year by year, a society that experiences frost seems to grow 1 or 2 percent. There has been a lot of interest in these findings, Masters continues in the report, while noting that many people are violently allergic to any explanation that has a whiff of geographic determinism. Nonetheless, while institutional factors do matter hugely, Masters concludes, in the end, old Jack Frost is still going to have a say in who gets rich and who stays poor (see too Masters and McMillan, 2001). The recent work of Jeffrey Sachs offers a second example, reinscribing as it does an economic connection between climate, geography, and society. Arguing for a focus away from states and toward regional complexes defined in terms of some mix of environmental and cultural endowments, Sachs offers that the later mix is the more relevant matrix through which to understand how development occurs. A state like Brazil, for example, ought better be subdivided for purposes of analysis between “a technology rich” and better endowed south and a “technology poor” and environmentally and culturally impoverished north (Sachs, 2001; see too Harvey, 2001). Sachs, who a few years ago gained international celebrity and notoriety as a lead advocate of the “shock therapy” approach to transforming the economies of the post-communist world, rarely betrayed any preoccupation with environmental or ecological concerns in that work, choosing instead to see in the block divides of the communist and capitalist systems the (hindered) limits to convergence. Of a piece, he neither previously, nor in this more recent work, has considered explaining what has produced the ground truth that allows for his proposed identification of the criteria that proscribe, for present purposes, a subdivision between southern and northern Brazil. That is, this regionalization is offered as a descriptive fact based on objective and extant environmental and cultural conditions, rather than as an outcome of an ongoing process of uneven development. An entire range of countries in fact, Sachs argues, are “geographically disadvantaged,” indeed “cursed” with what he variously terms a “geographical penalty,” a “geographical deficit,” or “poorer geographical endowments.” This is particularly true of countries in the tropics, he argues, where endemically poor soils together with climatic conditions favorable to the proliferation of debilitating diseases act as “fundamental geographical barriers” to economic development and prosperity. As Mark Bassin carefully reconstructs the argument Sachs makes in a recent newspaper article, Sachs has discovered that it is geography

The climate of globalization 149 that explains the “limits of convergence,” that is to say that despite capitalism’s new universality “for the first time in history,” many developing countries are nonetheless going to be left behind (Bassin, 2003; Sachs, 1997). The greatest geographical contrast to those disadvantaged regions, of course, is offered by the “temperate zone,” that is to say Europe and North America. Quite unlike the blighted tropics, these regions are geographically “blessed” with moderate conditions favoring industry and the expansion of agricultural production. There is a lesson here: due to these objective geographical conditions, at least in the short and medium terms, “for much of the world bad climates, poor soils and physical isolation are likely to hinder growth whatever happens to policy.” Indeed, for the tropics in particular, prosperity can only be assured through a sort of tenuous symbiosis with the developed world, through which the former will be fed chiefly by “temperate-zone exports” (Bassin, 2003; Sachs, 1997). Contrary to the ABC report, this is of course not the first time that economic (and cultural) progress has been linked directly to climate, or that the environment has been used to establish a hierarchy of regions, their resources and inhabitants. Indeed, a discussion regarding climate and its effects on the economy and therewith the social world are in evidence throughout the history of modern western thought, and in the Enlightenment period the effort to vest climatology and topography with explanatory power in relation to human society resonates in the thinking of authors as varied as Buffon, Linne, Kant and Hegel (as well as a series of nineteenth and early twentieth century cultural scientists who continued in this vein (Natter, 2003). It is worth remembering something of this tradition given the present prospects of a globally conceived civil society by way of the significant amount of Enlightenment writing in which an understanding of climate, environment and development came to legitimate a centering and ordering between a here and a there, attendant centers and peripheries, their insides and outsides; expressions, variously, of universal or merely particular varieties of human and geographical phenomena. Hierarchial orderings of the varieties of humankind are much in evidence in the Enlightenment period, and they are sustained by postulated relations of universality and particularity, and thus space, human identity, and the environment. In the classification systems put forth regarding race during the early eighteenth century, for example by George-Louis Buffon in his A Natural History (1748–1804) and The System of Nature (1735) by Carl von Linne, respectively, it is argued that an underlying hierarchical order in nature was established by Providence and that it is the duty of mankind to discover this order and to classify everything that exists from human to fauna and flora in order to understand Providence’s plan. In Buffon’s Natural History, all humanity is of one origin, but Buffon ascribes to climatic and biological causes differences in intelligence, customs, and habits. Positioned at the top of the human chain in Buffon’s schema, given these three criteria, is the European, while non-Europeans are ranked at lower points on the scale of a human, rational and moral, evolutionary capacity (Buffon, 1860; Eze, 1997). Rational, moral, and evolutionary attributes – the enlightenment virtues par

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excellence – were in Kant’s writings to became virtually synonymous both with Northern Europe and its “white” inhabitants. Kant in fact felt able to specify the greatest frequency of the occurrence of these attributes and their borders along lines of latitude and longitude. In his writings on race, Kant frequently refers to Buffon and Linne. In his “On the different races of man” (1775), Kant argued that there are four distinct varieties of the human species, each with a specific “natural disposition.” The stem genius of the species, that is, the original ideal human, was no longer present on the earth. Kant offered, however, that the location where its habitation most likely would have originated was between the 31st and 52nd parallels in the Old World. This portion of the earth “is rightly held to be that in which the most happy mixture of influences of the colder and hotter regions, and also the greatest wealth of earthly creatures is encountered; where man too must have departed the least from his original formation because from here he is equally well prepared for all transplantations” (quoted by Eze, 1997, p. 48). Kant’s speculations lead him to conclude that this applied particularly to those living in “the Northern regions of Germany” (Eze, 1997, p. 38). Finally, in his posthumous lectures on Physical Geography one learns what he already had stated in 1764:” Humanity is at its greatest perfection in the race of the whites” (Eze, 1997, p. 63). Exactly why a similar preoccupation with environmental influences should be gaining popularity at this particular moment is a complex question. In the long eighteenth century, it was tied, among other things, to the effort to understand and create a scale of relationships between a here and a there and to foster administrative and governance structures (e.g. nation states) administrating terra, but also an effort to ground a universal determination of mankind (including presumptive universal human rights), an effort that required knowledge of the variety of shapes human culture had assumed upon the earth. In the present, at least one contextual factor would seem to be fairly significant: the collapse of the communist system, the existence of which served to bifurcate global relations into two exclusive and opposing networks “whose political and ideological oppositions could themselves be taken as the ultimate source of variation and difference between societies across the globe” (Bassin, 2003, p. 14). As Bassin points out, Sachs in principle happily heralds the burgeoning universality of triumphant capitalism but Sachs makes it clear that divisions between societies and regions are going to persist, and that economic-material – and thus human, social and civic – conditions will most decidedly not converge. Insofar as communism is no longer available for convenient fingering as the culprit obstructing capitalism from realizing its universal mission, “then something else has to be found.” That the physical conditions of the natural world, which, as a great deal of eighteenth through twentieth century writing also demonstrates, can be plausibly invested with a virtually endless variety of meanings and implications, also in terms of purported national or ethnic or racial psychology, proves in this regard to be very useful again, but it is a phenomenon that I wish to stress the weight of this history of argumentation must caution against. But while the latter form of essentialism harbors quite evident dangers, the denigra-

The climate of globalization 151 tion of “stubborn residual cultural traits,” by neo-liberal proponents of the new universalism is no less fraught with dangers undermining efforts to build and extend civil society. On these interrelated issues, David Harvey has made several astute suggestions. First, we need critical ways to think about how differences in ecological, cultural, economic, political, and social conditions are produced and we also need ways to evaluate the justice/injustice of the differences so produced. Second, the striving for equality and social justice cannot possibly mean the erasure of all forms of geographical difference, even presuming such erasure would be feasible in a world that includes Nepal, Nicaragua, Finland, Poland, Saudi Arabia and the United States. What is at stake rather, particularly in a planetary view, is the question of the economic and cultural emplacement of these geographical differences in a global political economy and its attendant conditions of uneven development. For Harvey, as with H. Lefebvre, the production, reproduction and reconfiguration of space is central to the political economy of capitalism and is crucial for understanding the ebb and flow of locality production (Lefebvre, 1991). The equality presupposed in market exchange produces spiraling inequalities between regions and spaces insofar as these regions and spaces possess differential endowments and resources attractive for any particular phase of accumulation or development. Because all modes of production must take place in space, localities emerge, grow and dissipate in support of this production. In his recent article title “Globalization and the Spatial Fix,” Harvey has therefore commented upon the apparent discovery of geography by economists like Paul Krugman and Jeffrey Sachs – the later, as noted, in terms that approach environmental determinism – by stating, “the question is not how globalization has affected geography, but how these distinctive geographical processes of production and reconfiguration of space have created the specific conditions of contemporary globalization” (Harvey, 2001). Capitalism, Harvey offers, has to fix space (as in immovable structures of transport and communication nets, as well as in built environments of factories, roads, houses, water supplies and other physical infrastructures) in order to overcome space (achieve a liberty of movement through low transport and communication costs). “It has to build a fixed space or landscape at a certain point of history only to have to destroy that space at a later point in order to make way for a new spatial fix, that is openings for fresh accumulation in new spaces and territories, at a later point in history.” For those who find reasons to question this global form of uneven development, “a vigorous civil society,” as the Forum Internet site with which I began also notes, truly must constitute itself as a “global civil society.”

Glocalization In a related vein, other recent theorization, e.g. Cox et al. has stressed that while the periphery has often been locked into asymmetric and dependent relations with the more advanced industrialized countries, it was the way in which these

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relationships engaged with national and local structures that has been important in generating outcomes. Moreover, that these outcomes have been different from place to place. As others have argued, nations and regions in a relationship of dependency are not helpless within this process, even if their macro-economic freedom for maneuver is often constrained. Thus, in contrast to the idea that all states are hapless victims of globalization, it can be shown to be sustained by contemporary practices of geo-governance (Hirst and Grahame, 1996; Roberts, 1995), as evinced in organizational forms such as the World Trade Organization (Roberts, 1997), the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, or the International Monetary Fund structural adjustment plans – institutional outcomes following Bretton Woods. That is to say, globalization can be unbundled analytically, and specific processes and practices, as well as agents of globalization, from above and below, can be identified (International Forum on Globalization, 2002; Roberts, 2003). Globalism’s efforts to tether individual societies to a global capitalist economy are, furthermore, not merely reproducing extant capitalist relations, but are simultaneously reconstituting the scope of these relations in the process (Beck, 1997; Luke, 2003). That is, “global economic space” as in previous phases of globalization, is also dislocating extant social space (including the network of association comprising civil society). The most fundamental decisions impacting the terrain of the latter, including decisions over natural resources and their utilization (e.g. water, air, agricultural seed, energy sources) as well as the decisions of what to do with their waste products, are ever increasingly being made without meaningful consultation with the overwhelming majority of the population (precisely in their capacity as members of civil society) directly affected by these decisions. It is not so much that the meaning of local territorial arrangements and their governing mechanisms are being set aside, but that they are rather being reconstituted into a network of decision making capacity played out on an unequal terrain of “stake-holders” as corporate globalism engages with the local, the national and the global. Swingedouw refers to glocalization in this context, a contested reconstruction of scales that sees interventions of the nation state (with their social welfare and benefits programs) being scaled downwards to the level of the city or region on the one hand, and upwards to the governance and trade structures facilitating economic cooperation on a multi-national scale (EU, NAFTA) on the other. Meanwhile, as national economies become more and more porous and harder to “bound,” the idea that culture is a project of the nation and of national identity is itself being recircuited. Globalization has taken on complex geographic forms. The scalar dynamic of globalization entails new imprecations of global and local, new experiences of distance and proximity, new patterns in the worldwide spatial mosaic. Relations across, between, and through different scales are being complexly re-drawn in the contemporary world as the effects of the contemporary phase of globalization register in the most disparate localities and as various local(e)s “go global.” Global integration, Roberts summarizes, is proceeding apace (Roberts, 2003). World trade at the end of the 1990s was increasing faster than world economic

The climate of globalization 153 growth (Dicken, 1998; Bryson, 1999). Local, regional, and national economies and the fate of their populations are becoming increasingly enmeshed in transnational circuits of trade, finance, and investment. This integration, however, is notoriously uneven, serving to sharpen some spatial and social differences even as it softens others (Smith, 1984; Harvey, 1989, 1996). This is evident at the continental scale, as some observers depict Africa as “falling out of the world economy,” even as other parts of the globe (notably in East and Southeast Asia) become more and more enmeshed in webs of trade and finance (Agnew and Grant, 1997). All over the globe, new and dynamic geographies of inclusion and exclusion are reworking historical spatialities, albeit often resolving into familiarly asymmetrical territorializations across scales, while across all settings the outcomes of globalization mean different things for different groups within the effected locales. The new center, Bauman points out, defined by mobility, “puts a new gloss on the time-honoured distinctions between rich and poor. . . . Being on the move has a radically different, opposite sense for, respectively, those at the top and those at the bottom of the new hierarchy, with the bulk of the population . . . oscillating between the two extremes . . .” (Bauman, 1998, pp. 3, 4). Appadurai’s suggestion that the new regionalism is going to be one of “variable geographies” therefore has special resonance for understandings of locality, place and region, for those interested in re-routing “the sorts of locational, informational and political flexibility currently monopolized by the transnational corporations and their political allies” (Appadurai, 1991, pp. 7, 17). These seem important considerations in terms of our question of what the prospects for civil society “East of the Elbe” may be in the current situation. First, I think it imperative to approach the question of civil society and globalization in terms of both space and place, to see “the local” and “the global” as moments of continuum in a relational process, that is with an ongoing emphasis on localities understood not as “regions set apart” nor merely as the outcome of global processes, but as sites of trans-local/national/international flows of people, resources, and identities. Second, it seems not too helpful today to be an advocate or opponent of globalization. What is rather at stake is the issue of what specific forms and contents of “globalization” do we wish to see take hold. In both of my localized research contexts, and I suspect in others as well, such an understanding can undercut an overwhelming sensibility that I have found, which inclines many would-be practitioners of civil society to resign before an understanding of globalization qua globalism that lets it appear an und für sich as some inevitable transcendental trend or ontological “outside.” Hardt and Negri have referred in this context to the “spectral reign of global space” (Hardt and Negri, 2000), while Gibson-Graham provocatively ask whether “a global regime is consolidating itself not so much through institutional initiatives but through subjects who experience themselves as increasingly subsumed to a global order” (Gibson-Graham, 2002). That is, while the material production of “global economic space” of course plays a substantial role in the discursive emergence of a new world order, the deployment of the concept of globalization itself performs ideological effects that are part of globalism’s own legitimization and seeming inevitability.

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To dwell on the second point, globalization discourse in the corporate model, as Gibson-Graham note, situates the local (and thus all of us, who, after all, are in the world through “the local”) in a place of subordination, as “the other within” of the global order (Gibson-Graham, 2002). The consequences of this subjugation at the level of the local would seem to call forth economic victimhood, hyper market competition between localities mediated to some extent by forms of geo-governance, and – in the cultural realm of social identity – a stance of social passivity. Indeed, one of the not so latent points of the corporate model of globalization is that there is little efficacy in pursuing locally-based civil identity and civic professionalism at all, except to the extent that these might happen to be exercised or managed by the ranks of managerialist elites (this applies no less to the corporate model of the university, Reid and Taylor, 2003). Not so curiously, this is also the outcome and bequest of late-nineteenth and twentieth century (non) local governance in Appalachian Kentucky as generated during an extended period of resource-extraction (Billings and Blee, 2001). By contrast, a civic professionalism productive of a global–regional understanding of locality understands the socio-spatial nodal points through which all of us are in the world – i.e. the local – as the (doubtless unevenly developed) space of freedom and capacity in which to act. Globalization, understood in its primarily economic sense, which nonetheless is of course interlinked with the cultural realm, can in fact be located, indeed must be, if one follows the analysis of Harvey, Swyngedouw, Cox et al. If potentially interconnected social movements can be meaningfully linked by a chain of equivalence within a global-regional understanding of locality – their extension of local solidarities embedded in specific places to other similarly embedded global regional solidarities – their articulation of identity and identification suggest a viable alternative to a politics that presents as its choices either civil indifference, the subsumption of difference, or its ever increasing fragmentation. There are of course already any number of transnational social movements, which substantiate a politics of place that thinks globally and acts locally – Greenpeace, for example, is one of the oldest, while the Civil Society Forum, with which I began, is another, and I can point to a variety of other social, ecological, and economic justice organizations in Kentucky and Leipzig that are likewise connected (Natter, 2002). Both suggest a recognition becoming ever more common, that an intensification of participatory democracy requires both the areal and the networked forms of space to be interwoven as part of a co-temporaneous public sphere.

Identity and difference These perspectives strongly suggest that the scalar restructurings called forth by economic and cultural globalization, and their attendant new patterns of proximity, are a determinate part of changing processes of individual and collective identity formation. Poststructural identity theory, in part at first seemingly before the letter, has articulated an analytic for assessing these shifts at the turn of the previous century.

The climate of globalization 155 Within post-structural identity theory, interest in contingency, but also in what we might call contingent universality, has only increased with recognition of the challenges and opportunities to theorizing and implementing social justice in the wake of globalization, technological change, and the reconfiguration of human–environmental relations. Theoretically, various poststructural thinkers have stressed that social identities exist as a temporary suturing of diffuse elements into social formations, whose discursive form provides the grids of intelligibility within which individuals make meaningful their social reality (summarized in Natter and Jones, 1997). “Identity” and “identification” thereby signal a far greater sense of fluidity and contingency than was the case with the “subject,” the marker identity replaces, or – in some theory – refashions as multiple. In this view, any essential identity, whether “grounded” in the language of origins or projected backwards, as it were, from a telos that imaginatively inscribes a substantial essence, proves to be a false ideal. Doubtless, the concrete instrumentalization of the “concept of essence” (Marcuse, 1937/1968) during the early modern and modern periods have been enframed by the prerogatives of the nation-state; that is, have sought to obviate the particularities and vicissitudes of scale at the level of the nation. Identity “itself,” however, is never fully constituted or determined; identification is not reducible to identity, an incommensurability or gap operates between them. But rather than maintain that the value of identity is annulled by recognition of its non-foundational and contingent character, poststructural theory suggests that this incompleteness is in fact a welcome condition of democratic contestation. As Butler, Laclau and Zizek have recently summarized: “No social movement can, in fact, enjoy its status as an open-ended democratic political articulation without presuming and operationalizing [this] negativity at the heart of identity” (Butler et al., 2000, p. 2). To be sure, an understanding of the performative character of collective civic practices and of the human corporeality that embodies them have a great deal to contribute to a further refinement of our understanding of social identity and social justice (Schatkzi and Natter, 1996; Schatzki et al., 2001; Grosz, 1996; Butler, 1996). Yet this is no less true regarding an understanding of geographic context. Indeed, although a fair amount of theorization regarding identity addresses the complex with only latent recognition that “space matters,” poststructural geographers, for whom, contra Habermas, the ideal of transparent communication across scales remains problematically an issue of power and space, find that the material and ideological production of space – or territorialization – plays a substantial role in the constitution of society (Lefebvre, 1991; Harvey, 1996; Soja, 1996). The other half of the spatial bar, de- and re-territorialization, refers to the opportunities for tactics (de Certeau, 1984) that challenge the hegemonic suturing of identities and spaces (Harvey, 2000; Natter and Jones, 1997). As noted earlier with reference to the work of David Harvey, it is less a question of the “spatialization,” so to speak, of social processes, but rather a matter of the always operative mutual interpenetration of space and society (Lefebvre, 1990; Soja, 1996, 1998; Harvey, 1999). To succinctly state the import of Lefebvre’s

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social-spatial dialectic: socio-spatial differences are not only constituted, but themselves constitute socio-political and socio-economic processes. These processes and the identifications they engender work at many scales, from the individual to the global, and across different cultural, political, and economic terrains where lines of demarcation take hold. Importantly, if individuals achieve and resist their systems of identification in and through social space, it follows that without a non-foundational conception of space – as an equally open, heterogeneous, and indeterminate field – extant spatialities, both in theory and practice, will tend to reinforce – in advance – a foundational or essentialist moment in identity theory, whose outcome might be crunched, in the manner of spatial science, into the equation: certain spaces equal certain identities (Natter and Jones, 1997).

Difference, identity, and space The issue of scale remains a vexing one in articulating a regional–global understanding and practice of social justice (Harvey, 1996). Drawing upon Raymond Williams, Harvey, for example, notes that “loyalties contracted at one scale, in one place and in terms of a particular structure of feeling, cannot easily be carried over without transformation or translation . . . elsewhere or in general” (Harvey, 1996, p. 39). The move from tangible solidarities understood as patterns of social life organized in affective and knowable communities to a more abstract set of conceptions that would have universal purchase” involves a move from one level of abstraction, attached to place, to another level of abstraction capable of reaching out across space” (Harvey, 1996, p. 33). The seeming contradictions between different levels of abstractions, between distinctively understood particularities of places and the necessary abstractions required to take such understandings into a wider realm, offer multiple hindrances to the establishment of the scales of social justice. Further, even what Raymond Williams called militant particularisms, as Harvey notes, can be profoundly conservative, if their militancy is founded on an enclosed, rather than a porous, consciousness and ideology of place (see also Massey, 1994) Historically, these militant particularities have rested on the perpetuation of patterns of social relations and community solidarities – loyalties – achieved under a certain kind of oppressive and uncaring industrial order. Such conditions have often enough, as a number of poststructural critics of the concept of community have stressed (Balibar, 1996; Bhabba, 1990; Gilroy, 1994), served to undercut sympathies and civic identities for those who are not thought to be from that particular place, or to fit within a restrictive ideology of place, identity, and belonging. Precisely the structures that play a defensive role with respect to “the outside” – in the interest of furthering the power, autonomy, and unity of the community – are the same ones that often play an oppressive role “internally,” negating the multiplicity of the community itself. Massey’s study of the Docklands of London offers one example of the phenomenon: a working class neighborhood and community under duress from the pressures of gentrification

The climate of globalization 157 and urban planning measures designed to re-make the neighborhood for other purposes (e.g. tourism), mounted resistance against these measures by stressing community-based, non-property ownership rights. But at least initially, in the appeal to a sense of their historical, local privilege, even in the absence of ownership, was also embedded rampant xenophobia which stigmatized “foreigners” – in reality simply more recent immigrants – as outsiders to the community. This is one reason why “respect for diversity,” along with freedom of association and freedom of expression, belong to the values underlying civil society, as noted by the Civil Society Forum. Such a dynamic, one can hasten to add, also applies at other scales, including that of the nation state. The nation, as sympathetic commentaries by Tom Nairn has stressed, affirming recent Scottish nationalism, appears progressive in its protective function against external domination or, corporate global capitalism (Nairn, 1996). However, as other critical nation theorists have stressed, as did Nairn in earlier work, the nation can easily play an inverse role with respect to the interior it protects, repressing internal difference and opposition in the name of national identity, unity and security (Eley and Suny, 1996). Since at least the Peace of Westphalia (1648), these interactions have fostered the development of apparently self-contained geopolitical identity markers such as nations or regions inscribed as partial occupations of more general global space, as well as of categories of citizenship, gender, sexuality and race, which have traditionally been bound to such spatial containments (Eley and Suny, 1996; Balibar and Wallerstein, 1992). Yet the power to make and maintain difference is never uni-directional: it always works from both within and outside the category. Although boundaries, through a process of hegemony, may appear as rigid and hermetic, the differences so sorted are never neatly contained, they are above all maintained, and this in part through the force of the category itself. What implications ensue from the recognition of the processes of hegemony and the constitutive outside? At one level, theory has long acknowledged that race, gender, nationality, ethnicity and sexuality are socially constructed categories. As products of hegemony, the categories we take as materially significant for social identity not only lack a determinate “natural” or pre-discursive basis for grounding it, but often operate as the forceful grounds upon which identity is produced (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1991; Natter and Jones, 1997; Gilroy, 2000). For political geographers, the history of attempts between the French Revolution and 1945 by German geographers to ground German identity or that of “Mitteleuropa” in terms of “natural borders” is particularly rife in revealing such contradictions (Schultz and Natter, 2003), while the notion of transnational citizenship equally invites questions that are the tain of the earlier mirror (Balibar, 2003). It is not just that categories are “social” – hardly a meaningful distinction, unless God is being invoked – but rather that those aspects of alterity that are seized upon and amplified into a system of social differentiation are always contingently productive of subjects in the interest of hegemonic power, where and whenever a center “grounds” a particular scalar dynamic. Yet no dominant cultural strategy has proven over time to be so seamless that the

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trace of exclusion has not remained as a perpetual irritation to the equivalence proposed by this or that dominant group.

Decentralization, enablement, and civil society Decentralization of state functions at the national level has been one of the key features of contemporary globalization. It goes hand in hand with both the devolution of social welfare policy and the renewed importance of the local state as players in economic development. The key question is whether or not decentralization (and the discourse of enablement and the policies which it authorizes) is or will be enabling or primarily inhibiting of broader democratization processes. One can be justifiably cautious about what dominant trends may tell us about the democratic dimensions of this enabling process. In various contexts, community based organizations (CBOs) and some NGOs have indeed found entree “at the table” of social partnership (as in Agenda 2000, Partnership 2000, Imagining the new City, etc), but in a form that may appear as a strategic ploy designed to coopt legitimate concerns contradicting a general development logic already in place. Frequently, by seeking but also limiting input to the planning stage of development, CBOs find once again confirmed the unequal and uneven footing upon which their role in social partnership ensues. On the other hand, experience in the past decade of the “decentralization debate,” with specific reference to governmentality issues, also frequently recommends the utility of CBOs availing themselves of this entree, albeit with very open eyes, with the purpose of extending the rhetorical space of social partnership to ever more meaningful venues and settings. On some occasions, this extension might even mean the possibility of re-circuiting the dominant model of social inclusion – incorporation of “the excluded” into the market in neo-liberal terms – via consideration of environmental and social justice concerns that contradict or at least butt against the logic of neo-liberal market development. With respect specifically to governmentality questions, I can think of a few rudimentary indexes of how to track the “ground truth” of meaningful CBO input (see below). Decentralization has in any case become a central issue in development and in the development debate. Of necessity, the issue is tied as well to the concepts of social exclusion and social partnership. Debate within Europe has frequently been linkable to discussion and policies enacted in the so-called second and third worlds. It may therefore be of interest to note a recent estimate that of the 75 “developing” countries with a population of more than five million, 63 are actively pursuing decentralization polices that devolve functions and responsibilities at local governments (Lee and Gilbert, 1999; Helmsing, 2002). It would indeed seem that policies effecting Poland or Saxony within the context of the EU, are part and parcel of a condition with global outreach, which can also be charted in Kentucky. And to many minds, decentralization has ceased to be a local government affair and has turned into a local governance issue. Using a series of indicators in a trans-continental comparative perspective, Helmsing finds that the greatest progress in “enablement” has been achieved in

The climate of globalization 159 the adaptation of enabling practices in planning, only partially in actual practices within government procedures or in the political representation of CBOs, or in allowing them wholly or partially to manage public funds (2002). Furthermore, with regards to CBOs, these indicators suggest there has been relatively little institutionalization of enablement, especially on the financial side (Helmsing and van den Bosch, 1997). Thus, it has been relatively easy to introduce enablement in local planning – and much of the Agenda 2000, the Partnership 2000, or comparable initiatives can probably be understood in this way – but change in regulatory, administrative, and financial public decision making has been much slower and difficult. Those, I would offer, are in rudimentary form, a catalogue of indicators one might wish to track in the future in answering the general question regarding the efficacy of CBO activity within the field of civil society.

Conclusion In light of debates over globalization, it seems useful to suggest that civil society be theorized with a sensitivity to specific geographic scales and contexts within which theorists and activists understand the concept and deploy its discursive resources. Contemporary human society – not least in response to the emergence of global patterns of devolution and “enablement,” as well as various hybrid forms of “glocalized” governmentality, which circulate between local, nationstate and trans-national scales – has come to be understood less certainly in terms of fixed political and administrative structures and more as a complex and changing network of various individual and collective actors who at the same time depend asymmetrically on each other, even as they compete on an unequal terrain for advantages, influences, resources, rights, and other forms of power. In this context, debates over land use, for example sited at any particular local level, quickly leap into an over aching global-local network of actors, agencies and discourses (Natter and Zierhofer, 2002). These might pit interests determined locally or regionally versus national and global interests; sometimes local and transnational interests versus national and regional ones, and sometimes institutions serving globalization from above in concert with local elites versus others fostering globalization from below via a network of like-minded civic associations, themselves limited and enabled by some combination of their alternatives. Broadly speaking, this adjudication entails ethical or normative spheres as well: traditional ways and local dependencies, solidarities developed with or in opposition to locally situated articulations of power, or to the presumptive interests of a generalized consumer, humanity at large or the whole ecosphere, each of whose articulations is likewise situated by further power–space–knowledge networks. For these reasons, I wonder whether we can develop deeper understandings of how civil society should be contextualized as a result of: regional variations in cultural, economic, and political traditions; challenges to those traditions from “within” and “without” emerging from economic and cultural globalization; the spatial mismatch between traditional political borders and the cross-scalar

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geographies of individuals and collectives engaged in social activism; the linkages among activists made possible by developments in technology; and geographically uneven efforts to implement economic and environmental sustainability. As has been argued here, answers to these questions depend upon increased recognition of the spatial flows of these developments, as well as the flows of the benefits and burdens (e.g. toxic waste) of capital accumulation (Bullard, 1993; Pulido, 2000). As people in community-based projects ponder the need for new forms of democratic action in vast transregional and transnational contexts, the inadequacies of the old regionalism of “fixed geographies” becomes clearer, and this applies no less to the globalization from below than it does to globalization from above. To be sure, these efforts will benefit from a self-understanding on the part of at least some in the university community that we have a role to play in supporting a partnership designed to bolster a stance of civic professionalism within the university community (experts as specialized citizens) in partnership with non-university, grass roots, community-based citizens (in their role as local experts). Such a civic professionalism stands in marked contrast to the mode of professionalization largely fostered by a de-territorializing cooperating model of both the university and globalization (Reid and Taylor, 2003). It calls thereby for a renewed appreciation of the value of local knowledge that does not essentialize it, and of the value of fostering solidarities with like-minded, community-based, global–regional strivings fostering a global civil society around the planet.

Bibliography Agnew, J. (1998) Geopolitics. Revisioning World Politics (London: Routledge). Agnew, J. and Grant, R. (1997) “Falling out of the World Economy. Theorizing Africa in World Trade,” in R. Lee and J. Wills (eds) Geographies of Economies (London: Arnold). Appadurai, A. (1991) “Grassroots globalization and the research imagination,” Public Culture, 12 (1), pp. 1–19. Balibar, E. and Wallerstein, I. (1992) Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso). Balibar, E. (2003) We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Bassin, M. (2003) “Politics from Nature,” in J. Agnew, K. Mitchell and G. Toal (eds) A Companion to Political Geography, pp. 13–29. Bauman, Z. (1998) Globalization. The Human Condition (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press). Bhabba, H. (1994) The Location of Culture (London: Routledge). Beck, U. (1997) The Reinvention of Politics: Rethinking Modernity in the Global Social Order (London: Polity Press). Billings, D. and Blee, K. (2001) The Road to Poverty: The Making of Wealth and Hardship in Appalachia (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press). Buffon, G. L. (1860) A Natural History: General and Particular. Trans. W. Smellie. Bullard, R., Wright, B. and Chavis, B. (1993) Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots (Boston: South End Press). Butler, J. (1993) Bodies that Matter (London: Routledge).

The climate of globalization 161 Butler, J., Laclau, E. and Zizek, Z. (2000) Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (London: Verso). Bryson, J. (ed.) (1999) The Economic Geography Reader: Producing and Consuming Global Capital (New York). Cox, K. (ed.) (1997) Spaces of Globalization: Reasserting the Power of the Local (New York: Guilford). de Certeau, M. (1984) The Practices of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California). Dicken, P. Global Shift (New York: Guilford). Eley, G. and Suny, R. (eds) (1996) Becoming National (New York: Oxford). Eze, E. (1997) Race and Enlightenment (Oxford: Blackwell). Gibson-Graham, A. K. (2002) “An ethics of the local,” Rethinking Marxism 15 (1). Gilroy, P. (1994) The Black Atlantic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Gilroy, P. (2000) Against Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). Grosz, E. (1996) Volatile Bodies (London: Routledge). Hardt and Negri (2000) Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). Harvey, D. (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell). Harvey, D. (1996) Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell). Harvey, D. (2000) Spaces of Hope (Oxford: Blackwell). Harvey, D. (2001) “The spatial fix,” Geographische Revue, 3 (2), pp. 5–22. Helmsing, A. (2002) “Decentralization, enablement and governance in low-income countries,” Environment and Planning C, 20 (3), pp. 317–40. Herod, G., O’Tuathail, G. and Roberts, S. (eds) (1997) Unruly World? Geography, Globalization and Governance (New York: Guilford). Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T. (1991) Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum). Hirst, P. and Thompson, G. (1996) Globalization in Question (London: Polity). International Forum on Globalization (2002) Alternatives to Economic Globalization (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler). Kant, I. (1775/1960) “On the Difference of Man”, in Count, E. W. (eds) This is Race (New York: H. Schuman). Kidd, D. et al. (2001) “Special issue on social justice movements and the internet” Peace Review, 13, pp. 325–410. Lee, K. and Gilbert, R. (1999) Developing Towns and Cities: lessons from Brazil and the Philippines (World Bank: Washington, DC). Lefebvre, H. (1991) The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell). Luke, T. (1998) Contesting the Politics of Nature, Economy and Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Luke, T. (2003) “On cyborganization: reinventing the political,” Paper presentation, 2003 meeting of the American Association of Geographers. Marcuse, H. (1937/1968) “The concept of essence,” Negations (Boston: Beacon Press), pp. 43–87. Massey, D. (1994) Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Masters, W. and McMillan, M. (2001) “Climate and scale in economic growth,” Journal of Economic Growth, 6, pp. 167–86. Mouffe, C. (1995) “Postmarxism, Democracy and Identity,” Environment and Planning D, 13 (3), pp. 259–66. Nairn, T. (1996). Faces of Nationalism (London: Routledge).

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Natter, W. (2002) “Ueber Identitaet, Global-Regionalismus, und Globalisierung von Unten: Kentucky, eine Fallstudie,” Comparativ, 12, pp. 93–129. Natter, W. (2003) “Is universality the object of globalization?: Political geographies of contingent universality.” Paper presented at Max Planck Institute for the History of Science on Raeume der Globalisierung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Berlin, November 2003. Natter, W. and Jones, J. P. (1997) “Identity, space, and other uncertainties,” in G. Benko and U. Strohmayer (eds) Space and Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell). Natter, W. and Zierhofer, W. (2002) “Political Ecology, Territory and Scale,” Geojournal, 58 (1), pp. 1–7. Pulido, L. (2000) “Rethinking environmental racism,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 90 (1), pp. 1–17. Reid, H. and Taylor, B. (2000) “Embodying ecological citizenship: rethinking the politics of grass-roots globalization in the United States,” Alternatives: Social Transformation and Humane Governance, 25 (4), pp. 95–120. Reid, H. and Taylor, B. (2003) “John Dewey’s aesthetic ecology of public intelligence and the grounding of civic environmentalism,” Ethics and the Environment, 8 (1), pp. 74–92. Roberts, S. (2003) “Global strategic vision: managing the world,” in R. Perry and B. Mauerer (eds) Globalization and Governmentalities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Roberts, S., Secor, A. and Sparke, M. (2003) “Neoliberal globalization,” Antipode, 35 (5), pp. 886–97. Routledge, P. (2003) “Convergence space: process geographies of grassroots globalization networks,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 28, pp. 333–49. Ward, P. (1997) “The emperor is stark naked: the hype of globalization and convergence,” Planning Forum, 3, pp. 73–4. Sachs, J. (1997) “Nature, nurture, growth,” Economist, 343 (14 June). Sachs, J. (2001) “Why are the tropics poor? Assessing the roles of politics, economics and ecology,” Journal of Economic History, 61, pp. 521–44. Schatzki, T and Natter, W. (eds) (1996) The Social and Political Body (New York: Guilford). Schatzki, T., Cetina, K. and von Savigny, E. (2001) The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (London: Routledge). Schultz, H. D. and Natter, W. (2003) “Imagining Mitteleuropa: conceptions of ‘its’ space in and outside German geography,” European Review of History/Revue Europeenne d’Histoire, 10 (2), pp. 273–92. Slater, D. (1997) “Spatial Politics/Social Movements,” in M. Keith and S. Pile (eds) Geographies of Resistance (London: Routledge). Smith, N. (1984) Uneven Development (Oxford: Blackwell). Soja, E. (1996) Third Space (Oxford: Blackwell). Swyngedouw, E. (1997) “Neither global nor local: ‘glocalization’ and the politics of scale,” in K. Cox (ed.) Spaces of Globalization: Reasserting the Power of the Local (New York: Guilford).

12 Is there an organisational base for civil society in Central Eastern Europe? Social and economic potentials of civil society organisations in CEE after 1989 Slawomir Nale˛cz and Jerzy Bartkowski

Introduction Numerous debates about the rebirth of civil society in Central Eastern Europe often lack agreement on basic empirical data. This seems to be at least partly a result of the ambiguous and multidimensional nature of the civil society concept. The many proposed definitions, being mostly mixtures of normative and analytic approach, have been rather an obstacle than a help for empirical research, especially comparative work. Therefore we decided to focus on the civil society organisations (CSOs), which are non-controversial subjects of research both for those who think they are just one of many levels/indicators on which/with which civil society can be observed as well as for those who regard the CSOs as a civil society par excellence. The definition of CSOs as well as the problems regarding their operationalisation will be discussed in the first section of this paper. In spite of the theoretical differences regarding the subjective scope of the term civil society (analytical dimension), the rich literature on civil society commonly points to a set of normative qualities which such a society should possess (normative dimension). If the term civil society is limited to organisations then we expect them to realise a collection of functions which are in parallel to the qualities of normatively understood civil society. From this functional perspective, the CSOs should be seen as vehicles of: a b

c d e

participation and influence on public matters (representation and mediation of interests, advocacy of rights and control of state apparatus), expression of social diversity (articulation of minority groups’ traditions, values, interests, strengthening cohesion of the groups, reinforcement of individual’s identity, passions and inner-steering, self-realisation and support of individuals’ freedom), social integration (building up horizontal social ties, overarching social divisions, strengthening general trust), schooling in democracy (democratic attitudes, skills and behaviour), spontaneous, self-organising provision of social services.1

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Of course the extent to which CSOs are able to serve these functions is limited by the size of the organisations’ social base (most important for participation, expression, integration and socialisation functions) as well as by their economic capacities (mainly a service function). Taken in this way, a certain level of economic and social potentials of CSOs is a necessary condition (although not a sufficient condition) to classify a given society as a “civil” one in a normative sense. Following this line of reasoning we focused this paper on the potentials of CSOs in the countries of Central Eastern Europe where, after the collapse of communism, civil society became one of the main targets of social and political development. Describing CSOs’ capacities in countries such as Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic we go beyond the impressive growth of the number of organisations observed there in the first part of the 1990s: we try to describe the potential of CSOs with more direct and reliable indicators. First, the social base of CSOs in CEE and in EU countries is assessed by membership and volunteering rates, and also by the volume of voluntary work. The relatively low level of citizens’ participation observed in CEE CSOs is shown in the perspective of long term social and political trends related to the legacy of communism, the explosion of untapped social potential, privatisation of economy, extension of poverty and general shrinkage of social solidarity. Further, using employment parameters, the paper documents economic underdevelopment of the CSOs in CEE countries as compared to the EU and other developed countries. The small scale and distorted structure of non-profit economic potential in CEE is explained by the legacies of communism and the general government policy of maintaining state dominance in welfare service delivery as well as the lack of subsidiarity in policy toward CSOs combined also with some organisations’ reservations toward partnership with state institutions. Finally, we summarise the developments of the social and economic potential of CEE CSOs in 1990s and define their present status in relation to the question of influence the organisations could have for civil society as widely understood.

Civil society organisations: definition and operationalisation Even though we tried to escape from the terminological trap of civil society, we still must face the problem of definition and operationalisation in regard to civil society organisations (CSOs). In terms of the subjective analysis, we define CSOs as non-state and nonprofit entities acting above the level of private, family life. To be more detailed, our definition is in accordance with the structural-operational definition employed within the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project. Following the requirements of this definition, CSOs qua non-profit organisations are entities that share five features. In particular, they are: • organisations, i.e., they have an institutional presence and structure;

Social and economic potentials after 1989 165 • private, i.e., they are institutionally separate from the government; • not profit distributing, i.e., they do not return profits to their managers or to a set of “owners”; • self-governing, i.e., they are fundamentally in control of their own affairs; and • voluntary, i.e., membership in them is not legally required and they attract some level of voluntary contribution of time or money (Salamon et al., 1999, pp. 3–4). According to the definition, CSOs take on different legal forms: political parties, trade unions, churches as well as numerous other organisations, including associations, foundations, employers’ organisations, professionals’ organisations etc. As that wide range of entities is hardly manageable in comparative analysis, the churches will be excluded from the scope of CSOs, but they should complement our analysis as soon as the comparative data on them are available. Due to data availability problems, sometimes further limitations will be necessary as in the case of international comparisons of registration dynamics, where only the number of associations will be used. The growing number of CSOs: explosion of untapped social potential and the later slowdown The first years after the political breakthrough of 1989 are often said to be a period of renaissance of the civil society in the countries of Central Eastern Europe. Indeed, real civic activity, which earlier could not be tapped by the nonauthentic mass organisations subordinated to the communist party-state apparatus, began to emerge in many organisational forms: especially as associations and foundations. The process of their mass registration was enabled by legal and political changes, which eliminated or reduced government control over registration and tight supervision of the organisations’ activities. In addition, a big change of political climate motivated active citizens to bring their so-far informal activities into the legal framework, as well as encouraged them to engage in the new system founded on such values as self-organisation, self-government, pluralism and democracy. The available data from Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary show that the process of registration of new membership organisations was especially rapid in the first 3–4 years after 1989. Regardless the differences among particular countries, the data on the dynamics of newly registered associations may suggest that the large number of new born or only just incorporated citizens’ organisations may have brought great social and economic potential, making CSOs a new important sector in the economy and an important actor on the socio-political scene in CEE countries. Altogether, between 1989 and 1999, the population of incorporated associations multiplied by a factor of 123 in Slovakia, grew 81 times in the Czech Republic, 14 times in Poland and 3 times in Hungary (Figure 12.1).

No. of associations

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50,000 45,000 40,000 35,000 30,000 25,000 20,000 15,000 10,000 5,000 0

Period of steep growth

Period of flat growth

1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 Czech Republic

Poland

Hungary

Slovakia

Figure 12.1 Number of associations in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland, 1989–2001 (sources: Polish data, Ministry of Justice (quoted by Nale˛cz, 2004, p. 315); Hungarian data, according to Bocz et al. (2002); Czech data, Czech Statistics Office & Ministry of the Interior; Slovakian data, Albertina Firemni Monitor (2001).)

Although the number of organisations grew rapidly in the whole region, rates vary between countries and seem to be negatively correlated with the starting point – the social potential that was not tapped in legal organisations. The growth was slower in Hungary, where, thanks to more liberal communist rule, more associations could function relatively independently in the late 1980s than in case of Poland or Czechoslovakia. According to Eva Kuti and Istvan Sebestény, in Hungary “by the time the breakdown of the Soviet Bloc . . . civil society organisations were numerous, developed and widespread enough to become important actors of the systemic change” (Kuti and Sebestény, 2003, p. 4).2 In Czechoslovakia and Poland, a number of organisations registered in the early 1990s had existed informally at the end of the 1980s (Fric et al., 2004, p. 5; Siellawa-Kolbowska, 2002, pp. 80–91). In the early 1990s this untapped potential was transformed into CSOs, which were registered more quickly and in greater numbers in Poland and Czechoslovakia than in Hungary. Yet, in the second part of the 1990s the fast numerical growth of CSOs was much slower and, presently, their number either grows very slowly or remains stable.3 Unfortunately, not everything is as good as the growing numbers of registered organisations may suggest.

Social potential of civil society organisations in Central Eastern Europe Size and main fields The scale of the social impact exercised by CSOs can be estimated by the percentage of the population who belong to at least one organisation and, even

Social and economic potentials after 1989 167 better, by the proportion of those who contribute their unpaid work to such organisations. Thanks to the data gathered by the European Value Survey and World Value Survey it is possible to analyse those indicators for CEE countries as well as to compare them with other regions of Europe. To identify the social capacity of different types of CSOs, Table 12.1 gives the membership and volunteering rates not only in a combined form as a percentage of adults who are engaged in at least one organisation regardless of the organisation type, but it also provides results for trade unions, political parties and other organisations separately. A general look at Table 12.1 shows that the social base of CSOs in Eastern European countries is much narrower than is the case in EU countries. The rates of membership and volunteering in any CSO in Eastern Europe compared with analogous indicators in the EU all remain in the proportion of approximately 2:3. The same proportion can be observed between results obtained in EU and CEE countries with regard to membership and volunteering in any non-party non-union organisations. At the more detailed but still regional level, the size of the social potential of CSOs as well as “organisations other than parties or unions” in CEE seem to be similar to that observed in southern countries of the EU (Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece) both in terms of membership as well as volunteering. Only trade union membership rates are still higher in Central and Eastern Europe than in the South-West. The other countries of Western Europe, especially the northern countries (Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and the Netherlands) have much larger membership and volunteering potential than CEE countries, however, in the leading countries of the CEE group (Slovakia and the Czech Republic) CSOs appear to have a wider social base than is the case in many central EU countries such as France, West Germany or the UK (for more detailed comparisons see Annex, Table A1). Within the Eastern European group the social potential of CSOs and “organisations other than parties or unions” in CEE countries is outdistanced by that in Post-Yugoslavian countries (Slovenia and Croatia), but the CEE countries are ahead of the Baltic Republics and other post Soviet Union countries, which emerged only after the collapse of the Soviet Union.4 This sequence of the subregions of Eastern Europe suggests that the present underdevelopment of CSOs’ social base is bound to the severity and duration of the communist regime in the respective East European countries (e.g. Post-Soviet countries). In the countries where the communists had relatively less control over society or where their rule was weakened or abolished earlier than in other countries, the CSOs had more chance to develop their present social potential (e.g. Post-Yugoslavian countries). Within the CEE group, the differences are quite sizeable: Slovakia and the Czech Republic seem to have a large social potential of organised civil activity while the respective indicators for Hungary and Poland are half as large and in the case of Romania or Bulgaria, the organisations’ social base appears to be a third thinner than in Slovakia or in the Czech Republic. This variation cannot be

Table 12.1 Social base of Civil Society Organisations (membership and volunteering rates), ca 1999 Country/region (no. of countries from which the mean percentage was calculated)

Slovakia Czech Republic Hungary Poland Bulgaria Romania C-E Europe (6) Baltic Post-Soviet (3) Other Post-Soviet (3) Post-Yugoslavian (2) East Europe (14) S-W Europe (4) C-W Europe (7) N-W Europe (4) West Europe (15)

Members in at least one organisation (or activity) of a given type (% of population)

Volunteers in at least one organisation (or activity) of a given type (% of population) ■

All types of civil society organisations (CSOs) combined*

Trade unions

Political parties

All types of organisations other than parties and trade unions combined**

All types of civil society organisations (CSOs) combined*

Trade unions

Political parties

All types of organisations other than parties & trade unions combined**

65 60 31 25 23 21 38 28 37 47 37 39 51 88 58

16 10 7 10 7 9 10 6 28 14 14 5 10 44 18

7 4 2 1 5 2 3 2 1 4 3 4 5 8 5

56 54 24 19 14 13 30 22 13 40 26 33 47 81 53

51 33 15 14 19 16 25 19 13 26 21 25 30 41 32

6 3 1 2 4 6 4 1 4 4 3 2 1 5 3

5 2 1 1 4 2 2 1 1 2 2 2 2 3 2

47 30 14 12 12 10 21 17 9 24 18 22 29 44 31

Notes * Combined membership in all types of civil society organisations (CSOs), i.e. percentage of adult population who belong to at least one CSO, be that a trade union, political party or other organisation. ** Combined membership in all types of organisations other than trade unions or political parties ⫽ percentage of adult population who belong to at least one nonprofit, non-governmental organisation (NGO), e.g. association, movement, club etc. Data source: European Value Survey.

Social and economic potentials after 1989 169 explained only by the severity of the communist regime but must be linked to post-communist as well as precommunist developments of the CEE societies (e.g. the strong position of old, mass organisations in the present Czech Republic, political mobilisation of the 1990s in the Slovak Republic, and also the high level of civic, organisational engagement in pre Second World War Czechoslovakia). Although the level of CSO membership varies considerably between different parts of Europe the most popular fields of membership are more less the same. Trade unions, sport clubs, religious, cultural and professional organisations attract the biggest numbers of members and volunteers while the more service oriented organisations (active in fields such as welfare, local development or health care) remain much less popular. Among the CEE countries, the membership and volunteering structure varies quite significantly (Tables 12.2 and 12.3). In Slovakia and the Czech Republic, not only is the level of the indicators higher than in the other CEE countries but there also are disproportionally high rates of membership and volunteering in sport and cultural organisations. This wide participation in recreational-type organisations found in the Czech Republic and Slovakia makes the structure of membership and volunteering in these two countries very different from other CEE countries and more similar to that observed in prosperous societies of Central Western Europe (France, West Germany, Austria, UK, Ireland). Typically, in CEE countries (except Slovakia and the Czech Republic) the percentages relating to all fields of membership and volunteering are generally twice or more lower than in the countries of Western Europe. Other data on volunteering also confirm a relatively low level of organised civic activity in CEE countries. The results coming from the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project show that the amount of unpaid work contributed for CSOs (expressed as a percentage of non-agricultural employment in a given country) positions CEE at the end of the list of regions under comparison (Figure 12.2). Also with these data, the Czech Republic and Slovakia seem to be more participating societies than the regional average. From quantity to quality: changing pattern of participation in CEE CSOs Among the main pillars of communist ideology was the claim that the party–state apparatus embodied the interests of socially leading classes, primarily the workers or working class, which was supposed to encompass nearly the whole society/nation. To demonstrate how wide their social base was, the communists both supported and controlled a range of political and social organisations, having millions of people on their lists of members. Besides their own party and the other satellite parties, the communist authorities encouraged and often pressed citizens to join massive, centralised and subordinated organisations such as trade unions, youth or students’ organisations and other membership organisations, mainly of

Table 12.2 Members in at least one organisation as a percentage of adult population by country/region, ca 1999 Field of organisation’s activity

Slovakia

Czech Republic

Hungary

Poland

Romania

Bulgaria

C-E Europe

C-W Europe

S-W Europe

N-W Europe

West Europe

All CSOs Trade union Sport Religious Cultural Professional Welfare Party Youth Local Health Environment Women Peace Third World

65 16 18 17 7 5 7 7 7 8 4 3 7 0 0

60 10 22 7 11 6 7 4 7 3 6 7 2 1 1

31 7 4 13 4 4 2 2 1 1 2 2 0 0 0

25 10 3 5 2 4 3 1 1 2 2 1 1 0 0

21 9 2 4 3 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 0 0 1

23 7 4 2 4 3 2 5 1 1 1 2 1 1 0

38 10 9 8 5 4 4 3 3 3 3 3 2 1 0

51 10 19 15 11 5 7 5 5 3 4 4 4 1 3

39 5 11 7 10 6 5 4 3 3 4 5 2 2 3

88 44 36 41 26 12 15 8 7 6 7 19 3 2 13

58 18 21 20 15 8 8 5 5 4 5 8 3 1 6

Data source: European Value Survey.

Table 12.3 Volunteers (doing unpaid voluntary work) in at least one organisation (or activity) of a given type as a percentage of adult population by country/region, ca 1999 Field of Czech Republic Slovakia Hungary Poland Romania Bulgaria C-E Europe C-W Europe S-W Europe N-W Europe West Europe organisation’s activity All CSOs Sport Religious Trade union Cultural Welfare Youth Party Local Professional Health Environment Women Third World Peace

33 10 3 3 6 4 6 2 2 2 3 3 1 0 0

51 13 13 6 6 6 5 5 7 3 4 2 5 0 0

Source: European Value Survey 1999.

15 3 5 1 3 3 1 1 1 2 1 2 0 0 0

14 2 4 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0

16 1 4 6 2 1 1 2 1 1 1 1 0 0 0

19 4 2 4 3 2 1 4 1 2 1 2 1 0 0

25 5 5 4 4 3 2 2 2 2 2 2 1 0 0

30 8 7 1 5 5 5 2 2 3 4 2 2 2 1

25 6 5 2 6 4 3 2 3 3 3 3 1 2 2

41 15 11 5 10 7 5 3 4 4 4 3 2 3 1

32 9 7 3 7 5 4 2 3 3 3 3 2 2 1

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3.9%

0.6%

0.6%

0.5%

0.5%

0.3%

0.3%

Average in five Latin American countries

Average in five CEE countries

Romania

Poland

Hungary

Czech Republic

Average in five other developed countries

Average in twelve EU countries

0.7%

Slovakia

3.0%

Figure 12.2 Voluntary work in CSOs compared to (as a percentage of) non-agricultural employment in a given country or region, ca. 1995 (source: Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project).

professional or recreational character. According to the communist ideology (rooted in Lenin’s works), the role of the trade unions was to became a “transmission belt” from the communist party to the masses. This attitude was extended to all associations allowed by the communist authorities. These parties, unions and other mass organisations began to lose their members with the first signs of the communist system’s decline. After communist dominance was over, the political motives of membership shrinkage became even more salient but they were also supplemented by economic reasons (e.g. vanishing material benefits, which used to be provided by trade unions and other mass organisations; trade unions lost many members due to privatisation of the largest factories and major industries). In CEE countries, the process of withdrawal from membership in organisations linked to communism started well into the 1980s and continued less intensively in the early 1990s, but the countries that emerged from the Soviet Union experienced the most rapid decrease in membership and volunteering between 1990 and 1999, as the political and economical changes began there much later and had a much more painful character than in CEE countries. After 1989, the freshly registered non-governmental organisations (NGOs) brought new social potential which had not been tapped by the organisations existing in communist times. This new membership however was not enough to replace the heavy losses suffered by the trade unions, parties and mass organisations. Therefore, the general dynamics of membership “in any CSOs” between 1990 and 1999 was negative in all CEE countries (⫺9 percentage points on average, see Table 12.4). The only exception was Slovakia, where the tense political situation caused considerable mobilisation of the society (membership in any organisation grew by 9 percentage points).

Table 12.4 Members in at least one organisation (or activity) of a given type by country/region, 1990–99 Country/region (no. of countries)

Members of at least one CSO (% of population)

Members of a trade union (% of population) ■

Poland Hungary Czech Rep. Slovakia Romania Bulgaria C-E Europe (6) Baltic Post-Soviet (3) Russia Slovenia East Europe (11) S-W Europe (3) C-W Europe (7) N-W Europe (4) West Europe (14)

Members of a political party (% of population) ■

1990

1999

change

1990

1999

change

1990

1999

change

42* 50 62 56 30 41 47 67 71 39 54 30 53 82 56

25 31 60 65 21 23 38 28 32 52 30 34 51 88 58

⫺17 ⫺19 ⫺2 9 ⫺9 ⫺18 ⫺9 ⫺39 ⫺40 13 ⫺24 4 ⫺2 7 2

22 32 24 22 20 19 23 51 62 19 34 4 13 41 19

10 7 10 16 9 7 10 6 23 17 11 4 10 44 18

⫺12 ⫺25 ⫺14 ⫺6 ⫺10 ⫺12 ⫺13 ⫺45 ⫺39 ⫺2 ⫺23 0 ⫺3 3 ⫺1

2 2 5 3 3 11 4 11 11 3 7 4 5 10 6

1 2 4 7 2 5 3 2 1 3 3 3 5 8 5

⫺1 ⫺1 ⫺1 4 0 ⫺7 ⫺1 ⫺9 ⫺11 0 ⫺4 ⫺1 ⫺1 ⫺2 ⫺1

Members of at least one organisation other than union or party (% of population) ■ 1990 1999 change 27* 28 49 43 13 23 30 32 20 27 30 30 48 70 51

19 24 54 56 13 14 30 22 12 44 27 30 47 81 53

⫺8 ⫺3 5 14 0 ⫺9 0 ⫺10 ⫺8 17 ⫺2 0 ⫺1 11 3

Source: European Value Survey (for 1999 – all countries, for 1990 – the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland) and World Value Survey (for 1990 – all countries except the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland). For more detailed data on countries within different parts of Europe – see Annex, Table A2). Notes * There is a visible difference between the pointed results on membership rate obtained in European Value Survey (EVS ’90) and the results from the survey “Sprawy Polaków” (Figure 3). The difference is explained by two factors: 1 There was a very dynamic social situation between the beginning of 1990 (when EVS was carried out) and the end of 1990 (when the other survey was realised) connected with the wide social engagement in Komitety Obywatelskie “Solidarnosc”(Citizens’ Committees “Solidarity”) and rapid decomposition of this social movement after it won the municipal elections in May 1990. 2 There was a methodological difference between the two surveys as regards the way of asking about membership in organisations other than unions or parties. In EVS there were 13 ⫹ 1 questions on different types of such organisations while in the other research (“Sprawy Polaków”) the same phenomenon was measured with just one open-ended question.

Slawomir Nale˛cz and Jerzy Bartkowski

174

In all CEE countries there was a huge decrease in trade union membership (⫺13 percentage points on average). The engagement in political parties grew only in Slovakia (from 3 per cent to 7 per cent) but in all other countries there was a decline. The dynamics of membership in organisations other than unions or parties was negative in most of the CEE countries, where the losses in mass organisation membership were large and the new membership brought by freshly registered NGOs were not enough to replace them (Poland: ⫺8 per cent points, Hungary: ⫺3 per cent points, Bulgaria: ⫺9 per cent points). In the case of Slovakia and the Czech Republic the dynamics of organisations other than unions or parties was positive (respectively ⫹5 and ⫹14 per cent points) due to a much smaller outflow from mass organisations accompanied by an influx of NGOs members. Thanks to the survey data on membership gathered in Poland by Adamski’s team it is possible to get a more detailed picture about the complex nature of the membership dynamics of the last two decades in post-communist countries (Figure 12.3). The results show that during the 1980s the most affected were political parties, but trade unions and other organisations, so-called “social organisations” or “mass organisations” allowed by the communist state, also experienced a large drop in their membership base. Political parties lost 90 per cent of their social base,5 trade unions experienced a 64 per cent decrease in their membership6 and other organisations, mostly collaborating with the communist state, suffered a 68 per cent reduction of their basis.7 Within this last category of “other organisations” (line with crosses in Figure 12.3) the biggest losers were:

Membership in any organisation Trade union membership Political parties membership Membership in organisations other than parties or unions 27%

13% 18%

17% 15%

21% 9% 1988

1984

1981

1980

8%

22% 6% 2% 1990

20%

22% 16% 7% 1%

24% 14% 13% 1% 2000

59% 60% 53%

1995

72%

Figure 12.3 Membership in at least one organisation and membership in the subgroups (trade unions, political parties and other organisations), percentage of adult population declaring the membership (source: Nale˛cz (2003) based on data from public opinion surveys organised within the “Sprawy Polaków” Project).

Social and economic potentials after 1989 175 • •

highly politicised youth organisations (e.g. Union of Socialist Youth of Poland),8 paramilitary organisations and other politically involved mass organisations such as the Poland-Soviet Union Friendship Association.9

During the 1990s, political parties, trade unions, and other mass organisations rooted in the communist era continued to lose members although this decrease was slower. Besides the people’s need to get rid of all links to the past system, other reasons also played an important role. In the 1990s, the membership base of trade unions shrank primarily due to a slow but sure disappearance of state-owned elements from the economy. Gradual withdrawal of the state from the position of major employer, continuous reduction of employment in large factories (which used to be unions’ strongholds) and the growing share of the private sector in the national employment accompanied by the negative attitude of new private employers toward unions as well as the disappearance of various in-kind benefits previously distributed by the unions – all these economy-related factors contributed to the decreasing dynamics of the unions membership. Additionally, at least in Poland, one can observe a popular dissatisfaction with excessively elitist, over political and inefficient activity of the unions’ representatives (Gardawski et al., 1999, pp. 257–62). New political parties, which emerged in 1990s, had too little internal democracy and failed to live up to the expectations that citizens would be involved in the public decision making process. They acquired an image as isolated groups of selfish individuals representing nobody but themselves in an endless fight for popularity and power. This kind of reputation obviously blocks wide participation in political parties. In the last category, called “other organisations” (represented by the line with crosses in Figure 12.3) membership dynamics were influenced by two processes. One was a continuous membership decrease in the subgroup of mass, communist-era rooted organisations and the other was an upsurge of citizens’ involvement in the activities of so-called non-governmental organisations (NGOs): new associations and foundations mostly registered after 1989. The first process was still related to the massive withdrawal from links with the fallen political system but it was also strongly influenced by the disappearance of in-kind benefits that communist-era organisations used to distribute.10 The second process influencing the dynamics of “other organisations” in the 1990s was related to the enthusiasm and social energy released during the “Citizens’ Autumn” of 1989. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) set up after this political breakthrough brought new members and volunteers filling up the losses in the social base suffered by the mass organisations. The result of these two processes was the decreasing dynamics of membership in “other organisations” observed in the 1980s, when the decline in mass organisations was most visible, and some small increase in the 1990s – when the decline in mass organisations continued but was accompanied by the upsurge of membership in newborn NGOs.

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Besides the political and economic changes, which framed the dynamics of engagement in CSOs we should also expect that other trends also may have influenced the social base of the organisations in CEE countries. The CEE societies – at least this is visible in the case of Poland – underwent a process of particularisation, which was well expressed in the title of the article “From Solidarity to Freedom”, where the author showed how protest activity changed from wide, solidarity-based actions towards more numerous but socially narrower types of protest (PelczynskaNale˛cz, 2001). The worsening of social bonds was also acknowledged by 63 per cent of adult Poles, who compared the present human relations to those in the year 1989 (Wciórka, 1999). If we assume that the two above-mentioned results can be interpreted as indicators of shrinkage in social solidarity, growth of particularisation or very limited scope of social ties then we can logically link these phenomena with the observation that there are fewer organisations that maintain wider and socially effective nets of members. Similar trends in membership were found in the USA and in some countries of Western Europe (Putnam, 1995; Fukuyama, 2000). All the above depicted alterations of the membership base were accompanied by a qualitative shift in the character of involvement in all CSOs, from massscale, not necessarily voluntary, and most often passive membership to a more elitist, deliberate, and active commitment animated by inner desire and free will.11 A public opinion poll carried out in Poland at the end of the 1990s showed that CSO members were doing unpaid voluntary work four times as often as other respondents (37 per cent of organisation members included in the surveys) and were twice as likely to furnish organisations with financial contributions (79 per cent of responding organisation members).12 Also, the comparative and dynamic data from European & World Value Surveys catch the qualitative shift in social base of CSOs in CEE. If we agree that the proportion of people who do unpaid voluntary work for CSOs to the number of citizens who belong to these organisations can be an indicator of either deeper or more superficial modes of organisational participation then the following table shows that the quality of CSOs’ social potential improved in most of the CEE countries between 1990 and 1999 (Table 12.5). The qualitative shift could be also observed in central EU countries, although this process was twice as intensive in the CEE region.

Economic capacity of civil society organisations in Central Eastern Europe Size and structure Thanks to the data on employment, revenues and expenses gathered by the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project we can easily assess the economic capacities of CSOs in CEE countries. According to the employment and expenses indicators, in the middle of the 1990s the average size of nonprofit sector economic capacity in the CEE countries was still five times smaller than in the EU or in other developed countries (Figure 12.4).

Social and economic potentials after 1989 177 Table 12.5 Proportion of the number of volunteers to the number of members in CSOs, in CEE and in other regions, 1990–99 Country/region (no. of countries)

1990

1999

Change

Czech Rep. Slovakia Hungary Romania Bulgaria C-E Europe (5)* Baltic Post-Soviet (3) Russia Slovenia East Europe (11) S-W Europe (3) C-W Europe (7) N-W Europe (4) West Europe (14)

0.5 0.5 0.3 0.8 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.5 0.5 0.5

0.6 0.8 0.5 0.7 0.8 0.7 0.7 0.3 0.6 0.6 0.6 0.6 0.5 0.6

0.1 0.3 0.2 ⫺0.1 0.3 0.2 0.2 ⫺0.1 0.2 0.1 0.0 0.1 0.0 0.1

Data source: European & World Value Surveys. Note * Data on Poland are not included in the regional average result due to incomparability of the question on volunteering, which was posed in Poland in 1990.

6.1%

5.9%

2.2% 0.6% Romania

0.9%

Slovakia

1.2%

Poland

1.2%

Average % in five CEE countries

1.3%

Hungary

Czech Republic

Average % in five Latin American countries

Average % in twelve EU countries

Average % in five other developed countries

1.7%

Figure 12.4 Non-profit sector employment as a percentage of hired non-agricultural employment in CEE countries and in other regions, ca 1995 (source: Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project).

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Besides its small size, another striking phenomenon of the non-profit sector in CEE countries is the weak economic potential of organisations acting in the area of the public welfare system. Education, social services, health care and local development oriented organisations, which form a vast majority of the non-profit sector economic potential in developed countries – these types of organisations are much less developed in CEE countries. The share of economic potential of the CEE non-profit organisations acting in the welfare services fields is 45 per cent, while in EU countries it adds up to 78 per cent (Figure 12.5).13 This sizeable difference in economic capacity of welfare oriented CSOs between CEE countries and EU countries grows even higher when the fivefold difference in overall size of the CEE and EU non-profit sectors is considered. Another problem concerning the economic capacity of CSOs is a very uneven distribution of paid workforce and other material assets. The vast majority of the resources is at the disposal of a small number of organisations typically located in the capital and other big cities. In Hungary “it is one third that earn 94 per cent of the total revenue of the sector” and in Poland “9% of organisations (those employing more than five persons), use nearly 2/3 of financial assets, while 75% of organisations (those with no employee) have at their disposal only 1/10 of all financial means of the sector” (Kuti and Sebestény, 2003, pp. 10–11; Nale˛cz, 2003, p. 29).

19%

Education/research 8%

Healthcare

19% 13%

Social Services

27%

5% 5%

Development Culture/sport/ recreation

34% 11% 2% 3%

Civic/advocacy

3% 1% Sector’s 2% infrastructure 0% International 1% 1% Environment

Average for five CEE countries Average for twelve EU countries

11%

Professional Other

27%

5% 2% 0%

Figure 12.5 Distribution of non-profit sector paid workforce in fields of the sector’s activity in CEE and EU, 1995 (source: Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project).

Social and economic potentials after 1989 179 Evolution of economic potential: from state-related bureaucracy through NGOs to PBOs In the first part of the 1990s, organisations that had been cooperating with the communist state or had been a part of the previous political system lost a large part of the subsidies they used to receive, or in some cases were just dissolved. In the majority of CEE countries, most of these organisations had to limit their activities as well as personnel. In Poland, between 1989 and 1992 the “social and political organisations” rooted in the communist era lost more than 60 per cent of employees (Nale˛cz, 2004, p. 316) while in the Czech Republic the “old” organisations did not suffer such visible loses and still constitute the bulk of the non-profit sector (Fric, 2004, p. 18). Nevertheless, in all CEE countries, a large group of the “old organisations” managed to keep a relatively strong economic position, which results in the high shares of the non-profit sector economic potential observed in the fields of sport & recreation or professional and labour organisations.14 (Figure 12.5) At the same time, the large number of newly registered civic organisations did not transform into a sizeable economic potential of the non-profit sector as the main capital of these new entities was most frequently just peoples’ enthusiasm (Fric, 2003, p. 18). The newborn organisations not only had modest founders but they were also quite temperate in seeking financial support from the state. Having in mind the bad image of the communist state and of the “mass organisations” that used to cooperate with it, the new civic organisations tried to keep a distance from the state. Being very careful about their identity as citizen-based, independent organisations, they liked to call themselves “nongovernmental organisations” (NGOs) as opposed to the old “social organisations” or “mass organisations”. On the part of the political authorities there was general acceptance of the civic organisations as an indispensable part of the new democratic system, but generally politicians and state officials had no vision of the non-profit sector. In the first part of the 1990s the political elites were pressed by the problems of political and economical transformation and were preoccupied with orthodox liberal ideology and so did not think about assisting the newborn NGOs or about treating them as an equal partner in the delivery of public services such as health care, social assistance or education (Les and Nale˛cz, 2002, p. 31). At the same time, state administration passively kept working contacts with the “old organisations” and granted them resources allocated to such fields as sport or recreation and, to a lesser extent, the field of arts and culture. Such a policy is well reflected by a high share of public sector money among the revenues of nonprofit organisations acting in these fields. The most striking example of such practices was found in Poland, where the share of state support in the revenues of sport organisations (37 per cent) is much higher than in all other fields of nonprofit organisations’ activity, including social services (29 per cent), health care (24 per cent) and education (21 per cent) (Nale˛cz, 2004, p. 332). This ambiguous relationship between the CSOs and the state is well shown in

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Public sector

Private and corporate donations

Average for twelve EU countries

50%

Average for four other developed countries

43%

Romania

45%

Czech Republic Average for five CEE countries Hungary

24%

Slovakia

22%

15% 10%

43%

8%

49%

27%

29%

14%

32%

Poland

Average for five Latin American countries

7%

39%

27%

Earned income (sales, membership dues)

47%

20%

49%

18%

16%

55%

60%

23%

55%

74%

Figure 12.6 Sources of non-profit sector revenue in CEE countries and in other regions, ca 1995 (source: Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project).

Figure 12.6, where we can see the structure of revenues on the level of the whole non-profit sector in different countries and regions. The low share of public money within the non-profit sector, forced many organisations to look intensively for their own sources of income (earned income). Although the most popular source of own revenues are membership dues, in terms of financial value the most important category has become income from separate commercial activity or from selling organisations’ services.15 The last but still significant source of non-profit sector revenues were donations. During the 1990s the most important private donors were foreign foundations and other international grant giving institutions. According to the data on Hungary and Poland, in the mid 1990s foreign support, mostly directed to new non-governmental organisations, accounted for 6–7 per cent of the total nonprofit sector’s revenue (Bocz et al., 2002; Nale˛cz, 2004, p. 331). Unfortunately, at the end of the decade, foreign donors began to withdraw from support of

Social and economic potentials after 1989 181 NGOs in CEE countries. This cut was mostly felt by the infrastructure organisations (e.g. providing information, training and other types of support for other organisations) as they relied heavily on foreign support. Since then the organisations have intensified their efforts to base their finances on local sources. In Hungary and Poland, in Slovakia and the Czech Republic, one can observe a variety of efforts to establish institutions responsible for gathering and distributing money for local CSOs; however, these activities have not brought substantial successes yet. We also witnessed a gradual expansion of media campaigns intended to strengthen philanthropic behaviour among businessmen and the general public as well as some trend among organisations to become more transparent and attractive for donors.16 The significant obstacle for a broader private contribution to the sector is the low level of private resources, mass poverty, and underdevelopment of philanthropic culture among the new business classes. Although the CEE states privatised the majority of the commercial industries, the sphere of public services still remains dominated if not monopolised by the state providers. Such government policy keeps the non-profit providers at the margins of the main types of social services. Available data from Hungary show that “the third sector’s contribution to the total output is (. . .) 5 and 3 per cent in education, health and social care, respectively” (Bocz et al., 2002; Kuti and Sebestény, 2003, p. 10). A similar situation is reported in Poland, where “the share of nonprofit organisations in the market of social services varies from 0.01% in the case of primary health care, through 0.6% – in the case of primary education and 3% in the case of secondary education up to the highest 14% – the share of inhabitants of stationary social welfare facilities” (Les and Nale˛cz, 2001, p. 20). At least 50 per cent of the relatively high share of social services delivered by non-profits in Poland is an output of the activities undertaken by church-based charities, which generally have a better material base than secular NGOs, and maintain good relations with state officials. Even during the hardest times of communism the Church preserved some of its pre Second World War social care facilities, although they were run under strong government control (Nale˛cz, 2004, pp. 319, 330). During the 1980s, the Church distributed a large amount of international help sent to Poland. In many parishes, committees were established to distribute this aid. It is fair to assume that, during the 1990s, not only in Poland but throughout the whole CEE region, church-related organisations generally made an impressive step towards rebuilding their social service providing institutions so deeply rooted in the Christian tradition (e.g. Caritas). Besides the core welfare services, where CSOs play a marginal role, there is also a sizeable fraction of new organisations – NGOs, which aim at responding to new social problems via advocacy for the interests of the needy and influence on the functioning of state-owned social service providers (e.g. the campaign “Giving birth in a human way” which made a great impact on humanising the maternity clinics and hospitals in Poland). Another kind of activity taken by the non-profit organisations within the services delivery area has been the setting up of mutual help organisations or the

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establishment of new types of services operating mostly on a voluntary basis (at least at the beginning). These services, however, were most often located in niches, relatively small spheres of social needs that had not been addressed by the market or the state institutions (e.g. shelters for the homeless, group therapies for drug addicts or alcoholics, hospices). The idea of contracting the welfare services out of the public sector and the concept of subsidiarity are still far from implementation. The result of keeping state dominance in the provision of the main welfare services is well visible in the form of small non-profit sector employment in comparison with the largescale personnel establishments of the public sector observed in CEE countries and the much greater respective indicators obtained for the 12 EU countries (Figure 12.7). The first legislative initiatives in the direction of equalisation of non-profit and state-owned service providers appeared in the second part of the 1990s. In Hungary and Slovakia the laws granting citizens the right to designate 1 per cent of income tax for non-profit or state-owned service providers have been passed (in 1997 and 1999 respectively) and in Poland a similar but much broader law has been in preparation since 1996.17 In the Czech Republic, the subject of equal access to taxpayers’ money for the public services providers, regardless of whether they belong to the state- or non-profit sectors, emerged as an important topic in parliamentary debates (Firc, 2003, p. 10). Together with these gradual changes more and more non-profit organisations try to present their activities as oriented toward the public good to obtain the status of Public Benefit Organisation (PBO) and become entitled to wider financial support from the taxpayers. At the same time, the previous reservations towards involvement in more extensive cooperation with the state as embedded 43.5% 31.9%

4.6%

3.2%

2.5%

2.0%

0.9%

Average for five CEE countries

Poland

Slovakia

Romania

Czech Republic

Average for five Latin American countries

Average for five other developed countries

Average for twelve EU countries

5.9%

Hungary

15.7%

Figure 12.7 Employment in non-profit sector compared to (as a percentage of) employment in public sector, in CEE countries and in other regions, c.1995 (source: Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project).

Social and economic potentials after 1989 183 in the term “non-governmental organisations” (NGOs) so well adapted by the organisations set up after 1989, slowly began to vanish.

Summary and conclusions Restructuring of the CSO’s potentials The political breakthrough of 1989 opened wide possibilities for the activity of manifold citizens’ initiatives that could not become legal during the communist regime. Unfortunately, the impressive growth of the number of newly registered CSOs observed in 1990s did not transform into a sizeable economic potential of the non-profit sector nor did it widen the social base of the sector. This does not mean, however, that these capacities remained unchanged. Quite the contrary; both economic and social potentials of the CSOs underwent substantial restructuring. The economic capacity was mostly shaped by the relationship between CSOs and the state. At the start of our analysis of the economic potential dynamics, we acknowledged the huge impact that the communist system had on the profile of organisations that existed in CEE countries in 1990 and later. This impact of the communist state policy was visible in the generally low economic potential of the non-profit sector as well as in the underdevelopment of CSOs focused on welfare services delivery.18 Also, the relatively strong economic position of sport/recreational organisations as well as the favourable situation of trade unions and some professional organisations were identified as legacies of l’ancien régime since these types of organisations had been generously subsidised and used as a tool of public support mobilisation by the communist state. With the end of the communist rule these “mass organisations” rapidly lost generous state subsidies and had to limit their activities as well as numbers of employees or were even closed. In spite of that decline, a big part of them survived and, in some of the CEE countries, they still make the bulk of the non-profit sector economic potential (e.g. in the Czech Republic). In all CEE countries the big, old organisations still keep a significant economic position, especially if, besides the income from their possessions inherited from communism, these organisations still consume the majority of public grants designated for sport, culture and recreation. In contrast to the old organisations, the new ones set up after 1989 kept some distance from the state administration and tried to realise their goals independently of the state, underlying their own non-communist, non-governmental identity. Unfortunately, in most cases, the financial base of the newly born nongovernmental organisations (membership dues, private donations, sales and foreign aid) turned out to be insufficient for them to become fully-fledged service providers and soon the organisations started to look for support from the means distributed by the state. Quite surprisingly, the new ruling elites, despite their oppositional, social

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movement background did not form any consistent policy of support for the newly born and mostly very poor non-governmental organisations (NGOs). The needs of rebuilding civil society were rather underestimated in the programmes of the reforms. The reforms undertaken by the CEE governments did not designate much space for the non-profit sector within the reformed public welfare systems. CSOs were, varyingly, treated as belonging to the non-public sector, to the private sector, or even as profit-oriented business entities; in many respects. This unsteady course is pursued even today. As a result, non-profit entities do not receive much support from the system for their socially beneficial activities, which is well reflected in the low share of state support within the non-profit sector revenues and in the small scale of non-profit sector employment compared with public sector employment. That kind of state policy towards the CSOs could have retarded non-profit sector development to a much greater degree if the organisations had not been supported by the foreign donors and if the traditional, church-related welfare services institutions had not been reconstructed with such determination as was the case, for instance, in Poland. The unfavourable state policy was gradually improving at the end of 1990s, as the idea of subsidiarity slowly made its way through the legislation of the CEE states. In Hungary and Slovakia a law, which enables citizens to designate 1 per cent of their income taxes to any non-profit or state owned entity dealing with welfare services, has been passed, while in Poland and the Czech Republic similar acts are being prepared.19 Step by step, CSOs specialising in the provision of welfare services are gradually becoming accepted partners in public service delivery entitled to receive public money in the same way as the state welfare institutions used to be. This recent trend in state policies however, is still far from being irreversible and has not yet brought significant enlargement of the non-profit sectors’ economic capacity. The recent changes in state policy towards CSOs were accompanied by the alteration of the organisations’ identity. Nowadays, the majority of them want to be seen not only as organisations that are independent of the state (NGOs) but also as public benefit organisations (PBOs) entitled to receive taxpayers’ money for the services they provide. The social potential of the CSOs in Central Eastern Europe was also the subject of deep restructuring. In the 1990s, we can observe a process of withdrawal from engagement in organisations linked to the fallen communist system (especially from parties and trade unions). In some of the CEE countries this tendency began well in the 1980s and therefore, in the 1990s, the decrease in membership was smaller than in other countries, where due to more severe and longer lasting communist regimes this type of social reaction came later and took place mostly within the 1990s (e.g. Post-Soviet Baltic countries). Apart from political reasons we also pointed to economic motives for the membership shrinkage in trade unions and in mass organisations. Most important for the unions was a reluctant, anti-union atmosphere within the growing private sector. At the same time, vanishing material benefits contributed to the

Social and economic potentials after 1989 185 membership decrease both in mass organisations and in trade unions (the disappearance of material benefits for the members of mass organisations and trade unions was caused by the cut in state subsidies and the reduction of social functions in enterprises, accordingly). The organisations registered after 1989 – called non-governmental organisations (NGOs) – brought new social potential that had not been tapped by the mass organisations during the communist times. Unfortunately, this new civic engagement was not enough to replace the heavy loses suffered by the trade unions, parties and mass organisations. The general dynamics of membership in “any CSO” between 1990 and 1999 was negative in all CEE countries but Slovakia. This general decline was mostly due to a huge decrease in trade union membership but the other communist linked organisations also experienced large outflows. The engagement in political parties grew only in Slovakia but in all other countries there was a decline. Membership in organisations other than unions or parties fell in most of the CEE countries, where the losses in mass organisations’ membership were large and the new membership brought by freshly registered NGOs was not enough to replace them (e.g. in Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria). In the case of Slovakia and the Czech Republic the dynamics of organisations other than unions or parties was positive due to a much smaller membership outflow from mass organisations accompanied by an influx of NGOs members. Besides the common decline in numbers of members observed in the CEE region, we also noticed a positive change as regards the quality of citizens’ engagement in the activities of CSOs. These developments were documented by the observed growth in the proportion of volunteers to members in CEE countries between 1990 and 1999. Present status of CEE CSO’s resources Despite the growth of CSO numbers observed in the 1990s, both the economic and social potentials of these organisations remain underdeveloped. In the middle of the 1990s, the economic capacity of the organisational infrastructure of civil society in CEE countries was still five times smaller than in the EU or in other developed countries. The welfare service oriented organisations, which constitute three-quarters of the non-profit sector economic potential in EU countries still make up only 45 per cent of the sector economic capacities in CEE countries. The underdevelopment of the service delivering CSOs goes hand in hand with low financial support from the state. In CEE countries, taxpayers’ money represented 32 per cent of all non-profit sector revenues, while in EU countries it was 50 per cent. The concentration of paid workforce and material assets in the organisations in the capital or other big cities, rather than in the organisations located in more remote areas had the consequence that the typical (i.e. most numerous type of) CEE CSO was poor, had no paid personnel and no support from the state. Of course, this unfavourable economic situation has been very discouraging

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for the organisations’ activists, members and volunteers. Recent research on foundations and associations in Poland provided some data showing how the poor economic situation of organisations can damage citizens’ organised activity20 (Da˛browska et al., 2002, p. 1). Another confirmation of the links between the economic and social potential of CSOs comes from the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project. A 24 country analysis demonstrated that the extent of volunteer work contributing to non-profit organisations in a given country is strongly correlated with the number of paid personnel employed by CSOs (Salamon and Sokolowski, 2001, p. 12). This finding well reflects the difference between CEE countries and well developed countries of the EU. In the CEE countries, the civil society organisations posses very few paid personnel and this limits the scope of social networks by which these organisations could attract volunteers or members. In the case of more developed countries, the wide networks created with help of quite sizeable paid staff allow non-profit organisations to widely educate the public about the social problems they want to solve and to mobilise people to join these efforts on a voluntary basis. Generally, the social potential of CSOs in CEE countries must be described as being relatively small. In this region, the average citizen’s engagement expressed by the percentage of CSO members in the population or by the rate of volunteers is nearly twice lower than in EU countries. It is possible though, to point to exceptional CEE countries having relatively high membership and volunteering rates (e.g. the Czech Republic and Slovakia) as well as to southern EU countries (e.g. Italy, Portugal, Spain) in which percentages of volunteers and members among their populations are at the level of average CEE countries. The most popular fields of membership and volunteering are the same in EU and CEE countries (trade unions, sport, religious, cultural, professional and welfare oriented organisations) but in the CEE the rates of membership and volunteering are approximately half while the engagement in trade unions was still much higher. Conclusions Consistent with our initial assumptions on the possible influence that could be exercised on CEE societies by CSOs, we must conclude that according to the data presented in this article any expectations that the organisations could play a large role in the rapid transformation of CEE societies into civil societies seem to be too optimistic. The results of comparative analysis showed that, at the end of 1990s, the economic capacities of CEE CSOs were very weak, mostly due to the legacies of communism but also as a result of ambivalent policies of the new post-1989 governments. Having very limited economic potential (as is still the case), the non-profit organisations can perform a significant service function only in some niches left

Social and economic potentials after 1989 187 by the state and not yet explored by the market (e.g. shelters for homeless, hospices), while in the core welfare services their share remains marginal. The social base of CEE CSOs was also quite limited. The rates of members or volunteers within the CEE societies turned out to be nearly half that in EU countries. The flow of social resources, people’s financial contribution or voluntary work, is impeded by the economic crisis and the communist legacy in the form of mass habits. The modest number of citizens involved in the organisations’ activities also limits the potential influence that the organisations could have on the society at large. These poor economic and social circumstances seriously limited the organisations’ ability to influence the social reality of CEE countries both with regard to the CSOs’ economic function (provision of social services) as well as in terms of their social impacts (participation, pluralism, integration, socialisation). On the other hand, the economic and social assets of the CEE CSOs underwent important restructuring, which made them more independent and better representative of the needs of their more elite-like, but also more engaged, members. The CSOs are slowly but consistently trying to recover pre-communist charity traditions as well as to make use of European Integration processes to strengthen their position within the systems of public institutions of the CEE countries. Hopefully, these trends will continue to widen the scope of impacts generated by the activity of CSOs.

Annex Table A1 Social base of civil society organisations (membership and volunteering), according to the type of organisation, by country/region, c.1999 Country/region

Netherlands Denmark Sweden Finland N-W Europe (4) France United Kingdom Northern Ireland West Germany Belgium Austria Ireland C-W Europe (7) Italy Greece Spain Portugal S-W Europe (4) West Europe (15) Poland

Members of at least one organisation (as percentage of population in given country) All Civil Society Organisations

Trade unions

Political parties

Organisations other than parties or unions

92 84 96 80 88 39 34 46 51 65 67 57 51 42 56 31 28 39 58 25

24 55 62 34 44 4 7 6 7 16 19 10 10 6 8 4 2 5 18 10

9 7 10 6 8 2 3 2 3 7 12 4 5 4 8 2 2 4 5 1

91 68 92 74 81 37 30 45 46 60 60 53 47 38 44 28 22 33 53 19

Volunteers in at least one organisation or activity (as percentage of population) ■

All Civil Society Organisations

Trade unions

Political parties

Organisations other than parties or unions

34 37 56 38 41 27 42 21 21 35 30 33 30 26 40 18 16 25 32 14

2 4 11 4 5 1 2 1 0 2 2 2 1 2 5 1 0 2 3 2

3 3 4 3 3 1 1 1 1 3 3 2 2 2 5 1 1 2 2 1

49 36 54 36 44 25 43 21 22 35 29 29 29 24 32 17 13 22 31 12

Hungary Czech Republic Slovakia Romania Bulgaria C-E Europe (6) Estonia Latvia Lithuania Baltic Post-Soviet (3) Ukraine Belarus Russia Other Post-Soviet (3) Croatia Slovenia Post-Yugoslavian (2) East Europe (14)

31 60 65 21 23 38 34 31 19 28 35 46 32 37 43 52 47 37

Data source: European Value Survey.

7 10 16 9 7 10 5 11 2 6 21 39 23 28 12 17 14 14

2 4 7 2 5 3 2 2 2 2 2 1 1 1 5 3 4 3

24 54 56 13 14 30 29 22 15 22 16 10 12 13 36 44 40 26

15 33 51 16 19 25 18 22 16 19 13 19 8 13 24 29 26 21

1 3 6 6 4 4 1 2 1 1 4 5 4 4 4 3 4 3

1 2 5 2 4 2 2 1 2 1 1 1 0 1 2 1 2 2

14 30 47 10 12 21 17 21 12 17 9 14 5 9 22 27 24 18

Table A2 Membership dynamics according to the type of organisation, by country/region, 1990–99 Country

Netherlands Denmark Sweden Finland N-W Europe (4) France United Kingdom Northern Ireland West Germany Belgium Austria Ireland C-W Europe (7) Italy Spain Portugal S-W Europe (3) West Europe (14) Poland Hungary Czech Rep. Slovakia Romania

Members of at least one CSO (% of population)

1990

1999

change

84 81 85 77 82 38 52 56 67 57 53 49 53 34 22 33 30 56 42 50 62 56 30

92 84 96 80 88 39 34 46 51 65 67 57 51 42 31 28 34 58 25 31 60 65 21

9 4 11 4 7 2 ⫺18 ⫺10 ⫺18 8 14 8 ⫺2 9 9 ⫺6 4 2 ⫺17 ⫺19 ⫺2 9 ⫺9

Members of a trade union (% of population) ■

1990

1999

19 49 59 36 41 5 14 12 16 14 19 9 13 6 3 5 4 19 22 32 24 22 20

24 55 62 34 44 4 7 6 7 16 19 10 10 6 4 2 4 18 10 7 10 16 9

change 5 6 4 ⫺2 3 ⫺1 ⫺7 ⫺6 ⫺9 2 0 1 ⫺3 0 1 ⫺2 0 ⫺1 ⫺12 ⫺25 ⫺14 ⫺6 ⫺10

Members of a political party (% of population) ■

1990

1999

change

9 7 10 14 10 3 5 2 8 6 12 4 5 5 2 4 4 6 2 2 5 3 3

9 7 10 6 8 2 3 2 3 7 12 4 5 4 2 2 3 5 1 2 4 7 2

0 0 0 ⫺8 ⫺2 ⫺1 ⫺2 1 ⫺4 1 0 1 ⫺1 ⫺1 0 ⫺2 ⫺1 ⫺1 ⫺1 ⫺1 ⫺1 4 0

Members of at least one organisation other than union or party (% of population) ■

1990

1999

83 65 68 66 70 36 47 51 61 53 44 46 48 35 22 34 30 51 27 28 49 43 13

91 68 92 74 81 37 30 45 46 60 60 53 47 38 28 22 30 53 19 24 54 56 13

change 8 3 24 9 11 1 ⫺17 ⫺5 ⫺11 7 15 7 ⫺1 3 7 ⫺11 0 3 ⫺8 ⫺3 5 14 0

Bulgaria C-E Europe (6) Estonia Latvia Lithuania Baltic Post-Soviet (3) Russia Slovenia East Europe (11)

41 47 73 68 60 67 71 39 54

23 38 34 31 19 28 32 52 30

⫺18 ⫺9 ⫺40 ⫺37 ⫺42 ⫺39 ⫺40 13 ⫺24

19 23 59 52 43 51 62 19 34

7 10 5 11 2 6 23 17 11

⫺12 ⫺13 ⫺54 ⫺41 ⫺41 ⫺45 ⫺39 ⫺2 ⫺23

11 4 8 18 7 11 11 3 7

5 3 2 2 2 2 1 3 3

⫺7 ⫺1 ⫺6 ⫺17 ⫺5 ⫺9 ⫺11 0 ⫺4

23 30 36 32 27 32 20 27 30

14 30 29 22 15 22 12 44 27

⫺9 0 ⫺7 ⫺11 ⫺13 ⫺10 ⫺8 17 ⫺2

Data source: European Value Survey (for 1999 – all countries; for 1990 – the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland) and World Value Survey for 1990 – all countries but the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland.

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Notes 1 The categorisation proposed above was elaborated in Slawomir Nalecz’s PhD dissertation “Spoleczne znaczenie sektora non-profit w III RP” (Social Impact of the Nonprofit Sector in the III Republic of Poland) inspired by works of various authors: Schmitter (1997); Diamond (1999); Forbrig (2000); Szacki (1997); Sicinski (1991); Salamon et al. (2000). 2 There is a controversy whether the organisations officially recognised by the communist state enjoyed enough autonomy to be classified as civil society organisations. It seems however there was no universal rule. The amount of control exercised by the communist regimes varies with the type of associations and social environment, mainly with the size of locality. It depends on the country’s political regime as well. In the Czech Republic and in Poland the organisations were much more subordinated to the state than was the case in Hungary, where “. . . relatively liberal Hungarian version of state socialism had let ‘politically innocent’ voluntary associations exist, the development of the politically free third sector did not start from zero” (Kuti and Sebestény, 2003, p. 8). 3 In reality, at the turn of the century, there may even be a decline in the number of active organisations as it is difficult to say if the number of organisations registered in a given year exceeds the number of those which finished or suspended their activities but they did not have enough determination to de-register. The reports from Poland and the Czech Republic confirm that only about 2/3 of registered organisations remain active (USAID, 2002, pp. 60, 121). 4 In the countries where the soviet system remained for the longest period we can still observe quite high membership rates in trade unions but these particular memberships seem to be more inertial than actual. In the Soviet Union (up to 1991) membership in trade unions was often forced and brought no real engagement for the members. Trade union membership was strictly connected with employment, and meant nothing more than access to some social benefits. After the collapse of communism many workers left unions but we still can observe a significant part of them holding these memberships, but it is not accompanied by the real voluntary engagement (see Table 12.1). All other types of organisations apart from the unions, have uniquely low rates of membership and volunteering. 5 In 1980, 18 per cent of adult Poles declared membership in the communist party or other subordinated political party and in 1990 only 1.8 per cent belonged to any party. 6 Sixty per cent of respondents declared they belonged to a trade union in 1980 and only 22 per cent in 1990. 7 In 1980, 20 per cent of respondents declared membership in “other organisations” also called “social organisations” or mass organisations (i.e. the ones allowed during communism, which were not political parties nor trade unions) and only 7 per cent did so in 1990. 8 Nine per cent in 1980 and only 2 per cent in 1981 of adult Poles declared membership in “youth organisations”, which were steered by the Political Bureau of the communist party. 9 According to its official records, the Poland–Soviet Union Friendship Association lost more than 2.5 million of members between 1979 and 1985 (i.e. it lost more than half of its membership base, from 12.3 to 5.7 per cent of adult Poles). 10 In the 1990s, mass-social organisations previously subsidised by the communist state had to limit the services and other benefits they used to provide to their members and of course suffered large losses in their membership base. According to the data published in Statistical Yearbooks of Republic of Poland, between 1990 and 1997 the Polish Red Cross lost 261,000 members, the Polish Tourist Country-Lovers Association 395,000 and sport clubs 3,335,000 members (Nale˛cz, 2004, p. 42). 11 The practices of collective membership, when the whole personnel of a large factory

Social and economic potentials after 1989 193

12 13 14

15 16

17 18

19 20

or all pupils from chosen schools were made members of certain mass organisations without even asking them about it were well known in all Soviet Bloc countries. A very popular phenomenon was also an instrumental membership in the communist party or activity in its allied mass organisations undertaken to advance individual professional careers. Both forced and instrumental types of engagement contributed to the unfavourable image of membership and voluntary activity among the public. Data obtained in a public opinion survey carried out by OBOP in mid-1998, comprising a representative sample of adult Poles on instructions from the Comparative Nonprofit Sector Research team in Poland. In Scandinavian countries the share of welfare oriented NPOs is much lower than the EU average but still mostly exceeds 60 per cent (of non-profit sector economic potential in a given country). The communist authorities allowed, generously supported and even animated activity of mass organisations acting in the fields of sport, recreation and professional organisations as well as subordinated trade unions. These organisations were treated as a part of social politics and carriers of several individual and family benefits. In the case of sport there was additional reason for the state to support the organisations: sport was perceived as part of the international political competition between socialist and capitalist blocs. State support was especially strong in the former GDR. Within the subcategory of “sales” a quite important role is played by the money from office space rentals. This kind of income is often a founding base for “old” organisations that inherited some real estates from their communist era belongings. Among major media campaigns of the CEE CSOs one can mention, in Poland: a nationwide and still expanding, giving action of the Wielka Orkiestra Swia˛tecznej Pomocy (“the Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity”) (being organised yearly since 1990), contest for the title of “Dobroczynca Roku” (The donor of the Year); in the Czech Republic: “30 days for the civic sector” campaign (Fricˇ, 2004, p. 10). By the time this book is published the Law on Public Benefit Activity and Volunteering will have been passed by the Polish Parliament. The communist state wanted to keep its own monopoly in the welfare services such as education, health care, social services and therefore it liquidated and nationalised independent service providers, which were run by churches or independent CSOs. The result of this policy was still visible even six years after the fall of communism. In 1995, service delivery oriented non-profit organisations in CEE countries had one-eighth of the economic potential of their EU counterparts (relative to the given country’s economy). By the time this book is published the Law on Public Benefit Activity and Volunteering will have been passed by the Polish Parliament The results of a representative survey of foundations and associations carried out in 2002 showed that only 58 per cent of registered associations and foundations were really active while 10 per cent were definitely dissolved and the remaining 30 per cent were so inactive they were just impossible for the interviewers to find. Most often mentioned reasons for terminating the organisation’s activity were difficulties in raising funds (mentioned by 27 per cent of dissolved organisations) and then exhausted enthusiasm of the activists (22 per cent) (Da˛browska et al., 2002, p. 1).

Bibliography Da˛browska, J., Gumkowska, M. and Wygnanski, J. (2002) Podstawowe fakty o organizacjach pozarza˛dowych – raport z badania 2002 (Warsaw: Klon/Jawor). Diamond, L. (1996) Toward Democratic Consolidation, in L. Diamond and M. F. Plattner (eds) The Global Resurgence of Democracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), pp. 227–40.

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Bocz, J., Cseh, J., Kuti, É., Mészáros, G. and Sebestény, I. (2002) Nonprofit szervezetek Magyarországon, 2000 (Nonprofit organisations in Hungary, 2000) (Budapest: Központi Statisztikai Hivatal). Fric, P., Goulli R. and Vyskocˇilová, O. (2004, forthcoming) Czech country chapter, in E. Priller and A. Zimmer (eds) Future of Civil Society in Central Europe (Opladen: Leske ⫹ Budrich). Forbrig, J. (2004) Civil Society. Theory and Practice in East-Central Europe. PhD dissertation, Florence, European University Institute. Fukuyama, F. (2000) Wielki Wstrza˛s (The Great Disruption) (Warszawa: Politeja). Gardawski, J., Ga˛ciarz, B., Mokrzyszewski, A. and Panków, W. (1999) Summary, in J. Gardawski et al. Rozpad bastionu? Zwia˛zki zawodowe w gospodarce prywatyzowanej (Warszawa: Instytut Spraw Publicznych). Kuti, É. (1996) The nonprofit sector in Hungary, in E. Priller and A. Zimmer (eds) The Future of Civil Society in Central Europe (Opladen: Leske ⫹ Budrich). Kuti, É. and Sebestény, I. (2003, forthcoming) The nonprofit sector in Hungary, in E. Priller and A. Eckhard/Zimmer (eds) The Future of Civil Society in Central Europe (Opladen: Leske ⫹ Budrich). Les, E. and Nale˛cz, S. (2001) Mie˛dzynarodowe badania sektora non-profit w Polsce Raport zbiorczy. Warszawa: typescript, Komitet Badan Naukowych (grant nr H02E 011 16). Les, E. and Nale˛cz, S. (2002) Infrastruktura spoleczenstwa obywatelskiego. Wybrane Wyniki Mie˛dzynarodowych Badan Sektora Non-Profit w Polsce, in P. Glinski et al. (eds) Samoorganizacja spoleczenstwa polskiego: trzeci sector (Warszawa: IFiS PAN), p. 13–31. Nale˛cz, S. (2002) Tendencje rozwojowe sektora non-profit w III RP, in A. Juros (ed.) Organizacje pozarza˛dowe w spoleczenstwie obywatelskim – wyzwanie dla srodowisk akademickich (Lublin: LOS), pp. 25–30. Nale˛cz, S. (2004) Organizacje spoleczenstwa obywatelskiego w III RP, in I. Jackiewicz (ed.) Budowanie instytucji panstwa 1989–2001. W poszukiwaniu modelu (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Sejmowe). Pelczynska-Nale˛cz, K. (2001) Od Solidarnosci do wolnosci. Dynamika aktywnosci politycznej w okresie zmiany systemowej, manuscript (Warsaw: Instytut Filozofii i Socjologii PAN). Putnam, R. D. (1995) Bowling alone, Journal of Democracy, No. 1. Salamon, L. et. al. (1999) Global Civil Society. Dimensions of the Nonprofit Sector (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, Center for Civil Society Studies). Salamon, L. and Sokolowski, W. (2001) Volunteering in Cross-National Perspective: Evidence From 24 Countries. Working Papers of the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project, no. 40 (Baltimore: the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Center for Civil Society Studies). Salamon, L. et al. (2000) Global Civil Society At-a-Glance. Major Findings of the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, Center for Civil Society Studies). Schmitter, P. C. (1997) Civil Society East and West, in L. Diamond, M. F. Plattner, Yunhan Chu and Hung-mao Tien (eds) Consolidating the Third Wave Democracies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), pp. 239–62. Sicinski, A. (1991) Spoleczenstwo obywatelskie jako przedmiot badan spolecznych w Polsce, in Socjologia polityki w Polsce (Gdansk), pp. 39–45. Siellawa-Kolbowska, K. (2002) Niezalezne inicjatywy spoleczne w Polsce konca lat

Social and economic potentials after 1989 195 osiemdziesia˛tych, in P. Glinski et al. (eds) Samoorganizacja spoleczenstwa polskiego: trzeci sector (Warszawa: IFiS PAN), pp. 80–91. Szacki, J. (1997) Wste˛p. Powrót do idei spoleczenstwa obywatelskiego, in J. Szacki (ed.) Ani ksia˛ze˛, ani kupiec obywatel. Idea spoleczenstwa obywatelskiego w mysli wspólczesnej (Kraków-Warszawa: Znak-Fundacja im. Stefana Batorego), pp. 5–62. United States Agency for International Development, Bureau for Europe and Eurasia, Office of Democracy and Governance (2002) The 2001 NGO Sustainability Index for Central and Eastern Europe and Eurasia (http://www.usaid.gov/regions/europe_ eurasia/dem_gov). Wciórka, B. (1999) Czy grozi nam samotnosc w tlumie?, A public opinion survey summary (Warszawa: CBOS).

13 Weber, Eastern Europe, and civil society Christopher Adair-Toteff

After the fall of communism, many societies in Eastern Europe were ripe for change. Young people in particular were filled with hopes and dreams of a better life, or at least one that was radically different from that of their parents. They rejected totalitarian ideologies and longed for “civil society”. However, many students did not know where to find transitions – bridges – to show them how to create and live in a “civil society”. The American University in Bulgaria was established in 1992 with the idea of introducing a western, liberal arts curriculum to the students of Bulgaria and from a number of other countries in the region. In the first several years, faculty retention was atrocious, some found dealing with the students too difficult, others found the country too harsh, and others left because of both reasons. My wife and I joined the faculty in 1994, I was professor of philosophy, my wife professor of German and then sociology. The philosophy program was remarkably like many in the United States. Courses included Introduction to Philosophy, Logic, and three history of philosophy courses. The students responded predictably, they were baffled by the terminology, concepts, and arguments, and saw little relevance in the subject. This was understandable given the challenges facing them and us. This was a new school with new ideas, which challenged the old orthodoxy. Even the main university building seemed a risk: it had been the former Communist Party headquarters for southeast Bulgaria, and it was now the new bastion of the invading West. Locals and students alike were suspicious. Was this a CIA plot? One recurring “joke” was to identify the CIA operative among the faculty – a “joke” participated in by both students and faculty. Many students really wanted to learn about the West, and to become part of it. Yet, many of these same students had justifiable pride in the traditions and customs of their families. They were both envious and resentful. And, above all, they were suspicious. Most had grown up in countries with deteriorating standards of living. Many students’ parents earned a fraction of what they had earned before the change, and now with few or no social-security type benefits. Further, many of the old ways of treating students refused to die. Bribes were required, humiliation expected. Unfortunately, a few of the university’s own faculty continued these practices. Then there was the issue of the “environment”: chronic power outages, water shortages, and lack of food, to mention only some of the factors

Weber, Eastern Europe, and civil society 197 that faculty and students confronted almost daily. It was, of course, tremendously difficult for the expatriate faculty, but it was also really hard on the students. By 1994–96 students were coming from many countries: Bulgaria of course, but also from Romania, Yugoslavia, from Kazakhstan, Georgia, Moldovia, and even Poland, among others. While their family backgrounds differed, some were sons and daughters of former high Communist Party officials, others came from poor families. But they shared many traits. They were suspicious. When, during my first year, I asked one of my students to please answer a question about Descartes, the answer was totally unintelligible. The young woman in question was quite intelligent, so I asked her again. She responded with an excellent answer. I then asked: “Why did you not say this before?” Her reply was: “We were taught never to provide a direct response – because that could be held against us.” Two years later a student was taking a philosophy course from me as well as a sociology course from my wife. He was a bright student but failed his first sociology exam. When asked what was the problem, he replied that he had blinding headaches that interfered with his reading and that stopped him from concentrating. Two weeks of our working with various doctors and 15 dollars solved the problem. This young man of 25, who had served in the Romanian army, and whose doctors had even diagnosed the problem years earlier, could not afford the fifteen dollars for the proper glasses. The Fall of 1996 brought about many unpleasant changes, the most important was the increasing rate of inflation. By winter, many Bulgarians had to decide whether to have heat or have food – they could not afford both. January was very cold and inflation was into triple digits. The few things left on the shelves had prices changed several times a day. During the Fall I had decided that I would try a political philosophy course for the Spring. The timing could not have been better. By early February the country was politically deadlocked, mass demonstrations had sprung up around the country. Some AUBG students also participated. Many, however, were intimidated by the faculty: several teachers refused to allow their students to march and one political science professor cautioned that if they marched instead of attending his lectures they would be penalized. The notion that his lectures on some obscure political science theory were more important than the actual political events occurring outside was too much for many students and for me. Here I saw how Weber could make a major difference in helping the students to come to their own beliefs and their own decisions. I stressed Weber’s distinction between fact and value and argued that as students of political philosophy we had the obligation to examine situations from as many viewpoints as possible, to be “objective”. But, as political beings they had the right, if not the duty, to voice their beliefs. The students appreciated the difference between the cool impartiality of investigation and the hot partisan fervor. The political and economic crises were solved and things began to return to normal. However, I had realized, my students had made me realize, that I could not return to teaching them about Kantian epistemology. Instead, I needed to introduce more of them to Weber. The students

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liked Weber’s political philosophy. They saw in it an optimism that sometimes reflected their own. More often, though, they appreciated his relentless honesty about how a state functions. They were familiar with state power and the threats to use that, but now they had someone who could demonstrate the pros and cons of political power. More importantly, they easily grasped Weber’s two types of ethics. While some had an inclination to the ethics of conviction, Luther’s “Here I stand I can do no other”, most were drawn to the ethics of responsibility. They rejected Kant’s claim that we are not able to know the possible consequences of our actions. The students lived in the “real” world where we may not be able to know those consequences, but they were convinced that Weber was right in that we have the obligation to consider what the possible effects of our actions could be. They also appreciated Weber’s suggestion that the two types of ethics could be found in one and the same person. What they liked was not Kant’s ideal categorical imperative but Weber’s real imperatives to conviction and to responsibility. They had seen enough of a system where ideology ruled and of the unfortunate results that followed. They wanted a political approach that reflected political realities. A number of students seemed particularly interested in religion so I developed a philosophy of religion course that neither endorsed nor repudiated faith. Again, I emphasized Weber’s sense of value neutrality, that religion was to be studied. I also introduced Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism. Whereas students were unimpressed with Meister Eckhart, David Hume, or Friedrich Schleiermacher, they appreciated Weber. Although many of the students seemed to have the traditionalist’s approach to work: to work only enough to get by, most of them came to appreciate the importance of Luther’s notion of “Beruf”, or “calling”. They liked the idea of having a vocation and working hard in it. They began to reject the “traditional” approach to work “that we pretend to work and you pretend to pay us”. They began to work harder and their papers and exams reflected those efforts. They were intrigued by the notion of double election and they were able to relate to Weber’s characterization of the supreme “inner loneliness” of the Calvinist. They were not impressed by Franklin’s “utilitarianism” but they were by the modern capitalist’s “ethos” of hard work. I used The Protestant Ethic a number of times and not only in the philosophy of religion courses. And, in each and every instance, I found that the students responded extremely well to what Weber had to say. I offered a seminar on Weber. The cap was 20 but it drew 22 students. We worked through a number of Weber’s political, religious, and economic writings. It was a major success. I like to think that the course was such a success because I was such a superior professor but I know that it was really because of Weber. As before, the students appreciated Weber’s insights into human interaction, especially on political and social levels. They valued his passionate scientific “objectivity” as well as his passionate political involvement. And, they liked his discussions about legitimate domination. They could relate to all three “ideal” types: charismatic, traditional, and legal. During the summer of 2000, one of the four economics professors decided

Weber, Eastern Europe, and civil society 199 not to return to Bulgaria. I was on sabbatical that Fall and tried to think of something that I could do to help out the Economics discipline. Interdisciplinary courses were encouraged so I proposed an economics/philosophy coursed based on Weber’s Economy and Society. The dean, who was also one of the economics Faculty, liked the idea but some of the others were not keen about it. At least, not until another economics professor gave notice that she was leaving in December; then my idea was warmly embraced. I had expected only a handful of students and followed the pre-enrollment figures with fascination. By the beginning of the Economics/Philosophy class I had 62 students in two sections. It was over-enrolled by two students. I explained on the first day of class that we would not be reading all of Economy and Society but would read most of it. I also explained that this was a new course and I was uncertain of its success. I also mentioned my trepidation in dealing with economics and business majors. And most of the students were in those two fields. I also indicated that I would be using as many practical examples from “real” life to help to illustrate Weber’s theoretical points. It was surprising that no student withdrew from the course. The students, like many readers, had a difficult time understanding the first chapter of Economy and Society because it seems so abstract if not even artificial. But, they did appreciate Weber’s discussion about the artificiality of money. It took little effort to demonstrate to them that the “worth” of money is not necessarily fixed and unchangeable. No wonder, seeing how within four years they had seen the introduction of 500 leva notes, 1000, 2000, 5000, 10,000 and even 50,000 notes. Smaller bills replaced these large bills so they would not take up so much space. The exchange rate was 44 leva to the dollar in 1994; it was 440 leva to the dollar in 1997. Coins, the “Stoiniki” were phased out and then reintroduced. The leva was originally pegged to the dollar and then to the German Mark. Students also appreciated Weber’s discussion of domination. They knew about tradition, it was heavily factored in the family. They were intrigued by the notion of the charismatic leader partly because of the precariousness of the leader’s power and also because of what happens when the leader dies. Does the movement whither away or does it become fossilized? In any event, it is fundamentally transformed, and often for the worse. They were skeptical of Weber’s discussion of the legal, or bureaucratic, form of domination. They approved of the notion of the impartiality of the bureaucrat who bases decisions on proclaimed rules, but they also had had experience with bureaucrats who did not do that. They knew of the so-called bureaucrat not only under the communists but also under the capitalists. They were learning first-hand that even the AUBG administration was inventing rules that seemed design to thwart the students’ privileges and rights. And, sometimes, they were absolutely right to see that this was what was being done. Faculty, too, saw rules being put into place to “safeguard” certain things rather than ordering the few offenders to stop what they were doing. I often reminded students that Weber was not endorsing legal authority and that he frequently cautioned against its excesses.

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The students approved of much of what Weber had to say about the family. They came from families where everyone was close. They had difficulty understanding that while some American and European families are also close, there are some where brothers and sisters and even parents and children would rather not have anything to do with each other. They easily understood Weber’s opinion that Socrates and the “discovery” of the concept along with the invention of the scientific experiment were the two “causes” of Western rationalism. They appreciated how these moved us away from beliefs in gods and magic, and how it gave us the sense of control over our lives. They also understood Weber’s belief that rational arguments cannot be used to support our fundamental beliefs and that often, if not invariably, there will be clashes. In this, they took to heart what Weber said in his “swan song” Wissenschaft als Beruf. Students appreciated his ideal types regarding asceticism and mysticism. I tried to stress that these may seem to be polar opposites but sometimes the differing traits were found in one and the same person. They easily grasped the notion of the world-fleeing ascetic and only less so the idea of the inner world ascetic. This was the difference between the Catholic Monk and the Puritan ascetic. As expected, given that most of the students were majoring in accounting, business, and economics, the students mostly appreciated discussions about these matters. Here, it was not so much what Weber said, but what I thought were Weberian themes that intrigued them. Some of this had to do with money: showing them different countries’ bills and asking which ones would they prefer. My point was to emphasize Weber’s (and Aristotle’s) belief in the “conventionality” of money. I asked them to follow the disagreement over whether Mexican trucks should be allowed into the United States. While most of the discussion centered on the issue of the Mexicans’ truck’s safety the students came to realize that much of it was on the hidden issue of the American truck driver’s livelihood. They learned from this and other discussions that issues are rarely simple and often there is much that is going on behind the scenes. This, then, was a matter of trust. I stressed that in most, if not all, situations, trust is essential. Whether it is between boyfriend and girlfriend, between politician and a constituent, or between a businessperson and a customer, trust is crucial. The lack of trust can be, and often is, damaging. And often the damage is permanent. Weber and his Weltanschauung taught the students much and they learned it well. The results of the course were both surprising and gratifying. Only two of the 62 said that the course had not changed much of their thinking about economics and society. The vast majority had the opinion that it fundamentally altered their perceptions about people and money. Also, the vast majority said that they appreciated the course because it was totally unlike their courses in accounting, business, and economics. At the beginning I had told them that we would be thinking about financial matters, not engaged in them. The course was a philosophy of economics and sociology. These were the “subjective” results. The

Weber, Eastern Europe, and civil society 201 “objective” results were the following: the lowest grade was a B⫺, and I am considered a fairly hard grader. By far the majority of the students received As, A⫺s, with some B⫹s. And, they all earned those grades. They demonstrated a great understanding of Weber’s ideas, and I think this was in large measure because they liked them and so they understood them. I am not so certain that having so many students from Eastern Europe being Weberians is a good thing, but I am convinced that it is not a bad thing. The seven years that we spent in Bulgaria were among the most difficult of my life. The lack of goods and services, the political, economic, and social turmoil, all took their toll. Friends in Germany and in the United States kept asking why did we continue to be there. The majority of the expatriate teachers lasted one, two, or three years at most. Did we not have enough sense to leave, our friends wondered. The answer was, from the beginning, straightforward: the students that we had at the American University in Bulgaria were among the best and the brightest in all of my years of teaching. They thirsted to know, they wanted to understand, and they longed to make a difference. I continuously told them that I had come to Bulgaria in order to make a difference; but that I knew that whatever contribution I might make would be insignificant to the contributions that they could, and would, make. These students were the future leaders of businesses and countries, and what they took from their education would enable them to achieve those positions and would help them to implement their own ideas for the future. I found that their study of Max Weber contributed to their better understanding of the nature of politics, religion, sociology, economics, and even philosophy. Max Weber “spoke” to me, and he “spoke” to them. They found his high sense of intellectual rigor and relentless honesty refreshing and they embraced these traits. Weber showed them what the world was like and what it could, if not should, be like. While I did expressly refer to the creation of a “civil society”, with hindsight that was what the students were attempting to create. And Weber helped them immensely – he was someone to whom they could relate and someone who they could respect. Weber served me well and the students more so. He was, so to speak, the bridge over the Elbe, linking past and future, East and West. For those students Weber was the bridge.

Part III

The perils of transitology The role of intellectuals

14 How to be a sociologist and a humanist? Sociology as a vocation in liquidmodern times Zygmunt Bauman Stanislaw Ossowski was one of the most creative and original sociologists of the twentieth century and one whose fashion of doing sociology has retained in our times more freshness and topicality than most of its alternatives. I could have just recalled this great scholar’s stature and continuing importance and then moved right away to consider the significance of the work of Edmund Mokrzycki, his most faithful disciple and intellectual heir, if not for the regrettable ignorance of Stanislaw Ossowski’s rich and unique scholarly output outside Polish borders – an ignorance that clamours to be repaired because of the impoverishment of our shared social-scientific armoury it continues to cause. Battles that Ossowski waged with exceptional consistency, gallantry and skill might have been abandoned or forgotten by the new generations of social science practitioners; they might have been exiled to fringe periodicals and ephemera, but their stakes are as vital today as they used to be half a century ago, while bringing them to satisfactory conclusion has never been as imperative as it is in our own times of the universal ‘shake up’ of the received forms of human togetherness, of comprehensive revaluation of common life-strategies and the inevitable revision of the formative imagery of social inquiry. Those battles were waged in the open and with great ferocity during sociology’s ‘great war of recognition’. Its entry to the academic establishment was then still touch-and-go, the prospects of the sociologists’ bid for university chairs and departments hung in the balance, powers ready to endorse the sociologists’ ambitions and sponsors ready to invest in sociological enterprise remained thin on the ground. The benefits with which sociology could repay the benevolence of the powers-that-be were anything but obvious, whereas the ability of social studies to meet the standards possessed or believed to be possessed by the older, well-entrenched scientific disciplines was yet to be demonstrated. No wonder that a great majority of sociology’s spokesmen saw as their most urgent task the effort to convince the powers-that-be that their sponsorship of sociological inquiry was a rational decision to take, a sound and secure investment or at least a reasonable, not excessive risk considering its possible benefits. As seen by the promoters and advocates of sociology’s cause, that task appeared to be twofold.

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First, there was the need to create a demand for sociological services: to transform the powers-that-be into potential clients, eager to invest in an enterprise promising the kind of gains they felt they needed but missed. To do so, one had to adjust the form and the content of sociological inquiry to the output of products that the powers-that-be would be likely to consider beneficial, that is of use in the functions they were expected, and intended, to perform. Since the powers-that-be were concerned primarily with the administration of the society they governed and therefore inclined to view society from the managerial perspective, it was sensible to assume that the safest bet was to portray sociology as a prospective supplier of ‘engineering’ know-how, a body of knowledge indispensable for the practitioners of the social variety of engineering tasks. A need however arose to explain why the stuff the sociologists had currently on offer stopped somewhat short of enabling their promised applications. Explanations followed by and large the pattern set by Paul Lazarsfeld.1 ‘Sociology is not yet in the stage where it can provide a safe basis for social engineering. It took the natural sciences 250 years between Galileo and the beginning of the industrial revolution before they had a major effect upon the history of the world. Empirical social research has a history of three or four decades.’ In other words, the failing, however irritating it might have seem at the moment, was temporary – a side-effect of the late start and of a (rectifiable) time lag. The problem was one of timing, not of the nature of the task. The second task was to prove the last point: namely, that in the course of time there won’t be any qualitative difference left between the modality of social investigation and that of natural sciences. Here, the tone was set by, arguably, the most radical advocate of ‘here like there, in Sozialwissenschaften like in Naturwissenschaften’ view, Otto Neurath: ‘Sociology ought to rest on a materialist basis, and that means to treat men just like other sciences of reality treat animals, plants or stones. Sociology is eine Realwissenschaft just as, say, astronomy. Populations are like galaxies of stars more closely linked to each other than to other stars’.2 Few people followed Neurath’s programme to the letter, and fewer still dared to give it a similarly extreme wording, but the strategy sketched by Neurath was deployed far and wide throughout an academic sociology orientated towards the bureaucratic/managerial outlook of the institutions concerned primarily with the introduction and maintenance of social order, control, regularity of behaviour, continuity of interactive patterns and fighting back ‘social deviations’.3 To render the output of sociological investigation usable for such and similar concerns, the complexity of social realities had to be reduced to a limited, manageable number of ‘key variables’ and to be ‘standardized’, that is, made amenable to statistical processing. Above all, that output had to represent its human objects exactly like ‘animals, plants, or stones’ – that is to deny, ignore, or make null and void the notorious whimsicality and randomness of human choices and so quash the suspicion that despite all streamlining efforts human actors may defy their identification with the objects of natural sciences and prove to be essentially unpredictable. Since the managers’ purpose was to render

Sociology as a vocation 207 conduct of the objects of administration predictable, the defenders of scientific status of sociology tended to take up the task of reassuring the managers that those objects are indeed, or can be made, predictable. It was against such a tendency, one that gathered force in the aftermath of the Second World War bolstered by the seemingly limitless demand of mostly welfare, and warfare bureaucracies for a knowledge usable for ‘social engineering’ purposes, that Stanislaw Ossowski took a most resolute stand. Ossowski did not, as it were, question the validity of studies aimed at statistical, thoroughly quantitative, and reductive descriptions of spatially and temporally fixed segments of social reality. But he emphatically objected to the pretence that such kind of studies are the only way valid sociological work can (or for that matter, should) be conducted. Had the monopolistic ambitions of the proponents of such ‘empiricism’ been fulfilled – no room would be left in the realm of sociology for Veblen, Znaniecki, or indeed any of the classics of American and European social sciences.4 Contrary to the monopolistic claims of the ‘empiricists’, Ossowski insisted, two kinds of sociology coexist side by side, both valid and indispensable, though each is targeted on different goals and aimed at bringing different kind of benefits. Ossowski took for his starting point Lewis Coser’s witty juxtaposition of two types of people engaged in doing sociology,5 whom he named, respectively, as ‘literary men’ and ‘sociologists tout court’. In Coser’s rendering of the story, the second arrived at the stage occupied heretofore solely by the first armed with research projects, statistical methods, quantifiable variables and data processing equipment – new weapons that in their holders’ and users’ view entitled the newcomers to the natives’ respect. The natives were non-plussed – but, so Coser’s story goes, they found themselves in a plight similar to that of medieval knights faced with an army sporting guns and muskets. Ossowski questions that comparison – pointing out that unlike guns and muskets confronting swords and spears, the weapons of sociological newcomers could boast greater precision, but were evidently inferior in other respects – notably in their reach. Implied, though not explicitly expressed, was the idea that each cognitive task calls for task-specific instruments. The orthodox and the novel weapons of sociology alike were well suited to their respective targets, but the advantage so gained could easily turn into a handicap if applied to another purpose. A safety razor shaves better than an axe, but would hardly win a wood-chopping competition. In the years when Ossowski’s study was conceived and written, the kind of sociology close to his heart and mind was clearly on the defensive and launching a frontal assault against the apparently unstoppable advance of ‘sociological empiricism’ would have been as inadvisable as it seemed futile (a comparison comes to mind with Max Weber, aware that ‘under normal conditions, the power position of a fully developed bureaucracy is always overtowering’ and ‘everywhere the modern state is undergoing bureaucratization’ – yet bewailing the replacement of the ‘cultivated man’ by the ‘specialist type of man’, and concerned with the task to salvage, against the overwhelming odds, the fullness of personality and freedom of human individual).6

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The advancement of ‘empiricism’ was not an unmitigated disaster, social needs that paved its way were quite genuine and ought to be recognized and respected – and Ossowski was keen to make it clear, pointing out repeatedly that his considerations ‘are not aimed against the practical importance of the empirical sociological studies and do not question the validity of statistical methods in sociology’ (p. 277 – see note 4 for an explanation of page numbers). Besides, a counter-offensive was pointless – the task was but to preserve the niche in which to be able to resist the empiricists’ intention to run the show single-handedly; a shelter hospitable to the now decried seekers of wisdom as distinct from mere utility (to deploy the famed Aristotelian distinction quoted by Ossowski). Another factor to consider was that the ‘empiricists’, and they alone, broadcast on the same wavelength as the key-holders and gatekeepers of all public funds. The ‘empiricists’ were the only camp within the compound of sociology whose version of the sociological prospectus could draw the sympathetic attention of the people who decided the status and the prospects of the social sciences. This was true of both (Western and Eastern, free market and ‘planned economy’, capitalist and ‘socialist’) sections of what was then commonly called the ‘industrial society’ – but inside the communist camp the advantage of ‘argumentation from-utility’ was yet more salient than it was on the other side of the Berlin Wall. The rulers bent on a planned/managed/administered society and on an acting-on-command economy badly needed the kind of services that the ‘reductionist’ branch of sociology promised to deliver. They might have succumbed to the temptation to include such a version of social science into the officially endorsed canon of useful knowledge. Their own crude ‘economic stimuli’ tactics deployed to elicit the volume of obedience required by the planned targets chimed well with the reductionist mentality of ‘behavioural sciences’ and with their focus on the shortcut between stimulus and response. On the other hand, in the streamlined, monocentric, top-to-bottom model of the communist society there was no room for alternative sources of ‘wisdom’ – for autonomous sources of enlightenment and for non-commissioned wisdom liable to clash with the official wisdom – unique and indivisible, as required to secure the unity of action in a society that already knew (that is, has been authoritatively told) its objectives and was allowed only to seek the fastest and most expedient means to reach them. Ossowski was fully aware of the preordained harmony of sorts between a sociology adapted to the needs and mentality of ‘social engineers’, and the priorities of the rulers of a comprehensively managed state. Under the slogan of social engineering, sociological studies and institutes are now established in the countries that thus far knew no sociology or in which the past sociological traditions were crushed by historical events . . . [In these countries] the rationalization of social planning must emphasize particularly sharply the need of an exact study of specific social realities, while new sociological theories arouse anxiety because of their potential conflict with the Marxist assumptions. (p. 250)

Sociology as a vocation 209 This and related considerations go a long way towards explaining the visible care taken by Ossowski not to press too far the cause of sociology on whose behalf he appealed; to stop short of tearing to shreds the reputation of its detractors and so denying the competence of the sole helmsmen able to navigate the boat of sociology to the safe, state-accepted and protected haven. They explain as well the cautious, method-centred rather than value-centred, fashion in which Ossowski had chosen to argue the need of another sociology – empirical yet not empiricist, history-and-culture wise as distinct from task-focused, adding to the wisdom of humans rather than to their utility. Such an alternative to the dominant and overwhelming ‘empiricist’ trend Ossowski calls ‘humanistic sociology’. A Polish reader would spot this term’s affinity with Florian Znaniecki’s ‘humanistic coefficient’ – although even if the invoking of tradition could play its role in Ossowski’s selection of terms, the models of sociology to which the two terms referred differed considerably. The ‘coefficient’ in question was a qualifier with which every description of reality ought to be in Znaniecki’s view supplemented, and without which no description would be complete – as each social reality was somebody’s reality, pre-selected and composed by that somebody’s values (Alfred Schütz would say: by topical relevancies). The sociologist’s task was to unravel the values that gave reality (a seen and experienced reality) the shape implied by the description. The term ‘humanistic’ in the name of the alternative sociology Ossowski advocated did not refer primarily to a methodological precept (although such a sociology, obviously, called for a research-and-interpretation strategy distinct from the up-andcoming ‘empiricist’ fashion), but to the postulate to reckon with ‘the qualities or attributes proper to man’ (as the OED would explain the term ‘humanist’, tracing the first recording of that meaning back to 1727). Sociology envisaged and personally practised by Stanislaw Ossowski could not be like ‘science of nature’ simply because the objects of sociology, the humans, are not like the animals, plants, minerals or stars that the Naturwissenschaften explore, describe, and generalize about. In what way, however, are humans different? And in what way ought the fact of their difference to modify the investigative strategy of a sociologist aware of that difference? Human conduct is a motivated action. Weber would say that human actions are ‘meaningful’, and Schütz would say that humans tend to act ‘in order to’ even if they mistakenly, self-deceptively and misleadingly describe their actions in terms of ‘because of’. If this is why and how humans act, then we need ‘to put ourselves in the situation of the actors and try to enter into the spirit of their possible motives’ (p. 266). A desideratum that would be totally redundant if the object of study was the division of an amoeba cell, the flowering of a rose bush or the trajectory of a falling rock. Let us try to think through the consequences of Ossowski’s stance. Since ‘possible motives’ can be many, the courses of action would not be unambiguously determined by a situation that looks ‘the same’ to the uninvolved and unbiased observer. The road from the stimulus to a response is mediated, and that mediation could be left out of account solely in narrowly circumscribed

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segments of social reality that have undergone a thorough Gleichschaltung and routinization coupled with the total extinction or an effective disempowerment of the actors’ will (as in Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the liminal conditions of concentration camps). Otherwise, the road from stimulus to response passes through the slushy, unstable, treacherous, opaque, unmapped and unpredictable terrain of choice. A motivated animal is a choosing animal. Humans are choosing animals: they select among the possible motives, and so they select amongst possible responses. One can manipulate their choices – and all powers aim at doing just that. One can render some choices exceedingly seductive and so their choice eminently probable. One can render some other choices extremely offputting and so their choice highly improbable. With all this said and done, though, no amount of manipulation would quite succeed to conjure up a one-toone relation between stimulus and response. Human freedom of choice may be severely truncated, but hardly ever extinguished completely. This makes of the humans an exceptionally wayward and so unrewarding object for a science targeted on precise and foolproof results. Human conduct veers too far towards the black hole of randomness, washing out the boundary between predictions and guesses and drawing perception dangerously close to fantasy. As actors, humans are erratic, fanciful, capricious and whimsical. Only with a good deal of lopping and trimming can they be forced into the frame of a general rule. This renders them unpredictable – and so off limits for a science wishing to be of practical use for the order-builders and order-guardians. The modality of being human consists in staying perpetually under-defined and under-determined, in-waiting, on-the-move, in search of an identity that stays stubbornly ahead striving towards the completion that will never be reached (that is, as Ernst Bloch aptly put it – immer noch nicht geworden). That modality consists as well in the urge to transgress and transcend, an urge that makes the present – the sole stretch of experience available to direct empirical scrutiny – but a momentary stop-over in a movement with no pre-designed or definable-in-advance itinerary. Human life, the object and the subject-matter of sociology, is a continuous search for strategic responses adequate to perceived situational challenges, and a similarly continuous recycling of perception by the strategies selected and put in to operation. This is what we may gather when reflecting on our own ‘inner experience’ – doing what Stanislaw Ossowski saw as indispensable for a ‘humanist sociologist’. That reflection will tell us that we have ‘various, often colliding motives, that there are “varied personalities” inside us that may come to the fore in different situations and on different occasions’; it will tell us as well of ‘motives not strong enough to guide our behaviour and yet allowing us to visualize what would happen were they followed’ (p. 266). We would find out, in other words, that there are always more possibilities than realities and more realities than tested strategies can tackle, and therefore no situation can be an exact copy of another and no move can be an exact repetition of another. Situations and strategies measuring up against each other and transforming themselves in the process combine into the only constant and the only universal trait of our,

Sociology as a vocation 211 human, being-in-the-world. It is, though, quite a different kind of constants and universals that natural sciences are keen to discover and expect to handle expertly. To comprehend that truth, and to draw the conclusions that follow for sociological practice from that truth, was never as imperative as it is now, when (as Pieter Nijhoff succinctly yet poignantly expressed it)7 ‘public authorities have to renounce the project to “make” societal life and big industries cease to be encompassing and integrative “states within the state” ’ and so ‘social scientists lose planning agencies as their main clients. In an environment of fluid transactional processes they find more employment in explication of all sorts of effective interpretations in the lifeworld . . . Intellectuals and professionals are looking for a new definition of the situation, to fit their change in position . . .’ Preoccupied with that new task forced on the social-scientific agenda by the progressive ‘liquidization’ of institutional framework of life, social scientists could do worse than to study once more and ponder the advice Stanislaw Ossowski bequeathed. Living in a liquid-modern setting8 calls for, and ultimately consists of, an incessant flow of reflexivity. Allow me to restate once more9 that sociality responsible for all its structured yet fugitive forms, their interaction and their succession, is a discursive activity, an activity of interpretation and reinterpretation, of interpretation fed back into the interpreted condition only to trigger off further interpretive efforts. To be effectively and consequentially present in such a habitat sociology must conceive of itself as a participant (perhaps better informed, more systematic, more rule-conscious, yet nevertheless a participant) of the never-ending self-reflexive process of interpretation and devise its strategy accordingly. Edmund Mokrzycki has successfully, with great acuity and persistence and remarkable results, continued the work Ossowski left unfinished. Mokrzycki was the most accomplished, insightful and creative among Ossowski’s disciples, one who put the Master’s methodological (and, let it be made clear, profoundly ethical) credo to a striking cognitive effect. Mokrzycki, let us recall, began his scholarly pursuits with a book reviewing and systematizing essential precepts of humanistic sociology. His last, posthumously published oeuvre10 demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt the enormous potential those precepts reveal when thoughtfully and skilfully put into operation. Mokrzycki’s Unsentimental Balance is a formidable achievement: a most comprehensive survey of all the major collective actors of Poland’s most recent social and political history, of the departures to which all actors contributed, each one in their own, though seldom if ever preconceived and self-monitored, way and whose impact they all felt as a series of unanticipated consequences or side-effects of their entanglement and interaction. We learn from Mokrzycki’s study that the mouldy and decayed, progressively shell-like communist regime imploded under the pressure of the expectations and demands it itself generated, yet was unable to fulfil; that the classes that made the Polish revolution were the first to fall as its victims; that one of the largest classes of Polish society, the peasants – viewed under the planned-economy regime as a germ of capitalism

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sown into a soil hostile to capitalism – have become in the post-communist Poland a most formidable obstacle to the capitalist market economy; and that most categories of the Polish population held and continue to hold values and preferences that are mutually incompatible, (most notably, market values and a preference for categorial privileges (Mokrzycki, 2001, pp. 25, 28). To cut a long story short, we learn that the logic of history is a derivative of essentially illogical attitudes and pursuits, whereas the apparent irrationality of historical drifts is the product of the prime collective actors’ earnest efforts to deploy rational strategies that would secure the rationality of choices. Mokrzycki’s last book is a most impressive display of the ‘humanist sociology’ in action and a convincing proof, if a proof is needed, of its remarkable capacity to aid the comprehension of the interplay of social forces, whereas even the most sophisticated statistical collations may at the very best record their byproducts; of its ability to assist the inventory of possible sequels to the present conflicts and the future conflicts they are likely to gestate once being implemented; and, above all – to aid imagination, to deepen the sorely needed insight into the inner springs of the ‘history making’ – of the process to which we all willy-nilly contribute while being, consciously or not, made by it. Armed with the precepts of ‘humanist sociology’, Mokrzycki became a supreme master of the most momentous and critical of contemporary, liquidmodern life arts: the art of continuous and self-monitoring interpretation of human, individual and group-shared experience. This art will not excise uncertainty and insecurity from the conditions under which life tasks are faced and performed, but must be mastered if men and women acting under such conditions are to hope for a modicum of control over their lives. ‘[S]ocial groups whose special task is to provide an interpretation of the world’ for their society, Karl Mannheim gave the name of ‘intelligentsia’11 – referring to the educated strata of the population, to people with primary allegiance to reliable knowledge, professional expertise and responsible judgement. No wonder that while surveying the whole spectrum of the post-communist Polish society, Mokrzycki most often focuses on the plight of the present-day categorial equivalent of ‘intelligentsia’. He worries ‘whether the current crisis of educated circles does not portend the decline of the whole formation’ (p. 39) – meaning the fading, wilting, perhaps dying out of the function that the ‘intelligentsia’ of yore was (according to Mannheim – and the common opinion) expected to perform and did, for better or worse and with mixed results, undertake. As Mokrzycki repeatedly points out, the ‘intelligentsia’ in its specifically East-European form of a category marked out (at least by some of its influential members) as a collective missionary with a calling to lift ‘the people’ to a level of humanity that they would be incapable of reaching unassisted and unprodded, or of a category construed as a class anointed to speed up the wheels of progress and pull the country out of its backwardness, is itself a symptom of ‘backwardness’; more precisely, of the ‘backwardness complex’ suffered by peoples who have been downgraded by an overwhelmingly powerful metropolis

Sociology as a vocation 213 to the status of ‘periphery’ or Hinterland and who consented with the verdict but were keen to reverse the sentence: ‘in this sense, the very existence of the intelligentsia as a social class is a structural symptom of backwardness’ (p. 41). Over and above the particularities it shared with other parts of Eastern Europe smarting under the economic and cultural impact of the fast industrializing West, the Polish intelligentsia (because of the absence of a political state of its own) used to combine and press into one indivisible vocation the civilizing mission and the claim to, or a duty of, political leadership. The circumstances that once made the educated classes of Polish society into the ‘class of the intelligentsia’ so understood are these days fast receding – after taking up a mutant shape and leading a phantom life during the 40 years of communist rule. Whether or not the image of a body unified in mission, purpose and action chimed or jarred with the past realities of the degree-holders’ lives, nowadays educated Poles desert that social body (or a social phantom) in droves. Mokrzycki explains this ever more pronounced trend by the rapid deterioration of the status of its academic and artistic (by its nature the most vociferous, most often heard and most visible) sector, groomed for a secure and sheltered existence under the umbrella of the now withdrawn state patronage and desperately trying to recoup a privileged existence by emigrating into the unfamiliar world of market competition and offering their competencies and know-how to the highest bidder. ‘People with the highest skills’, explains Mokrzycki, ‘apply individual strategies of escape from the on-going pauperization of their social sphere’ (p. 47). This is, undoubtedly, the truth and nothing but the truth. But is it also the whole truth? Could the massive desertion from the intelligentsia’s ascribed or imputed function be satisfactorily explained as a summary outcome of individual escapes induced by the fast fall of salaries and royalties? And a corollary question: could the past dedication of a significant part of the knowledge class to ‘social issues’ and ‘political causes’, as well as their bid for the role of the ‘people’s conscience’, be satisfactorily explained by the economic boons and perks once associated with that role? After all, quite often the assumption of such a role was for its practitioners anything but a lucrative business; sometimes it entailed a considerable risk to livelihood or even to the chance of an ordinary, let alone peaceful and comfortable, existence. At all times and under all conditions there were such social positions among those available to the ‘people in the know’ that in terms of gains and comfort were more alluring and secure than missionary chapels. Totality is more than the sum of its parts, as Durkheim kept reiterating. There must be more to the massive and drastic U-turn of the educated professions than a number of individuals (however great) seeking better incomes. Whatever has remained of the Polish ‘intelligentsia’ has entered the late-modern, liquidmodern or post-modern world carrying along memories of the now bygone Sturm und Drang era of modernity, nation- and state-building, with the unique role of prophets, pattern-setters, guides and teachers of the would-be nation and republic it assigned to its ‘knowledge class’; memories that survived the years of

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storage in the communist refrigerator. In the result, a process extended in the West over a number of successive generations and disclosing its logic only to a detached retrospective observer or an archivist, has been condensed in the East into the life-span of one generation and even into a one brief time-stretch of that life. A historical tendency shrunk to the size of a biographical problem and lived-through, accordingly, in a personal drama fashion. It is reasonable to suppose that this circumstance could not but have coloured Mokrzycki’s portrayal of the historical fate of the Polish ‘intelligentsia’. The fateful departures spread over a relatively long period and proceeding gradually, perhaps even surreptitiously in the West, acquired in the East a breathtaking speed. Otherwise, however, the process perceived in Poland as the ‘demise of a whole formation’ was but a re-staging of transformations that have taken place, if somewhat earlier, all over the modern world. The transformations in question could be, for the sake of brevity, subsumed under the formula of the passage from the ‘managerial form of domination’ to the ‘disengagement strategy of power’.12 In the new context, the construction of ‘central value syndromes’, Kulturkämpfe and cultural crusades, proselytizing and converting, viewing culture as a missionary activity, understanding education as the activity of enlightenment and spiritual perfection, and other typically modern tasks that provided the structural frame for the active engagement between ‘intellectuals’ and the ‘people’ as well as for the sibling rivalry and a perpetually simmering conflict between intellectuals and political powers, lost much of its urgency and attraction as well as its most powerful sponsors and most resourceful clients. Under the circumstances, the ‘knowledge classes’, or at least their upper and most illustrious crust, followed the business elite into the planetary cyberspace – weakening in the process their ‘local’ (that is, territorially defined and confined) ties and commitments. Let loose from their past bonds and engagements, they also became self-centered and self-referential; the ‘particular intellectual’ of Michel Foucault is a person concerned with the conditions of his or her professional activity (surgeons with hospitals, actors with theatres and film production, writers with the book markets, professors with universities and research institutes, and each category with the public or private subsidies for their area of professional engagement) – but with little else; certainly not with what used to be seen as ‘public causes’ or ‘needs of society’ and with what would require the people concerned to go beyond their (professional) duty. Should we worry, or should we, as not so long ago Henri-Bernard Levi did in France, rejoice at the disappearance of the ‘intellectuals’ of yore whose episodic glory the brave new knowledge class debunked, by design or by default, as an unfortunate and regrettable error of history? Is a society with no place for the orthodox functions of modern intellectuals a better – safer, saner, more enjoyable – place to live? Or does the gradual, but relentless phasing out of the intellectuals’ jobs in public life signal certain malfunction, perhaps even a serious indisposition or deficiency of the present-day forms of human cohabitation – and thus should warn us that trouble is in store? This is an open question, and bound to remain such until a full inventory of

Sociology as a vocation 215 associated processes and their joint consequences is taken. The most we can do now (but what, in my opinion, we should do – and urgently) is to give some thought to the possibility of being ‘intellectuals’, that is persons who – on the ground of their professional competence and the social visibility which such a standing provides – assume responsibility for the matters affecting ‘public interests’: widely understood human rights, decency of public standards, the quality of human life, the practice of social justice and other matters that are similarly, by their nature and definition, of ‘joint and shared concern’. We can take clue from Pierre Bourdieu how to proceed in our thinking. Just about half a decade ago Le Monde initiated a short, sharp debate between a number of leading lights of French intellectual life – on the convoluted and hotly contested issue of the relations between intellectuals and the media. Claude Lanzmann and Robert Redeker13 put the case of Pierre Bourdieu in the focus of their response. The choice was in no way random. Bourdieu, for many years an archetypal ‘sociologists’ sociologist’, concerned more than with anything else with the scientific standards of the profession of which he had become one of the leading practitioners and tone-setters, merged from his academic seclusion a short while before the Le Monde debate to reclaim the public realm, that in his view has been neglected for too long by the men and women who carried credentials that gave them both the right and the duty to supervise its cultivation. Bourdieu found that public realm occupied, in the absence of the rightful owners and administrators, by the media. And he did not like what he saw. He found the realm poorly, if at all, cultivated. He found it also mercilessly exploited – as in the case of television worrying solely about l’audimat figures and expelling all serious thought from the public stage by setting speed/acceleration norms that no serious thinking could, by its nature, meet; or in the case of the journalists, good only at ‘the production of those highly perishable goods – the news’.14 Claiming for the intellectuals the forum, the agora, that (in Cornelius Castoriadis’s terms) intermediate ‘private/public’ space where private problems and public issues come face-to-face in order to engage in a dialogue and in the effort of mutual translation and understanding was not, of course, a novelty. The idea that the supervision of the agora is the birthright (or a professional prerogative) of the intellectuals, and that the media people, bereft of the qualities and credentials that make the intellectuals what they are, are false pretenders and usurpers, was not new either. C. Wright Mills made that point with exquisite bluntness as early as the 1950s; but well before that time as much as after it scores of intellectuals in France and elsewhere treated their rights to the agora as too natural and obvious to require litigation and a complex legal argument. Such a need would not occur to either Peguy or Sartre, whom Lanzmann and Redeker selected as samples of the ‘public intellectuals’’ tradition. This was no more the case, though, when Pierre Bordieu made his bid for the restitution of stolen property. Towards the end of the twentieth century, the almost uncontested domination of the public sphere by the media had become a commonplace. And the intellectuals did not seem to mind. Either they had retreated into their separate,

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professional plots and turned into Michel Foucault’s ‘particular’, instead of ‘general’, intellectuals,15 concerned solely with their own respective professional plots, or they joined Régis Débray’s ‘mediocracy’ and settled there comfortably, learning the rules of the game in which success is measured by notoriety rather than the quality of work and above all by the number of television appearances. It was against that state of affairs that Bourdieu issued a call-to-arms. Among the deafening silence of fellow intellectuals (interrupted but by the funeral canticles intoned and conducted by Henri Bernard-Lévy), even restating old and elementary, once banal, truths might have had, and did have, thunderous effects. Did Bordieu’s intervention signal resurrection of Peguy/Sartre intellectuals? Resumption of the abandoned mission? A valiant assault to recapture the spiritual leadership that the post-Sartrean learned classes left to the merchandisers of ‘infotainment’? Lanzmann and Redeker don’t think so – at least they did not at the time they took part in the Le Monde debate. ‘Bourdieu’, they said, ‘is not an intellectual after Péguy and Sartre fashion; he is mostly a scientific pontiff, a cardinal Ratzinger of science, demanding for the scientific orthodoxy everything written about in the newspapers’. Bourdieu, in their opinion, would have no truck with the current occupiers of the agora, let alone a negotiation leading to a modus vivendi. He aimed at unconditional surrender of the adversary and the scientists’ undivided sovereignty over the territory presently in its possession. The uncontradicted power of persuasion (or is it rather power of stultification and stupefaction?) that the mediocrats are wielding can, in Bordieu’s strategy, be only opposed and eventually vanquished by the (also indisputable, but in its case rightly) authority of science. As Bourdieu sees it, the battle against the mediaborn-and-spread ideology needs to be waged, and will be won, under the sign of scientific objectivity. Lanzmann and Redeker, we may say, spotted in Bourdieu’s stance a dustedoff version of Karl Mannheim’s scientific crusade against ideology – and were not impressed by what they discovered. They saw in Bourdieu’s strategic plan not so much a bid to go back to Sartre, as a fall-back on the illusion which the ‘glorious generation’ of intellectuals rejected and left behind – ‘a repetition of the old scientistic dogmatics’. That was, they believed, a manifesto of the science’s monopoly of judgement; not an invitation to a dialogue, but an a priori, principal delegitimation of all debate. To Bourdieu’s ‘scientism’, Lanzmann and Redeker opposed a stance more fitting the thinkers wishing to resurrect the Péguy/Sartre tradition. Under new conditions (such as, for instance, what Philippe Sollers characterized succintly as ‘une époque de pluralités, d’incertitudes, de visages sans cesse nouveaux, de surprises, de croisements, de confrontations, de singularités irréductibles’),16 ‘intellectuals need to risk profanation, contradiction, a debate in places other than their coteries, with no advantage except the clarity of observation and rigorousness of the argument’. ‘Victory of the experts’, Henri Guaino observed a year later,17 is precisely what is wrong with contemporary politics and what portends an end to political

Sociology as a vocation 217 debate, that blood and bone of all democracy. ‘Between the experts and the judges, no room has been left for national sovereignty or popular sovereignty’. In his remarkable study of contemporary politics, as subversive as he would wish democracy to be, Jacques Rancière18 avers that ‘normal’ politics portends the uncontested rule of those claiming right to power on the ground of their birth, wealth or expertise, while democracy is a challenge to such pretensions and the practices that follow. Democracy is nothing else but a call to equality, to the power of the ‘officially powerless’, to the rule of those who are, again ‘officially’, without a title to rule. Democracy, as Pierre Lepape summed up reviewing Rancière’s study,19 is not an institution but a rupture in the institutional logic; essentially, democracy is a state of continuous dissent against the powers’ endemic inclination to inward-looking solidarity, to ‘closing ranks’, entrenchment and ossification. In the light of such observations, Bourdieu’s appeal to the authority of science and its spokesmen looks uncannily like an essentially antidemocratic force. It does not reach beyond a postulate of a sort of ‘musical chairs game’: a reshuffle of command-givers inside the control tower of institutional politics, a game from which the rule of the controllers and the powerlessness of the controlled would emerge unscathed; if anything, reinforced. A year had passed since Lanzmann and Redeker charged Bourdieu with trying to apply more poison as an antidote to the already advanced contamination of public life, when, in a conversation with Günter Grass20 broadcast on Arte, Bourdieu sounded the retreat: a partial retreat, to be sure, and voiced halfheartedly. One may guess that by that time it had become clear to Bourdieu that resistance against ‘pensée unique’, the dominant neo-liberal free-market ideology, would remain ineffective and pointless as long as it were waged on that ideology’s own privileged ground: that of calculation of profits and losses, costs and effects subjected to the rules of objectivity and rationality as articulated and asserted as binding by the same ideology. The sole chance to break through the otherwise impermeable defences of the neo-liberal Weltanschauung was to challenge its unspoken, and for that reason non-disputed premises, with the ‘death of utopia’ most prominent among them. The task of intellectuals, Bourdieu said, is to ‘open their mouths’ ‘and try to resurrect the utopia’. For some time already the place occupied in Bourdieu’s thought by the consistent argument against TINA (the ‘There Is No Alternative’ formula of neoliberal sages and the politicians they advise) had been widening unstoppably. TINA, obviously, is an invocation not to initiate, but to end the debate. But so too is an appeal to the authority of science, particularly when put in front of the lay public, admittedly non-expert-like and lacking in the academic credentials that are the sole permits to speak respected by those already on the rostrum. Utopia, on the other hand, is manifestly and self-consciously stripped of the right to demand obedience; and particularly a blank-cheque, unquestioning obedience. Utopia aims at setting imagination in motion, inspiring thought and prompting speech. Unlike TINA and the invocation of unshakeable scientific authority, utopia cannot but be an invitation to dialogue. This seminal shift in Bourdieu’s strategy was, presumably, what Thomas

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Ferenczi had in mind when, reviewing the latest collection of Bourdieu’s trenchant essays and public statements,21 he noted that in recent years Bourdieu ‘has renounced in a number of his interventions, the attitude of a scientist in order to assume the posture of a militant’. One may question however Ferenczi’s interpretation of the shift. Consider the ever-more active presence of Bourdieu on the public stage and his increasing tendency to focus on the most topical issues of the day, the issues that happen also to occupy the attention of the politically alert and attuned part of the public (and ought to draw concerns of the rest, thus far disinterested) – do these signal renunciation of the scholarly, academic role? Is the abandonment of scholarly, academic values a price one is bound to pay for political commitment? Scientist or militant – either/or? Bourdieu himself would deny the dilemma, as we can judge from the following admission: ‘I found myself led by the logic of my work to transgress the limits assigned to me in the name of the idea of objectivity – that appeared to me more like an idea of censorship’. Far from being either an act of treachery or a feat of reincarnation, the new militancy has been brought about and moved to the fore by the professional logic that a sociologist needs to obey for the sake of her/his professional integrity. The logic of sociology leads inescapably to transgression – to the transcendence of genuine or putative ‘objectivity’ or research and its interpretation. Sociology cannot but trespass, continuously and resolutely, on the boundaries drawn between academic study sine ira et studio and the always-already-engaged-and-committed, subjective experience of its human objects/partners-in-conversation. The sudden widely publicized entry into political debate might have seemed to be a U-turn for someone who had been prophesying for years the purity and impartiality of objective science, but looking back on the way the subject-matter of sociology was construed by Bourdieu from the very start of his academic life one could conclude that rather than a change of course, that entry was predetermined, perhaps even over-determined by the whole development of Bourdieu’s social theory. As Philippe Frisch points out,22 political confrontation was inevitable for a thinker who as far back as in 1972 asserted that ‘power of the words and power over words always suppose others kinds of power’. Already in 198423 Bourdieu defined political struggle as a ‘struggle to maintain or change a vision of the social world, through the conservation or modification of the categories of the world-perception and working on the constitution of common sense that appears as the truth of social world’. From there, just a small step led to the conclusion24 about the contestation between ‘three camps vying for the same stake: imposition of legitimate vision of the social world’, and that the pragmatic precept which follows is to focus on ‘the access to the means of legitimate manipulation of the world visions’. To sum it all up: vita contemplativa of a sociologist leads irrevocably to a vita activa; more precisely, both kinds of life are begotten and spend their time in each other’s immediate and intimate company. It is the purely professional requirements of objectivity and reliability that make the sociologist a ‘man of action’. Inserted, by choice or by the nature of things, in the competitive

Sociology as a vocation 219 struggle over the substance and shape of world visions, sociology cannot but carve itself upon the reality which it investigates; it transforms the human world as it goes on examining its credentials. This is, one may say, the fate of a sociologist, someone who took it upon herself to practise the social-scientific profession. Like anyone else, though, the sociologist, knowingly or not, confronts the possibility of re-forging the fate into vocation. The vocation is, unlike the fate, a matter of choice and responsibility. One thing is to go on practising a profession which willingly or not interferes in the areas where political and ‘mediatic’ powers would prefer to rule undisturbed. Quite another is to challenge the adversary to a duel and openly declare the start of the contest. By doing things that by their very nature are not neutral, the sociologist is already responsible for the shape of the world s/he investigates. Entering political battle is nothing more, yet nothing less either, than assuming responsibility for that responsibility; that step is an ethical demand and a moral act. It is also a ‘citizen duty’. Assuming responsibility – the transformation of a sociologist into an intellectual – is an act of ‘transgression’, but such transgression as organically arises out of the loyalty to the vocation. In an extended interview conducted in front of a large audience in February 1999, Philippe Frisch asked Bourdieu directly what sort of reasons prompted him to commit that act after several decades of mostly academic self-identification. Bourdieu pointed out two reasons.25 One was biographic: at a certain stage of his scientific career he accumulated enough authority to make his interventions in matters of wider import and concern publicly audible – and weighty. The second reason is the discovery that ‘western societies face a formidable peril’ – ‘a destruction of the social order exceedingly difficult to build’. ‘To invent the idea of “the public” as opposed to “the private”, generations of lawyers and philosophers were needed. And lo and behold – it is being abolished and nothing is being done. This is why the sociologist intervenes’. The gradual, yet merciless disintegration of the structures on which our shared civilization has rested threatens consequences of which the politicians do not speak, of which the public is unaware, and which most of our contemporaries are unable to grasp and visualize, let alone predict. Never before was the sociologist’s intervention as urgent and imperative as it has become of late. Indeed, there are few, if any, others who are capable of doing the job unless the sociologists undertake to do it. In the postscript to his recent magnum opus, La Misére du Monde,26 Bourdieu points out that the numbers of personalities of the political stage who can comprehend and articulate the expectations and demands of their electors are fast shrinking; the political space is inwardfocused and bent on closing upon itself. It needs to be thrown open again, and that can be only done through bringing the (often inchoate and inarticulate) ‘private’ troubles and cravings into direct relevance to the political process (and, consequently, vice versa). This is easier said than done, though, as the public discourse is inundated with Émile Durkheim’s ‘prénotions’ – rarely vented and even less frequently scrutinized presumptions, uncritically deployed whenever subjective experience is raised to the level of public discourse and whenever

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private troubles are categorized, processed in the public discourse and rerepresented as public issues. To do its service to human experience, sociology needs to begin with clearing the site. Critical assessment of tacit or vociferous prénotions must proceed together with an effort to make visible and audible the aspects of experience that normally stay beyond the individual horizons, or beneath the threshold of individual awareness. With a whole-hearted approval, Bourdieu quotes Emmanuel Terray, who in his turn draws inspiration from the ancient wisdom of Hippocrates: ‘A passive recording of the symptoms as described in the confessions of the sick can be done by anybody. If that was enough to intervene effectively, there would be no need of the medics’.27 But the commonly available diagnostic ability does not suffice; hence the need of medics when it comes to the cure of bodily ailments. And of sociologists, when it is the social body that falls victim to a disease. And so genuine medicine starts ‘with the cognition of the invisible illnesses, that is facts of which the sick person does not speak, of which he is not aware or which he has forgotten to mention’. Among such invisible and unspoken-of facts, social realities that constitute the domain of sociological study figure most prominently. ‘[I]l faut évidemment remonter jusqu’aux véritables déterminants économiques et sociaux des innombrables atteintes à la liberté des personnes, à leur légitime aspirations au bonheur et à l’accomplissement de soi’. Genuine medicine starts here . . . But where do we go from here? A moment of reflection would show that ‘to make people aware of the mechanisms that make their life miserable, perhaps even unlivable, does not mean to neutralize them; bring into light the contradictions does not mean to resolve them’. A long and tortuous road stretches between the recognition of the roots of trouble and their eradication, and making the first step in no way assures that further steps will be taken, let alone that the road will be followed to the end. And yet there is no denying the crucial importance of the beginning – of laying bare the complex network of causal links between pains suffered individually and conditions collectively produced. In sociology, and even more in a sociology that strives to be up to its task inside our Risikogesellschaft, the beginning is yet more decisive than elsewhere; it is this first step that designates and paves the road to rectification that otherwise would not exist, let alone be noticed. And this for two reasons. To start with, the risks that have taken over the role of the major threats to human existence from the traditional dangers of the past, differ from their predecessors in one paramount respect. Old-style troubles were straightforward and all too obvious to the sufferers. There was no doubt that they were real, nor was there any question that something had to be done to stave them off, defuse, rectify or at least alleviate them. There was no mystery either about what was to be done, even though the means to do it were often difficult to come by (in the case of hunger, for instance, it was self-evident to the point of banality that food, and food alone, is the remedy). Not so in the case of the risks. Most of them are neither seen nor felt. Although we are all exposed to their consequences and in one measure or another suffer as a result of them, we can neither smell, hear, see

Sociology as a vocation 221 nor touch the slow but unstoppable worsening of climatic patterns, the rises in levels of radiation and pollution, the fast shrinkage of supplies of non-renewable raw materials and sources of energy; and, indeed (it is here that sociology comes fully and truly into its own), the politically and ethically uncontrolled processes of globalization that sap the roots of our existence, dismantle safety networks together with social bonds that sustained them, and infuse individual life with unprecedented volumes of anxiety-generating uncertainty. We would hardly know of all this happening were we not told that this is the case and alerted to the possible consequences of the processes under way. Singly, severally or even all together we would not come to that knowledge were we to confine ourselves to the individually available experiences. As Ulrich Beck, who more than anyone else alerted us to the intricate mechanisms of Risikogesellschaft, put it,28 ‘we the citizens have lost sovereignty over our senses and thus the residual sovereignty over our judgment . . . [N]one are so blind to the danger as those who continue to trust their eyes’. The direct link between perception and effective (remedial or reforming) action has been broken – and will not be tied up again without assistance. The new, repaired link can be only a mediated one. To confront their existential condition and come to grips with its challenges, humans need to step beyond the individually accessible experiential data. The sought-after adequacy between condition and action will not be established without interpretation. This circumstance assigns a totally new role to the interpreters armed with an access to data not available inside, and only obliquely accessible from, individual experience. Unlike orthodox dangers, the risks saturating the human condition in the world of global dependencies may be not only overlooked, but also ‘interpreted away’ even when noticed. They may be denied, unduly played down, assigned to putative causes. Accordingly, actions that need to be undertaken to thwart or limit the risks may be diverted away from the true sources of danger, and the diffuse anxiety generated by ambient fear and endemic uncertainty may be channelled against wrong targets. The urge to act, instead of being systematically deployed in confronting the risks point blank, may be used up in sporadic and random outbursts that leave the founts of uncertainty by and large unscathed and intact. The scattered, unfocused uncertainty in which Risikoleben is soaked even at its most tranquil and enjoyable moments lends itself, notoriously, to many, often incompatible, interpretations. The locating of social factories of the anxiety-ridden products is a contentious matter. Answers to the vexing question ‘what is to be done’ are as a rule hotly contested. Interpretation is an ongoing, perpetually inconclusive process, full of trials and errors and of frustrated, though seldom if ever ultimately defeated, hopes. Sociology is an integral part of the interpretative process, a potentially powerful voice in the never-ending dialogue; a real-life version of the hermeneutic spiral, in which not just the understanding, but the quality of human condition is at stake. Much of the success or failure of the interpretation-targeted public dialogue hangs on sociology acquitting itself of the task of stretching the cognitive horizons of interpretative effort. And so we come to the second reason for which ‘the first step’ acquires a

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uniquely decisive role in coping effectively with the trials and tribulations of Risikoleben, and for which sociology, as long as it makes the widening of the interpretative frame the focus of its vocation, acquires an added significance for the fate of that endeavour. This second reason lies in the process of individualization – one of the most prominent and seminal aspects of the great social transformation that leads to the present day ‘liquid modern’ condition. Casting members as ‘individuals’ is the trade-mark of modern society. That casting, however, was not a one-off act; it is an activity re-enacted daily. Now, as before – in the ‘fluid’ and ‘light’ as much as in the ‘heavy’ and ‘solid’ stage of modernity – individuality is a universal human fate, not a matter of individual choice. The individual’s self-containment and self-sufficiency, which is sometimes taken to be the substance of ‘individualization’, may be an illusion. That men and women have no one to blame for their frustrations and troubles does not need to mean now, anymore than it did in the past, that they can protect themselves against frustration using their own domestic appliances, or pull themselves out of trouble, Baron Münchhausen style, by their boots-traps. Risks and contradictions go on being socially produced; it is the duty and the necessity to cope with them that are being individualized. The self-assertive capacity of individualized men and women however falls short, as a rule, of what a genuine self-constitution would require. And yet this sad truth has been made difficult to grasp. Troubles may be similar, but they no longer seem to form a ‘totality greater than the sum of its parts’; they neither acquire a new quality nor become easier to handle by being faced in a company. The sole ‘advantage’ that being in the company of other sufferers may bring is to reassure each one that fighting the troubles alone is what all the others also do daily – and so to refresh and boost once more the flagging resolve to go on doing just that. The overall effects of ‘individualization by decree of fate’ are what DanyRobert Dufour described recently29 as ‘new forms of alienation and inequality’. All ‘grand figures placed in the centre of symbolic configurations’ – like physis, God, King, people, nation, race or proletariat, have one by one disappeared from the horizon of life-projects, intestate and without successors. In the absence of the Other to which one could relate the logic of one’s own life-pursuits, the individual is doomed to seek, zealously yet in vain, ‘a self-referential definition’. ‘The new individuals are abandoned rather than liberated’. Abandoned to the Sisyphean labours of self-reference, individuals are drawn away from the idea that the collectively designed, shaped and run mechanisms of their individually suffered troubles could be changed and made more humanfriendly. They are prevented thereby from embarking on the sole expedition that may lead to the promotion of their ‘individuality by decree’ to the rank of individuality de facto and to the genuine self-assertion that defines it. In the absence of credible translations between the languages of private worries and public issues, and with dedicated and trustworthy translators conspicuous mostly by their non-availability, agora loses its past charms and attraction. The individual, as Alexis de Tocqueville prophetically declared, is an enemy of the citizen. Cit-

Sociology as a vocation 223 izens reincarnated as individual consumers leave the agora in droves. But the vacated space does not stay empty for long. It has been populated once more; this time, though, by individuals wishing to be reassured in the irreversibility of their fate. The new agora has become a stage where private individuals confess and rehearse in public their private struggles with privately suffered and privately confronted individual adversities. From that agora, both the actors and the spectators emerge reinforced in their belief that this is exactly how the world is constructed and how its residents need to live their lives.30 In other words, the agora, that in Castoriadis’ spot-on definition ‘public/private space’, ceased to be the site of translation between private and public, that substance of all politics, and particularly of the democratic politics. If the new ‘individualized’ predicament and the consequent disempowerment of the citizens qua citizens is to be confronted point blank, the art of the translation needs to be re-learned and the agora made once more available for practising it. It is in this awesomely difficult yet imperative task that sociology is called, as Pierre Bourdieu keeps reminding us, to the crucial role. This is a life-and-death matter for the sociological vocation – not another manifestation of scientists’ conceit and unwarranted pretension. This is also the condition of re-uniting vita contemplativa and activa and so salvaging them both from the impotence and irrelevance unavoidable in separation. This is, finally, the task in which pursuit of the intellectual vocation is formed, or, rather, stands a chance of resurrection at the time when dismantling the bridges connecting the Lebenswelt of the individuals and the real world shaped by forces unknown to them and escaping their control is fast turning into the major cause of the new misère du monde. Indeed, we need to repeat after Pierre Bourdieu: ‘those who have the opportunity to devote their lives to the study of the social world, cannot rest neutral and indifferent regarding the struggles in which the future of humanity is at stake’.31 Stanislaw Ossowski did not. Neither did Edmund Mokrzycki. Like Bourdieu said: they did not, because their scientific honesty and their feeling of responsibility towards the human objects of their study did not allow them to.

Notes 1 In 1948 speech to Oslo students. Here quoted after C. Wright Mills (1957) The Sociological Imagination (Oxford University Press), p. 100. 2 In Empirische Soziologie, a manifesto of ‘scientific sociology’ published in Vienna in 1931. 3 Neurath’s motifs figured most prominently among the practitioners of sociology eager to be ‘born again’ as ‘behavioural scientists’, who dismiss the relevance of anything that may occur on the way from the tangible and measurable ‘input’ and similarly tangible and measurable ‘output’ of human ‘black boxes’. 4 See Stanislaw Ossowski, O osobliwosciach nauk spolecznych, originally published in 1962. Here quoted after the posthumously reprinted version in Dziela (Works), vol. 4, PWN 1967. Page numbers refer to that edition. 5 Lewis Coser’s review of C. Wright Mills’ Sociological Imagination, in Partisan Review 1/1960.

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6 Comp. From Max Weber, edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, Routledge 1948, pp. 232–44. 7 Pieter Nijhoff (1988) ‘The right to inconsistency’, in Theory, Culture and Society, 1, pp. 87–112. 8 For the explication of the term, see the introduction to my Liquid Modernity (Polity Press, 2001). 9 Zygmunt Bauman (1992) Intimations of Postmodernity (Routledge), p. 204. 10 Edmund Mokrzycki (2001) Bilans niesentymentalny (IFiS PAN). Pages indicated below refer to this edition. 11 Karl Mannheim (1960) Ideology and Utopia (Routledge) (first published in 1936), p. 9. 12 I have written on this topic extensively in Part I of Society under Siege (Polity Press, 2002). 13 Claude Lanzmann and Robert Redeker (1998) ‘Les méfaits d’un rationalisme simplificateur’, Le Monde, 18 September, p. 14. 14 Pierre Bordieu, L’emprise de journalisme, ibid., 85. A year later Serge Halimi, Bourdieu’s close collaborator, would (following Ignazio Ramonet) add another, no less grave a charge, that of translating the interests of international capital into an ideology with universalistic pretentions (Serge Halimi, Les nouveax chiens de garde, LiberRaisons d’Agir, 1997, p. 46). 15 ‘Particular intellectual’ in the sense given to the term by Foucault has all the marks of a contradictio in adiecto. Whatever traits intellectuals may carry, ‘particularity’ – confinement to their own respective métiers, is not among them. A scholar, an artist, a writer becomes an ‘intellectual’ the moment s/he steps beyond the narrowly circumscribed ‘interests of the profession’ and assumes, or claims, responsibility for the issues of more general import. 16 Philippe Sollers (1998) ‘Pour la pluralisme médiatique’, Le Monde, 18 September, p. 15. 17 Henri Guaino (2000) ‘Le retour de la politique’, Le Monde, 30/31 January, p. 13. 18 Cf. Jacques Rancière (1998) Aux Bords du Politique (Paris: Ed. La Fabrique). 19 Pierre Lepape (1998) ‘L’utopie, malgré tout’, Le Monde, 27 November. 20 Pierre Bourdieu and Günter Grass (1999) ‘La tradition “d’ouvrir sa gueuele” ’, Le Monde, 3 December, p. 16. 21 Thomas Ferenczi (2001) ‘Les intellectuels dans la bataille’, Le Monde, 19 January, p. VIII. Review of Pierre Bourdieu’s Contre-Feux 2. 22 In his introduction to Pierre Bourdieu (2000) Propos sur le champ politique (Presses Universitaires de Lyon), pp. 11, 19. 23 Pierre Bourdieu (1984) ‘Espace social et gènese des classes’, in Actes de la recherche des sciences sociales, Juin, pp. 3–14. 24 Pierre Bourdieu (1996) ‘Champ politique, champ des sciences sociales, champ journalistique’, in Cahiers de recherche, N.15, Lyon, pp. 13, 16. 25 Propos sur le champ politique, pp. 46–7. 26 Ibid. 27 Emmanuel Terray (1990) La politique dans la caverne (Paris: Éditions de Seuil), pp. 92–3. 28 Ulrich Beck (1991) Politik in der Risikogesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp Verlag). Here quoted in John Torpey’s translation – in Ecological Enlightenment (New Jersey, Humanities Press, 1995), pp. 66–7. 29 Cf. Dany-Robert Dufour (2001) ‘Les désarrois de l’individu-sujet’, Le Monde diplomatique, February, pp. 16–17. 30 In L’individu incertain (Paris, Calman-Lévy 1995), Alain Ehrenberg picks up a Wednesday evening in October 1983 as the watershed date (at least for France). On that evening, Viviane and Michel, an ordinary and on the whole unremarkable couple easily dissolved in a city crowd, appeared in front of French TV cameras, and there-

Sociology as a vocation 225 fore millions of TV viewers, so that Viviane could say of Michel: my husband suffers from eiaculatio praecox, and complain that when with him, she never experienced pleasure. A watershed, indeed. Not just the boundary between the private and the public has been erased, but the spaces in public view have been captured for the display of sentiments and deeds heretofore reserved solely for most intimate confessions. Since that Wednesday evening, of course, Viviane’s pioneering act has been endlessly reiterated in millions of TV chat-shows and newspaper ‘exclusive stories’, the contemporary replicas of the agora. Far from shocking, it has become the daily intake of hundreds of millions of individuals ‘like her’ and the only publicly staged events in ‘public interest’. 31 Claude Lanzmann and Robert Redeker (1998) ‘Les méfaits d’un rationalisme simplificateur’, Le Monde, 18 September, p. 14.

15 Hidden actors, overlooked dimensions and blind intellectuals Nine paradoxes that account for institutionally entrenched ignorance Andrzej Zybertowicz Neglect of security intelligence is one of the most striking shortcomings of the transitological literature1

“When the Berlin Wall came crashing down and the Cold War reluctantly proved, to everybody’s surprise, to be truly over, there was an apparent, almost embarrassing inability to define the key parameters that would mark the era that had obviously dawned. Even to give it a name proved difficult” (Winkler, 2002, p. 1). This quotation provides a good entry point into the twofold purpose of the present chapter. First, I want to shed some light on sources of the difficulties of defining of the “new” epoch. Second, I would like to suggest that some weaknesses of the new, East of the Elbe democracies stem from the inability of intellectuals to recognise some of the key social stakeholders involved in the process of the systemic transformation. Massive institutional shifts, which have been under way since the end of communism, have provided extremely fertile grounds for the proliferation of ramified informal power networks in the East-Central European countries, Poland included. Rampant corruption, the extremely poor quality of the lawmaking process, unregulated lobbying, a myriad of conflicts of interest, the limited efficiency of the police, and crises within the Ministry of Justice can all be seen as both preconditions and results of the operation of such networks. One of the indicators of the strength of these networks is the fact that large scale economic frauds are rarely explained to the public fully, and usually the main culprits escape unpunished. What should be striking is the fact that many of these frauds, although achievable only with complex logistical preparations, took place in companies or institutions that have been under the so-called counterintelligence protection of civilian or military intelligence services. With such protection the services establish “guardian angels” whose task is to cultivate networks of informants within institutions (the Military Technical Academy is a good example here) under their responsibility. It is highly unlikely that ramified activities aiming at illicit transfers of public resources, operations involving many culprits, could escape the attention of networks of professional secret intelligence services.

Hidden actors, overlooked dimensions 227 What is more, in many cases the media have documented the presence of various figures connected both to the old and new intelligence services among those suspected in the most intricate of the frauds (see for example Ciesla, 2003; Ciesla and Jachowicz, 2002; Cychol, 2001, 2003; Gargas, 2003; Kittel and Marszalek, 2001; Los and Zybertowicz, 2000; Zybertowicz, 1997, 2002). This should be striking, but numerous students of the transformation avoid being interested in patterns easily detectable by systematic readers of the Polish press and/or the Supreme Chamber of Control reports. The post-1989 history of the Polish intelligence services abounds with scandals: leaking counterfeited compromising materials as well as genuine items, “wild” lustrations, as well as other actions of dubious legality and/or usefulness. The services were not simply accused of disrupting or interfering with the political activities of individuals or organisations. They were also charged with initiating various media campaigns, spreading slanderous rumours, inspiring and/or hindering shifts in legal arrangements, initiating dubious economic activities (like manipulating the Polish stock market), and even organising and/or suppressing political parties. The services were blamed for unlawful infiltration both of left- and right-wing political groupings and bringing about the fall from power of three Prime Ministers, one deputy Prime Minister, and numerous minor figures, not to mention unlawfully intervening in all three presidential campaigns (see for example AMC, 1996; Baranski, 1997, 2001; Biernacki, 2002; Demokratyczna kontrola . . . 1998; Jakimczyk, 2003; Kosobudzki, 1998; Los and Zybertowicz, 1999; Marszalek, 1998; Pytlakowski, 2001; Wróblewski, 1998; compare Zybertowicz, 1999). Some of the charges may be exaggerated or unfounded: the point remains, though, that they were never fully explained either by the judiciary or by the media. In July 2001, two months before the parliamentary elections were won by the post-communist parties, Zbigniew Siemia˛tkowski – a social democratic party MP, minister of the interior in 1996, later on the government coordinator of the intelligence services, and since 2002 director of the civilian Foreign Intelligence Agency (Agencja Wywiadu) – stated that the reform of the services that he designed should “deeply plough the structure, which had been evolving for decades, and had through informal methods captured the whole organism of the state, and until now has operated with impunity beyond anybody’s control” (Siemia˛tkowski, 2001). After the elections, in December 2001, colonel Marek Dukaczewski, the newly nominated director of Military Information Services, who had spent five years in the National Security Bureau of President Aleksander Kwasniewski’s Chancellery, declared that “in Poland, during the last twelve years, there has not been a mechanism created to prevent the intelligence services from intervening in political games” (Dukaczewski, 2001).2 Yet, instead of explaining the scandals and taking legal measures against those responsible, instead of accountability, the Polish public has been offered a quasi-reform of the services. The parliament passed a new law on intelligence services (statute of 24 May 2002) which merits this label of a quasi-reform because, among other reasons, it did not meet the objectives of its own designers. According to their declarations, the two most important intelligence

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organisations: the civilian State Protection Agency (Urza˛d Ochrony Panstwa) and the Military Information Services (Wojskowe Sluzby Informacyjne), both covering foreign and domestic intelligence tasks, were to be dissolved. In their place two new organisations were to be established: the Agency for Internal Security (Agencja Bezpieczenstwa Wewne˛trznego) and the Foreign Intelligence Agency (Agencja Wywiadu). Nonetheless, although the two new agencies were formed, the military services went virtually unscathed. The undercover community has once again proved that it can resist reform projects initiated by “irresponsible” politicians. Yet, the mainstream of Polish intellectuals (sociologists and political scientists included) finds nothing interesting to be explored in this domain (see Wicenty, 2002). For them it goes unnoticed that the intelligence services’ formal and informal networks cultivate fertile soil for the spread of perverse social capital (in the sense of M. Rubio, 1997). It goes unnoticed that there is a sort of “dirty togetherness” (in the sense of Adam Podgórecki, 1976, pp. 24–5; 1993, pp. 21, 99) and that the services contribute to deterioration of the weak tissue of civil society in Poland. Instead, the intellectuals are eager to interpret away issues of that kind, playing down via a plethora of rhetoric twists the import of the intelligence services and the assets they accumulated during the transformation (see Los, 1995; Sojak, 1998; Zybertowicz, 1998). Phenomena like the nomenklatura endowment, large economic frauds, the spread of organised crime, repetitive abuses of intelligence services, “wild” lustration, and, last but not least, an institutionalisation of non-accountability, both within the polity and the society (on the last item see Hausner and Marody, 2000), are usually interpreted as pathologies (see e.g. Wnuk-Lipinski and Ziólkowski, 2001). This means that the phenomena are perceived as marginal parts of the basic processes of the transformation (i.e. democratisation, marketisation, privatisation, changes in stratification system, party system emergence, value systems shifts, etc). However, in my opinion, these “dirty phenomena” actually rest at the very core of the transformation (see Los and Zybertowicz, 2000). If this opinion is sound, the prevailing definitions of major actors and factors are haunted by systematic flaws. My aim below is to shed light on this tendency to ignore such phenomena. In order to do this I invoke nine paradoxes, which, to my mind, account at least partly for the institutionally entrenched ignorance that veils the “behind the curtain” dimensions of (not only) the Polish transformation.

Nine paradoxes The rise of communism paradox Despite the fact that the Marxist theory of history attributes priority to economic factors, the Leninist regimes were set up as a response to the dynamics of the political sphere. That means, among other things, that the stability of the regimes relied heavily on political institutions such as the intelligence services

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(broadly understood ). In some phases of communism’s history some countries even displayed the essential features of police-states; for example, I would argue that this was the case of Poland of the 1980s (see Los and Zybertowicz, 2000; Zybertowicz, 1997; compare Chapman, 1970). The vanishing actor paradox Many scholarly models of the communist regimes have found that the secret police were crucial to the establishment, reproduction and stability of the regimes; they were one of the pillars of the system (see e.g. Friedrich and Brzezinski, 1965). However, once we review standard models of the systemic transformation we notice that the role of the police has been almost completely neglected. The misdirection of research interests paradox Despite the fact that the intelligence services’ role under communist regimes was immeasurably more prominent than within capitalist countries, the overwhelming majority of scholars who deal with the domain of covert action4 focus their interests on mature democratic states.5 This can easily be seen if you survey the tables of contents of such journals as Intelligence and National Security or International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence. The paradox of governance (control) of communist society6 On the one hand, those in power (the nomenklatura) went to great pains to prevent the subjected population from free expression of ideas, thus (op)pressing the society to articulate in the public sphere only views congruent with the official depiction of the nation’s situation. On the other hand, the rulers did not spare any efforts to uncover what the subjected population may actually have thought. The secret police were instrumental in achieving both of these aims. First, the police imbued people with fear, disciplined them, and normalised their behaviour7 through practices as varied as spreading of slanderous rumours, harassing, battering, arresting, secretly killing, and, last but not least, infiltration of groups that they perceived as hostile to the system (see e.g. Cenckiewicz, 2003; Ruzikowski, 2003; Widacki, 1992; Zybertowicz, 1995/96, 1997, 1998). However, once the first aim was achieved and silence and/or hypocrisy were effectively enforced, the rulers found themselves cut off from the credible information feedback that is necessary for governing a modern mass society. Hence, the second main assignment of the secret police was the task of uncovering what was going on within the minds of the silenced. This task was achieved mostly through even more ramified networks of secret police informants than those originally necessary for the surveillance of potential disorderly behaviour. Therefore, a system of massive infiltration and clandestine channels of information gathering was initiated and maintained.

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In this context, one should also remember that any communist state necessarily had to cope with much more complex regulative tasks than other, “normal” kinds of states. This followed from the system’s totalitarian (or quasitotalitarian) nature. To illustrate this it is sufficient to recall the scope of everyday information flow that is necessary for managing a command economy. The absence of the market as a source of information on economic processes, as well as the lack of owners’ control over managers, meant the absence of the basic regulative feedback needed to provide the minimum rationality indispensable for economic performance. And once again, the role of the secret police in this process can hardly be overestimated (see Los and Zybertowicz, 1997, 2000; Zybertowicz, 1993, 1997). Thus, in this context, it seems legitimate to speak about the centralised policing of politics (see Marx, 1974). Various police agencies were not simply protecting the system of power; networks of informants had become indispensable for the very constitution of the communist system – both for its emergence and for its everyday operation. One may even claim that communism developed a specific pattern of social control (or even of governance) which could be appropriately labelled regulation through infiltration (more in Los and Zybertowicz, 2000, pp. 47–52). The shield and sword8 paradox I (the death of the old system) Although communist intelligence services were designed to protect the party and the system per se, eventually they became active in the regime’s dismantling. The services covert operational techniques were instrumental not only in sustaining the communist regime, but also in the facilitation of the system’s dismantling (partly pre-planned, partly spontaneous) and the eventual reassembling of some of the vested interests of some of the old regime stakeholders. Since many scholars cannot come to terms with this role inversion, this paradox accounts for, at least to a degree, the vanishing actor paradox. Under communism, the services, by their very nature, were by far the most knowledgeable institution (see Los and Zybertowicz, 2000, chapter 3), and, therefore, the first to recognise the miserable condition of the system. The services’ capacities to monitor, manipulate, and, last but not least, de/mobilise social support proved to be crucial for initiating a top-down process of reforming the system. When the process eventually got out of hand, the resources of the services again proved to be useful for providing a soft landing for the nomenklatura at large. The shield and sword paradox II (a society in transformation) “In a revolutionary situation, the institutions of security intelligence play a far more exposed, ambiguous role than they do in consolidated democratic politics. Together with ethnic minorities, they are at the centre of post-communism’s moral panics and conspiracy theories, yet at the same time they are expected to

Hidden actors, overlooked dimensions 231 protect the people and enlighten policy-makers in a period of uncertainty and disquiet” (Williams and Deletant, 2000, p. 1; emphasis mine – AZ). Another observation of Kieran Williams tells us how this paradox was “solved” in practice: “The pursuit of NATO membership has been substituted for serious discussion of what it means to feel safe or unsafe in a multipolar, globalised Europe. This is alarming, since effective control of security intelligence presupposes that it should not fall to the services to decide what or whom to consider a threat; these are political issues requiring open debate and public awareness” (Williams and Deletant, 2000, p. 20). The courage and betrayal (or resistance and infiltration) paradox The more courageous and better organised dissident groups were (i.e. the more these groups were perceived by the nomenklatura as dangerous), the more regularly they were infiltrated and infected with secret police collaborators. The surge of civil society in Poland in the 1980s was paralleled by the expansion of secret police infiltrations. Thus, the courage and organisational skills employed in building strong enclaves of civil society led to increased levels of duplicity. Intensified infiltration resulted in heavy pressures on dissident groups, making those groups more treachery-prone. So one may infer here, speaking in statistical terms, a paradoxical equation: more courage brought about more betrayal. Not only anti-systemic social movements but virtually all kinds of social circles that the communist authorities perceived as potentially “uncertain” were infiltrated by various branches of the intelligence services. In the late 1980s, the net of so-called secret collaborators was about 100,000 strong (see Ruzikowski, 2003). First, the infiltration included use of so-called undercover functionaries employed in civilian institutions of importance (like the state postal system). Second, the infiltration consisted of various techniques of recruitment of real, or potential, dissidents. Some of them became fully-fledged agents of the secret police, some were half-aware collaborators with the police, and some played hazardous games aiming at outsmarting the secret police, but many found themselves in a blurred zone of lost or dual loyalties. Probably only a few escaped completely unscathed from the numerous police attempts at bribing, cheating, flattering, flirting, threatening, battering, harassing, seducing and manipulating in general. The resistance and infiltration paradox has produced cognitive and moral consequences with which many groups of Polish dissidents are still struggling to come to terms (see e.g. Grajewski, 1996; Zybertowicz, 1998; compare Rosenberg, 1996). Especially poignant is the fact that among the heirs of this predicament are some of today’s most important public discourse tone-setters.9 The courage and betrayal paradox will also serve partly to explain the next paradox: the decommunisation paradox.

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The decommunisation paradox The very same rationale that makes decommunisation necessary renders it impossible. Decommunisation should be implemented due to the persistence of informal parasitical power networks that undermine the rule of law, and partly account for the facade-like character of Polish democracy (see Skórzynski, 2003; Zybertowicz, 2002). However, the strength of these very networks has made a civilised (i.e. legally designed and implemented) decommunisation highly unlikely. Among other things, this is due to the fact that infiltration of the democratic opposition groups has made it extremely difficult today to differentiate between those to be purified and the potential purifiers. International capital and the anti-anti-communism paradox According to an argument offered by Richard Pipes’ in his book Property and Freedom (1999) the best vaccine against the threat of communism is the spread, and economic and cultural embedding, of private property in social life. For this reason, one might expect that the inflow of Western capital to post-communist countries would be the best decommunisation strategy. Yet nothing like this has actually happened. In practice, the capital inflow in the early 1990s has enhanced the role of former police/nomenklatura networks, both in economic and cultural life. Western capital’s presence has also served to delegitimise efforts to thwart the influence of the post-nomenklatura networks. There are two primary reasons for this. First, large Western corporations, newcomers to the emerging Polish market, readily employed former secret police/nomenklatura operators who were, sometimes rightly, perceived as insiders able to navigate the intricate and often poorly regulated (see e.g. Jarosz, ed. 2001) privatisation projects. Second, Western capital entered Eastern Europe in an atmosphere of globalisation, technocratic rationality, expertise, and depoliticisation that hampered legal, moral, and cognitive attempts to cope with the heritage of the police-state (see Los and Zybertowicz, 2000, chapter 10). All this has substantially narrowed the space for any endeavours aimed at uncovering the truth about the old system’s atrocities or bringing the culprits to courts.

Conclusions and a speculative hypothesis These largely unrecognised and/or neglected paradoxes have significantly contributed to the perpetuation by researchers (and intellectuals in general) of a very incomplete and/or even fictitious portrayal of the mechanisms of the postcommunist transformation. The paradoxes contribute to a sort of blanketing effect that prevents alternative conceptualisations of the phenomena from exer-

Hidden actors, overlooked dimensions 233 cising a grip on social consciousness. Certain topics are systematically marginalised, or even excluded, both from research interests and from the public discourse. To my mind, it is virtually impossible fully to comprehend the interplay of the social forces in contemporary Poland without understanding the legacy of communist police–state institutions. The transformation in Poland consists of components (processes and phases) both spontaneous and purely reactive, as well as intentional (i.e. at least partly pre-planned and carefully executed at various levels of the social structure). In some cases hidden stakeholders of the transformation were designing future operations and conditions; in others they were just taking advantage of opportunities which they saw arising. An individual as an actor might not be able to initiate some events, but an organisation or loose network with better access to information and better resources at its disposal can achieve much more, for example in the domain of institutionalising new rules of the game. The intelligence services did not invent the systemic transformation. Neither were they the sole major actor in it. They do not rule in contemporary Poland. However, nowadays the services’ resources (redefined under new conditions) provide a robust frame, a sort of skeleton, for informal power networks which haunt many dimensions of Polish public life. In 2002 and at the beginning of the 2003 this was repeatedly stressed in the Polish press (see e.g. Ciesla and Jachowicz, 2002; Marszalek, 2003; Pytlakowski, 2003). Without focusing social scientists’ interests on the intricacies of the services’ role we are not likely to understand the key factors that hinder the pursuit of the rule of law in Poland (and, almost certainly, in other post-Soviet states). The unacknowledged presence of the paradoxes accounts for the group-think syndrome preventing research into dirty phenomena and data in general (in the sense of Gary T. Marx, 1984; compare Andrew and Dilkes, 1984). What if these very phenomena are not on the margin of the processes of transformation but at their very core? (see Los and Zybertowicz, 1999; Los, 2003). What if some of the post-communist countries “have reached a point where illegal, parasitic webs have permeated agencies important to the functioning of the state to such an extent that a battle against them threatens the integrity of the state itself”? (Los, 2003). World Bank scholars are exploring the “capture of the state” phenomenon in post-communist Europe. However, unlike some of them (see, for example, Hellman et al., 2000), the present writer claims that the capture is mostly pursued not by firms, but by the business-security complex. Can it be that the scholars’ blindness to the dirty phenomena partly accounts for, to invoke Zygmunt Bauman’s paper in this volume, “the absence of credible translations between the languages of private worries and public issues” and contributes, therefore, to agora losing its past charms and attraction? Now let me offer a piece of speculative theorising. One of the phenomena requiring explanation is the repeated electoral successes of post-communist groupings in new, by and large democratic elections. What are the deep sources of these successes? Are there any long-term (in the sense of Fernand Braudel) processes at work? For example, do the post-communists possess a unique

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knowledge and/or experience of the societies which they ruled for decades, a knowledge that is not available to centre/rightist blocs? Let me propose here a very abstract approach to this issue. In mathematical theories of chaos a notion of attractor has been developed. An attractor is a state of things toward which a given system tends. Let me quote, putting aside for a moment theoretically proper form in the hope of concretising the discussion, a few passages from the Encyclopedia Britannica (De Luxe Edition CD-Rom, 2002): “A central concept is that of structural stability, which arose from attempts to describe the ‘typical’ behaviour of a dynamical system – behaviour that persists when the system itself is perturbed. It must be distinguished from the stability of an individual solution – behaviour that persists when the initial conditions of a fixed system are perturbed. Structural stability is a formal way to capture the idea of behaviour that is not destroyed by small changes to the system.” “An attractor is a region of state space that captures the long-term behaviour of the system. It is now known that structurally stable systems can possess attractors on which the systems behave in an apparently random manner.” “That it is an attractor means that all nearby solutions tend toward it and thus will also oscillate, at least to a high degree of approximation. Periodic attractors are of basic importance in applications of dynamical systems”. Now, my intuition is that focusing our interest on the paradoxes discussed above might help us to identify something in the vein of attractors in postcommunist social systems. Taking the paradoxes into consideration could also help us to solve another fascinating question: why the old systems’ attractors (and attractions!) have not been dismantled so far.

Notes 1 Kieran Williams in Williams and Deletant (2000, p. 21). 2 Such observations are not exceptional, see for example, Celinski (2003) and Hausner (2003). 3 By intelligence services I mean all state institutions except the state police officially authorised to collect, process and disseminate information that might be achieved via resorting to covert methods. The services also have the latitude – sometimes granted half legally – to influence secretly or manipulate institutions, organisations and individuals. Under communism the services usually included foreign intelligence, domestic counterintelligence, political police and special forces. 4 I use the term “covert action” in a broad, generic sense of the notion, not in the much narrower sense employed in intelligence services studies. One of the narrower definitions is as follows. “Covert action can be defined as any operation or activity (including the use of violence) designed to influence foreign governments, persons, or events in support of the sponsoring government’s foreign policy objectives while keeping the sponsoring government’s support of the operation a secret” (Intelligence Services, 2002). 5 I owe this observation to Professor Christopher Andrew of Cambridge University.

Hidden actors, overlooked dimensions 235 6 7 8 9

It is based on Vladimir Bukovski’s observation. Associations with Michel Foucault’s ideas are justified here. “Shield and Sword” was a title of a KGB official, though internal, bulletin. The most notable case is the daily Gazeta Wyborcza led by Adam Michnik. That became especially poignant in 2002 when one of the leading publicists of the daily was revealed as a former collaborator of the communist political police.

References AMC. (1996) “Minister oskarza ‘Wprost’,” Zycie, 7–8 December, edition B, p. 5. Andrew, C. and Dilkes, D. (1984) “Introduction”, in C. Andrew and D. Dilkes (eds) The Missing Dimension: Governments and Intelligence Communities in the Twentieth Century (London: Macmillan). Baranski, M. (1997) “Przepraszamy Kaczynskiego”, Nie, 21 August, p. 1. Baranski, M. (2001) Bunt janczarów: Kulisy tajnych sluzb Trzeciej Rzeczypospolitej (Warszawa: PPUH “ALMAR”). Bauman, Z. (2006) “How to be a sociologist and a humanist? Sociology as a vocation in liquid-modern times”, (this volume, Chapter 14). Biernacki, M. (2002) Polska bez mafii. . . . Interviewed by M. Trzcinski (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo MOST). Celinski, A. (2003) “Interviewed by M. Baranski”, Trybuna. 26 April; cited Gazeta Wyborcza, 28 April, p. 2. Cenckiewicz, S. (2003) “Sluzba bezpieczenstwa wobec I Krajowego Zjazdu Delegatów NSZZ “Solidarnosc”, Arcana, 51–2 (3–4), pp. 94–125. Chapman, B. (1970) Police State (London: Pall Mall). Ciesla, W. (2003) “Na klopoty – FOZZ”, Gazeta Wyborcza, 17–18 May, pp. 18–19. Ciesla, W. and Jachowicz, J. (2002) “Big Brothers, czyli wojna agentów”, Gazeta Wyborcza, 2–3 November, pp. 12–15. Cychol, D. (2001) “Z czego zyja˛ szpiedzy”, Nie, 2 August, p. 1. Cychol, D. (2003) “Prawda, z która mija sie˛ Tober”, Nie, 17 April, p. 3. Demokratyczna kontrola nad sluzbami specjalnymi (1998) [A debate], Mysl Socjaldemokratyczna. No. 4, pp. 103–25. Dukaczewski, M. (2001) “Interviewed by A. Walentek”, Zycie Warszawy, 4 December. Friedrich, C. J. and Brzezinski, Z. (1965) Totalitarian dictatorship and autocracy, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press) (first edn 1956). Gargas, A. (2003) “Imperium zielonych cieni”, Gazeta Polska, 9 July, pp. 3–5. Grajewski, A. (1996) “Lustracja po polsku”, Przegla˛d Polityczny, No. 31, pp. 8–14. Hausner, J. (2003) “Akt oskarzenia”, Polityka, 21 June, pp. 38–40. Hausner, J and Marody, M. (eds) (2000) Jakosc rza˛dzenia: Polska blizej Unii Europejskiej? EU-monitoring IV (Kraków: Malopolska Szkola Administracji Publicznej Akademii Ekonomicznej w Krakowie). Hellman, J. S., Jones, G. and Kaufman, D. (2000) “Seize the State, Seize the Day: State Capture, Corruption AND Influence in Transition”. World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 2444, September. Intelligence Services and Democracy (2002) Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF), Working Paper Series, No. 13. Jakimczyk, J. (2003) Jednostka nr 3362, Rzeczpospolita, 16 July. Jarosz, M. (ed.) (2001) Manowce polskiej prywatyzacji (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN).

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Kittel, B. and Marszalek, A. (2001) “Urza˛d Ochrony Suskiego”, Rzeczpospolita, 1 March. Kosobudzki, T. (1998) Bezpieka w MSZ: Sluzby specjalne w polityce zagranicznej RP w latach 1989–1997 (Kielce-Warszawa: Wydawnictwo ELIPSA). Lane, D. (2006) “Explaining the transformation from state socialism: revolution, class and elites”, (this volume, Chapter 10). Los, M. (1995) “Lustration and truth claims: unfinished revolutions in Central Europe”, Law AND Social Inquiry, 20 (1), pp. 117–61. Los, M. (2003) “Crime in transition: the post-Communist state, markets and crime”, Crime, Law AND Social Change, Special Issue: Crime and Markets in Post-Communist Democracies, Vol. 40, Nos 2–3, October, pp. 145–69. Los, M. and Zybertowicz, A. (1997) “Covert action: the missing link in explanations of the rise and demise of the Soviet Bloc”, Periphery, 3 (1/2), pp. 16–20. Los, M. and Zybertowicz, A. (1999) “Is revolution a solution? State crime in communist and post-communist Poland (1980–1995)”, in M. Krygier and A. Czarnota (eds) The Rule of Law after Communism: Problems AND Prospects in East-Central Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate), pp. 261–307. Los, M. and Zybertowicz, A. (2000) Privatizing the Police-State: The Case of Poland (London: Macmillan, St. Martin’s Press. Marszalek, A. (1998) “Polityczne kulisy dzialania UOP”, Rzeczpospolita, 25 July. Marszalek, A. (2003) Czy sluzby oklamaly premiera, Rzeczpospolita, February 5. Marx, G. T. (1974) “Thoughts on a neglected category of social movement participant: the agent provocateur and the informant”, American Journal of Sociology, 80, pp. 402–42. Marx, G. T. (1984) “Notes on the discovery, collection, and assessment of hidden and dirty data”, in J. Schneider and J. Kitsuse (eds) Studies in the Sociology of Social Problems (Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex Publishing Company). Pipes, R. (1999) Property and Freedom (Knopf). Podgorecki, A. (1976) “Kontrola spoleczna trzeciego stopnia”, in Problemy profilaktyki spolecznej i resocjalizacji (Warszawa, IPiPS UW). Podgorecki, A. (1993) Social Oppression (Westport, Con. and London: Greenwood Press). Pytlakowski, P. (2001) Republika tajnych sluzb, Polityka, 21 July, pp. 3–9. Pytlakowski, P. (2003) “Koledzy z Alei Niepodleglosci”, Polityka, 25 January, pp. 24–7. Rosenberg, T. (1996) The Haunted Land: Facing the Europe’s Ghosts After Communism (New York: Vintage Books). Rubio, M. (1997) “Perverse social capital – some evidence from Colombia”, Journal of Economic Issues, 31 (3), pp. 805–16. Ruzikowski, T. (2003) “Tajni wspólpracownicy pionów operacyjnych aparatu bezpieczenstwa 1950–1984”, Pamie˛c i Sprawiedliwosc, 1 (3), pp. 109–31. Siemiatkowski, Z. (2001) “Interviewed by M. Baranski”, Nie, 26 July, p. 5. Skorzynski, J. (ed.) (2003) System Rywina, czyli druga strona III Rzeczypospolitej (Warszawa: Swiat Ksia˛zki i Rzeczpospolita). Sojak, R. (1998) “Demaskowani i wykluczeni. Dyskurs antylustracyjny w Polsce w swietle socjologii wiedzy”, Terazniejszosc. Czlowiek. Edukacja, No. 2, pp. 29–59. Wicenty, D. (2002) “Zagubiona rzeczywistosc: Dlaczego zakulisowe wymiary zycia spolecznego nie sa˛ przedmiotem badan polskich socjologów?”, MA thesis completed at the Institute of Sociology, Nicholas Copernicus University. Widacki, J. (1992) Czego nie powiedzial general Kiszczak (Warszawa: BGW).

Hidden actors, overlooked dimensions 237 Williams, K. and Deletant, D. (2001) Security Intelligence Services in New Democracies: The Cases of Czech Republic, Slovakia AND Romania (London: Macmillan and School of Slavonic and East European Studies, UCL). Winkler, T. (2002) “Managing change: the reform and democratic control of the security sector and international order.” Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF), Occasional Paper, No. 1. Wnuk-Lipinski, E. and Ziolkowski, M. (eds) (2001) Pierwsza dekada niepodleglosci: próba socjologicznej syntezy (Warszawa: ISP PAN). Wroblewski, B. (1998) “Podwójne falszerstwo?” Gazeta Wyborcza, 21 April, p. 5. Zybertowicz, A. (1993) W uscisku tajnych sluzb: upadek komunizmu i uklad postnomenklaturowy (Komorów: ANTYK). Zybertowicz, A. (1995/96) “A neglected dimension of contemporary social movements dynamics: secret services in the field of constraints and facilitations for social movements.” Working Paper, No. 15, Advanced Study Center, International Institute, University of Michigan. Zybertowicz, A. (1997) “Niewidoczna wladza: komunistyczne panstwo policyjne w Polsce lat osiemdziesia˛tych”, in R. Bäcker and P. Hübner (eds) Skryte oblicze systemu komunistycznego (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo DiG), pp. 153–92, 244–7. Zybertowicz, A. (1998) “Sztuka zapominania: panstwo policyjne jako nierzeczywistosc”, in W. Wrzosek (ed.) Swiat historii (Poznan: Instytut Historii UAM), pp. 429–39. Zybertowicz, A. (1999) “Urza˛d Ochrony Panstwa jako podmiot gry politycznej”, Zeszyty Naukowe WSO im. T. Kosciuszki, special issue: Socjologiczne aspekty bezpieczenstwa narodowego, Wroclaw, pp. 141–55. Zybertowicz, A. (2002) “Demokracja jako fasada: przypadek III RP”, in E. Mokrycki, A. Rychard and A. Zybertowicz (eds) Utracona dynamika? O niedojrzalosci polskiej demokracji (Warszawa: IFiS PAN), pp. 173–214.

16 The enchantment of the social Radoslaw Sojak

Social capital, understood as trust among individuals and their ability to create intermediary institutions between state and family, seems to be one of the most important factors influencing not only ‘the wealth of nations’ but generally social workings.1 It is also extremely important for transforming post-communist countries. Important and indispensable, it is at the same time a very fragile and vulnerable kind of social good. Social capital may not be imported; it is easily corrupted and destroyed; and, as with other resources, it may be depleted. My argument is that traditional (I use this word in its Weberian meaning) sources of trust are being rapidly and extensively used and, as a result, are almost worn out. There are several factors that contribute to this process. Among the most important are: the legalisation of social relations (generally analysed by Jürgen Habermas and also pointed out by Francis Fukuyama), the ritualisation of politics, and the growth of both social and spatial mobility. Moreover, the September 11 attacks added a new dimension to this processes, as the rate of state control in most Western countries will probably increase tremendously, resulting in further weakening of the trust between both communities and individuals. Thus the questions arise: can we find any alternative sources of social capital; may trust be preserved in late modern societies?

Knowledge and enchantment I want to suggest that alternative sources of trust could be cognitive in nature. Two notions coined by Anthony Giddens may be very useful to explain this. The first one is the notion of knowledgeability by which Giddens (1984, p. 375) means: Everything that actors know (believe) about the circumstances of their action and that of others, drawn upon in the production and reproduction of that action, including tacit as well as discursively available knowledge. Thus, every actor has a certain level of knowledge and expertise concerning the situation he is part of, and this knowledge has a direct influence on his control of his own environment. The more knowledgeable the actor is, the more control he

The enchantment of the social 239 exerts over his environment and other actors.2 If trust is a matter of control and predictability then it is tightly connected with knowledgeablility. The second concept is that of ontological security – ‘confidence and trust that the natural and social worlds are as they appear to be, including the basic existential parameters of self and social identity’ (Giddens, 1984, p. 375). In other words, ontological security depends on firmness of one’s worldview and stability in the basic factors affecting one’s present situation. If trust is a matter of stability then it is closely connected with ontological security. To sum up: sufficient knowledgeability gives us confidence about our close spatial, temporal and social environment, while ontological security guarantees that this environment is a coherent part of a much wider social and natural world. Only in such circumstances may trust prevail and develop. That is why the matter of trust becomes a matter of cognition. And here we enter the Weberian story of disenchantment of the world. As we begin this discussion, two preliminary remarks are necessary. First, one should note that the disenchantment thesis is susceptible to at least two different interpretations – historiosophical and psychological. The first one – probably predominant – regards Weberian disenchantment as yet another way of addressing one of the fundamental problems within social theory – the nature of modernity. Here, the level of enchantment may be measured in terms of the extent of rationalised, institutional control over social life. The second interpretation envisions enchantment mainly as a property of the mind, and thus is an important part of what we may call Weberian ‘philosophy of consciousness’. In this case the main question deals with the strategies that the mind brings into play when it is confronted by mystery. These two interpretations are complementary. Nonetheless, the outcome of the interpretation may be seriously influenced by bias towards one of them. The reader must be aware that the analysis that follows is slightly biased towards a psychological interpretation – one that is anchored in a quite famous quotation from ‘Science as Vocation’: The increasing intellectualisation and rationalisation do not [. . .] indicate an increased and general knowledge of the conditions under which one lives. It means something else, namely, the knowledge or belief that if one but wished one could learn it any time. Hence, it means that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted. (Weber, 1948, p. 139) This means that the disenchantment of the world is, from the psychological point of view, the confidence in human cognitive powers. That is why disenchantment of the world did not destroy social capital immediately and by itself. It might have weakened the traditional, moral or religious foundations of trust, but at the same time it strengthened the cognitive basis of social capital. Second, there seems to be a strong conviction within the social sciences that

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the world may be – for good or bad – re-enchanted (see Berman, 1983; Campbell, 1989; Schneider, 1993; Ritzer, 1999). There even seems to be a certain nostalgia for the enchanted world. This longing fuels at the same time theories quite close and very remote from Weberian tradition. Good examples of the former are the early Frankfurt school’s critique of instrumental reason and Jürgen Habermas’ concept of colonisation of Lebenswelt; while Michel Foucault’s archaeology of deraison and genealogy of Western punishment system provide good examples of the latter. Regardless of all the differences mentioned above, every analysis is based on a presupposition of the symmetry of the disenchantment process. Each analysis holds that the disenchantment of nature renders the disenchantment of the social. My chapter is based on exactly the opposite conviction. I will try to point out that the more disenchanted, controllable and predictable nature becomes, the harder it is to grasp the structure of the social. To rephrase Bruno Latour (1988), some control over nature renders disenchantment; more control enchants us again.

Late modern complexity Following Niklas Luhmann (1994, p. 58), I understand complexity of the social system as a situation where the system has no central representation of itself and thus the segments of the system turn out to be more and more unpredictable for each other. With rising complexity, social life gradually loses its cognitive transparency. If we take into account that the root of every enchantment is a situation when ‘we are confronted by circumstances or occurrences so peculiar and so beyond our present understanding as to leave us convinced that were they to be understood, our image of how the world operates would be radically transformed’ (Schneider, 1993, pp. 2–3) then we must agree that complexity yields enchantment. But late modern complexity has some additional traits that give a new quality to it. These are the ‘objectualisation’ of the social and the compression of space and time. I will concentrate mostly on the former, as it is less apparent. In a preface to the second edition of Durkheim’s Rule of Sociological Method, one can find a very symptomatic footnote saying that, although the social consists of both individuals and things, only the former are active elements of the society (see Durkheim, 2000, p. 12). Thus, objects were muted as far as social communication is concerned. This was probably pushed to the limits by Meade’s and Blumer’s symbolic interactionism. Here objects are void of essence and meaning unless they are referred to within the internal thinking processes of an individual (Blumer, 1962). Quite surprisingly, things were brought back into social play by radical constructivists who observed that ‘[o]bjects displace human beings as relationship partners and embedding environments, or that they increasingly mediate human relationships, making the latter dependent on the former’ (Knorr-Cetina, 1997, p. 1). Bruno Latour (1993) goes even further so as to distinguish between what he calls human and nonhuman social actors.3 In general then, by ‘objectualisation’ I understand the situ-

The enchantment of the social 241 ation when the social becomes more and more saturated with things, devices and technical procedures. It is helpful to consider two other theoretical propositions in order to grasp fully and analyse the enchanting effect that ‘objectualisation’ has on the social. The first one is a specific theory of culture adopted after Jerzy Kmita. According to his theory, culture is generally made up of rules. There are two main realms of rules: symbolic and technical. The former must be understood by other members of the society to be effectively put into practice; on the other hand, the latter – while established and institutionalised – does not need such an understanding. In other words, the rules of symbolic culture are built upon cooperation, while the rules of technical culture work without it due to a certain level of routinisation. How much routinisation does technical culture need to be independent of human understanding and meaning creation processes? The answer to this question can be found in the social studies of science and a theory of black-boxing (see Whitley, 1972; Latour, 1987). As maintained by some constructivists, each and every technical device starts as a very vulnerable and controversial project. The execution of the project involves, among other things, closing those controversies. Once this is achieved, once input and output of the technology stabilises, it becomes a black-box. From that moment on, one does not ask how does it works, but simply uses it.4 And this is exactly the moment when the rules governing usage of the device become technical in the above-mentioned Kmitian meaning. To combine those two theories and relate them to the problem of late modern complexity and the enchantment of the social we must note the different rate of social change within symbolic and technical culture. In simple words, the latter changes much more rapidly and with relative ease. It is much easier to produce a new anti-arteriosclerosis medicine than to effectively convince people to abide by any prophylactic rules. The more cooperation is needed among potential users of innovation, the harder it is to spread that innovation. This is exactly the point where the relevance of social capital becomes apparent. Trust smothers the cooperation that is needed for symbolic culture to work properly. Thus, trust allows culture to follow the pace of technological change. But as the ‘objectualisation’ processes advance, technological change erodes the cognitive sources of the trust. In consequence, symbolic culture has a hard time adjusting itself to the constant flow of new devices and technological possibilities that are entering and transforming human collectives. Science and technology become a source of unpredictability within the social. Humanity took the place of God also in that sense that it grew to be a cause of mystery for itself.5 For example we don’t know if our influence caused global warming, nor do we have an idea how we contributed to the appearance of HIV or BSE. The results of our actions become surprising and unpredictable. The more objects people have, the more devices in our hands, and the more technological procedures in our institutions, the more enchanted the social becomes. Another factor that adds a new quality to late modern complexity is an

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enormous time and space compression. A great amount has already been written within the social sciences on that issue (see for example Bauman, 2000; Giddens, 1991), so let me just stress those issues that are particularly relevant to the problem of the enchantment of the social. First of all, humans have gained the possibility of acting over huge distances. As a result, the causes of our present situation and the results of our present action may hide far beyond our – also cognitive – horizon. That partly changes the structure of social action. If we adopt the model of an agent advocated by Giddens (1984, pp. 5–7), relations between the agent and each and every action becomes split into five elements. These are: motivation of action, rationalisation of action, reflexive monitoring of action, unacknowledged conditions, and unintended consequences of action. In a situation of space and time compression the importance of the last two of these is growing. Complexity means that it is harder to shield our actions from unacknowledged conditions and to protect ourselves from unintended consequences. There are couple of important consequences of this situation. •

•

•

It becomes much harder to determine which agent is responsible for any given effect. Not only it is harder to track the chain of actions to pinpoint the root actors and motivations, but it is also harder to ascribe responsibility for the effect. Complexity diffuses responsibility among so many actors and intermediaries that no one is really responsible. As our actions may reach further and produce longer lasting results the risk arises that unintended consequences will surprise us after a long time. And as we become more potent, the possible side-effects may also be greater. The source of time and space compression – the development of technology – constantly lowers the costs of world wide, and long lasting undertakings. As the cost of changing the global system diminishes, the system loses its stability and predictability.

Reduction of complexity According to Luhmann, in order to survive, every system has to reduce the complexity both of its environment and itself. The main way to reduce the complexity of the system is to update its representation of itself. Thus, the tools for complexity reduction are mainly discursive. Late modern societies are no exception to the above-mentioned rules. The question arises whether the discursive tools available to us for complexity reduction are efficient and relevant. If they are, we may hope that the complexity reduction processes will preserve reservoirs of social capital based on trust in our ability to understand the workings of the social. If they are not, we may expect ill-reductions – oversimplified representations of the system leading to gradual loss of transparency and predictability. One of the most efficient discursive tools for reducing the complexity of the social for modernity was the meta-narrative. But late modernity was very suspi-

The enchantment of the social 243 cious about any possible religious, scientific, philosophical or political metanarratives (see Lyotard, 1979), and as a result the ability of the meta-narratives to reduce the complexity of the social system was greatly constrained. It is quite possible that late modern societies lost their meta-narratives exactly when they were most needed. But loss of meta-narratives would not be very harmful unless it was accompanied by a decrease in the validity of certain distinctions well embedded in our discourse and our understanding of the social. The best examples are: Science/technology – the distinction often used to free science from responsibility for the consequences of technological development. This distinction is constantly undermined by the growing volume of private resources involved in scientific investigations. One should remember, for example, that genetic combinations discovered by scientists may be, and have been, patented by industries financing the research. Legal/illegal – this distinction is undermined especially in the realm of international law. Two interrelated problems are most important here: first, questions of legitimisation of any international tribunals dealing with crimes committed across political, geographical and cultural borders. Second, the problem of international immunity being granted to the majority of countries and refused to a few. Politics/economy – on the one hand, we may observe a global trend (supported strongly by the WTO and IMF) to reduce political influence on the economy, but at the same time the intimate relations between international corporations and high level politics are apparent – the last prominent example being the Enron bankruptcy scandal (see Hertz, 2001). Peace/war – this distinction was greatly undermined by the global situation after the September 11 attacks. The issue is further complicated by the fact that with the possession of high-tech weapons, unnoticed warfare becomes possible (see Lem, 1986). Public/private – the new techniques of surveillance based on software or chips implanted into peoples’ bodies actually make this distinction obsolete. Also worth noting is the gradual loss of validity by some concepts well embedded in our discourse, such as: Independence – the concept of the independence of a nation state is radically redefined by new modern complexity. There is a general tendency to delegate state prerogatives to other global actors, and as a result, the states lose their governance abilities. If a corporation is able to close more work places in a week than a state is able to create in a year, then the balance of powers between the two is greatly disturbed (see Monbiot, 2000).

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Free market – this concept is greatly undermined by the close ties between economy and politics. Yet modern economics further denies this concept through what is called ‘organised markets’ – a stable, hierarchical organisation of intermediaries that leaves hardly any space for competition.6 Freedom from ethical responsibility – there is a strong sense that there are certain segments of the social, certain institutions and activities, that are ethically neutral. This conviction is probably strongest in the case of the sciences (see for example Szyszkowska, 2002). But in the world of late modern complexity, with the compression of time and space, we may never be sure where the field of our responsibility ends. The problem is that the above mentioned concepts are constantly and stubbornly used to organise the public experience of late modernity. Pierre Bourdieu once observed about dualisms haunting social theory: I think indeed that the curse of these dualisms [. . .] is that they find [. . .] social support in pedagogy. I have written somewhere that professors are perhaps the main obstacle to the progress of scientific knowledge, at least in the social sciences. I know from experience [. . .] that professors have a pressing need for simple oppositions for purposes of teaching. (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p. 181) The same may be said about the above mentioned distinctions and concepts with the exception that they are needed not only by scientists, but also by politicians and journalists who have a similar pressing need for simple oppositions. They use these distinctions and concepts to communicate easily with others – but the communication becomes less and less informative.

The late modern enchanted mind There are a couple of important consequences of the inability to discursively reduce late modern complexity. They all may be called ill-reductions, as they try to perform the same function – ordering the experience of complexity – but do so in such a way that they obscure our cognition even further. A readiness to accept one-dimensional explanations of the social takes the predominant position among these ill-reductions. There is a great variety of so-called conspiracy theories of history (see Pipes, 1997; Zdybel, 2002), ranging from great cosmological visions of human genesis, to historiosophical visions concerning the birth of the modern world, to more humble views explaining only twists and turns of recent policy. The irony of the conspiracy theories of history lies in the fact that while obscuring the understanding of the workings of the social, they contribute to the creation of a friendly environment for any covert actions. The other face of late modern ill-reduction is the psychologisation of social conflicts. This psychologisation is best observed in the realm of politics. Here,

The enchantment of the social 245 more and more often, social conflicts are grasped and understood in terms of the fear, phobias and frustrations of those who do not find representation of their interests in mainstream political life. We could observe a virtual festival of psychologisation of social conflict after Lionel Jospin’s loss to Jean-Marie Le Pen during the French presidential election. But this process also has a deeper, structural version, as was pointed out by Ulrich Beck. He noticed that structural problems concerning unemployment are often reduced to individuals’ abilities or inabilities to adapt to a new situation. As a result, the solution to the structural problems are quite often sought on the individual level (Beck, 2002). The psychologisation of social conflict is especially dangerous as it undermines one of the most important achievements of democracies – the ability to mediate social conflict. Psychologised social conflicts become irrational, in Lewis Cosers meaning of the word, and so it is hard to establish their stakes and thus to solve them. Last but not least, the late modern enchanted mind is very distrustful. The inability to understand the workings of the social, susceptibility to onedimensional explanations, and psychologisation of the social conflict result in the erosion of social capital. Trust may not prevail in a fast changing, mysterious and unpredictable world void of discursive tools that would enable it to grasp its own nature. The most unsettling question that rises at the end of this analysis would be: under what conditions could social sciences provide a remedy for this situation?

Notes 1 The importance of trust as a social capital was stressed within sociology by such noted thinkers as Niklas Luhmann (2000), Anthony Giddens (1991), Francis Fukuyama (1997), Piotr Sztompka (2000), Robert Putnam (1994) and Steven Shapin (1995). 2 Thus knowledgeability correlates with power – more knowledgeable actors are usually more powerful ones. 3 Similar observations were made also by authors quite remote from the constructivist tradition. Georg Ritzer claims, for example, that ‘the new means of consumption are better characterised by interaction with things than with people’ (Ritzer, 1999). 4 This is of course is a small simplification – black-boxes may be re-opened. For example, controversies over the ozone hole have successfully re-opened such stable black-boxes as our refrigerators or deodorants. 5 From this point of view the closing sentence of Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge warning that ‘you may have killed God beneath the weight of all that you have said; but don’t imagine that [. . .] you will make a man that will live longer than he’ (Foucault, 1989, p. 211) seems to be overoptimistic. 6 I won’t mention the confusion introduced by the fact that the countries stressing free trade as one of the most important international values are also the most protective as far as their own markets are concerned (see, for example, Stiglitz, 2002).

References Bauman, Z. (2000) Globalization. The Human Consequences (London: Polity Press). Beck, U. (2002) Spoleczenstwo ryzyka. W drodze do innej nowoczesnosci (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe SCHOLAR).

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Berman, M. (1983) The Reenchantment of the World (Ithaca). Blumer, H. (1962) ‘Society as symbolic interaction’, in A. M. Rose (ed.) Human Behaviour and Social Processes (Houghton Mifflin Co.), pp. 179–92. Bourdieu, P. and Wacquant, L. (1992) An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press). Campbell, C. (1989) The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford: Blackwell). Durkheim, E. (2000) Zasady metody socjologicznej (Warszawa: Panstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe). Foucault, M. (1989) The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Routledge). Fukuyama, F. (1997) Zaufanie. Kapital spoleczny a droga do dobrobytu (WarszawaWroclaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN). Giddens, A. (1984) The Constitution of Society. Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Berkeley: University of California Press). Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (London: Polity Press). Hertz, N. (2001) The Silent Takeover: Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy (London: Arrow Books). Knorr-Cetina, K. (1997) ‘Sociality with objects: social relations in postsocial knowledge societies’, Theory, Culture & Society, 14 (4), pp. 1–30. Latour, B. (1987) Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press). Latour, B. (1988) ‘The politics of explanation: an alternative’, in S. Woolgar (ed.) Knowledge and Reflexivity: New Frontiers in the Sociology of Knowledge (London: Sage), pp. 155–76. Latour, B. (1993) We Have Never Been Modern (New York: Harvester Weatsheaf). Lem, S. (1986) ‘Weapon systems of the twenty first century or upside-down evolution’, in L. Stanislaw, Biblioteka XXI wieku (Kraków). Luhmann, N. (2000) ‘Familiarity, confidence, trust: problems and alternatives’, in D. Gambetta (ed.) Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations, electronic edition (Department of Sociology, University of Oxford), pp. 94–107. Lyotard, J.-F. (1979) La condition postmoderne. Rapport sur le savoir (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit). Monbiot, G. (2000) Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain (Basingstoke and Oxford: Pan Books). Pipes, D. (1997) Conspiracy. How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where it Comes From (New York: The Free Press). Putnam, R. (1994) Making Democracy Work. Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Ritzer, G. (1999) Enchanting a Disenchanted World. Revolutionizing the Means of Consumption (Pine Forge Press). Schneider, M. (1993). Culture and Enchantment (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press). Shapin, S. (1995) A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press). Stoglitz, J. (2002) Globalization and its Discontents (London: Allen Laine). Sztompka, P. (2000) Trust: A Sociological Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Szyszkowska, M. (2002) ‘Wolnosc uczonych’, Przegla˛d, 13 maja, 49.

The enchantment of the social 247 Weber, M. (1948) ‘Science as vocation’ in H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills (eds and trans.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul). Whitley, R. (1972) ‘Black-boxism and the sociology of science: a discussion of the major developments in the field’, in P. Halmos (ed.) The Sociology of Science, Sociological Review Monograph, nr 18 (Keele: University of Keele), pp. 61–92. Zdybelz, L. (2002) Idea spisku i teorie spiskowe w swietle analiz krytycznych i badan historycznych (Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS).

17 Was “real existing socialism” merely a premature form of rule by experts? Stephen P. Turner

The history of Communism in the twentieth century, if the current orthodoxy is to be believed, was no more than a detour in a process in which history ends in a world of civil societies organized as liberal democracies that increasingly relate to each other following the model of liberal democracy itself, through the rule of law, collective discussion, the general recognition of human and civil rights, and so forth. In this image of world history, the worldwide dominance of liberal democracy is the culmination of a process that appears as a first draft in the Westphalian peace, which gradually spread through time, for example, through the internationalist ideology of Woodrow Wilson. In this teleological image of history, Communism appears as a developmental error, an error produced by an accidental combination of erroneous ideology and special circumstances of delayed development in certain countries that made them particularly susceptible to it. In what follows, I propose to reconsider this version of the meaning of twentieth century Communism, especially, but I am afraid very abstractly, with reference to Eastern Europe and Russia. My concern will be with a three-part relationship, between the state, civil society, and expertise. I will argue that the system of real existing state socialism was a kind of experiment in the construction of a model of relating expertise, the bureaucratic state, and the political forces arising from “civil society.” I will ignore, or rather bracket, the problem of the Soviet system itself and also the coercive character of Communist regimes, important as these issues are. My concern will be with civil society, or rather with an important but seldom discussed aspect of the problem of civil society, the place of non-governmental organizations in processes involving knowledge and expertise.

Expertise and the state: five models To clarify what I take to be the main issues here, let me simply identify four alternative structures of the relation between expertise and the state of the kind that actually existed in the late 1940s, at the moment that Eastern Europe became Communist. The descriptions are caricatures, but I trust that they will at least be recognizable. We may conveniently describe these alternatives as the

“Real existing socialism” 249 Napoleonic, the German, the British, the Swedish, and the American. By the “Napoleonic” I mean to designate powerful centralized state bureaucracies with a formally separate system of specialized technical training; the Grande Écoles in the original model, in which the organizations of the state itself produced a need for expert, specialized, civil servants, typically with high prestige and pay, and a specific ethic which is connected to their special education for service in a particular bureaucracy or group of bureaucracies. This is a model of the appropriation of expertise in which political control is exerted from the top to the top, for example where political authority comes from a Presidential political system and flows to a state bureaucracy in which careers are bound up with an internalized system of promotion and command, and are thus cushioned from politics, except in the sense of responding in a broad way to social and technical needs as defined, typically, from a national perspective. The characteristic “input” of locals to the process of decisionmaking is protest. The relevant bureaucracies respond to pressure, and seek to avoid protest, but they do not respond to local initiative. The end of the era in which the local notables exercised real or potential power in France came in 1848, and was decisive (Halévy, 1974). This model, minus the Grandes Écoles, is relevant to the Eastern European case, for it is a fair description of the system of rule of the Austro-Hungarian empire. There were of course other differences, notably those that arose from the extent of decentralization of authority in response to the problem of nationalities. The Grandes Écoles developed an internal culture of national competitiveness that provided a progressive, expert element that the Austro-Hungarian empire lacked. But both relied on central authority delegated to a class of bureaucrats without local allegiances whose careers were bound up entirely with the system itself. Expertise entered from the top or center, if it entered at all, into administration, and “politics” was something separate from expertise entirely. The systemic problem of this scheme was protest: centralization, either in its broad French forms or its narrow, bureaucratically oriented Austro-Hungarian form, meant that policy was insensitive to local issues and problems, and the rigidities and distortions that resulted from the long lines of communication of public opinion meant that protest was the only means of getting a response. Implicitly, this meant that the bureaucracies were not merely administrative but political, engaged in the business of responding to and avoiding protest. Freed of practical political responsibility, local political movements, such as Serbian nationalism and Viennese anti-Semitism, devoted itself to “politics” in the sense of ideology, symbolism or political theatre. The decentralization of the Austro-Hungarian empire, however, meant that a remarkable variety of self-help associations could flourish: among these were the Moravian associations of sheep breeders and agriculturalists that were central to the creation of a connected set of research institutions in Brno (Brünn), eventually including university professorships and abbeys, that served as the research community in which Gregor Mendel made his genetic discoveries (Orel, 1996). This Central European success story of the nineteenth century

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should dispel any thought that such institutions are limited to the “West.” And this type of collective body has been revived in the more recent period. For example, groups of Polish agricultural producers have played a significant role in the re-organization of the Polish meat industry and the regulation of meat products. Part of the contribution of these groups to the processes of politics is knowledge; they possess specialized understandings of the activities that the state regulates and affects through its actions, and can serve as a counter or constraint on the claims of state bureaucratic experts by distributing specialized knowledge among institutions of different kinds, operating under different constraints than those of bureaucratic discipline and careerism. In Britain, the system was one of parliamentary sovereignty, but at the same time one in which a strong “professional” class of civil servants actually carried out the functions of the bureaucracy. Ministers came from Parliament, and they were in the classic sense amateur politicians; men, for the most part, who were men of the world, but who also had considerable experience in the raw politics of their own political party. The political parties generally were large and complicated organizational phenomena. The realities of bureaucratic life were familiar to any experienced party man. Experts, however, posed difficult problems for the civil service. Although the civil service was professional with respect to career patterns, with respect to specialized knowledge it was an organization of amateurs: persons who were stringently selected, especially at the very top, on the grounds of their performance as students at Oxford and Cambridge in academic areas, such as the study of classics, that had no direct relation to the kind of task that they performed in the bureaucracy. What this meant was that bureaucratic decision making had a high level of what might be thought of as cultural cohesion, which allowed for the extensive use of discretion. The system had great strengths as an administrative tradition, but was nevertheless poorly adapted to the application of expert knowledge. In the 1930s, in particular, the technical problems of the siting of telephone and telegraph lines were critical. But it was necessary for the bureaucracy and civil service system to acknowledge and accommodate the existence of this kind of expertise, and in the system that existed this meant that someone who was part of the civil service cadre and had been promoted through the system needed to be put in charge of these technical decisions. It was not possible under the system simply to appoint an outsider with the relevant technical skills because this would have meant that the outsider would have been given a high rank and a set of privileges within the civil service system for which their records did not qualify them. Thus, either some kind of special structure within the bureaucracy and outside the civil servant traditions had to be created, with all of the many problems attendant on this, including the fact that this new bureaucracy needed to operate in terms of rules and traditions of its own, or the problem needed to be granted to a separate body of some sort, such as a commission. The problem was similar to the one faced by the military in wartime, and the solution there was to have experts “seconded” or temporarily assigned to

“Real existing socialism” 251 generals and admirals and their staff to be used as seemed fit, in effect granting considerable personal discretion on a personal basis to particular experts who proved themselves to officers. This was obviously not a permanent solution; in fact, after the war the scientists who were crucial to British success for the most part went back to academic life. Like all solutions, it had weaknesses, in the sense that there were areas in which it was vulnerable to problems of particular kinds. In this case, it was prone to expert errors, errors made possible by the combination of expert status and administrative discretion and secrecy, and also to de facto dominance by professional associations, which used administrative discretion for their own ends to produce a system congenial to their interests, a situation well-represented by the National Health Service. Nevertheless, this was a system that was relatively responsive to local concerns and initiative. Parliamentary sovereignty, along with the fact that parliamentarians held cabinet positions, meant that the local concerns of members of parliament could not be ignored. Ministers were directly accountable to parliament; questions could be raised, votes could be refused, and party positions could be contested, and, not surprisingly, ways to accommodate national policy and local concerns could be found. Members of parliament functioned as local notables, and constituent service and local loyalty mattered in their election. Another solution, which we might call the German solution, served, like the Napoleonic system, to integrate expertise into government bureaucracies and so turn experts into bureaucrats. But it differed both with respect to centralization and with respect to the existence of Grandes Écoles. The German solution was also different with respect to the relationship between the bureaucracy and politics. The bureaucracy was typically not neutral, but in fact embodied a welldeveloped political set of powers of its own and a considerable amount of bureaucratic secrecy and discretion, so much so that the bureaucracy amounted to the continuation of the empirical state as a kind of alternative to democratic politics rather than subordinate to democratic politics. But the German bureaucratic system had an additional flaw which was simultaneously its greatest virtue, the practice of promoting on merit within the bureaucracy people who were genuinely competent and expert with respect to the tasks of bureaucracy itself. What this produced, certainly consistent with other German state traditions, was what we might call expert bureaucracies, which typically held themselves to high standards, but standards of their own devising. The German way was often systematically different from what was done in accordance with international standards, but, most importantly, there was nothing in the character of either independent expertise or independent amateurism that could effectively counter the expert claims and critically evaluate the experts’ practices in the bureaucracy. The Grandes Écoles were in some sense outside the bureaucracy; in the German case, the bureaucracies themselves monopolized expertise and defined the categories of expert knowledge. The very fact of the monopoly on expertise held by the bureaucracy created a

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systemic problem. Promotion and success in a bureaucratic career required conformity with the dominant climate of opinion within the bureaucracy. Mavericks who bucked the system could not rise in the bureaucracy, there were no alternative careers to which they could carry their expertise, and there was no hope of returning to a position with a change of political leadership. This meant that there simply were no external controls on bureaucratic power, except, rather oddly, in the powers of other bureaucracies with a political base in the cities or Länder. So the German system avoided the problems of the centralization of political authority, and responded to local problems differently: the bureaucracies tended to legitimate themselves by respecting the expectations of local stakeholders directly, by-passing the formal democratic process itself, thus protecting itself from informed amateur criticism and informed criticism of associations. These stakeholders, of course, had expert knowledge as well: the monopoly of the state bureaucracies was never complete. But associations, such as trade groups, were accustomed to operating so closely with the ministries in this kind of stakeholder relationship that conflict was systematically avoided. This tended to confirm the power of the experts within the bureaucracies rather than to challenge them. Not surprisingly, the solutions that resulted from ministerial “leading” of stakeholders were not always consistent with what experts elsewhere believed, that is to say, with the best science or best policy. The Swedish case, like the rest of Scandinavia, was a variant on this model, with a greater role for citizens. Problems tended to be defined by movements of citizens in the expectation of future state action or support. Experts played a characteristic role in this process. Once a problem had been politically defined, agricultural surpluses, for example, and a movement with some ideas of how to solve it had developed sufficient membership, experts played a role in identifying detailed policy solutions that the state could accept and implement. This model assumes both a high level of grassroots initiative, a competent body of experts, and a responsive national state. It works as well as it does because of scale and because it is possible to borrow solutions tested elsewhere. The French problem of centralization and the German problem of choosing a unique and non-comparable alternative path thus does not arise. There is nevertheless a very striking feature of this system. The role of the expert is not to create a climate of opinion, nor to serve as technical advisor to a party (although this is certainly possible and consistent with the system, and was in fact a role played by the Myrdals, for example), but rather to solve a unique problem of policy, for which expertise is useful, but not in itself sufficient. This allows for a certain amount of creativity, in that it frees the expert from the limitations of the self-disciplining community of experts, and their self-limitations with respect to what is really known, without relying on a bureaucratic consensus enforced by the discipline inherent in bureaucratic careers. The American case is too complex to deal with at length, but as with all such comparisons, the basic constitutional fact of federalism is central. In many respects, however, it is a mixture of forms, in which there is an element of overlap and competition. Expertise is not bound to particular bureaucracies, and

“Real existing socialism” 253 few bureaucracies have the kind of autonomous power found in European bureaucracies. There is often an expert culture with a strong base in universities, which competes with bureaucracies, or work under competitive contract to them. Experts often speak directly to voluntary organizations and politicians to define policy, rather than to the state, which applies policy legalistically and contractually rather than through the exercise of discretion. A wide variety of centers of expertise and initiative compete to be heard in the policy process, and stakeholders typically exert influence through expert claims, that is by asserting their expertise to a public audience, rather than in negotiations, as in Germany. Market competition is the default mode of resolving conflicting claims, rather than regulatory power, and the characteristic problems of regulation involve the control of competition rather than the assertion of special state expertise. Nevertheless this market competition occurs in an environment in which there is a large array of intermediate associations, such as trade groups and local associations of citizens, in which knowledge is transmitted. This is not a process that produces uniformity directly, but it imposes consequences on those who do not adapt, and thus places significant pressures on local governments, local associations, and trade groups to respond by acquiring expertise.

The party of experts Leaving out the topic of ideology entirely, we can see the Soviet model – and as I will show, this model pre-dates the Soviet era in Russia itself – as a particular solution to the problem of expertise in relation to bureaucracy and politics. It is characteristic of bureaucracies that the mechanisms of promotion and careers back up the policies and rules by enforcing a kind of consistency in the use of discretionary power, consistency that is more or less cultural and more or less specific to the culture of the bureaucracy. Parties, whatever their aim, are themselves forms of discipline in which differences of opinion are subordinated to party goals, and party goals are themselves dependent on the achievement of a certain level of agreement on matters of opinion. Expertise amounts to a kind of mastery of a set of opinions with respect to some specified technical activity with a specialized content. There is an inherent problem of knowledge and power, the problem for those in power of securing trustworthy knowledge, and the problem for those with knowledge of securing the trust of those in power. The idea of a party of experts, a party whose features include expertise, is a solution to this problem. The potential conflicts between the three elements disappear: the three are united into one closely related unit. Unity of this sort, however, comes at a price. Uniformity is characteristic of bureaucratic organizations; a kind of “groupthink” emerges.1 Groupthink is both a virtue and a pathological feature of expertise – a pattern that depends on a number of forms of “soft discipline” operating together. In a system in which people exercise limited discretion under the gaze of others who judge the exercise of this discretion, it allows for consistency and avoids the reliance on punitive powers and overt authority, which would amount to simple

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authoritarianism; amateur decision-making, rather than decision-making backed by expertise. But if we combine the internal soft discipline of bureaucratic careerism with the discipline of subservience to party opinion and the additional discipline of that of the community of experts, we produce a peculiar combination that guarantees a very considerable degree of uniformity, in which a soft system of discipline with mutually supporting mechanisms of control effectively smothers alternative opinion and excludes outsiders. Ideology is relevant here. Communism was, in a peculiar sense, a form of the ideology of expert rule which made as its centerpiece the full utilization of the powers of production, the conquest of nature, the claim to being scientific, the identification of party ideology with science and rationality, all of which were tremendously attractive to scientists in the west in the 1930s, so it should be no surprise that strong resistance was not the norm. What does this have to do with civil society? A brief example from the area of agricultural history is relevant here. In pre-1914 Russia, a policy was promoted by the state to organize peasants into cooperative forms of production, credit and consumption, following a pattern that was well-established internationally. But this was, from the start, a policy in which the state sought to apply expert knowledge in order to reform peasants against the peasants’ selfperceived interests – to tutor their preferences, in the phrase used by Phillip Kitcher – in order to bring about some higher result. The problem they faced was that the cooperatives, though they involved a quarter of the peasant households, did not work very well, and were “marked by high rates of default, assemblies that rarely met, boards that lacked links in their communities, and associations that lacked active involvement of their members” (Kotsonis, 1999, p. 137). A few quotations will suffice to show the authoritarian tendencies in this model of expertise. At a congress of Zemstvos, one expert speaker said: “For the agronomist there can be no cooperatives as such. Cooperatives are for him only the means for achieving social and economic ends: the reorganization of the household” (quoted in Kotsonis, 1999, p. 114). Another added that the goal was to “instill consciousness where it did not exist” (quoted in Kotsonis, 1999, p. 114). The program required that the expert plays a political role. “Who, if not the agronomist, should correct the errors of the independent activity of incompetent cooperative leaders, and defend the cooperatives from village kulaks and enemies” (quoted in Kotsonis, 1999, p. 118). The agronomist was thus in a kind of competition for authority with local notables, defined them as enemies, and spoke for the “true” interests of the peasant against the peasants’ narrow individualism and profit-seeking. The model of expertise here is one in which civil society, represented by the leadership of the local community, is an irrational obstacle to progress, which the expert must overcome. It is only a short step from this image of the role of the expert to the idea of a disciplined expert party, using propaganda to bring about the needed tutoring of preferences to enlist support and eliminate opposition, in order to bring about the full application of the expert’s knowledge. And it need hardly be added that by this logic the next need – coercion – is entirely

“Real existing socialism” 255 justified. But it would be a mistake to overlook the significant role of education in this process. Success in this system for an individual came through becoming trained, and the Soviet regime put great emphasis on literacy and technical education. This was the soft side of rule by experts, and it had a profound effect. But in the context of a coercive apparatus, education was itself a form of rule. And it is not surprising that in much of Eastern Europe, a central aim of the Communist restructuring after the war was to train working class students in such areas as economics, and to place working class scholars and party loyalists in positions of power in the educational system to ensure that the apparatus of education did not turn into a locus of resistance to the state. Yet there have been circumstances in which the kind of comprehensive application of expert power implied by this model seemed justified. An important element of the appeal of the socialist regimes in Eastern Europe in the post-war period reflected the trauma of unemployment in the 1930s. The Soviet Union was seen, during the post-war period, as the sole success story in the face of the world economic crisis of the 1930s, and it was generally believed that this was due to the effective implementation of planning as a means of rationally organizing the Soviet economy. Of course, the idea of planning was fashionable throughout Europe and even in the United States. It was adhered to by Fascists and Nazis, but also by the Socialist parties in many of the smaller states. Hendrik DeMan, the socialist who turned Fascist in the course of the war, was an exponent of what he called planisme, and similar ideas gripped many scientists, especially in England, where a movement of scientists in support of socialist planning and the planning of science developed. This was a natural alliance, in a sense, because much of the admiration of the Soviet regime and of Communism had to do with the idea of technological conflicts with nature and the expansion of human powers. The war enhanced the reputation of planning, because under wartime circumstances all of the belligerents engaged in a massive amount of planning, economic controls, and massive programs of technological development based not on market competition or private initiative but on state direction. Planning in this sense implies comprehensiveness: there is no point to planning the economy without planning the inputs into the economy, and when these are inputs of human talent, this implies the planning of education and education for the purposes of the plan. It is often said that the defining issue of the nineteenth century labor movement, and of the dominant socialist parties, was the shortening of workers’ hours. After it was achieved, the movements fragmented, especially in the 1920s. From this perspective, the great depression of the 1930s was a political Godsend: it created a new issue of equal power, namely employment. This was precisely what Communism did promise: to provide expert management of the economy in such a way that unemployment would cease to exist. Moreover, the promise had a grounding in Oscar Lange’s famous economic theory of socialism (Lange and Taylor, 1938). The theory was, on the surface at least, validation of the claims that expert planners could indeed abolish unemployment and at the same time produce all the benefits and efficiencies possible under capitalism.

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Lange established that it was theoretically possible for socialist planners to set prices in a way that would mimic the effect of the market without introducing the lags and uncertainties characteristic of the adjustments made by the market to new information in the form of prices, and at the same time enable the redistribution of the “social dividend.” If prices were defined by the experts, there would be no uncertainties, and prices could be adjusted without introducing uncertainties in ways that assured full employment. The “planner” or expert in this model had a technical task which, in practice, would have been difficult to perform, but which in any case was never performed and was never intended to be performed. Planners focused instead on fixing prices and distributing income in a way that assured employment. This dispensed with the market, of course, but it also dispensed with the surrogate for the market that Lange had imagined as part of his model, and in practice unemployment was avoided by simply granting state-operated planned money from central funds to assure employment at levels necessary to avoid unemployment. What actually occurred, as Michael Polanyi shrewdly observed with respect to the Russian economy before the war, was a system in which planners listened to factory managers and took their estimates and integrated them into a “plan.” The system was in practice polycentric, driven more or less by self-set goals, as well as the larger goal of providing employment. Yet it was an economy “run by experts” who were governed by various forms of soft discipline, and in which the relevant expert knowledge, the knowledge of managers, was fed into a planning bureaucracy governed by the same soft discipline. There is a sense in which it “managed” in name only; it had no independent expert grounds for making decisions, but could only collate them. But the system nevertheless did allow for the influence of expert opinion to be felt, and this had important consequences in such areas as health care. It was expert opinion on a leash, the leash of soft discipline of state bureaucracies together with the harsher discipline of the party, but it was expert opinion nevertheless.

Is there a lesson? In one sense, this system of rule by a party of experts with control of a real administrative structure was a fulfillment of the Saint-Simonian dream, in which the enlightened actually ruled. And it worked to bring about the main results it aspired to: unemployment was eliminated, and a certain level of technical sophistication and competence was reached and preserved. Why did it fail? It is easy enough to say that the experts were not really experts, that they were deluded by their ideology, that their ideology was false, that the principles, for example those espoused by Lange, were not actually applied, and so forth. But this is too simple. Utilizing, assessing, and organizing expertise is always a problem for politics. There is always an agency or trust problem to solve. To judge the claims of an expert or a body of experts with respect to their absolute or scientific or metaphysical validity requires a God, or alternatively some sort of super expert, and not the ordinary citizens of real existing modern society.

“Real existing socialism” 257 The Communist party assumed this role and failed, not surprisingly. Indeed, the Soviet model, understood purely as a scheme for organizing expertise, seems, if not doomed to fail, to be a high-risk system in which everything is bet on one order of things without mechanisms for either correction or for counterbalancing the system in case of error. Nevertheless, the societies on which this model was tried were an attempt to reach out into a particular kind of future, a future with a significant role for expert knowledge. Perhaps the formula was, for the reasons I have indicated here, the wrong one. It is still quite unclear that anyone has discovered the right formula. Different administrative traditions and different institutional histories, some of them very particular, have enabled some countries and some political formations to handle expert knowledge successfully. But there may be some general lessons. The Russian example mentioned above can serve as an ideal typification of a common situation in the present development of civil society in the least developed areas of post-communist Europe, in which a passive and resistive group of subjects respond to an institution, such as an NGO, created or subsidized for their benefit for purposes largely defined by experts who represent central authority or Western development bodies. Much can be said about this commonplace situation, but I will restrict myself to a simple case, based on a comment made by one of the many critics of the present focus on civil society, who regard it as neo-liberal ideology, and who suggest that post-communism has been a failure in which the benefits of worker solidarity in the former regime have been replaced by insecurity and insipid Western “civil society” institutions with no value. As one of these critics puts it, “for many citizens it is far from clear that their rights have been enhanced in any substantive way: the reemergence of Rotary clubs is little consolation when you no longer have secure employment” (Hann, 1996, p. 9). Aside from the problem of logic here – the fact that Rotary clubs are not labor unions and not in the business of enhancing employment rights – the comment indicates is a fundamental misunderstanding or bias with respect to what it is that civil society consists of, and as it happens one that obscures the problem of knowledge. Rotary clubs are paradigmatic bits of civil society – NGOs that fill the space between the family and the state. They serve the interests of businessmen, in that they enable them to meet socially, and cooperate on service projects. But they serve a great many other familiar purposes: people who come together and are practised in working together can transfer this skill and the relations of trust they embody to other domains. They have political potential that they would not otherwise have. They relate to one another as quasi-equals and democratically, in terms of formal procedures of decision-making, rather than in terms of competition or as members of families or parties. But they also serve as ready audiences for, and constraints on, experts, and thus are important instruments for the creation of relations between experts and the users of knowledge. A typical Rotary Club’s activities include luncheons with speakers. The speakers are disproportionately drawn from the ranks of local bureaucratic experts, often in relation to policy concerns. So these

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meetings serve as a means of face-to-face transmission of knowledge, and allow for the expert and the members of the community to interact face to face as something like equals, under the rules of common membership and courtesy that the clubs embody. Most of this is familiar from de Tocqueville. But de Tocqueville failed to grasp the knowledge aspect of these associations in the United States, even at the time that he wrote. To an astonishing extent, the associations that he admired had, like the present day Rotary clubs, significance as educational, or more precisely, knowledge transmission bodies. Masonic organizations such as the Eastern Star provided speakers who provided expert knowledge in a form that could be digested by the public. The famous American farmer’s movement, The Grange, was structured on the model of the Masons, complete with quasimedieval “ranks” for its members, like the Masonic degrees. But the ranks were based on the attainment of knowledge: to achieve a rank required one to have mastered a body of scientific agricultural knowledge. So these organizations were not only a machine for the production of civility, they were also part of a system of the personal transmission of expert knowledge. And citizens with knowledge could respond to the state not only as equals but also by dominating it: by holding its offices, by judging its office holders, and by initiating policy. In this role, then, they were a means of the democratization of knowledge. Why democratic? In some settings, of course, organizations like the Masons and religious confraternities have been anti-democratic in effect, serving as a means of elite dominance. In the United States, and more generally where there are a large number of such organizations, the effect is otherwise. The number of organizations makes a difference when the organizations overlap with respect to membership, so that people who found themselves excluded or out of sympathy with any one organization would belong to another organization with members from the first organization. Membership within the organizations was “democratic” in the sense that a certain degree of equality was assumed within the organization (as these organizations were either fraternal organizations or modeled in some fashion on fraternal organizations). “Brotherhood” was the term that many of these organizations used. A social world dense with such organizations was necessarily democratic in tone, since the overlap of fraternal memberships served to make almost everyone a member of a group that shared fraternal ties with a member of each of the other fraternal groups. When they are sufficiently numerous and dense, they also serve as a means for producing a genuine public realm that respects the public/private distinction. A person who is a member of several organizations will be constrained by their ties to manage, outside of the political arena, conflicts of interest, or to promote means of performing basic political acts, such as distributing political positions, on grounds that avoid conflict, such as merit. Thus these organizations can serve as a countervailing force to the kind of local political clientelism that is characteristic of state-centered political orders. And much of what they can do is a matter of knowledge and information. By serving as a means of transmitting knowledge about the technical issues facing the state, they serve as a means of

“Real existing socialism” 259 producing transparency, enabling the public to respond effectively, and to recruit other experts to countervail against the state’s experts, if need be. Thus, when we discuss the absence of civil society, it is not merely a matter of the number of NGOs, but of the capacities for political action that these organizations directly and indirectly serve to enhance: knowledge and access to knowledge, as well as the capacity to speak back to experts, are central to these capacities. It is very striking that development agencies in the Third World have been compelled to invent bodies that mimic these capacities in order to gain the co-operation of those whom they aim to help: to respect “local knowledge” claims and systems and democratize the development process by inclusion and respect for the knowledge of those affected by the development strategies, empowering them to talk back (cf. Frossard, 2002, pp. 140–1). So the Rotarians are a poor symbol of the triviality of the achievements of post-communist society. They are, instead, the paradigm of a kind of association that mediates between expertise and the people, and a creator of the kind of citizens who are capable of dealing with the state not as subjects but as competent and informed constrainers, as well as facilitators of the personal relations that allow for the flow of knowledge in both directions across networks of institutions. The state-directed organizations of the Communist period were designed to provide services, but to preclude the use of the organizations to talk back to the state. Whether they can be converted to these new purposes is an open question. One must be wary of nostalgia here. Although it is difficult to see how to replace the kind of political education, the means of producing politically responsible citizens, which associations like the Rotarians provide, these may no longer play the central role they once did. There may be other means of personal transmission of knowledge that will come to take the place of these older forms. The kind of civil society that may be needed today is a kind that perhaps is best exemplified by a current example. In 2001, an Airbus crashed in New York City, and questions about the cause of the crash were not easily answered. The culprit seemed to be the rudder, but it was not clear whether this was a technical flaw or a human error, and it was also unclear which kind of technical flaw or human error could have produced the crash. A typical expert bureaucratic agency in the United States, the National Transportation Safety Board, had the task of examining this question, and ordering remedies. But questions immediately arose about the validity of this agency’s initial conclusion. In response, an activist created a website that allowed for a public discussion by experts of various kinds, including pilots and engineers, which permitted the questioning on a technologically equal level, that is to say on an expert level, of the conclusions of the expert bureaucracy. On the website, individuals expressed opinions different from the official ones. This is itself, of course, a form of civil association, and one that has many more elaborate analogues, such as the World Wildlife Federation and Greenpeace. There is a sense in which these organizations are the real analogues to nineteenth century civil society. Where this leaves us with respect to the larger question of the development of

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civil society in Eastern Europe is not entirely clear, but it does pose a question about what sort of “civil society” is relevant. To the extent (and it is a large extent) to which these new forms of expert civil association are not national but are transnational and heavily weighted toward the participation of the most technologically developed countries with the largest bodies of independent experts, it suggests that becoming part of this network may be the necessary response to the twenty-first century “expertised” state. The need for the personal transmission of knowledge at the local level is not likely to vanish, however, nor is the need for forms of expertise that counter the state’s expertise. Traditional “civil society” institutions are not the only means of doing this, but to deal with the complexity of the knowledge demands of the modern state without them requires a substantial alternative administrative tradition and structure, such as the French or German systems. The nomenklatura represented a failed solution to a genuine problem, not merely an ideological aberration. The historical irony it suggests is this: a society that fully utilizes knowledge, something which the Communists aspired to, requires the independent institutions that it was so eager to destroy.

Note 1 The phrase is associated with Irving Janis, who applied it to faulty decision-making, such as Kennedy’s decision to support the Bay of Pigs invasion and to the decisionmaking that went into the war in Vietnam (Janis, 1982). It has been applied more recently to such fiascos as the Challenger disaster. These are American cases, but each represents a special kind of bureaucratic situation in which stake-holders function as a group and are in a position to ignore or exclude outside opinion, which is usually treated as incompetent or hostile. These decisions contrast with the more typical case in the US, in which federalism leads to conflicts of policy that bring to the surface issues on which outside experts as well as bureaucratic experts disagree in the public arena, often in the courts.

Bibliography Banfield, E. (1991) “Leo Strauss,” in E. Shils (ed.) Remembering the University of Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp. 490–501. Berger, S. (1972) Peasants against Politics: Rural Organization in Brittany 1911–1967 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Burke, E. ([1790] 1955) Reflections on the Revolution in France (New York: Liberal Arts Press). Frossard, D. (2002) “How farmer-scientist cooperation is devalued and revalued: a Phillipine example,” in D. A. Cleveland and D. Soleri (eds) Farmers, Scientists and Plant Breeding: Integrating Knowledge and Practice (New York: CABI Publishing), pp. 137–59. Galpin, C. J. (1938) My Drift into Rural Sociology: Memoirs of Charles Josiah Galpin (University, LA: Louisiana State University Press). Gaston, H. E. (1920) The Nonpartisan League (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe). Gullander, Å. (1948) Farmers Co-operation in Sweden (London: Crosby, Lockwood & Son). Halévy, D. (1974) The End of the Notables (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press).

“Real existing socialism” 261 Hann, C. (1996) ‘Political society and civil anthropology,” in C. Hann and E. Dunn (eds) Civil Society: Challenging Western Models (London: Routledge), pp. 1–26. Janis, I. (1982) Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascos, 2nd edn (Boston: Houghton Mifflin). Kotsonis, Y. (1999) Making Peasants Backward: Agricultural Cooperatives and the Agrarian Question in Russia, 1861–1914 (New York: St. Martins Press). Lange, O. and Taylor, F. M. ([1938] 1964) On the Economic Theory of Socialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Orel, V. (1996) “Heredity before Mendel,” in Gregor Mendel: The First Geneticist, trans. S. Finn (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 7–35. Smithe, S. (1873) Grains for the Grangers: Discussing All Points Bearing on the Farmers Movement for the Emancipation of White Slaves from the Slave-Power of Monopoly (Chicago: Union Publishing Company). Turner, S. (2004) “Bureaucracy, experts, and the organized public: three responses to cholera in the 19th century,” in N. Stehr (ed.) The Governance of Knowledge (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Books). Turner, S. (2003) Liberal Democracy 3.0: Civil Society in an Age of Experts (London: Sage). Woods, T. A. (1991) Knights of the Plow: Oliver H. Kelley and the Origins of the Grange in Republican Ideology (Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press).

Part IV

Comparative perspectives

18 Democratic consolidation in third wave democracies Axel Hadenius

A wave of democratization took place during the last quarter of the twentieth century. It was, as Samuel Huntington has put it, the third wave of democratization in the course of this century. It began in Southern Europe in the mid1970s, when authoritarian rule came to an end in Portugal, Spain, and Greece. Shortly thereafter, a similar development occurred in Latin America, where military rule had been the dominant pattern. Within the space of a decade – up to the late 1980s – all of these military regimes fell. Then, at the close of the 1980s, the wave of democratization arrived in Eastern Europe, where the Communist oneparty regimes fell like dominoes within two years. At the beginning of the 1990s, finally, a series of political transformations got underway in sub-Saharan Africa, an area long governed by one-party states and military regimes. By the middle of the 1990s, all of the one-party regimes had fallen, and many of the military governments had also been hit by the wave of change (Huntington, 1991; Zakaria, 1997; Diamond, 1999; Doorenspleet, 2000). What happened then? The dominant pattern in the wake of the third wave was a transition to democratically elected governments. What were the results, as far as they can be judged today: did the new projects succeed? Has democracy taken root and started to become stable in the areas touched by the third wave? Has the process of democratization, in other words, given way to a phase of democratic consolidation? That is the question to be treated in this essay. I begin by (1) indicating various criteria for democratic consolidation. Thereupon follows (2) a review of various theories – and factors associated therewith – which may be capable of explaining democratic consolidation. That done, I proceed to (3) a review of actual development in the areas touched by the third wave: Southern Europe, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Africa.1 For each area, I attempt an assessment on the basis of the stated criteria for democratic consolidation. In addition, I consider the possible impact of different explanatory factors.

Democratic consolidation: criteria When we talk about democratic consolidation, we are talking about democracy’s preservation – such that, once introduced, it puts down roots and becomes

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lastingly established. We are venturing, in other words, an assessment of democracy’s prospects in the future. When we claim, for example, that democracy has become more firmly consolidated in country A than in country B, we are saying that democracy in country A has better prospects for surviving in the future. But certain, of course, we can never be. About the future we can only make prognoses. Consequently, it is both logically and linguistically mistaken to say that democracy in a country has become consolidated (established). For we can never be certain of this. What we can claim, on the other hand, is that the probability of democracy lasting is high – or low. When we talk of consolidation, then, we are talking about calculations of probability in connection with democracy’s future prospects. How can such calculations be done? As so often when it comes to judgements about the future, we begin by looking back in time. We look at the trend in years gone by and presume that what we see there yields an accurate prognosis for the future. We extrapolate from the observable trend. What should we look at, then, where democratic consolidation is concerned? In the research on this subject, four types of criteria are most commonly used.2 They can be summarized in the following points. i ii iii iv

An unbroken series of free and fair elections. Government turnover. No anti-democratic forces of significance. Mass support for democratic principles.

i According to the first criterion, it is the electoral process we should look at. If several successive elections are held which qualify as free and fair, this is a sign that the democratic order is stabilizing. ii The second criterion focuses on electoral outcomes: more particularly, on whether or not they result in a shift of government. In a functioning democracy, the opposition wins elections now and then. That a shift in government can take place – in ordered forms – is a sign of democratic maturity. The first two criteria are procedural in character. The following two bear on political behavior and political attitudes. iii The existence of organized groups in society with an anti-democratic agenda can constitute a latent threat to democracy. This may be a question of parties – or other associations with a political focus – such as economic or political coalitions, groupings within the armed forces, etc. If such groups exist, if they command a considerable following, and if they dispose of substantial resources, then democracy is not safe. iv If democracy is to be secure, it must enjoy broad popular support. There must be a faith in democracy’s principles among the broad mass of citizens – and, at the same time, a suspicion of (and readiness to reject) alternative, non-democratic forms of government. The support for democracy must

Democratic consolidation 267 also display robustness in the face of such social problems as may arise; it should not fall substantially when, for example, the economy worsens. Where all of these criteria are fulfilled, it may be said that democracy has become “the only game in town.”3 The practice of democracy is maintained, procedurally speaking. Democratic elections are held and shifts of government take place. And among all actors – on both elite and mass levels – a broad consensus prevails that political disputes are to be settled through democratic methods.

Explanatory factors What are the factors that decide democracy’s fortunes? Here too, we can draw up a list on the basis of past research in the area. It consists of five points. (i) Socioeconomic development This is the argument – originally set forth by Seymour Lipset – of the so-called modernization school. The thesis is that social and economic development promotes democracy. When it comes to measuring development (or modernization), we can use a number of indicators. We may consider infant mortality, literacy, energy consumption, or per-capita GNP. Which precise measure we select does not matter all that much, for the measures in question tend to be strongly correlated. Per-capita GNP is the measure most frequently used. Using this as our point of departure, we can state that, among very poor countries (those with a per-capita GNP of less than $1000), the number of tolerably stable democracies is extremely low. Among countries where, on the other hand, development has really gotten under way – those with a per-capita GNP of more than $6000 – there is a clear majority that show signs of democratic stability. What is the underlying reason for this? One way of interpreting the correlation is to say that social and economic development helps to change the political culture – i.e. it gives rise to new political attitudes. The reasoning here reflects the idea of a ladder of needs. People suffering poverty and misery are wholly taken up with survival; they are accordingly prepared to submit to any regime capable of creating tolerable conditions. When, by contrast, development has gotten under way and living conditions are better, citizens tend to take a growing interest in questions of power and selfdetermination. At the same time, political resources at the mass level are strengthened; this may be seen as a parallel explanatory factor. The school system improves and literacy increases. The supply of information also increases, due to the growth of print and broadcast media. Ordinary citizens thus become more capable of exerting influence and defending their interests in political life. Another interpretation, and a complementary one, is that economic development serves to moderate conflict. As a result of development, society becomes more diversified. New social groups and new identities are formed. Social and

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geographical mobility increases, as does social intermixture. The consequence is a reduction, and partial dissolution, of such antagonisms between different population segments as may traditionally have existed. In a growing economy, finally, there is a larger cake to distribute. This makes it easier to satisfy the interests of different social groups. Conflicts in political life are thus reduced (Lipset, 1959; Inkeles, 1974; Diamond, 1992; Hadenius, 1992; Prezworski et al., 1996; Inglehart, 1997; Vanhanen, 1997). (ii) Civil society This is Alexis de Tocqueville’s old argument – which has gathered many advocates in recent years, the name of Robert Putnam being perhaps the best-known. In a vigorous civil society, there are dense networks of organized cooperation among people, of both a formal and an informal kind. Such networks, whether expressly political or more apolitical in nature, can have an impact on democracy’s prospects – in two different ways. The first is the most obvious. Collective action yields a strength vis-à-vis others, which an individual can scarcely achieve on his own. Organizing is therefore an effective method for exerting influence. This is the external aspect. But there is an internal aspect as well. Concerted action in regular forms has an impact on those taking part. We may call this the socializing effect: we are affected by the environment (in this case the organizational environment) of which we are a part. Regular interaction between people serves to strengthen their cohesion and identity. The forms taken by such cooperation are important too. The manner in which people work within their organizations affects their attitudes and behavior. If the organizations in question are democratic and activating, this affects those who take part in them: the participants are schooled in democracy. They acquire values and skills that come to good use in political life too. By contrast, this kind of democratic socialization cannot take place within hierarchical, elite-dominated organizations. If they are open to a broad participation carried out in democratic forms, then, organizational networks in social and political life can function as effective channels for popular influence. They can also serve as important “training grounds” for democracy (Tocqueville, 1969; Putnam, 1993, 2000; Gellner, 1994; Diamond, 1995; van Deth, 1997; Hadenius, 2001). (iii) Cleavages in the population Democracy entails the free expression of the conflicting views and opinions found in society. Democracy thrives when people come together in groups and act on behalf of common interests. At the same time, however, democracy requires tolerance for the opinions of others, and respect for peaceful forms of conflict resolution. These ambitions have not always been easy to reconcile. If different groups have sharply conflicting views, and little trust in each other, it becomes hard to sustain the tolerance required by democracy, and to maintain

Democratic consolidation 269 peaceful forms for conflict resolution. It is common in such a context to speak of cleavages within the population – i.e. of boundaries and dividing lines that separate people into different categories and groups. If the cleavages are very deep and distinct – such that people in all of the groups make a sharp distinction between “us” and “them” – a polarization can arise which makes it difficult for democracy to function. There are cleavages of various kinds. One type is that along lines of class. This means that people group themselves – in terms of their identity and their opinions – according to their position on the socioeconomic ladder. The more sharply divided along such lines a society is, the stronger and more implacable will be the conflicts within it. Studies have shown a clear relationship between the severity of economic cleavages4 and the incidence of democratic instability. Where economic cleavages are very great, instability tends to be rife – and viceversa. Cleavages of the second type may be denoted as cultural fractions. Among these may be reckoned differences of linguistic or religious affiliation, as well as certain pronounced divisions in customs and forms of life that may exist between different groups in the population. Theorists of democracy in former times often took a pessimistic view of democracy’s prospects in societies marked by substantial divisions within the population. John Stuart Mill is an example. It was long thought that popular rule was possible only in relatively homogeneous units. States ought therefore to be rather small. The Lilliputian city-states of antiquity were long regarded as the ideal units for popular government. Yet it has proved possible, as we know, to establish democracy both in states that are very large (in area or in population) and in states marked by a high degree of ethnic heterogeneity (such as India and the United States). Democracy can live with cultural and class divisions – indeed, they can positively contribute, as mentioned above, to political pluralism and organizing. It is when these divisions become too deep and severe that problems arise. It is easier, in general, to mobilize persons according to group identity if the latter is based on several cleavages, which coincide with one another. If the population is divided into segments which are at once distinguished by language, by religion, and by sharply divergent cultural practices, then group affiliation will tend to be more pronounced. The tendency becomes stronger still if such cleavages coincide with divisions rooted in class – so that, for example, a linguistic line separating different elements of society from each other coincides with a social and economic stratification. If this is the case – if the various divisions reinforce one another – the level of conflict will tend to be higher (Mill, 1951; Lipset and Rokkan, 1967; Dahl, 1971; Horowitz, 1985; Muller, 1997; Menendes Moreno, 1999; Hadenius and Karvonen, 2001). (iv) Institutional factors Where the part played by institutions is concerned, there are several lines of argument, each of them associated with the others in central respects. One

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well-known argument goes back to Montesquieu, and after him to James Madison in particular. The general idea is to counteract the concentration of power in public life; unless this is done, abuses of power and encroachments on opposition groups will be a constant risk. Power must therefore be checked and balanced. A political order in which resources and decision-making are highly concentrated, and in which both are free from scrutiny and inspection, constitutes an invitation to political decay. Arend Lijphart has set forth an argument along partly similar lines. The problem with which he has been particularly occupied is that of creating forms for democratic cooperation in sharply divided societies. Experience shows, Lijphart claims, that it is certain institutions – characterized by inclusion, the dispersion of power, and protection for the interests of different groups – which have shown themselves to work. Power must be divided up, and a broad participation in the political process made possible. All groups of significance should be included, and each must feel it has an opportunity to influence the course of events. This is accomplished most effectively through the use of parliamentary government and proportional representation. There ought to be a broad participation in the executive as well. Governments of national unity – or at least large coalitions in which the most important parties take part – are to be preferred. Quotas should also be applied in the filling of important posts within the administration, so that the various groups feel trust in the public agencies and have a sense of participation. It is furthermore important that public resources be distributed in such a way that all groups in society receive their due share. Lijphart also stresses the importance of protecting specific group interests. Certain controversial questions ought, therefore, to be kept off the national agenda. A system of segmental autonomy should be applied in such questions, whereby the groups themselves decide (or regional organs, at any rate). Finally, there should be an agreement on the protection of minorities. It must not be possible to squash any group on questions vitally important to it. A spirit of consensus should prevail when flammable issues arise. This leads to another idea, one associated with Max Weber in particular. According to the latter, it is of especial importance how the state functions procedurally. If access to the state apparatus furnishes great political advantage to the ruling group (or party), there will be little interest in making deals or in sharing power. Under such circumstances, those who control the state apparatus enjoy a great advantage in the area of political resources, which means they find it easier to win elections. The “softness” of the institutions in question – i.e. the lack of rule-based governance – is important here. The less a state apparatus behaves in accordance with rules, the more it can be exploited for purposes of corruption, or for narrow party-political aims. If there is thus much at stake in political life – if it makes a big difference whether one gains or loses control over the important state organs – then a sharp political polarization will tend to result, making cooperation more difficult. The problem becomes yet worse if political power is highly centralized. A corrupt state apparatus is furthermore inefficient, and tends to generate a low level of public confidence in state organs.

Democratic consolidation 271 In sharply divided societies, a particularly important role is played by the police and the judiciary. It is trust in these institutions, to a great extent, which makes popular intermixture and cooperation possible in daily life. We may not trust the individuals on the “other side,” but we trust the institutions regulating our interaction – that is, we trust them to operate neutrally and efficiently when conflicts arise. A state functioning in accordance with the rule of law, in other words, is needed if conflicts are to be moderated and integration achieved. A grim spiral of mounting conflict can indeed, under certain circumstances, come into being when different groups live interspersed. Usually, however, such an unhappy state of affairs has its background in a disintegration of the state institutions charged with regulating intercourse among the groups, or in a degeneration of said institutions into an instrument for the one-sided assertion of the interests of a single group (Hamilton et al., 1961; Myrdal, 1968; Lijphart, 1977; Weber, 1978; Della Porta and Vannucci, 1997; Hadenius, 2001). (v) International factors Here it is a question of external influence. For our present purposes, four such influences may be distinguished: (a) diffusion, (b) measures of support, (c) sanctions, and (d) intervention. Where (a) diffusion is concerned, it is a question of influence through the power of example. Changes carried out in one country spread to others. As Samuel Huntington has shown, the great swings in democracy’s fortunes over the course of the twentieth century – in both an upward and a downward direction – have had the character of diffusion (what he calls “snowballing”). As a general matter, diffusion effects are greatest between countries that are close geographically and similar culturally and institutionally. It is at bottom a question of influence via information. It is critical, therefore, that information be able to spread. It is for this reason that governments in authoritarian countries often try to prevent the spread of information from without. External forces, for their part, often try to penetrate such barriers. This can be accomplished, for example, by means of radio broadcasts in the languages spoken in the countries in question. Another method is (b) to give direct assistance in the form of active measures to promote democracy. This may mean providing resources of various kinds to organizations and to the media, as well as supporting educational efforts. Measures to improve institutional capacity may also be taken. Another option is (c) sanctions. These put undemocratic regimes under pressure. There are several ways of doing this. The method most commonly used, and presumably the most effective, is to impose economic sanctions. This may mean imposing obstacles to trade, cutting off development assistance, or making loans difficult to obtain. There are also various political and symbolic measures that can be taken. For example, a country that does not meet democratic requirements can be refused membership in organs of international cooperation. It can also be excluded from sporting events, cultural gatherings, diplomatic interchange, etc.

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Finally, in the case of (d) intervention, external military forces enter the country directly in order to change conditions there. This means using military means to “make the world safe for democracy” (in the words of Woodrow Wilson). An outside actor, in other words, takes matters in its own hands. A modern example is that of Haiti, which was invaded by American troops in the 1990s. Other examples include the American intervention in Somalia at the beginning of the 1990s, and the NATO action against Serbia at the end of the decade. It should be noted, however, that these interventions have been related to the establishment of democracy – i.e. to efforts to bring down an authoritarian government. External military involvement for the purpose of defending a democratic regime that is about to fall is uncommon. One example might be the British intervention in Tanganyika in the early 1960s, which prevented a military takeover (it could be questioned, however, whether the government of Tanganyika at that time was democratic). It is clear, from both recent history and the longer view, that diffusion – i.e. international imitation – is a highly effective factor in promoting democracy. But how is it with the more active and targeted methods here considered (assistance, sanctions, and intervention)? It appears, in general, that such methods have little abiding impact unless there is a partner of local importance working in the same direction, e.g. a government or strong opposition movement working in a democratic spirit. If that component is missing, efforts from without have seldom any significant effect; external assistance has little impact if it remains an isolated phenomenon unsupported by any major internal actor. Targeted regimes have often been able, in fact, to exploit sanctions and interventions in order to whip up nationalist sentiment against encroachment from without. Instead, then, of undermining the target regime (the intended effect), methods of this kind may at times reinforce the regime’s popular base (Huntington, 1991; Drake, 1998; Whitehead, 1996; Carothers, 1999; Gruel, 1999; Rose, 2000).

Actual development: four geographical areas We shall now examine the four areas affected most heavily by the third wave of democratization: Southern Europe, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Africa. In so doing, we shall proceed on the basis of the criteria for consolidation and explanatory factors set forth above. Southern Europe The “third wave” of democratization in Huntington’s sense began with the downfall of authoritarian regimes in Portugal, Greece and Spain in the mid1970s. Since then, in all of these countries a series of free and fair elections have been held. Several changes of government have taken place, and in ordered forms. In these cases, therefore, the elementary (procedural) criteria for consolidation are amply fulfilled. How well, then, has democracy become rooted in public attitudes? Has it

Democratic consolidation 273 come to be “the only game in town”? In the years since democracy was introduced, there has been but a single serious attempt to destroy the new order. This took place in Spain in 1981, when elements in the military and police carried out a revolt. This action did not meet, however, with the approval of larger groups in society. The same has been documented in opinion polls. The principles of democracy enjoy very broad support – at both elite and mass levels. Popular support for the principles for democracy is at the same level as in Western Europe in general, which is 80 percent or above. There are no significant political groups making an anti-democratic appeal. By contrast, however, citizens’ evaluation of how democracy actually works in their country is not particularly high. In the cases of Spain and Portugal, only 40 percent of the population in the mid-1990s were content with how democracy functioned in their country. The level in Greece was just under 30 percent. All three of these countries came in well below the West European average which was 55 percent (Klingemann, 1999; Rose, 2001). What is the reason for this dissatisfaction? To a degree, it reflects prevailing social and economic conditions. Economic growth, to be sure, has been strong. At the same time, however, unemployment is much higher than the European average. Furthermore, the citizens of these countries generally rate the efficiency of their public sector as low. They also express a low level of confidence in politicians and political institutions. Yet, such discontent does not result in antidemocratic tendencies. A great many citizens are critical of how democracy actually works in their country, but they do not wish to switch to another form of government. They simply want their democracy to work better. That citizens express their dissatisfaction in this manner – even as they seek changes within the framework of the existing system – is a sign that democracy has indeed become “the only game in town.” If we consider the structural conditions, modernization has been marked. With respect to GNP and similar indicators of social and economic development, these countries are now substantially above the critical level (usually thought to be at around $6000 per capita).5 Civil society has also been strengthened. In particular, the membership and organizational capacity of the parties has improved over the past decades. There is a vital and independent press as well. As far as institutional conditions are concerned, we can note that the legal institutions have become more efficient and have proved capable of defending their independence. Institutions wielding a considerable measure of local power have been built up (as have organs of regional power, in the case of Spain). External conditions may have contributed as well, particularly membership in the European Union. The statutes of the Union stipulate that a country must be a democracy if it is to become a member. This requirement – in combination with the fact that the countries in question are (in net terms) the recipients of large amounts of aid from the EU – has been of considerable importance. It is in Spain that democracy has encountered its most serious problems. Regional divisions – in turn rooted in long-standing ethnic and linguistic cleavages – have created tensions. This applies particularly to the Basque country,

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where a separatist movement has been prominent. The regional reform seems, however, to have satisfied aspirations in most of the regions. The fact that it was carried out asymmetrically – so that areas with an especially strong regional identity were able to obtain greater autonomy – has certainly contributed to the success of the reform. It was not enough, however, for the militant groups in the Basque country, who wish to form an independent Basque state (which would also include areas now in France). Periods of political murder and terror have followed. Yet, such developments do not seem able to dislodge the democratic order (Gunther et al., 1995; Linz and Stepan, 1996; Morlino, 1998; Gill, 2000). Latin America Democratization in Southern Europe was followed by comparable developments on the other side of the Atlantic. Within the course of a decade beginning in the late 1970s, all of the military regimes in Latin America disappeared. In the years since then, the countries in question have held a number of elections, which have in most cases fulfilled reasonable demands in respect of freedom and fairness. And there has been no shortage of government turnovers. These criteria for consolidation, then, are by and large well-satisfied. As far as public support for democratic principles is concerned, there are significant variations across the continent. In such countries as Uruguay and Costa Rica, the level of approval is close to the average in Western Europe – the level is between 70 and 80 percent. By contrast, there are countries – such as Brazil, Paraguay, Honduras and Guatemala – in which half the population (and in some cases quite a bit more) do not express support for democratic principles. When it comes to how people in the different countries assess the actual operations of democracy, we see a mixed picture. Uruguay and Costa Rica again follow the West European pattern: a good 50 percent give a positive reply. The average for the continent, however, is 30 percent. In several countries, like Guatemala and Colombia, approval falls to some 15 percent. In these countries, then, a large majority of citizens expresses dissatisfaction with how democracy actually works in their country. Furthermore, the general trend at the start of the new millennium is in a downward direction. Support for the principles of democracy is on the decline in Latin America. In several countries the proportion of the population expressing sympathy for authoritarian, non-democratic alternatives is growing (Lagos, 2001; Economist, 2001). Another bad sign is the fact that, in many countries, encroachments on democracy have met with little opposition. In certain widely noted cases, such as Peru and Venezuela, it may even be said that measures of this kind have enjoyed farreaching popular support. When Agusto Fujimori, Peru’s president, closed parliament in the early 1990s (and then ruled for a year alone, during which time a new constitution was drafted), few popular protests were to be seen. On the contrary, he obtained a ringing endorsement in a subsequent referendum. In Venezuela, Colonel Hugo Chávez attempted a coup in the early 1990s. He did

Democratic consolidation 275 not succeed, because critical elements in the military stood behind the existing regime. However, opinion polls carried out in connection with these events showed that a clear majority of the population supported Chávez’s actions. When, some years later, Chávez ran for the office of president, he won a convincing victory, and he has thereafter been re-elected in the same manner. He was also quick to dissolve parliament. Protests from the supreme court had no effect. The purpose – as in the case of Fujimori – was to make a “clean sweep” by introducing a new constitution greatly strengthening the powers of the president. In subsequent referenda and elections to parliament, Chávez has won brilliant victories. Examples of violations of the constitutional order (and of the principles of democracy) can be found in other countries as well. In Ecuador, the political situation has at times been chaotic. Two presidents have been removed during the last ten years – in unconstitutional ways resembling revolt. Here, as in several other cases, it has been possible to violate the constitution, and prevailing democratic norms, without encountering serious difficulties. The present order seems, in a fair number of countries, to have few adherents among the mass of the people. The political game, it appears, is for many citizens a distant activity, and one of which they are highly suspicious. Coup-plotters with a “popular” aura are thus able to garner great sympathy among the broad masses. The methods of democracy, evidently, are not “the only game in town.” What is the background to this? Let us first look at the economy. The military regimes, in most cases, had relinquished power in the midst of economic chaos. Budget deficits were enormous; currencies were declining sharply. Elected politicians have faced a difficult task in coming to terms with these problems. They have often been forced to impose harsh austerity measures, which have hit the poor hardest. Economic growth, finally, has been meager in many cases. Turning now to the criteria for modernization, we may observe that literacy rates are relatively high in Latin America: on average about 80 percent. But GNP levels are still quite modest in many cases. The average comes to about $2800 per capita; however, the difference is great between the richer countries, such as Argentina and Uruguay ($6000–$7500), and poor ones like Honduras and Nicaragua ($400–$750). What part does civil society play? Does it contribute to political pluralism and offer channels for popular participation? Not to any substantial extent. The infrastructure of civil society, like that of the political parties, is in many cases weakly developed. The organizations and parties are often structured in a clientelist or personalist fashion. To be sure, popularly rooted social movements with a more democratic structure are emerging. These movements tend, however, to work outside established political channels. Nor should their prominence be overstated. What is the situation when it comes to social cleavages? Latin America is that part of the world in which class cleavages are the most pronounced, as measured by the distribution of incomes and property among the different social groups. There is a large poverty-stricken population, and a thin stratum of

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extremely wealthy persons. In recent years, moreover, class divisions – already very large – have increased further. The population in Latin America is strikingly homogeneous, linguistically and ethnically speaking. In certain countries, however, there is a large Indio population (with its own languages). Bolivia and Guatemala are examples. The Indios have been marginalized, both economically and culturally. Even so, no important political parties have emerged on the basis of this identity. The explanation lies presumably in the brutal repression of long standing to which the Indians have been subjected. For a long time, moreover, there were literacy-based restrictions on voting rights, which served to disenfranchise the poor in the countryside. These restrictions applied until the midtwentieth century. In some cases, in fact – as in Guatemala and Brazil – they continued all the way up to the 1970s and 1980s. When at long last they were removed, the political mobilization of Indians took place primarily within the framework of the already established parties. Now to institutional factors. Political life in Latin America has traditionally been highly centralized. The state apparatus, moreover, has been “soft” (not rule-governed) in character. Popular organizations have often been weakly developed. These characteristics – which in large part apply still today – make for a fragile democracy with weak roots. Political power in Latin America is to a great extent centered in the presidential office. Parliaments, courts, and other balancing organs find it hard to make themselves felt. A strong centralization prevails vertically as well. Local and regional bodies are typically weak. Resources and decision-making lie in the hands of the central administrative apparatus, which is controlled by the president and his party. Critics have claimed that the democracy practiced in Latin America is merely “electoral” or “delegative” (O’Donnell, 1994). Elections are held and changes of government occur. It is at this point, however, that popular influence ends. Once elected, those holding power at the central level have a very free mandate, and can enjoy the fruits of power as they wish. This enjoyment of the fruits of power is facilitated by the soft structure of the state. The lack of supervision and oversight makes possible far-reaching nepotism and corruption. This has several consequences. For one thing, the administrative capacity of the state is undermined. Less is accomplished, and what is accomplished is done poorly. Corruption and similar failures tend to cause annoyance among citizens. This gives public institutions (and the politicians who control them) a low level of legitimacy. Moreover, a soft state leaves its imprint on organizational life. It promotes clientelist forms of organization, together with their accompanying features: hierarchy and boss-rule. Organizations of this type leave very little room for popular influence. Populist challengers like Fujimori and Chávez have thus been able to win strong support with their harsh attacks on a closed and corrupt political order. The problem is that politicians of this type seldom do anything to change the centralized and soft structure of the state. Nor do they lay the basis for a more open and democratic type of organizing. As a rule, rather, they tie the organs of public power tightly to themselves, and they exploit the soft state for their own

Democratic consolidation 277 (political as well as private) purposes. The popular suspicion that brought them to power tends, therefore, to return in time. Fujimori’s rise and precipitous fall illustrate this pattern. International influences can make a difference as well. For the last decade for example, an organization for economic cooperation (Mercosur) has existed in the Southern Cone. Among the members are Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. Only states that are democratic can be members. This makes, of course, for pressure on the states in question. But most of the other states are not members. In material terms, moreover, this is an organization with relatively little to offer. It is primarily a free-trade bloc. A more important factor is the pressure originating from outside the region. Since the late 1970s, the United States has supported the democratization that has taken place, and has at the same time endeavored to keep coup-plotters out in the cold (which was not the case earlier). The threat of economic sanctions has also been an effective weapon, in view of the difficult financial situation prevailing in many of the countries in question. Another instrument has been to cut off military cooperation. Such methods have sufficed to counteract military coups. This has helped to keep many of these fragile democracies going. By contrast, methods of this kind have had little effect on the type of coup-presidents described above. Threats and protests from Washington have not had much impact; indeed, defiance of the big neighbor in the north has yielded valuable political points for these regimes on the home front. It should be noted, moreover, that the US government took a fairly dubious stand with respect to a much-observed military coup attempt in Venezuela in the spring of 2002. The return of the elected president (Chávez), after a few days in hostage, was the effect of pressure from leaders of nearby states (who refused to endorse the military’s choice of successors), in combination with the exposure of an unpredicted level of popular support for the ousted president. The US government, however, seemed (silently) to have backed the plotters. Mexico is a special case. It distinguished itself, over a long period, by an extremely stable political order. Since the 1920s, the country was governed by a single party: the Institutional Revolutionary Party (also known – by its Spanish initials – as PRI). PRI accomplished this feat through a combination of clientelism (in well-organized forms), rigged elections, and repression. During the 1990s, however, a gradual democratization took place. The definitive sign of the old order’s demise came in the presidential election of 2000, which was won by an opposition candidate. Whether this means that a lasting democratic order has been established is still too early to judge. There is a better basis for judgement, however, in the case of some of the other countries (since a longer time has passed since democracy was introduced). In several instances, as in Uruguay, Costa Rica and Chile, there is reason to believe that democracy can take root and achieve stability. Elsewhere in the continent, the situation is more difficult. Here it may be the populist coupsyndrome that sets the pattern. In Latin America, as we know from earlier periods, diffusion effects are strong: trends spread quickly and easily throughout the region. The question is whether the developments in Uruguay or in

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Venezuela will set the pattern for the other countries (O’Donnell, 1994; Linz and Stepan, 1996; Roberts, 1997; Becker, 1999; Diamond, 1999; World Bank, 2000; Franklin, 2001; Hadenius, 2001; Seligson, 2002). Eastern Europe After 1989/90, democratization finally also occurred in Central and Eastern Europe. For roughly a decade now, the majority of these countries have tried their hand at democratic government. The major exceptions have been Belarus, Ukraine and Serbia. Free and fair elections have otherwise been the rule, and many changes of government have taken place. As far as such indicators of democratic stability are concerned, the signals have been, on the whole, undeniably positive. Another positive thing is the relative scarcity of markedly undemocratic groups. In virtually no country is a return to the old order (of Communist oneparty dictatorship) presented as a real alternative. The most plainly undemocratic position was that taken by Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian president, who moved against ethnic minorities and political opponents in an aggressive nationalist spirit. This took place, it should be noted, behind a façade of democratic elections. Beneath the surface, however, there was a far-reaching manipulation and control by the state. A similar façade is found in Belarus, and to a considerable extent also in Ukraine. This is not a model, however, which appears to have much potential for spreading. It has been associated with economic stagnation or even decline (the regimes in question having been the most unwilling to restructure the economy). Milosevic, moreover, has been forced from power by a popular uprising (Linz and Stepan, 1996; Janos, 2000; Zeilonka, 2001). Central Europe In the post-communist countries of Central Europe,6 support for democratic principles is now widespread, lying in general at 80 percent. But there is also considerable dissatisfaction in many of these countries with the actual functioning of democracy. In Hungary and Slovenia in the mid-1990s, for example, only about 20 percent gave a positive assessment; in Bulgaria the level was even lower: less then 10 percent. Most countries in the region, however, scored a level of around 40 percent – on a parity with Portugal and Spain (Klingemann, 1999; Rose, 2001). The economic situation has been very difficult for the peoples of Central Europe. Yet, the downturn was not for the most part as sharp as that in Russia (see below), and a noticeable turnabout was evident in most cases beginning in the mid-1990s. During the difficult years in the beginning, a considerable portion of the population in many countries looked back with sympathy on the old order – especially in countries where the Communist regime had been fairly mild (as in Hungary). Even so, less than a fifth of the population of Central Europe desired – according to an opinion poll from 1993 – to return to the Com-

Democratic consolidation 279 munist system. The proportion has since then diminished, in line with the gradual improvement in living standards (Rose et al., 1998). Turning now to the level of modernization, we find that the general level of education is high. The economic level, however, remains modest in many cases. Per-capita GNP in the region is on average $3000 – on a level, that is, with Latin America. In Central Europe, too, there is a considerable spread between countries. Slovenia and the Czech Republic are at the top ($8000 and $5000 respectively); Albania and Moldavia have the lowest figures ($900 and $400 respectively). In this respect, therefore, there is no secure basis as yet for democracy in these countries. In many cases, rather, it seems there is a long way to go. Nor does the state of civil society give cause for optimism. Organizational life is but weakly developed. The parties have few members, and they have little in terms of an organizational apparatus. They are cadre parties in the main, and they owe their existence in many cases to the extensive public subsidies given to the parties in many of these countries. The institutional structure, on the other hand, is for the most part more favorable. The Russian pattern – with its strong centralization of powers in the hands of the president – has no counterpart in the states of Central Europe that have undergone democratization. Parliament is stronger, and legal institutions tend to be better equipped and politically more independent. In several countries, moreover, a vital local democracy has developed. A continuing problem, however, is the often widespread corruption. With regard to social cleavages, the main worry centers on nationality conflicts based on language (and sometimes religion as well). For example, there is a Turkish minority in Bulgaria, a Russian minority in the Baltic countries, a Hungarian minority in Slovakia and Romania, etc. In some cases separate parties have been formed on an ethnic basis – e.g. for Hungarians in Romania and Turks in Bulgaria. These parties were viewed, at first, with suspicion among the parties representing the linguistic and religious majority. In most cases they were politically excluded. Yet there are signs in several cases that a more generous attitude is now being taken towards the ethnic parties, while the willingness to include them in political decision-making is growing. Except for the former Yugoslavia, no acts of war have been undertaken, and no terrorist tendency is detectable. The tensions arising from distinct ethnic identities in the region, it seems, can be handled within the framework of democracy. One factor conditioning the degree of democratic stability in Central Europe is a strong pressure from the outside. All states in the area have needed extensive loans and aid from the West. This aid has been tied to certain conditions – also as far as forms of government are concerned. Still more important, perhaps, is the ambition of many states in the region to accede to the European Union. Any state entering the Union must fulfill democratic criteria. These external pressures contribute strongly to put the democratic system in these countries on a permanent basis (Dawisha and Parrott, 1997; Kitschelt et al., 1999; WaldronMore, 1999; Rupnik, 2000; World Bank, 2000; Dowley and Silver, 2002; McFaul, 2002; Bunce, 2003).

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Russia Russia, as the major successor of the former Soviet Union and the region’s longtime hegemon, is a very special case, which, in fact, in its territorial extension stretches beyond Europe’s geographical area. In the mid-1990s less than 10 percent of citizens in Russia expressed satisfaction with the functioning of democracy. Only one in two agreed with the statement that democracy is the best form of government. There is still a widespread sympathy for the previous order. In a study done at the start of the new century, 51 percent took the view that the system of government applied in Soviet times was a good one; 33 percent ventured a negative judgement.7 Asked if it is best to have a strong leader who need not worry about parliaments and elections, a greater number concurred (44 percent) than disagreed (39 percent). Only 18 percent were satisfied with democracy’s functioning, while 63 percent expressed dissatisfaction (Klingemann, 1999; Teorell and Hadenius, 2000). In this period, Russia has experienced severe problems. Over the course of the 1990s, the country was hit by an economic crisis with scarcely a counterpart in modern times. It was sharper and more sudden, for example, than the famous economic downturn that afflicted Germany in the 1920s and 1930s (and which is usually thought to have been an important reason for Hitler’s success). For a large part of the Russian population, great social strains have followed these economic troubles. Corruption and lawlessness, moreover – already widespread during the last years of the Communist era – have accelerated greatly under the new regime. With respect to indicators of modernization, educational levels have long been very high in Russia. Literacy is virtually universal. This of course is positive. The level of economic development, conversely, remains low. At about $2000 per-capita, GNP is well below West European standards. Civil society, as yet, is only weakly developed. During the long years of dictatorship, free organizations were not allowed. However, some of the party-controlled trade unions (which had not at the time been independent bodies) have survived and converted themselves into autonomous interest organizations for the pursuit of better wages and working conditions. But they are small and relatively powerless. There are also some veterans’ associations with a certain importance. On the whole, however, the organizational arena is empty. The parties have shallow roots, too. The organizations formed in connection with elections are often composed of sundry parties and movements with only a temporary existence. Membership rolls are for the most part conspicuous by their absence. Outside the largest cities, moreover, parties scarcely exist (organizationally speaking). An exception in this regard is the Communist Party, which has a significant membership and an apparatus extending over the whole country. This organizational capacity represents a legacy from the autocratic Communist Party of former years. As far as social cleavages are concerned, we can state that a sharp class division is developing between, on the one hand, a thin stratum (often with a back-

Democratic consolidation 281 ground in the old nomenklatura) which has been greatly favoured by the economic changes, and, on the other, the broad mass of the people whose living conditions have severely deteriorated. With regard to language and religion, the population is relatively homogeneous. Yet the country does have minority problems occasioning considerable tensions, especially in its southern areas, where many Muslims are living. The bloody war in Chechnya must be seen in this context; it reflects the strong desire of the central power to prevent secession in these regions. The institutional structure in Russia is hardly favorable from a democratic standpoint. Political life is largely stamped by the “delegative” form of democracy. It is the presidential power that dominates. The position of the parliament is a modest one, and the same can be said of various institutions of supervision and control. There is, however, nowadays a significant degree of regional autonomy. Vertical centralization, in other words, is limited. To that extent a balance of power exists. There are strong governors who are capable of standing up to Moscow. The situation within the regions, on the other hand, is often far from favorable in respect of pluralism, political openness, and the presence of balancing powers. Many regions function as authoritarian enclaves. If anything, it is in many ways astonishing that the democratic order – with regard to elections and political freedoms – has survived as well as it has. At the mass level, after all, democracy has not developed any deep roots. It is still, it appears, an elite project. Many political leaders have a democratic orientation. There is, furthermore, a broad consensus about the main lines of policy. The overriding objective is to get the economy going, and for that reason good relations with the West are a necessity (if loans and various types of assistance are to be obtained). On that point there is, under present circumstances, scarcely any alternative. And the continuation of such relations presumes, in turn, the maintenance of democratic institutions. Given the political orientation prevailing at present, then, the international factor must be considered to be important. If, however, a more nationalist and militarist tendency (of which there are also some signs) were to become dominant, the situation could change. In such a political context, a “strong man” could well emerge. A leader of this type would be able to reckon, most likely, with substantial popular support. There are – aside from the country’s degradation as a great power – many internal problems that need to be addressed; and democracy is not, among the broad masses, “the only game in town.” In addition to the polling figures mentioned, it is important to note that public confidence in the parties and in many democratic institutions is extremely low. It is the president and the armed forces that command the greatest public confidence (Pammet, 1999; McFaul, 2001; Barany and Moser, 2001; Tikhomirov, 2001; Hadenius, 2002). Africa The dramatic events in Eastern Europe in 1989–90 also had repercussions in Africa. The effects, however, have been less widespread than those in Eastern

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Europe. Only in some countries has a series of free and fair elections been held. Still fewer countries have seen government turnovers. Benin and Ghana belong to the category of countries that fulfill both of these criteria of democratic consolidation. But the majority of the states south of the Sahara do not. Many of these states have remained – some more clearly and drastically, others less so – under some form of authoritarian rule. In some countries, war and anarchy prevail. And among the states that follow democratic rules of the game – such as Botswana and South Africa – several democratic elections have indeed taken place, but no changes of government have occurred (which would furnish extra proof of democratic validity). Is this the case because democratic values are weakly rooted in the population? The data from studies done in six African countries in 1999/2000 hardly confirm such an assumption (Bratton and Matteus, 2001). Seventy percent of citizens on average agree that democracy is the best form of government. At the same time, support is weak for such well-known non-democratic alternatives as military rule and the one-party state. A little more than 10 percent, on average, prefer these alternatives; in other words, a strong majority opposes them. To the extent that its fortunes depend on popular attitudes, then, democracy would seem to have brighter prospects. Africa, however, is an extremely poor continent. The level of social and economic development is low. Of the 45 states south of the Sahara, 15 have a percapita GNP of $250 or lower. Another 15 states fall between $250 and $500. Only a few states exceed the $1000 level. Botswana and South Africa are the richest, at just over $3000. Educational levels are also low, the literacy rate being some 50 percent on average. Democratic hopes, however, as the African experience shows, are cherished also by people who are very poor. Yet attitudes, of course, are only part of the equation – there must be resources and opportunities also. Owing to the low level of economic development, political resources are weakly developed at the mass level. There are also certain other factors serving to complicate democratic efforts. Civil society, for one thing, is only weakly developed. What is lacking above all are organizations – with a clear political focus – that link city and countryside, and which function in a nationally integrating manner. As a rule, parties are weakly organized; often, moreover, they have a distinct regional base. There are also sharp conflicts in many countries between different population groups. These conflicts are associated with traditional ethnic and linguistic cleavages. Democracy in Africa, to a great extent, has been about balancing ethnic demands and ensuring that a wider range of groups are included. In a good many cases, however, this has proved difficult. Nor can the institutional apparatus be said to constitute a favorable factor. African states, on the whole, are highly centralized. The power of the president is dominant. Parliaments and other supervisory organs are scarcely capable of balancing presidential power. The same can be said of local and regional institutions (where they exist). The actions of the state rarely correspond to the concept of governance by rules. Administrative capacity is low, corruption is rife in

Democratic consolidation 283 many countries. The combination of heavy centralization and a soft state structure (which provides rich opportunities for the pursuit of personal and political purposes) has contributed to a high level of political conflict. The soft state also constitutes an invitation to clientelist policies – carried out by networks of political bosses able to pass on advantages to their supporters. This kind of organization – at once elitist and feeble – makes it hard to achieve bottom-up influence in the political system. As far as international influences are concerned, there can be little doubt that the countries of Africa have been exposed to a heavy pressure to democratize. Many of these states depend heavily on aid; nowadays donors often place clear demands on their recipients with regard to the respect of human rights, free elections, etc. As mentioned before, however, such demands can be hard to realize unless strong domestic forces are also acting on behalf of political change.8 The popular support that exists for a democratic order is naturally a very positive factor. At the same time, however, opportunities for establishing such an order are limited. Political resources at the mass level, for example, are extremely sparse, due to the low level of development. The existing organizations and institutions offer small prospects for popular activation or the exercise of influence from below. To this must be added the sharp antagonisms between different population segments that can be found in many countries (Gyimah-Boadi, 1996; Bratton and van de Walle, 1997; Reynolds, 1999; Weisman, 1999; World Bank, 2000; Hadenius, 2001; van de Walle, 2002). But even under unfavorable circumstances, democracy can be established and can last. The example of India is illustrative here. It is a poor country, too, with a per-capita GNP of $500 and a literacy rate on a par with Africa’s. Sharp divisions within the population – on the basis of ethnicity, language, and religion – also exist. Yet democracy has prevailed in India for most of the period since independence in the late 1940s. One major difference is that in India there were opportunities for organization and representation already during the colonial period. Thus, the country started out (at independence) in an appreciably better position than its counterparts in Africa. Its institutional structure, moreover, was different in important respects. Federalism, together with a system of ever-stronger local self-government, has brought about a far-reaching dispersion of power, and has offered opportunities for a degree of self-rule to the different population groups. Instead of presidentialism – the rule in Africa – parliamentary government prevails in India. As a consequence, access to the executive power is more variable and widespread (especially given the wide range of parties). This reduces conflict and promotes a spirit of cooperation. Parliamentary government also helps to make the parties more cohesive. In general, India has unusually strong political parties, as compared with other countries in the Third World. The independence of the judiciary is another important component; legal institutions are thus better able to carry out their control functions vis-à-vis the political powers. Institutional reforms of a similar sort would likely facilitate democracy’s progress in Africa (Chhibbar, 1999; Mitra, 1999; Hadenius, 2001; Nesiah, 2001).

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Notes 1 The Far East and Southeast Asia were to some degree affected by the third wave too. Countries like Taiwan, Thailand, South Korea, and the Philippines bear mentioning. But the tendency was less far-reaching. 2 Criteria of democratic consolidation are discussed in Lipset (1959), Gunther et al. (1995), Linz and Stephan (1996), Schedler (1998) and Diamond (1999). 3 The expression is taken from Di Palma (1990). 4 Typically measured by the difference in resources between the highest and lowest income strata. 5 Per-capita GNP in Spain is around $14,000; in Portugal and Greece around $11,000 (World Bank, 2000). 6 I have in mind here the countries in the area stretching from Estonia to Albania. 7 The remaining 16 percent answered “don’t know.” 8 South Africa under Apartheid was an exception; here a combination of external and internal pressure served to bring the prevailing order down.

References Barany, Z. and Moser, R. (eds) (2001) Russian Politics: Challenges of Democratization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Becker, J. (1999) “Latin America: beyond ‘democratic consolidation,’ ” Journal of Democracy, 10, pp. 138–51. Bratton, M. and Matteus, R. (2001) “Africa’s surprising universalism,” Journal of Democracy, 12, pp. 107–21. Bratton, M. and van de Walle, N. (1997) Democratic Experiments in Africa: Regime Transitions in Comparative Perspective (New York,: Cambridge University Press). Bunce, V. (2003) “Rethinking recent democratization. lessons from the postcommunist experience,” World Politics, 55, pp. 167–92. Carothers, T. (1999) Aiding Democracy Abroad. The Learning Curve (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace). Chhibbar, P. K. (1999) Democracy Without Associations. Transformation of the Party System and Political Cleavages in India (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press). Dahl, R. (1971) Polyarchy (New Haven: Yale University Press). Dawisha, K. and Parrott, B. (eds) (1997) The Consolidation of Democracy in EastCentral Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Della P., Vannucci, D. and Vannucci, A. (1997) “The ‘perverse effects’ of political corruption,” Political Studies, 45, pp. 516–38. Diamond, L. (1992) “Economic development and democracy reconsidered,” in G. Marks and L. Diamond (eds) Reexamining Democracy: Essays in Honor of Seymour Martin Lipset (Newbury Park: Sage Publications). Diamond, L. (1995) “Rethinking civil society: toward democratic consolidation,” Journal of Democracy, 6, pp. 4–17. Diamond, L. (1999) Developing Democracy. Toward Consolidation (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press). Di Palma, G. (1990) To Craft Democracies (Berkeley: University of California Press). Doorenspleet, R. (2000) “Reassessing the third wave of democratization,” World Politics, 52, pp. 789–804. Dowley, K. and Silver, B. (2002) “Social capital, ethnicity and support for democracy in post-communist states,” Euro-Asia Studies, 54, pp. 405–27.

Democratic consolidation 285 Drake, P. (1998) “The international cause of democratization 1974–1990,” in P. Drake and M. D. McCubbins (eds) The Origins of Liberty. Political and Economic Liberalization in the Modern World (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Economist (2001) “An alarm call for Latin America’s democrats,” www.economist.com, 2001–10–02. Franklin, S. (2001) “Regional integration and democratic consolidation in the Southern Cone of Latin America,” Democratization, 8, pp. 75–100. Gellner, E. (1994) Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and its Rivals (London: Hamish Hamilton). Gill, G. (2000) The Dynamics of Democratization: Elites, Civil Society and the Transition Process (London: Macmillan). Gruel, J. (ed.) (1999) Democracy without Borders. Transnationalization and Conditionality in New Democracies (London: Routledge). Gunther, R. P., Diamandouros, N. and Puhle, H.-J. (eds) The Politics of Democratic Consolidation. Southern Europe in Comparative Perspective (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). Gyimah-Boadi, E. (1996) “Civil society in Africa,” Journal of Democracy, 7, pp. 118–32. Hadenius, A. (1992) Democracy and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Hadenius, A. (2001) Institutions and Democratic Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Hadenius, A. (2002) “The development of political parties; Russia in perspective,” Studies in Public Policy, # 365, University of Strathclyde. Hadenius, A and Karvonen, L. (2001) “The paradox of integration in intra-state conflicts,” Journal of Theoretical Politics, 13, pp. 35–51. Hamilton, A., Madison, J. and Jay, J. (1961) The Federalist Papers (New York: New American Library). Horowitz, D. L. (1985) Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press). Huntington, S. (1991) The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press). Inglehart, R. (1997) Modernization and Postmodernization. Cultural, Economic and Political Change in 43 Societies (Princeton; Princeton University Press). Inkeles, A. (1974) Becoming Modern: Individual Change in Six Developing Countries (London: Heinemann). Janos, A. (2000) East Central Europe in the Modern World. The Politics of the Borderlines from Pre- to Postcommunism (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Kitschelt, H., Mansfeldova, Z., Markowski, R. and Toka, G. (1999) Post-Communist Party Systems: Competition, Representation and Inter-Party Cooperations (Cambridge University Press). Klingemannn, H.-D. (1999) “Mapping political support in the 1990s: a global analysis,” in P. Norris (ed.) Critical Citizens. Global Support for Democratic Governance (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Lagos, M. (2001) “Between stability and crises in Latin America,” Journal of Democracy, 12, pp. 137–45. Lijphart, A. (1977) Democracy in Plural Societies: A Comparative Exploration (New Haven: Yale University Press). Linz, J. J. and Stepan, A. (1996) Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation:

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Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe (Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press). Lipset, S. M. (1959) “Some social requisites of democracy: economic development and legitimacy,” American Political Science Review, 53, pp. 69–105. Lipset, S. M. (1960) Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (New York: Doubleday). Lipset, S. M. and Rokkan, S. (1967) “Cleavage structures, party systems, and voter alignments: an introduction,” in S. M. Lipset and S. Rokkan (eds) Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-National Perspectives (New York: The Free Press). McFaul, M. (2001) Russia’s Unfinished Revolution. Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin (Cornell: Cornell University Press). McFaul, M. (2002) “The fourth wave of democratization and dictatorship. noncooperative transitions in the postcommunist world,” World Politics, 54, pp. 212–44. Menéndez Moreno, A. (1999) Political Cleavages: Issues, Parties, and the Consolidation of Democracy (Boulder: Westview Press). Merkel, W. (1999) Systemtransformation (Opladen: Leske ⫹ Budrich). Mill, J. S. (1951) Utilitarianism, Liberty and Representative Government (New York; Dutton Press). Mitra, S. and Singh, V. B. (1999) Democracy and Social Change in India. A CrossSectional Analyses of the National Electorate (New Delhi: Sage). Morlino, L. (1998) Democracy Between Consolidation and Crises: Parties, Groups, and Citizens in Southern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Muller, E. N. (1997) “Economic determinants of democracy,” in Midlarsky Manus I. (ed.) Inequality, Democracy and Economic Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University). Myrdal, G. (1968) Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations, 3 vols (New York: Twentieth Century Fund). Nesiah, V. (2000) “Federalism and diversity in India,” in Y. Ghai (ed.) Autonomy and Ethnicity. Negotiating Competing Claims in Multi-ethnic States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Newton, K. (1999) “Social and political trust in established democracies,” in P. Norris (ed.) Critical Citizens. Global Support for Democratic Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press). O’Donnell, G. (1994) “Delegative democracy,” Journal of Democracy, 5, pp. 55–69. Pammett, J. D. (1999) “Elections and democracy in Russia,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 32, pp. 45–60. Przeworski, A., Alvarez, M., Cheibub, J. A. and Limongi, F. (1996) “What makes democracy endure?,” Journal of Democracy, 7, pp. 39–55. Putnam, R. (1993) Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Putnam, R. (2000) Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster). Reynolds, A. (1999) Electoral Systems and Democratization in Southern Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Roberts, K. M. (1997) “Beyond romanticism: social movements and the study of political change in Latin America,” Latin American Research Review, 32, pp. 137–51. Rose, G. (2000) “Democracy promotion and American foreign policy,” International Security, 25, pp. 186–203. Rose, R. (2001) “A diverging Europe,” Journal of Democracy, 12, pp. 93–106. Rose, R., Michler, W. and Haerpfer, C. (1998) Democracy and its Alternatives. Understanding Post-Communist Societies (Cambridge: Polity Press).

Democratic consolidation 287 Rupnik, J. (2000) “Eastern Europe: the international context,” Journal of Democracy, 11, pp. 115–29. Schedler, A. (1998) “What is democratic consolidation?” Journal of Democracy, 9, pp. 91–107. Seligson, M. (2002)”The impact of corruption on regime legitimacy: a comparative study of four Latin American Countries,” The Journal of Politics, 64, pp. 408–33. Tocqueville, A. de (1969) Democracy in America (Garden City: Anchor Press). Teorell, J. and Hadenius, A. (2000) Russian Citizen Survey (Department of Government, Uppsala University). Tikhomirov, V. (ed.) (2001) Russia After Yeltsin (Adershot: Ashgate). van de Walle, N. (2002) “Elections without democracy: Africa’s Range of Regimes,” Journal of Democracy, 13, pp. 66–88. Van Deth, J. W. (ed.) (1997) Private Groups and Public Life. Social Participation, Voluntary Associations and Political Involvement in Representative Democracies (London: Routledge). Vanhanen, T. (1997) Prospects of Democracy. A Study of 172 Countries (London: Routledge). Waldron-More, P. (1999) “Eastern Europe at the crossroads of democratic transition. Evaluating support for democratic institutions, satisfaction with democracy, and consolidation of democratic regimes,” Comparative Political Studies, 32, pp. 32–66. Weber, M. (1978 [1968; orig. in German 1921–22]) Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (Berkeley: University of California Press). Whitehead, L. (ed.) (1996) The International Dimensions of Democratization: Europe and the Americas (New York: Oxford University Press). Wiesman, J. (1999) “The continuing case for demo-optimism in Africa,” Democratization, 6, pp. 128–55. World Bank (2000) Development Report (Washington: Oxford University Press). Zakaria, F. (1997) “The rise of illiberal democracy,” Foreign Affairs, November/ December, pp. 22–43. Zielonka, J. (2001) Democratic Consolidation in Eastern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

19 Building post-communist states Political corruption and strategies of party formation in Estonia and Latvia Li Bennich-Björkman

Introduction The fall of the Berlin Wall and the slow collapse of the Soviet Union in the beginning of the 1990s gave birth to tremendous expectations and hopes for the large parts of Europe under Communist rule at that time. For a few years the similarities uniting these countries, including their Communist heritage and their common need of dual transitions, seemed to lead observers to the premature conclusion that their post-communist trajectories would follow each other more or less closely. Today, it is easy to conclude that the variation in political and economic development between, on the one hand, the broad group of countries classified as East and Central Europe (CEE) and on the other the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) is wide and seems to be growing. Consequently, in recent years, considerable scholarly efforts have been invested in attempts to make sense of, in particular, economic differences developing under post-communism (Lavigne, 1999; Nissinen, 1999; Johnson et al., 2000; King, 2001; Åslund, 2002). In this chapter I join forces with those analysts who, provoked by the immense challenge that the variation in the path and pace of postcommunist development offers, search for some possible explanations to the patterns that can be observed. However, here the focus is on identifying one central reason behind the most crucial political difference manifesting itself between the post-communist countries: the wide variation now evident in the levels of state capture (Anticorruption in Transition, 2000; Hellman et al., 2000; Holmes, 1997; Gehlbach, 2001; Åslund, 2002). The World Bank, in a highly useful distinction, contrasts administrative corruption directed at influencing implementation practices with state capture as the illicit infiltration by powerful economic actors in the very heart of legislation, regulation and decision-making. The selling of parliamentary votes and presidential decrees to private interests is among the practices that fall under state capture, as is the widespread practice of illegal party financing by economically powerful interests (Anticorruption in Transition, 2000). The economist Anders Åslund recently concluded that the differences in political corruption between the post-communist states are “astounding”, and that the real drama played out during the transition has been the struggle

Building post-communist states 289 between liberal reformers and rent-seekers of various origins (Åslund, 2002, p. 356). The true reformers have constituted a minority and rent-seekers in the shape of new entrepreneurs, old nomenklatura, or power-maximising politicians threaten democratic consolidation and economic growth by halting legislation and reforms. I think Åslund is right. But the question still remains; why have some countries succeeded so much better in locking rent-seekers out of the political process? The explanation developed here acknowledges the importance of the social composition of, and ideas and norms in, the informal networks contributing to the founding of the political parties in the early phase of transition. The parties that became politically dominant in the first democratic governments are particularly important to follow, since they “set the tone” and paved the way for norms, which later have become predominant (cf. Della Porta, 1996). Basically, the argument presented points out the importance of alliances and of the cognitive roots of alliance formation (cf. King, 2001). The major step to minimise the influence of rent-seekers in state-building in the early formative years was mentally to abandon the Communist ideology and practice of organising society in a way where politics and economics went together and arrange for a society with separated elites to develop. The idea is developed through a comparative case study of Estonia and Latvia, two states of reasonable similarity and, most crucially, with similar trajectories of transition behind them, but with great differences in political corruption. The variation between them is quite clear, even though there is reason to be cautious about absolute numbers. The state capture index from the World Bank (Anticorruption in Transition, 2000), is supported by the results from a number of other aggregate measures of corruption, governance, and the rule of law. A recently published governance index shows, for example, that Estonia receives 78.9 (out of a best 100) on control of corruption and 77.6 on rule of law. Latvia’s figures are respectively 55.9 and 65.9 (http://info.worldbank. org/governance/). Lithuania, the third Baltic state, rates 65.2 and 62.9. For a number of years the independent organisation Transparency International through its Perceptions of Corruption Index (PCI) has drawn a sharp line between Estonia and Latvia. While Estonia over the years has enjoyed an honourable top position among the post-communist transition countries (places like 26, 27 out of 90), Latvia ranks in the lower echelons of the scale, indicating higher levels of perceived corruption.1 The extensive economic ties between political parties and domestic entrepreneurs and banks are a recurrent theme in most accounts of the Latvian political system. Regardless of whether it is politicians, journalists, or academic analysts that are consulted, the picture remains basically the same.2 The composition of political networks and the party formation process are studied through a structured case study of Estonia’s Pro Patria (Isamaa) and Latvia’s Latvijas Cels, two parties dominating the political scene in the first democratically elected governments under independence. The major aim is to provide empirical evidence that the party formation process developed differently in the two Baltic states, and that these differences affect the levels of

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political corruption today. Political parties have been shown to be crucial in post-communist state-building (Berglund et al., 2001; Hedin, 2001; GrzymalaBusse, 2001). Political agents during the transition acted in and through parties, even though these were far from ideologically consistent. Therefore, the formative processes leading to the establishment of the political parties dominant in the early phase of transition are the foci of interest. I show that the choice by key political agents either to include economic actors in the social networks from which most political parties emanated or to separate political networks from economic interests is a crucial factor behind the development towards state capture. The composition of the political networks on which the new parties rested had great implications for how the future relations between the simultaneously developing post-communist state and the class of new capitalists would be organised. How is early political network formation linked to political corruption? What are the possible causal mechanisms? The hypothesis says that the alliance strategies used by the political entrepreneurs differed between emphasising integration or separation of elites, which affects the development of state capture after transition. When integrative strategies were chosen, bringing the new class of economic entrepreneurs into political networks, integration contributed to fragile states once capitalism and capitalists began to strengthen their positions (cf. Eyal, 2000; Kang, 2002). Hence, the inclusive strategy created vulnerable political institutions, where an imbalance between state and economic interests was built-in already from the start. Strategies of separation instead provided some necessary room and time for the development of norms of political behaviour during the most formative period of state consolidation. It was an Ulyssean strategy of “tying oneself to the mast”, not exposing the party system to material temptations (cf. Elster, 1979; Lewin, 2001, 330 ff.). The other strategy was to “sleep with the enemy”, while thinking you were always on top. This chapter is divided into four parts. The first introductory section gives a short summary of previous research and describes the material used in this study. In the second and third section the analysis of the composition and ideas of the politically important networks in Estonia and Latvia is briefly presented. In the fourth and concluding section the results of the study and argument of the paper are summarised. Previous explanations of political corruption Institutional legacies from the communist period are sometimes argued to have affected the trajectories followed during and after transition (Grzymala-Busse, 2001, p. 6). Countries with more of a tradition of rule-of-law during the Communist era should fare better, as should countries with a longer experience with sovereignty (Anticorruption in Transition, 2000, p. 25). As for the Baltic states, institutional legacies do not differentiate between them in any substantial way, even considering that Latvia experienced a more harsh suppression from the native Communists (Misiunas and Taagepera, 1993, p. 146). Within the group of

Building post-communist states 291 CEE-countries the variation in political corruption is even wider, which casts doubt on the general applicability of the theory. Transition path is another recurrent factor in the discussion (Anticorruption in Transition, 2000, p. 29). How the transition proceeded, its social base or lack thereof is believed to be crucial. In most CEE-countries transition took off from broadly based social movements that had formed in opposition to the communist system. Solidarity in Poland is the most typical example (Wankel, 1992; Berglund et al., 2001; Åslund, 2002). In most CIS countries on the other hand, transition started as an initiative from above, and “even came as a fait accompli following the disintegration of the Soviet Union” (Anticorruption in Transition, 2000, p. 29). Social organisation has remained weak in many of these countries, leading to severe consequences for the development of public accountability. Again, the explanation primarily relies on a divide between Central-Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. However, the Baltic states in a theoretically and empirically fascinating way find themselves in between this divide. Transition in all three countries followed the “civil society” pattern of CEEcountries, although the Baltic states formally belonged to the group of former Soviet republics. Transition paths do not differentiate between Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, at least if macro-level development is in the centre of interest. Privatisation, including the methods used in the privatisation process, is a factor hard to by-pass, while at the same time its effects are quite hard to measure. Systematic research into the effects of the varying methods of privatisation on the political system is still in demand (Anticorruption in Transition, 2000, p. 32). Even though problems have occurred in the Latvian privatisation of large state monopolies such as Latvian Gas, the oil transit monopoly of Ventspils Nafta, Latvenergo, and Lattelekom (Davis, 1996; Nissinen, 1999), the privatisation in all three Baltic states is compared with that in most of the former Soviet republics, regarded as successful and in parity with the that of Central and Eastern Europe. Economic reforms have been slower in Latvia (and in Lithuania) but they have not been stalled. Party strength and the extent to which the party systems congealed into being dominated by one party or being more pluralistic is analysed as an explanation of the related phenomenon of state capture namely state politicisation, i.e. the extracting of rents from the state by political parties (Grzymala-Busse, 2001). For the Baltic states the patterns of party strength in the first post-independence governments differentiate Lithuania rather than Latvia as one-party dominant. Pro Patria in Estonia had 28.7 per cent of the seats, Latvia’s Way had 36 per cent, and LDLP (the reformed communists) in Lithuania had 54 per cent (Pettair and Kreutze, 1999). Elite recirculation and the extent to which the old Communist nomenklatura has continued to play a significant role in politics is a factor discussed in the literature, both descriptively and sometimes as explanatory. In particular, sociologically influenced investigations on elite circulation and reproduction have attracted great interest (Lane, 1996a, 1996b; Steen, 1996, 1997). While this discussion ties in with the one below, addressing agency and choice, the interests

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and ideas of the former nomenklatura are often taken as given rather than investigated. Comparing the Baltic states, representatives of the old Communist elite – who were quite popular – enjoyed a more secure position in Latvia after independence than in Estonia (cf. Steen, 1997). But their strongest position is found in Lithuania, where the reformed Communist party won the first independent elections by a landslide victory, gaining their own majority in the parliament (Pettai and Kreutzer, 1999; Novagrockiené, 2001). Still, state capture has remained at a low level in Lithuania in comparison to Latvia. Elite reproduction is not a factor that in itself explains the pattern. Material The Estonia and Latvia case studies rely heavily on key informant interviews. I strove to include the people most active in the party formation process, but also tried to get the accounts of more peripheral bystanders. The interviews are “biographical” (Hedin, 2001, p. 23), with the purpose of identifying key political actors, their pre-independence and post-independence networks, and the recruitment patterns within these networks. Additionally, the norms and atmosphere prevailing in the first governments are also investigated. Through the interviews I try to reconstruct the cognitions the agents then held about the state and how relations between the state and the economy should be organised. As in all processes tracing and reconstructing past mentalities, difficulties arise since present perceptions may influence recollections of what was believed in the past. Therefore, information has to be handled with care. The empirical period covered stretches from the end of the 1970s until the second elections in 1995, with particular focus on the period between 1990–94/95. This was a crucial founding period, a “formative moment” where new paths were laid out, deliberately or less deliberately (cf. Nørgaard and Hansen, 2000; Grzymala-Busse, 2001, p. 12).

Pro Patria and the nationalist movement in Estonia In 1991, the Estonian Pro Patria party was founded. In September 1992, the party gained almost 29 per cent of the seats in the Estonian parliament, the Riigikogu. During the following two years Pro Patria, with the support of the nationalist Estonian National Independence party and the Modukaad, played a crucial role in leading Estonia’s transition to democracy and capitalism. However, the establishment of the party in 1991 is but the end-point in a chain of events in which the university city of Tartu in southern Estonia as well as the dissident student, and later historian, Mart Laar play leading parts. When the literature has pointed to the role played by the civil society in the Baltic states in bringing an end to the Soviet empire, the environmental protests starting in 1986/87 are often taken as a point of departure (Hedlund and Gerner, 1993; Misiunas and Taagepera, 1993). But at that time, an informal organisation of mostly Tartu students had already existed for some time in Estonia, slowly

Building post-communist states 293 paving the way for a rejuvenation of the dissident movement that would prove to be decisive in the road towards an independent Estonia. The group of young dissidents called themselves Noor Tartu (Young Tartu), and they had been meeting in organised forms since 1979. One of its initiators was the 19-year old Mart Laar. Laar estimates that the organised group consisted of around 30 people including himself, the historian and present parliamentarian Lauri Vahtre, and the now professor of archaeology Heike Valk. This core group drew in additional people in their activities, increasing the total number of people involved. The motivations were clearly political, even though Soviet power had not yet begun to crumble and the Gorbatchev glasnost lay years ahead. “Already in 1979 the group was very targeted against the Komsomol: there were democratic procedures and elections and huge discussions of democracy.”3 Even though the Soviet system at the time seemed quite consolidated, contact with the West had been growing continually since the 1970s. For Estonia, the large emigrant community residing in Sweden, Canada, and the US was a valuable resource for getting in touch with Western influences (Misiunas and Taagepera, 1993), which may have benefited the group and its political discussions. The Noor Tartu-group in Estonia is a fascinating example of a very early but quite formalised expression of grass-root activity outside the realms of the Soviet state, with the clear aim of opposing the state. Emerging out of the 1960s generation, it was an organisation and likewise a broader network oriented towards the future, even though its ideological roots were planted in the soil of the late nineteenth century. In retrospect, since the organisation started to meet already in 1979, the individuals that made up the core leadership had almost ten years of preparation behind them when democratisation and liberalisation started in 1988. The Noor Tartu-group was the fore-runner of the Estonian Heritage Society, founded in 1986, an organisation that has been compared in some respects to a political party, and which played an important role in the nationalist movement (Misiunas and Taagepera, 1993, p. 314).4 It is easy to understand the links between the two, since the Heritage Society also rested on ideas of finding the Estonian historical roots in the nineteenth century national awaking in Estonia. Officially cultural, the organisation still entertained political ambitions of independence. The university in Tartu has played a particular role in the growth of the nationalist minded opposition, and it is no exaggeration to say that the university’s role as an independent intellectual centre has been formative for the Estonian political transition. While the Noor Tartu-group and the Heritage Society were dominated by students and academics, they were not directly linked to the university or outflows of academic life. Nevertheless, traces of the initial Noor Tartu-network can be found in an informal but crucial university seminar, which started to meet at the end of the 1980s. The Tartu-seminar came to serve as a profound learning experience for those who participated, and prepared them for political leadership. A group of history and journalism students, among them Juri Luik and Indrek Kannik who later became ministers in the first government,

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decided to arrange an informal and alternative seminar where social science literature, copied from the West was discussed and debated. The feasibility of liberalism and social democracy for future Estonian development was discussed along with economic theory – although nobody was a trained economist. “Social science literature was copied, about various roads to developing society; socialdemocratic way and liberal way. Economic theory but not economic practice much”.5 While the activities had at first been focused on rebuilding a national consciousness, especially in Noor Tartu, the Tartu-seminar took a step further by outlining through academic discussions what could be the political alternatives for an independent Estonia. “The university is not only education but also networking.” The words are Mart Laar’s as he tries to capture the influence of the “Tartu-factor” in the Estonian transition and subsequent political development. One thread of a uniquely “networking” nature remains in tracing how the wide network resulting in Pro Patria was woven. The many informal and formal organisations that partially overlap form a clear pattern, part of which includes the role played by the Estonian Students’ Building Troops and the Estonian Student Association. Both were intimately related to university life, but the Estonian Student Association was Tartu-based while the Building Troops also involved students from Tallinn. The story of the Estonian Students Building Troops, EÜE, is a splendid example of unintended consequences. Over a period of many years, starting in the 1960s, hand-picked top students met at construction camps during the summers to repair and rebuild communal farms – the kolzhoses – that dominated the rural landscape. The students, of both sexes, lived together during these months and often came back for several summers in a row. Besides work, these so-called troops provided ample opportunities for socialising and building social networks. While the Communist Party saw the troops as a fortunate combination of cheap labour and fulfilling the Marxist ideal of shifting between manual and intellectual work, the troops functioned as veritable greenhouses for future Estonian leaders of the younger generation. While acquiring skills in leadership and planning, the Estonian students simultaneously formed close bonds of friendship. Hence, the student Building Troops contributed to knitting the student networks even closer together, and trained the Estonian students – the future leaders – in leadership and responsibility. Again we see that the social streams overlap when Mart Laar points out that almost everybody from the Noor Tartu group also participated in the Building Troops. “Many student songs came from the Building Troops. Some were more cynical and pragmatic in the troops and they more went into business later”.6 There were also building troops in Latvia, but they did not play any role in the creation of networks or parties after independence.7 Finally, there existed one more arena connected to university life where social ties important for subsequent political formation were knit: the Estonian Student Association. Restored in 1988, the Student Association seems to have returned to traditions inspired by the German student movement that dominated

Building post-communist states 295 the student corporations during the first republic in the 1920s and 1930s. The corporations focused mostly on the codes of conduct and the social obligations towards other members, the codes of honours within the EUS are strict and the mutual obligations towards fellow members demanding. Ethics played a leading role as well as nationalism, and “if corrupted you immediately got expelled from the organisation: socially among the student friends a very terrible fate”.8 The core group of people active in the Noor Tartu, the Building Troops, the Estonian Heritage Society and the Tartu-seminar were also to be found in the Estonian Student Association. All of the formal and informal organisations were based in or had connections with Tartu and the university there. The dense network that was successively built up during the 1980s, starting already in 1979, was shaped by the intellectualism encouraged at the university. But ideas, norms, and practical experiences formed these people as well, bringing into life at the dawn of democracy a well-prepared group of closely knit friends and acquaintance. Ideas of nationalism and nationalist feelings encouraged in Noor Tartu, the Heritage Society, and the Estonian Student Association constituted a single legacy, in combination with an early praise for democratic practices. Second, liberal economic ideas for developing society, in contrast to social-democratic or even developmental state approaches, were formed. From the Student Association the members of the network acquired norms that held honesty and non-corruption as absolute ideals in combination with social obligations towards fellow members. The work within the Building Troops provided practical training for leadership, strategy, and planning, thus generating experience among the new elite that is often lacking in young democracies. Finally, all these arenas together provided excellent opportunities for these individuals to get to know each other, and know each other in some cases quite well. When the Pro Patria was officially established in 1991 it was founded on a combination of the networks just described. The party was equipped by the resources that the ideas and experiences described above implied, and when it, as a dominant force, formed the first government it is no exaggeration to state that it was a comparatively wellprepared party that started to govern.

The creation of Latvijas Cels When the first government after independence was formed in Latvia in June 1993, Latvijas Cels had an equally or even more dominant position in comparison with Pro Patria in Estonia. With 36 per cent of the seats in the Saiema, the party which governed in coalition with the Farmer’s Union had a good platform for political action. Since 1993 the party has been in government, and has until the election in 2002 enjoyed a stronger position in national politics than any other party in Latvia even though its electoral support has decreased considerably. Strange as it may seem, the party was actually not officially founded until after the elections for the first post-independence government in September 1993. During the elections it was an electoral alliance running for office. The

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party has been described as a kind of political machine, enrolling individuals keen on political power rather than motivated by ideological commitments. As will be shown, reality is more complicated than that. In a very early analysis Lieven described the party as “a bouillabaisse of both radicals and moderates from the PF [PF means the ‘popular front’, in Estonia Rahvarinne, in Latvia Tautas Fronte and in Lithuania Sajudis, editor’s remark], moderate Latvian émigrés under the leader of the World Federation of Free Latvians, Gunars Meierovics, and former leaders of the Communist establishment” (Lieven, 1993, p. 301; cf. Nissinen, 1999, p. 130). Nissinen, in a much later account, considers the diversity of the party its greatest asset in the 1993 elections. Men from the Communist party and the Soviet Latvian government were found together with nationalists and émigré anti-Communist leaders (Nissinen, 1999, p. 130). Clearly, from this brief sketch it is obvious that Latvijas Cels is far from being like the homogeneous and closely knit Pro Patria. While the influential political force in Estonia at the time of the first elections in 1992 had roots in student movements and nationalist organisations, the stage appears to have been set quite differently in Latvia when elections took place in 1993. The roots of Latvijas Cels date back to only a few years before the establishment of the party in 1993. The need to form organised parties emanated from the initiative of a number of deputies linked to the Economic Commission and the Commission for Foreign Affairs to set up a political club – Club 21. The club was not open to everybody and in the context of profound uncertainty that all actors found themselves in, this move created a chain reaction among the other deputies in the various Commissions of the Supreme Council: “The reason why people in the Supreme Council founded own parties was that Club 21 was so closed. So many parties were formed – Club 21 forced other parties to form”.9 The role of the Club 21 in the political life of Latvia has been much debated, and the “rumours” circulating about the mysterious club are numerous. “The club is considered as highly elitist and it is compared to the Masonic League. New members can join the club only on invitation and their candidacy must be approved by the members. What is said at the meetings of the club is not publicized” writes Nissinen (1999, p. 130). But even though the stories told about Club 21 can be rather spectacular, the purposes behind the club were concrete and down to earth. Latvia needed a political party with internationally feasible ideas. Club 21 was the means by which to achieve this aim. Club 21 was established in February 1992 after a Christmas greeting had appeared in the newspapers in December 1991, signed by 21 people. A few individuals elected to the Supreme Council, who decided to create the basis for a modern and open party “with European outlooks” were the architects behind the original club, explains Janis Krumins one of the Club’s founders.10 Two people played a quite significant role in the creation of the Club: Janis Krumins, a journalist and member of the Popular Front, and Indulis Berzins, who later became Latvia’s foreign minister. At least one other person was also quite involved from the start, although his role as a founder is more uncertain: Valdis Birkavs, a

Building post-communist states 297 lawyer elected to the Supreme Council, member of the legislative commission there, and later chairman of the Latvijas Cels.11 Krumins’s description of the atmosphere in which the ideas of the Club were first conceived indicates that Krumins and Berzins where disappointed with the low level of political skill and education that surrounded them in the Supreme Council: “they were not ready for political life – they were from the countryside, not so educated”.12 Hence, the goal from the start was to establish a political party, but since “party” had a bad ring to it at the time the purpose of the club was not openly declared, even if, as Krumins puts it, “some of them understood”. The founding members at the February meeting numbered 63 (21 ⫻ 3). The opening of Club 21 in February 1992 was as theatrical as the rules of entrance: there were statutes and a law (of one sentence) which were read aloud from a tribune by the founder Indulis Berzins.13 Basically, the Club served three purposes. First, it offered an arena in which a new and integrative network, the basis for the modern, Western and open party, could grow. In contrast to Estonia where such a network already existed in the 1980s and later founded Pro Patria, Latvia had to deliberately nourish such a network within the realm of a political club where the “progressive” political actors could meet each other behind closed doors. “The people invited to the club was like-minded people: tolerance, democracy, market economy” as Valdis Birkavs says.14 Second and no less important, Club 21 had the crucial task of providing basic input regarding ideas and experiences from the West on democratic, economic and administrative issues. In short, it was through Club 21 that those who were to form the modern and progressive party of Latvia got some insights into modern statecraft, which was provided by the foreign experts invited to the club. Noor Tartu and in particular the Tartu-seminar in the late 1980s filled the same function for the network behind Pro Patria as did Club 21 for those founding the Latvijas Cels. They were all organised yet informal “study circles” about political alternatives and economic theory (and practice) that helped prepare the new political elite to cope with the huge challenges of transition that lay ahead. In these informal settings, the liberal reformers, the committed individuals who were genuinely working for a change of society, could freely discuss their ideas. Third, the club served as a national think-tank, gathering together like-minded people of a liberal and Western-oriented nature to discuss future alternatives for Latvian political and economic development. Who was invited to Club 21? The declared aim was to integrate society and not to exclude groups or individuals. A modern party rested on pluralism and tolerance; that was the idea guiding the founders as they recruited members. Club 21 rested on three “whales” explains Krumins; the political entrepreneurs, the intelligentsia and the economic entrepreneurs (business). While the political entrepreneurs formed the core of Club 21, people from the cultural field, the “intelligentsia”, were invited since they enjoyed a high reputation in Latvia. The third group is however the interesting one in this context. Why were the economic entrepreneurs, the new businessmen, invited to a club that definitely had the purpose of creating a winning political party which should build the Latvian state? They were brought in to support projects and to support the future party,

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states Krumins.15 In other words, the pragmatic attitude of the founders of Club 21 made them see the new entrepreneurs as useful allies in their political efforts. That was a gross miscalculation. The decision to base Club 21 on economic entrepreneurs along with the politicians and the intelligentsia was a choice of great consequences for Latvia’s future political development. It opened up direct avenues of pressure for entrepreneurs into the political parties, primarily through Latvia’s Cels but later through other parties as well. In addition to their economic influence, these entrepreneurs could also rely on personal ties and friendship connections in demanding favourable treatment from ministers and others (cf. Nørgaard and Hansen, 2000). The trouble had started already when Club 21 was active (it closed down unofficially in 1994/95). As the first euphoric feelings of independence started to fade, the idealistic motivations of working for a common cause gave way to more egoistic ambitions, at the same time as the economic entrepreneurs increased their strength and power. Already “inside” with regard to political power “the business people started to make this lobby always in the Club 21. To the Club came prime ministers, Godmanis, then Gorbunovs etc – business people wanted to use this possibility and lobby for themselves, not for the interests of the Club. I had control from the beginning over the business people but they wanted to lobby for themselves”.16 When the party Latvijas Cels was finally established in September 1993, it rested on three pillars. Club 21 was the most important one, and the core in the party consisted of members of the club. This is true for Indulis Berzins, Valdis Birkavs, Mãris Gailis, Anatoijs Gorbunovs, and Ojars Kehris, among others.17 Within the Club 21 network, this included many in the new economic elite that dominated Latvijas Cels: close ties between politics and economics moved into the party sphere. Soviet era nomenklatura like Ivars Godmanis and Anatolijs Gorbunovs formed the second and not so important pillar of the party, while émigré Latvians returning from abroad to help build an independent Latvia formed the third.

Conclusions Three things differ between the Estonian and the Latvian political networks, i.e. in the conditions leading up to the formation of the governing parties in the first governments. First, timing was decisive. The Estonian organisation Noor Tartu, one of the early forerunners of Pro Patria, was formed in 1979 and subsequently provided the base for the Heritage Society and the Tartu-seminar. Discussions, ideas, and impulses from Western theory and practice had an opportunity to develop during the 1980s, which is quite a long time given the circumstances. The Latvian Club 21, upon which the Latvijas Cels was founded, saw the light of day in the beginning of 1992, and the much needed impulses and ideas came in during a phase where the transition was already underway. The discussions taking place in Club 21 did not create any advance preparedness for what was to come unlike the Tartu-based informal organisations and seminars in the 1980s

Building post-communist states 299 Second, the Noor Tartu, the Tartu-seminar, and the Heritage Society were rooted in an academic environment dominated by university and student organisations. Tartu was an intellectual centre in Estonia, partly in opposition to the system. That created an atmosphere of openness and of respect for academic knowledge that characterised the Estonian “learning environment”. In Club 21, the more or less openly declared ambition was instrumental; to create a “winning party” in the elections to come. A pragmatic, instrumental atmosphere rather than an intellectual one prevailed. Third, the Tartu networks, which produced the liberal reformers of the first government in Estonia appear to have been socially (and ethnically) homogeneous; intellectuals, academics and university students comprised the core of these networks. Potential rent-seekers were not included in the ranks of Pro Patria. In Club 21, the stated ambition was to integrate the Latvian society through heterogeneity: people from various sectors of society, of different sexes and of different ethnic origins were to mix. The Latvian counterparts to the Estonian liberal reformers found in Pro Patria, Janis Krumins, Indulis Berzins, Valdis Birkavs and Mãris Gailis were committed to making Latvia a pluralistic, democratic and market-oriented society. But out of decisions grounded in a still prevalent Communist mentality, a need for money and an under-estimation of the risks, they made a pact with the “devil” in the shape of the new economic entrepreneurs emerging in the Latvian context. By letting the potential rentseekers into the party formation process, the liberal reformers contributed to embedding great vulnerability into the emerging party system. The argument that has been presented in brief here is that the variation in state capture has its roots in the informal dimensions of the party formation process. The social composition and the ideas of the networks behind the parties that dominated the first governments have made a crucial difference with farreaching consequences. A break with the past was necessary, but that break had less to do with whether or not reformed Communists were allowed to take part in government. Abandoning the order of the Communist era and replacing it with a separation of politics and economics was the strategically crucial choice. To understand the present post-communist political landscape it is crucial to grasp the historical circumstances surrounding the transitions from communism to capitalism and from totalitarianism to democracy. The argument that the informal political formation and the alliances then created affected the future development of the party systems and hence political institutions, is not only valid in these two cases but of relevance in a larger post-communist context. The simultaneous formation and re-formation of political and economical elites in Estonia and Latvia was a process that took place in an uproar of extreme uncertainty. It is not far-fetched to suggest that an almost “Rawlsian-like” veil of ignorance structured behaviour and decision-making during the earlier years of transition, before the political and the economic arenas had begun to congeal into some kind of predictable pattern (cf. Rawls, 1972).18 In parallel with the hypothetical situation imagined by Rawls, a new but informal social contract had to be established in the middle of a situation of transition where few of the

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crucial actors had either knowledge or experience of the systems that were now being introduced. How individual positions were going to develop was likewise hard to imagine. Nobody actually knew (cf. Grzymala-Busse, 2001). What conclusions regarding the social composition, ideas, and norms of the Pro Patria and Latvijas Cels can be drawn? To start with social composition, it was not the inclusion or exclusion of reformed Communists that mattered most but the inclusion or exclusion of the new capitalist class. Although the first democratic governments in Estonia and Latvia rested on two parties, which in Estonia’s case excluded former Communists (but Marju Lauristin was in the government) while Latvijas Cels was deliberately created as a broad “coalition” between various interests, including the old elite of reformed and progressive Communists, this factor did not affect outcomes in any direct way. The composition factor that did matter and has affected the level of political corruption in the two countries was the inclusion of economic entrepreneurs in the political networks on which Latvijas Cels was founded. While the five overlapping networks behind Pro Patria all had roots in the university city of Tartu, several of them in an academic setting, the core of Latvijas Cels was built on the new integrated network formed in Club 21; basically an arena where political and economic entrepreneurs were linked together. Why where different strategies of alliance formation used? Ideas on what role the state should play for economic development and what the relations between the two sectors should be are perceptions of importance in shaping the postcommunist context. At least three profoundly different state models circulated and still play a role in the minds of post-communist politicians and officials: the totalitarian state, the neo-liberal state, and the developmental state (cf. Nørgaard and Hansen, 2000, p. 19). While the neo-liberal state is an insulated and minimal one, the idea of the developmental state entails a state-led economic development with close interaction between business interests and groups that participate in policy design and implementation. The way that actors thought about who they are may also have mattered in political network formation. Can the choice of an inclusive strategy in the Latvian case and a separation of elites in the Estonian one be linked to differing ideas about the ideal state? Ideas about a western-oriented, democratic state, and market economy (a “normal” state) existed both in the ranks of Pro Patria and in Latvijas Cels. The initial core in Latvijas Cels, Janis Krumins, Indulis Berzins, Valdis Birkavs and Mãris Gailis, were the founders of Club 21, and they dreamt about building a party that promoted a modern, market-oriented and basically liberal society. In Estonia Mart Laar’s confidence in the liberalisation of the economy was decisive. But the extent to which those visions were embraced varies. In Pro Patria it was a unanimously shared goal, while in Latvijas Cels there was also room for other visions to influence ways of thinking: visions that saw Latvia’s development approaching the model of a developmental state, where the state plays an active part in promoting growth through ties to business interests. In the Latvian case the prevalence of such a model of development – which Nørgaard and Hansen demonstrate is predominant in the Latvian political elite even today19 –

Building post-communist states 301 made it seem more self-evident also to include the new entrepreneurs in the informal party formation process. In this way cognitive perceptions of the state – in the Estonian case the view of the insulated neo-liberal state prevalent in the nationalist circles and in the Latvian case the more mixed views of a liberal but also developmental state – partly caused the two parties in formation to be constructed differently.

Notes 1 PCI is a measurement based on perceptions among different groups of observers like businessmen, the public and risk analysts. Åslund (2002) has objected that the ranking therefore may contain invalidities since such perceptions may be influenced by corruption being highly exposed in, for example, the media. But exposure is not equivalent to a high level of corruption but could instead be a proof of efficient controls. 2 Of all the Latvian top politicians I have interviewed, almost everybody agrees that the economic ties are extensive, and that they are a problem. 3 Interview Mart Laar, Tallinn 2 May 2001. 4 Cf. Interview Marju Lauristin, Uppsala 1 March 2001. 5 Interview Marju Lauristin, Uppsala 1 March 2001. 6 Interview Mart Laar, Tallinn 2 May 2001. 7 Interview Inese Voika, President of Delna (Latvian branch of Transparency International), Riga 19 October 2000. 8 Interview Mart Laar, Tallinn 2 May 2001. 9 Interview Juris Celmins, Riga 16 October 2001. Celmins is today a rector of a technical high school. The reason why other labels than “party” were so frequently used – like “club”, “organisation” “movement” – was that the term “party” had a very bad ring to it; “party” meant quite simply the Communist party and nobody wanted to be associated with that. 10 Interview Janis Krumins, founder of Club 21 and today Minister of Regional Affairs representing the Jaunas Partei, Riga, 17 October 2001. 11 Interview Krumins, Riga 27 October 2001, Interview Gailis, Riga, 23 October 2000. 12 Interview Krumins, Riga 27 October 2001. 13 Interview Krumins, Riga 17 October 2001. 14 Interview Valdis Birkavs, prime minister 1993–94, chairman of LC, Riga 18 October 2001. 15 Interview Krumins, Riga 17 October 2001. 16 Interview, Janis Krumins, 17 October 2001 (Riga), founder of Club 21. 17 See fax from Andris Berzins (LC), present prime minister for information regarding LC persons also active in Club 21. 18 In John Rawls’s famous theory of justice, the author argues that the most just distribution in society is achieved if a social contract is reached behind an imagined “veil of ignorance”, i.e. where you do not know your future social or professional position. His optimistic assumption is that under such circumstances people will try to create institutions that also care for those less fortunate in the market. 19 Nørgaard and Hansen (2000, p. 44) report their findings from an interview study with past and present Latvian ministers in 2000. They conclude that “the majority of the interviewees seem to favor an active (developmental/social-democratic) state with comprehensive responsibilities for economic and social development”.

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References Åslund, A. (2002) Building Capitalism. The Transformation of the former Soviet Bloc (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Anticorruption in Transition. A Contribution to the Policy Debate (2000) (Washington DC: The World Bank). Bennich-Björkman, L. (2001) “Är de baltiska staterna redo för ett EU-inträde”, in U. Bernitz, S. Gustavsson, L. Oxelheim, Europaperspektiv 2001.Östutvidgningen, majoritetsbeslut och flexibel integration (Nerenius & Santéreus förlag). Bennich-Björkman, L. (2002) “Explaining state capture in Estonia and Latvia: identity, international role models and political formation”, in W. Maciejewski (ed.) The Baltic Sea Region: Culture, Politics Societies (Uppsala: Baltic University Press). Berglund, S., Aarebrot, F. H., Vogt, H. and Karasimeonov, G. (2001) Challenges to Democracy: Eastern Europe Ten Years after the Collapse of Communism (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar). Blyth, M. (2001) “The transformation of the Swedish model. economic ideas, distributional conflict, and institutional change”, World Politics, 54, October, pp. 1–26. Bornefalk, A. (2000) Essays on Social Conflict and Reform, (diss) (Stockholm: SITE). Coleman, J. (1990) Foundations of Social Theory (Cambridge MA & London: Harvard University Press). Davis, J. (1996) Privatization and Regulation of Public Utilities in Latvia (Edinburgh: Centre for Economic Reform and Transformation). Dawisha, K. and Parott, B. (eds) (1997) The Consolidation of Democracy in East-Central Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Della Porta, D. (1996) “Actors in corruption: business politicians in Italy”, Unesco 1996. Dellenbrant, J.-Å. (1991) “The re-emergence of multipartism in the Baltic States”, in S. Berglund and J.-Å. Dellenbrant (eds) The New Democracies in Eastern Europe. Party Systems and Political Cleavages (London: Edward Elgar). Diamond, L. (1999) Developing Democracies towards Consolidation (Yale: Yale University Press). Easter, G. M. (1996) “Personal networks and postrevolutionary state building. Soviet Russia reexamined”, World Politics, 48 (4). Edin, M. (2000) Market Forces and Communist Power. Local Political Institutions and Economic Development in China, (diss) (Uppsala University). Elster, J. (1979) Ulysses and the Sirens. Studies in Rationality and Irrationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Elster, J., Offe, C. and Preuss, U. K. (1998) Institutional Design in Post-Communist Societies, Rebuilding the Ship at Sea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Evans, P. (1995) Embedded Autonomy. States and Industrial Transformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Eyal, G. (2000) “Anti-politics and the spirit of capitalism: dissidents, monetarists, and the Czech transition to capitalism”, Theory and Society, 29, pp. 49–92. Fodor, E., Wnuk-Lipinski, E. and Yershova, N. (1995) “The new political and cultural elite”, Theory and Society, 24. Frye, T. (2001) “Interest group of elite exchange? Business lobbying in Russia”. Paper presented at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting San Francisco, September 2001. Gehlbach, S. (2001) “Social Networks and Corruption.” Paper prepared for presentation at 2001 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association.

Building post-communist states 303 George, A. L. (1979) “Case studies and theory development: the method of structured, focused comparison”, in P. G. Lauren (ed.) Diplomacy. New Approaches in History, Theory and Policy (New York: The Free Press). Governance Research Indicators Country Snapshot, http://info.worldbank.org/governance/kkz, 30 May 2002. Granovetter, M. (1973) “The strength of weak ties”, American Journal of Sociology, 78, pp. 1360–80. Grofman, B., Evald M. and Taagepera, R. (2000) “Fission and fusion of parties in Estonia, 1987–1999”, Journal of Baltic Studies, XXXI (4), pp. 329–57. Grzymala-Busse, A. (2001) “Political parties and state politicization in East Central Europe.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Fransisco, September 2001. Hadenius, A. (2002) “The development of political parties: Russia in perspective.” Paper presented at the conference Democracy in Russia, Uppsala University 12–13 April, 2002. Hedin, A. (2001) The Politics of Social Networks. Interpersonal Trust and Institutional Change in Post-Communist Germany (Lund: Lund Political Studies), p. 118. Hedlund, S. (2000) Århundrates brott. Historien om hur Jeltsins män plundrade Ryssland (Stockholm: Fischer & Co). Hedlund, S. and Gerner, K. (1993) The Baltic States and the End of the Soviet Empire (London: Routledge). Hellman, J. S., Jones, G. and Kaufmann, D. (2000) Seize the State, Seize the Day. State Capture, Corruption and Influence in Transition (The World Bank, World Bank Institute), September 2000. Holmes, L. (1997) “Corruption and the crisis of the post-communist state”, Crime, Law and Social Change, 27, pp. 275–97. Huntington, S. (1991) The Third Wave. Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press). Johnson, S., McMillan, J. and Woodruff, C. (1999) “Property rights, finance and entrepreneurship”, World Bank, 22 June, 1999. Johnson, S., Kaufmann, D., McMillan, J. and Woodruff, C. (2000) “Why do firms hide? Bribes and unofficial activity after communism”, Journal of Public Economics, 76, pp. 495–520. Kang, C. C. (2002) Crony Capitalism. Corruption and Development in South Korea and the Philippines (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Keat, P. (2001) “Explaining patterns of government favoritism: geographic concentration of industry and trade union bargaining in post-socialist Poland.” Paper presented at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, San Fransisco, September 2001. King, G., Keohane, R. O. and Verba, S. (1994) Designing Social Inquiry. Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research (Princeton: Princeton University Press). King, L. P. (2001) “Making markets: a comparative study of postcommunist managerial strategies in Central Europe”, Theory and Society, 30, pp. 493–538. Lane, D. (1996a) “The Gorbachev revolution: the role of the political elite in regime disintegration”, Political Studies, XLIV, pp. 4–23. Lane, D. (1996b) “The transformation of Russia: the role of the political élite”, EuropeAsia Studies, 46 (4), pp. 535–49. Lavigne, M. (1999) The Economics of Transition. From Socialist Economy to Market Economy, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan).

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Lewin, L. (2001) Ideologi och strategi. Svensk politik under 130 år (5 upplagan) (Stockholm: Norstedts). Lieven, A. (1993) The Baltic Revolution. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the Path to Independence (Yale: Yale University Press). Linz, J. and Stepan, A. (1996) Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation. Southern Europe, South America, and the Post-Communist Europe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press). Misiunas, R. and Taagepera, R. (1993) The Baltic States. Years of Dependence 1940–1990 (London: Hurst & Company). Monroe, K. R. (2001) “Morality and a sense of self: the importance of identity and categorization for moral action”, American Journal of Political Science, 45 (3), pp. 491–507. Nissinen, M. (1999) Latvia’s Transition to a Market Economy. Political Determinants of Economic Policy Reform (London: Macmillan and the School of Slavonic and East European Studies). Novagrockiené, J. (2001) “The development and consolidation of the Lithuanian political party system”, Journal of Baltic Studies, XXXII (2), pp. 141–55. Nørgaard, O. and Hansen, H. O. (2000) “State of the state in Latvia”, Demstar Research Report No 1. Olson, D. M. and Norton, P. (eds) (1996) The New Parliaments of Central and Eastern Europe (London: Frank Cass). Pettai, V. and Kreutzer, M. (1999) “Party politics in the Baltic States: social bases and institutional contexts”, East European Politics and Societies, 13 (1). Putnam, R. (1993) Making Democracy Work. Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton New Jersey: Princeton University Press). Rawls, J. (1972) A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Rothstein, B. (1992) Den korporativa staten (Norstedts: Stockholm). Rose, R., Mishler, W. and Haerpfer, C. (1998) Democracy and its Alternatives. Understanding Post-Communist Societies (London: Polity Press). Rose, R. (2000) New Baltic Barometer IV: A Survey Study (University of Strathclyde: Centre for the Study of Public Policy). Rose-Ackerman, S. (1999) Corruption and Government. Causes, Consequences and Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Schoenman, R. (2001) “Bureaucrats and Biznes-men: bureaucratic overlap, new economic interests and the rules of economic dominance in post-socialist Poland.” Paper presented at the 2001 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Fransisco September 2001. Schröder, H.-H. (1999) “El’tsin and the Oligarchs. The Role of Financial Groups in Russian Politics Between 1993 and July 1998”, Europe-Asia Studies, 51 (6), pp. 957–88. Spruds, A. (2002) “Interest groups and foreign policy. Influence of Russian business elites in Russia’s Baltic policy 1991–2000.” Unpublished seminar paper, East European Studies, University of Uppsala. Stark, D. and Bruszt, L. (1998) Post-Socialist Pathways. Transforming Politics and Property in East Central Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Steen, A. (1996) Elites, Democracy and Policy Development in Post Communist States. Research report 02/96, Department of Political Science, University of Oslo. Steen, A. (1997) “The new elites in the Baltic States: recirculation and change”, Scandinavian Political Studies, 20 (1), pp. 91–112.

Building post-communist states 305 Transition. The First Ten Years. Analysis and Lessons for Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, 2002 (Washington DC: The World Bank). Wankel, C. (1992) Anti-Communist Student Organizations and the Polish Renewal (London: Macmillan). Wasilewski, J. and Wnuk-Lipinski. E. (1995) “Poland: winding road from the communist to the post-Solidarity elite”, Theory and Society, 24, pp. 669–96.

20 Similarities and differences in the social reality and sociological analysis of Russia compared with Poland and Hungary Helmut Steiner All of the eastern European transformation societies share two distinctive features: first, their state socialist past with its legacy of inherited contradictions, and second, capitalist perspectives in both the economy and society with the concomitant manifold problems in development. The commonalities affect economic and social structures, political institutions and mechanisms of power, systems of social norms and ideological values, and each of these interrelated topics can be further elaborated in empirical and concrete terms as well as political and theoretical ones. However, the more detailed such an analysis becomes, the more the differences between the individual states or groups of states become apparent. In this context, one can distinguish at least three groups with specific similarities in historical and present terms. First, there are the central European countries that had reached, prior to state socialism, a specific level in terms of economic/capitalist developments and civic/social ones, and which retained an institutionalised private property sector with, in addition, movements voicing calls for societal reform and democratic protest in the decades of state socialism, and which have taken the earliest and most thorough steps until now in establishing a civil society, and a capitalist system of institutions and values in the economy, politics and society. Countries fitting this description are, Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, although it would also apply in part to the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and to Slovakia and Slovenia; these are all states that have become most integrated into the western alliances of NATO and the EU and where acceptance into these organisations is foreseen within the next few years. Second, there are the central eastern and south-eastern European states with a comparatively lower level of development in economic/capitalist and civic/social terms prior to state socialism, under which there was almost complete nationalisation of all economic means of production and markedly little developed reform and protest movements, and where capitalist economic and social development has been introduced but has remained comparably slow or been restricted. The counties under this heading would be first and foremost Albania, Bulgaria and Romania. Despite the major differences in ownership structure and the forms of democratic institutions within former Yugoslavian socialism, the majority of the

Social reality and sociological analysis 307 Yugoslavian successor states – Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia and Serbia – are to be included here because of the similarity in their pre-socialist legacy and, above all, the disastrous political, ethnic, warlike and, lastly, economic processes and events since 1989. Third, there are the successor states of the centrally-organised, Tsarist and state socialist societies in Russia/the Soviet Union, experiencing regional capitalist development until 1917 and a state-organised industrialisation and social education programme from the 1920s, with a modernisation driven by violence and bureaucratic mechanisms that, due to an increasingly rigid backlog of reforms and lack of democratic mechanisms, led to the social and political disintegration of the USSR and, on the basis of the previous 15 Soviet republics, the establishment of independent successor states – though exceptionally unequal ones. They then, for the first time, took part in a civil society and capitalist development. This is true primarily of the core country of EuropeanAsian Russia, followed by the Ukraine and Belarus with, in Europe, Moldavia and the trans-Caucasian states of Armenia, Azerbaijan und Georgia. In a broader sense, the former Soviet republics and present-day Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan und Uzbekistan are also to be included in this category. There is now a mass of documentary and scientific material available on the social transformation processes continuing since the 1980s in Eastern Europe, together with records of the social science research accompanying them. In general, international comparative studies have only managed to cover a part of these societies in their process of transformation. Ivan Szelenyi’s research into the change of elites in eastern Europe, for example, is the most representative to have appeared.1 In the following, from the range of analysis on specific countries available, I propose to examine some aspects of the similarities and differences between the core country of Russia in the former great power of the Soviet Union, and Poland and Hungary from the first group of the eastern European transformation states. Among the most apparent differences within the shared state-socialist development as a whole, two are of especial significance: first, the new order, in historical terms, was initially established in Russia and institutionalised over a period of around three decades with all its various Russian and Soviet characteristics before it became the “Soviet model” used as the pattern for post-World War II societies of this type, with only comparatively minor national deviations from it allowed in the development of individual countries. In other words, the “original sin” inherent in the Soviet model was then additionally transmitted to historically different conditions in Eastern Europe. Second, Soviet dominance was not solely limited to implementation. It continued in the relationship of a major power to smaller states with dependence and subordination in political, economic, intellectual and cultural and indeed even military spheres. The Hungarian economist Janos Kornai has illustrated, in general terms, the

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Block 1 – Undivided power of the MarxistLeninist party – Dominant influence of the official ideology

Block 2 – Dominant position of state and quasi-state ownership

Block 3 – Preponderance of bureaucratic coordination

Block 4 – Plan bargainng; – Quantity drive; – Paternalism; – Soft budget constraints; – Weak responsiveness to prices

Block 5 – Forced growth; – Chronic shortage economy; – Labour shortage and unemployment on the job; – The system specific situation of foreign trade

Figure 20.1 The main line of causality in the state socialist system (source: Janos Kornai: The Socialist System. The Political Economy of Communism (1992) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 361).

main mechanisms underlying the economic system – and hence the social system – as shown in Figure 20.1. The figure shows the main line of causality running from left to right, The arrows indicate how each group of phenomena is influenced not only by the previous group of phenomena (i.e. not merely the group one layer deeper), but by all the deeper factors, directly or indirectly. For instance, one of the groups of phenomena in the last block – the development and reproduction of chronic shortage – is not simply explained by such phenomena as soft budget constraint or weak responsiveness to prices; among the explanatory factors that act directly here is the preponderance of state ownership and bureaucratic coordination. Kornai has presented here a “basic model”, which was applied in a “stricter” or “weaker” version in individual countries, or during particular historical phases. In the case under consideration here, one can draw the general conclusion that in the USSR, and thus in Russia today, this model was fundamentally applied with greater stringency than, in comparison, in Poland or Hungary. In economic terms, there were short-lived flexible phases in the USSR, for example, in the 1920s (with the New Economic Policy), briefly in the 1960s (the “Liberman debate”) and in the post-1985 period (perestroika), which finally led to these functional mechanisms being undermined and literally collapsing. In contrast, in the correspondingly shorter period from 1945, Poland and Hungary experienced various phases of strict application of these basic prin-

Social reality and sociological analysis 309 ciples with “more” or “less” vigour. Above all, there were recurring efforts for reform, with partial success, formation of opposition and protest movements and counter-elites, which in the 1980s finally culminated in eroding the system and overcoming it. Such differing antecedents are the root cause of why the USSR/Russia experienced uncontrolled disintegration of a system that had been rigidly applying this functional principle for decades and was unprepared for the sudden “opening up” heralded by perestroika; this socialist reform alternative, itself without any clear concept or overall plan, failed. The dissolution of the USSR as a state and the “release” of the former constituent republics into independent nation states led to 15, largely unprepared, successor states with numerous specific problems. The change in political leadership in 1991 from Mikhail S. Gorbachev to Boris N. Yeltsin within the core country of Russia marked the official pivotal transition from a socialist to a capitalist perspective of development, and led directly in 1991 to politically sanctioned measures being taken immediately to privatise state property in the economy (a policy implemented under Yegor T. Gaidar and Anatoly B. Chubais). This landmark on a specifically “Russian way” of social and political change in the system was followed by others when, in 1993, Yeltsin ordered force to be used to dissolve the first democraticallyelected Russian Parliament and then ratified a new constitution founding an autocratic presidential democracy. In contrast, over a comparatively longer period, Poland and Hungary experienced an evolutionary transformation of their institutions and mechanisms, affecting equally the economy, politics, social life, culture and the social sciences. The social movements in Poland emerging from Solidarnosc and the “round-table talks” led, with the expanding democratic institutions and mechanisms in Poland and Hungary, to “more civilised forms” of system change in the direct political arena as well as the economic sphere. If we leave to one side the historical differences established over the centuries, we then find the main causes for the divergent past and present societal development in Russia and the two countries of Poland and Hungary located in the differing implementation of political change at the end of the 1980s and the start of the next decade; this difference can still be perceived nowadays and is primarily due to political reasons and not societal ones. This becomes clear when considering the pertinent economic and socioeconomic data on Russia and comparing this to Poland and Hungary; in these aspects, they were and are still similar, even today. Instead, the main reasons for the divergence between Russia on the one hand and Poland and Hungary on the other were and are political processes, orientations, institutions, mechanisms and, in part, the actors involved. A few concrete examples should be sufficient to illustrate this point (see Table 20.1). In 1980, Hungary had merely 2.9 per cent of the non-agricultural labour force active in the private sector; in Poland this figure was 4.9 per cent. In 1988, the

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state sector proportion of the economy was over 90 per cent in Poland (excluding agriculture), Hungary and Russia, despite all three countries having made discernible advances in evolving or strengthening a private industrial sector in the 1980s2 (see Table 20.2). In the Soviet Union too, the second half of the 1980s (“Perestroika”) shows the first visible increase in the private sector economy (Table 20.3). During the 1990s and the beginning of the next decade, both Russia as well as Poland and Hungary developed societies with a capitalist economy based on private property, multi-party states with parliamentary institutions and a civil life comprising different types of ideological, cultural and intellectual elements. However, within the marked commonalities and similarities, noticeable differences and disparities can be found. First. In all three countries – as in other post-socialist states – the privatisation of state property was carried out by the former nomenklatura and, first and foremost, in their own private interests. The political, economic and, in part, cultural capital of the state socialist countries was gathered in their hands. They occupied the political positions, applying the knowledge acquired via their ruling function; they presided over and had unrestricted access to economic resources and they had the required professional training, culture and social contacts to be able to privatise the state economy for themselves.3 In the majority of these states, there was no functioning, competent counterelite available as an alternative to implement these tasks of economic continuity (further development) and discontinuity (through privatisation). In my view, Solidarnosc, the powerful and organised opposition movement, gave Poland the only genuine opportunity to take a different course. Why, in the final analysis, the widespread nomenklatura capitalism asserted itself here and not a bourgeoisie drawn from opposition forces within the society is a question for my Polish colleagues. Nomenklatura capitalism emerged in its most marked form in Russia for several reasons. To begin with, political and economic power was centralised in the USSR more than in all the other countries of this type. Furthermore, although the perestroika phase, brief in historical terms, destabilised the old system and mechanisms, it generated neither lasting socialist nor liberal reform movements “from below” with new players and democratic mechanisms. Instead, new political institutions and privatisation were initiated and realised “from above”. Despite all the privatisation measures, since transformation was imposed “from above” and the undeveloped democratic culture and weak democratic institutions (Duma, government, parties, unions) continued unaltered, the same closely-linked network between economic and political power crystallised as oligarchic capitalism in the new capitalist owner and manager class. The oligarchies are the representatives of, and players in, Russian state capitalism.4 Second. Although, within only a few brief years in all three countries, new political institutions on the basis of parliamentary multi-party democracy had shaped

Social reality and sociological analysis 311 Table 20.1 Socio-economic indicators

Level of economic development (GNP or GDP per Capita 1985 – USA ⫽ 100) Economic expenditure of the state budget (per cent of total budgetary expenditure, 1981) Activity employment rate of women (in the Age Group 40–44 years, 1985) Income distribution proportion of total income earned (in the 1970s) – Poorest 40 per cent of individuals – Richest 20 per cent of individuals

Soviet Union

Poland

Hungary

50.0

39.2

46.0

54.8

61.1

42.6

96.8

84.7

84.7

23 (1973) 37 (1973)

23 (1975) 37 (1975)

26 (1979) 32 (1979)

Source: Janos Kornai The Socialist System. The Political Economy of Communism (1992). (Princeton, 2000, pp. 6, 135, 233, 318).

Table 20.2 Growth of private small-scale industry and private retail trading in Hungary

1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989

Number of self-employed craftsmen (per cent)

Number of private retailers (per cent)

100 104.8 108.4 110.8 121.1 125.8

100 113.7 129.3 142.1 154.2 176.9

Source: Janos Kornai; The Socialist System. The Political Economy of Communism (1992). (Princeton, 2000, p. 438).

Table 20.3 Growth of the so-called cooperative sector in the Soviet Union (per cent) January 1987 January 1988 January 1989 January 1990

15,000 Members ⫽ 100 1014 9310 17,159

Source: Janos Kornai (2000) The Socialist System. The Political Economy of Communism. (1992). (Princeton, 2000, p. 440). Note With the beginning of the Reform, the term “Cooperative” came into use as a cover name for part of the private sector. In some cases it meant a private partnership; in other cases it referred to a group of private owners who hired employees.

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political life, their actual societal effect differs with regard to Poland and Hungary and to Russia. In the former countries, the parliaments under state socialism were transformed by the critical dialogue and “societal learning processes” in the 1980s and at the start of the 1990s. A number of factors led to new parties being formed in Poland and Hungary and the transformation of their communist state parties into social-democratic style political parties: the founding of the Polish Solidarnosc movement and the strengthening of opposition groups in Hungary; the attempts at reform and change within the communist state parties in both countries; and the “roundtable talks” and arrangements made between state parties and the opposition. The spectrum of parties and groups, both old and new, participating in this change became representatives in the newly elected parliaments for socially and politically differentiated societies. In contrast, the short-lived democratic impetus in the USSR at the climax of perestroika with mass movements, unofficial groups, personnel changes throughout the Communist Party and at the highest levels, and a national delegates’ election with a limited choice of alternative candidates, was followed by – the restoration. The social movements became lame and popular support for a socialist reform project evaporated as disappointment grew over the lack of an overall plan and positive results, with rapidly worsening conditions and supply of goods, and the effect of the first-ever far-reaching revelations about Stalinist crimes beginning to be felt. Although the putsch against Gorbachev in 1991 could be thwarted, it nonetheless simultaneously provided Yeltsin with an opportunity to gain the upper hand in his personal rivalry with Gorbachev and gave him a chance to accept the dissolution of the USSR as the price of strengthening the positions already gained – this latter move was calculated to remove any future higher USSR authority over Yeltsin’s office as Russian President. Measures for an alternative economic programme – a market economy with no social safety net – were pushed through politically as a “shock therapy” and in 1993 an increasingly fractious parliament of relatively freely-elected deputies (the Supreme Soviet) was violently dissolved in order to introduce a constitution granting the President sweeping constitutional rights even greater than the substantial powers enjoyed by his American and French counterparts. This created a political framework that has inhibited the development of any functioning party system, even up until the present. From all the social movements and unofficial groups founded under perestroika, the only ones able to establish themselves were the low-profile “Jabloko” social-liberal movement under Grigorij A. Jawlinskij and numerous small groups both within and outside parliament. The official Liberal Democratic Party under Vladimir W. Zhirinovsky has taken its place in parliament adopting a provocatively right-wing stance. However, ruling parties – in the narrowest sense of the word “parties” – resting on a stable societal basis do not yet exist in Russia. Before every election, newly-formed “electoral alliances” are created for the President’s predetermined cabinet. They each appear under similar patriotic slogans including

Social reality and sociological analysis 313 “Russia’s Democratic Choice”, “Our House Russia”, “Fatherland – All Russia”, and are then supported in the run-up to the election with generous financial subsidies and the backing of the entire political authority lent by the power apparatus of a nationwide government-backed television network, without there ever being the creation of lasting functioning party structures with individual members. In this narrow sense, only the Russian Communist Party can be addressed as a genuine party; it can draw on a membership base of individuals across the entire country, on institutional structures and internal party communication. In addition, it is the strongest single political force (especially when taken with the “Agrar” party cooperating in agricultural areas). However, its political profile has not developed further since perestroika and in some cases it has reverted to pre-perestroika positions. The former reform wing around Gorbachev are no longer members – i.e. the largest part of the former party intellectuals, and of the intelligentsia as a whole. The political programme swings between distant social goals and corrective measures or refusals to intervene in existing day-to-day policy without any considered, conceptual alternatives for their own social policy to be implemented over a set, limited period. The membership base is ageing, primarily oriented to the past and to the Soviet Union, or some “idea of Russia”, and largely without any impetus from subsequent generations. To that extent, the Russian CP differs significantly from the present profile of the former state parties in Poland and Hungary (or indeed in other eastern European states) which, as socialist social democratic parties, have been, and in some cases are, still involved in democratically-elected ruling coalitions. Since 1993, the Russian presidential regime has comprised constitutional autocratic possibilities, initiated by Yeltsin and being fully exploited by Vladimir W. Putin in a rationalised law-and-order form.5 Third. Comparing Poland and Hungary with Russia in the foreign policy area, we note that the entire political, economic and cultural orientation towards western Europe, or “the West”, differed historically and still differs. Despite the eastern European geographical location and the integration of a large part of Poland into the Russian Empire over many years, the simultaneous historical relations of Poland and Hungary to Germany and Austria, France, Great Britain and the USA – though not without conflict – formed a traditionally strong bond to western Europe and America; this was equally true even during the decades of state socialism, at least in comparison to other states of a similar type. After 1989, the opening of economic and political borders led both Poland and Hungary into NATO, the western European–American military alliance, and into close relations – in an intellectual and cultural sense too – with western Europe, and lastly resulted in their foreseeable entry into the European Union. This integration with the West seems to be conflict-free, yet despite all appearances, actually contains complex problems and conflicts, for example, in terms of genuinely equal treatment in the EU and, in addition, the economic perspectives there – as illustrated by the case of the Polish agricultural sector.

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In contrast, from the era of Tsar Peter I and Catherine II through to the development of state socialism and up until the present, the Russian state has been marked by a dual character as an integral part of European civilisation yet simultaneously as a Eurasian territorial state stretching to the Pacific. Correspondingly, from Peter I until the present, the central issues not only in power politics but equally in intellectual discourse relate to this alternative of a European or a Eurasian orientation. Despite both current Russian policy and intellectual debate being unequivocally directed to and dominated by the European orientation, the concrete societal problems in the vast regions of Asian Russia, ethnic problems and difficulties over strategic military and raw materials with the Caucasian and Asian USSR successor states, and complex relations to the Middle East, South-East Asia and the Far East all continually call for and favour both political and intellectual debates on the Eurasian orientation of Russia, even as topics for academic yearbooks and journals. Russia is facing a set of problems, ranging from streams of refugees to restructuring what were previously internal economic relations into international ones between the Soviet successor states, from the effect on domestic and foreign policy of the ethnic war with Chechnya and the American military bases in Georgia and central Asia to the steady progress of NATO towards their western border. For Russia, these are completely new types of issues, in both their geopolitical and domestic aspects, and they tend to promote autocratic power mechanisms rather than democratic ones. It is no coincidence that dictators (e.g. Argentina and even Chile) during development phases in Latin America utilising, at the very least, autocratic mechanisms of power, as in Mexico, for example, are cited – at least, every now and again – to give a new stimulus to Russia’s own practices. Yet this, in turn, is not only a domestic Russian problem; it is also, at root, a problem to be tackled by her European neighbours. Social science analyses of the social transformation occurring in eastern Europe have become established as an international area of research,6 involving, apart from large number of academics and scientists from the affected countries themselves, numerous social scientists from western Europe, the USA, etc. In the meantime, different types of country-wide research have taken their place alongside case studies, and regional and sector analyses. The transformation countries we are most concerned with here, namely, Poland, Hungary and Russia, belong to those best researched, but the theoretical questions asked, methodological approaches used and central subject matter chosen are only partially comparable. Numerous Polish and Hungarian studies (and to an extent Czech and Bulgarian research) are also available in English and hence can reach a wider international audience (for example, W. Adamski, R. Andorka, H. Domanski, Z. Ferge, N. Genov, J. Kornai, P. Machonin, I. Szelenyi, W. Wesolowski, and the journal Sisyphus); nonetheless, the international comparative theoretical discussion on the types and characteristics of eastern European transformation is still in its infancy. This is even clearer when one considers how many Russian, Ukrainian and

Social reality and sociological analysis 315 eastern European publications have hardly been able to find access to the international arena, whether due to the language barriers or because they are frequently difficult to obtain. Our thanks go expressly to our Polish colleagues for the annual series of international colloquia on eastern European transformation that contributes to closing this gap in our scientific knowledge. When considering Russian research, for example, the following might be included in future: the annual symposia on Russia’s future development organised for the last 10 years by Tatiana I. Zaslavskaya, “The Russian Public Opinion Monitor” published by Yurii A. Levada and his staff, the edited collections of works on Russia in the process of transformation and sociology in Russia by Vladimir A. Yadov, with, to a certain extent, the contrary positions taken by Gennadij W. Osipov, but also publications by the new generation of Russian sociologists born around 1960 (Inna F. Deviatko, Aleksandr F. Fillipov, Svetlana G. Kirdina, Vladimir W. Radaev).7 It may be useful, at this point, to illustrate the commonalities and differences in the social sciences too by taking a number of specific examples. One might mention, for example, Ivan Szelenyi, who, alongside the economist J. Kornai, has advanced to become one of the key researchers into the state socialism’s dissolution processes and the social and political upheaval that took place in forming the new capitalist social relations. Both researchers initially chose Hungary, their own homeland, as the starting point for the generalised analytical statements on state socialism and the need to introduce social and economic reforms and the direction these should take, and both were making such statements very early on. After 1990, this also led them – and especially Szelenyi – to consider the situation beyond Hungary’s borders and undertake major comparative studies in eastern Europe. Since The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power, together with G. Konrad in 1973/74,8 Szelenyi’s own process of individual scientific development – as with a few others – has been intimately linked with the social transformation process of Hungary and eastern Europe. Although The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power found a broad readership and appeared in a number of languages, public reception generally highlighted dissident issues; indeed, even up until the present day, two other aspects have not been given the attention they deserve. First, the book needs to be understood as a critical, theoretical debate with the usage and experience of post-Stalin state socialism; in other words, it represents a search for a “third way”. Second, the book’s reception tended to leave the pertinent scientific discussion in the background. In an afterword (“Preface” in the English edition) written by Szelenyi in 1978, he expressly emphasised the difference between the “intellectuals’” social functions in post-Stalin state socialism and the analysis offered by Trotsky and Djilas. In contrast to the former’s notion of “bureaucracy” and the latter’s “new class”, Konrad and Szelenyi trace, from the 1960s, ever stronger links between the party and state bureaucracy and parts of the intelligentsia in the exercise of political control. This, of course, does not exclude conflicts continuing between the political bureaucracy and the intellectuals – quite the contrary. However, essentially, on the road to more rational ruling practices in post-Stalin state

316 Helmut Steiner socialism, bureaucracy and intellectuals entered a political symbiosis. In contrast to Trotsky and the Maoists – and owing to the lack of private capital in the means of production – Konrad and Szelenyi explicitly highlight the (state) socialist and non-(state) capitalist character of this eastern European type of society. There is indeed, in view of Szelenyi’s later transformation analysis, one further crucial aspect worth quoting in full here: In our earlier sociological publications, which appeared in Hungary and even won us some academic recognition, we carefully avoided flirting with Marxism, consciously shunning the usual mandatory references to the “Marxist classics”. But when we started to work on the theoretical summary of our previous empirical work we suddenly realized the analytic power of Marxist class analysis, and this book remains basically within that paradigm of class analysis, as first formulated by Karl Marx and later somewhat modified by Max Weber . . . we used the tools of Marxism in this book not because our academic establishment expected it of us, but on the contrary because in the course of our work we came to discover the explosive critical potential of Marxist theory. (emphasis, added)9 In 1978, he even places this theoretical, methodological and scientific political credo as a concrete analysis after the evaluation of the urban sociological studies carried out together with G. Konrad in the 1960s and 1970s in Hungary.10 A new landmark in Szelenyi’s analyses of the (still) state socialist transformation process was his work first published in 1988 in the USA as Peasants, Proletarians, Burghers: Socialist Embourgeoisement in Rural Hungary,11 which even ten years later explicitly adopted the methodological principles cited above. This study too was the result of long years of empirical research, in this case in rural Hungary, examining the market economic activities and structures inherent in, or, since the 1970s, revitalised and expanded in the social structural consequences on former farmers and small agricultural entrepreneurs with a wage-dependent livelihood (“worker-farmers”), arising from, a socialist policy of industrialisation, collectivisation, and urbanisation in rural areas. For familyrun companies the alternative option was a “socialist embourgeoisement”. Szelenyi does not limit himself to merely empirically describing these processes but adopts them in turn as a basis for far-reaching thoughts on class theory, social transformation theory and the theory of social change. But in our view, “embourgeoisement” does not imply the restoration of capitalism. Rather, a new socialist formation is in the making. This new formation is a mixed economy in which the dominant bureaucraticredistributive mechanism of coordination (the statist mode of production) is increasingly complemented by market coordination (the petty-commodity mode of production), in which people can break out from the cadre-proletarian

Social reality and sociological analysis 317 axis of social stratification by “embourgeoisement” or “petty-bourgeoisification” . . . The idea of such an alternative, a “Third Road” is often ridiculed as naïve or utopian. This book is about the viability of that Third Road. Our story suggests that mixed economies can reproduce themselves, that more complex systems adapt more effectively to economic challenges, and that systems where there are two masters may offer a more balanced distribution of power, with more room to maneuver for the powerless.12 (Emphasis added) Our aim here is not to debate the view expressed itself. Rather, our concern is exclusively directed to the long, ongoing transformation process already occurring under state socialism, and the notions of transformation around it. As early as the 1990s, Szelenyi already introduced a continuation of the above ideas in the most comprehensive work yet providing a representative comparative study on elite changes in eastern Europe, simultaneously initiating theoretical generalisations linked to them.13 The authors surprise the reader with their claim that they want to present a “new theory of the transition to capitalism” by relating the story of “how capitalism was established in a post-communist central Europe without capitalists”. In extending their original concept of intellectuals to the technocratic-intellectual elites, they find the key players to introduce market mechanisms even without private property. And so, just as Marx und Weber offered classical sociological analyses for the development of capitalism and its historical forms, the result of Szelenyi’s study leads him to set the outline of a research programme on the agenda for a “neo-classical sociology” for analysing and explaining this type of capitalism. In the following diagram, he summarised the key features with the research tasks related to them (cf. Table 20.4). Although the work of others in Hungarian transformation research ought definitely to be included in such an overview, for example, Zsusza Ferge, Tamas Kolosi and Rudolf Rudolf Andorka, who died a few years ago, Szelenyi’s model and the elite issue were to offer a transition to some basic observations on Polish transformation research. Far more than in the case of Hungarian social science, even since the 1970s, and especially since the 1980s, Polish transformation research had been taking shape and establishing itself under state social relations. From the intentions it had and the objects of research chosen, it was also more “political” than the Hungarian research studies; from the start, it was connected with social movements, which were linked to the clear opposition movements that emerged in Poland, and were a direct element in social counter-elites being formed there. For example, for Wladyslaw Adamski14 and Edmund Wnuk-Lipinski15 the Solidarnosc movement was not merely a research object but a part of their practical work. But Wlodzimierz Wesolowski too, in his PVAP capacity, had conducted research early on into political movements and elites including the counter-elites in the formation process, had observed the changes taking place within the composition of the Polish Sejm and had included Catholic social teachings and

Table 20.4 A research agenda for a neoclassical sociology of comparative capitalism Classical core

New core

Post-communism

Class relations

propertied class working class intellectuals

large and strong small and well organised large and professionalised

large and strong small and poorly organised large and bureaucratised

small and weak large and poorly organised large and non-professionalised and non-bureaucratised

Institutions

relations in the state property rights

small and strong well-defined individual property rights

big and strong individual property is complemented with cross-ownership

big and weak recombinant property coexisting with a decaying public and emerging private ownership

Distributions of capital

dominant capital dominated capital subordinate capital

economic cultural social

economic social cultural

cultural social economic

United States, England, France

Japan, Taiwan, South Korea

Hungary, The Czech Republic, Poland

Examples

Source: G. Eyal, I. Szelenyi, E. Townsley (2000) Making Capitalism without Capitalists. The New Ruling Elites in Eastern Europe. (1998). London – New York: Verso, p. 191.

Social reality and sociological analysis 319 communitarian ideas into his own thoughts.16 In a certain, exaggerated way, one could claim that the Polish social scientists, far more than their Hungarian counterparts, have concentrated on “political capitalism” as a newly formed type of society.17 In this context, it is also noticeable that the Polish studies into elite change are more differentiated than a large part of the work available from other countries, which tends to limit itself to focusing on the discrete event of a continuing “replacement mechanism” process. The model proposed by the Krakow-based social structure researcher Jacek Wasilewski highlights the discontinuity and specific features of elite change in various stages of transformation18 (see Table 20.5). While, in Hungary and Poland, the upheavals and discontinuity this entailed were comparatively “constant” and “predictable”, development in Soviet Russia was marked by a series of decisive “breaks”. Gorbachev’s “Perestroika” replaced the near total stagnation prevalent until 1985, in the social and political spheres and in the public and academic arena too, introducing a rollercoaster of social movements, changes and emotions. It ended in 1991 with the failed attempt at socialist reform, the dissolution of the USSR, Yeltsin’s seizure of power in Russia and the official transition to capitalist economy and societal development, which was further encouraged in the face of existing resistance by Yeltsin dissolving Parliament and introducing an authoritarian presidential constitution in 1993. Yeltsin’s first and second Chechen wars and Vladimir Putin taking on the Presidency led to a reinforcement of the authoritarian power structures that had already again been more centralised. If, until 1985, only insiders had been aware of the range of academic debate taking place in the Soviet Union, this changed fundamentally after Perestroika. Both Tatiana I. Zaslavskaya,19 whose critical analysis of economic mechanisms (The Novosibirsk Manifesto) brought her national and international renown in 1985, and Vladimir A. Yadov20 moved to Moscow, from Novosibirsk and Leningrad respectively, as advisors on socio-political issues and heads of scientific institutions. After his isolation in 1972, Yuri A. Levada21 returned to public academic life and, with Tatiana I. Zaslavskaya, founded the highly regarded research institute, the “WZIOM”, which he has headed since the start of the 1990s. Despite the increasing range of social science studies, Zaslavskaya, Yadov and Levada represent a continuity in Soviet Russian sociology and transformation research that is open scientifically, engaged in a search for appropriate methodologies and provides a richness of empirical results. One can cite, for example, the annual symposia on “Where is Russia heading?” organised by T. I. Zaslavskaya, held for the tenth time in January 2003, V. A. Yadov’s overview publications, and Monitoring Public Opinion, the bimonthly journal published the WZIOM under J. A. Levada, as exemplary for an intellectual and cultural life that, while perhaps not exhaustive, is certainly rich and varied. As much as the Russian development differs from that in Hungary and Poland, both in terms of sociology and social reality, the analytical observer nonetheless perceives a similarity in the societal processes in all three countries. If we turn to Wasilewski’s typological model of elites in transition,

Table 20.5 Radical change and three elites: elite of transition, elite of transformation and elites of consolidation Elites

Major tasks, institutional choices

Leading institutions

Leading personalities

Mass – elite relations, social processes

Elite of transition:

Deconstruction of the old regime, the transfer of power, and institutional choices concerning the shape of a new regime – Exit from state socialism, democratisation – General vision of a new order: setting up a blueprint of a sovereign, democratic, prosperous and Westernoriented country (e.g., “coming back to Europe” formula, introduction of new national insignia, etc.) – Basic rules of a new game in politics and economy (e.g., presidentialism vs. parliamentarism vs. capitalism etc.)

Mass political movements Parliament Non-communist government

– Leaders of mass democratic movements, – dissidents, party reformers, visionaries, popular tribunes, devoted designers. Model figures: Lech Walee˛sa Vaclav Havel Vladimir Meclar

– Symbolic politics – Unequivocal support for profound changes – Vast elite autonomy – Changes legitimised through common goals and values – Communitarian interests dominate particularistic interests Policymakers, planers and “technologists” of democracy and market economy.

– Political parties – Economic and market institutions (e.g., banking

Model figures: Leszek Balcerowicz Vaclav Klaus

– Reform politics – Disintegration of mass democratic movements

Mission and vision

Elite of transformation Engineering the new order

Crafting democracy and market economy – Electoral system and executive-legislative relations – Constitution building

Elite of consolidation: integrating and habituating the new order

– Detailed program of political and economic reforms Policies’ engineering, implementation of reforms’ projects (e.g., privatisation, taxes, social security plans, etc)

system, stock exchange, big corporations), Trade unions and other organised interest groups

Consolidating democracy and inducing growth – Habituating of the new order – Economic efficiency and growth – Global and international environment; European integration

– Party system – Local and regional self-government – Bilateral, multi-lateral and international organisations – Non-governmental organisations

Professional politicians, moderators, growth inducers Model figures: Alexander Kwasniewski

– Limitation of elite autonomy; professionalisation of politics – Interests restructuring – particularistic interests dominate communitarian interests – Changes legitimised through group interests – Societal costs of reforms, democratises among victims of transformation; reradicalisation and remobilisation of masses – Business seeks politics – Distributive politics – Further limitation of elite autonomy – Institutionalisation of interests, stabilisation of a new structure of society – Gradual demobilisation of masses – Politics seeks business

Source: Jacek Wasilewski (2001) “Three elites of the Central-East European democratisation”, in R. Markowski and E. Wnuk-Lipinski (eds) Transformative Path in Central and Eastern Europe (Warsaw), p. 137.

Media

% of total management

Total number

18.4 18.4 7.9 15.8 7.9 15.8 13.2 2.6 –

2.2 7.8 8.6 13.9 20.3 19.8 10.9 12.8 3.6

0.9 4.8 12.3 15.9 16.8 26.4 8.6 12.3 1.9

0.9 6.6 22.6 12.3 27.4 19.8 7.6 2.8 –

1.5 4.9 7.4 11.3 12.3 19.7 15.8 19.7 7.4

3.1 9.5 13.6 14.5 17.0 19.4 9.0 10.5 3.4

78 241 344 368 429 491 228 266 85

29.0 732

9.7 246

12.7 322

7.2 181

2.0 51

7.3 185

1.5 38

14.2 359

4.2 107

4.2 106

8.0 203

227.0

Agricultural production

10.3 22.2 19.5 15.1 11.9 11.9 3.8 4.3 1.0

Trade

21.6 15.7 19.6 5.9 17.6 11.8 5.9 1.9 –

Services6

2.2 2.8 8.3 10.5 17.7 21.6 13.3 15.5 8.8

High technology sector5

0.6 4.7 6.8 12.1 15.5 21.7 12.1 18.6 7.8

Science and technology4

1.2 11.8 14.6 17.9 19.9 17.5 8.1 7.3 1.3

Military and industrial complexes3

Banks and savings banks

2.5 11.7 19.0 17.2 16.3 19.8 5.7 6.6 1.2

Financial-services groups2

Raw-materials industries1

Before 1929 1930–35 1936–39 1940–45 1946–49 1950–55 1956–59 1960–65 In/after 1966 % of total management Total persons

Industrial sector

Year of birth

Table 20.6 Russian business elite 1999 by economic sector and age-group (in per cent)

0

Source: Sowremennaja Polititscheskaja Istoria Rossii (1985–99 gody). Tom 2: Liza Rossii; Moscow 2000 Evaluation of biographies of 2530 prominent CEOs in Russia’s economy. Notes 1 Gas and oil fields. Refineries; coal mines; ore; gold and diamond mines; quarries. 2 Investment and financial companies. banks and loan organisations. 3 Military and industrial complexes (see above). 4 Development firms; scientific and technical facilities and firms, including those belonging to major companies. 5 Micro-electronic and optical engineering companies; space technologies; freezing technologies. 6 Insurance companies; private financial services and lawyers; security services; hotels and catering services; private sports and cultural facilities. People (in per cent) older than 60: 26.2%.

Social reality and sociological analysis 323 transformation and consolidation, we could add M. S. Gorbachev, B. N. Yeltsin and W. W. Putin as Russian model figures, although the list would need to be expanded to include others, for example, B. E. Gaidar and Anatoly B. Chubais in the transformation elites. Even when classifying the new Russian business elites (2350 people) using the latest edition of Kto est Kto (Who is Who), one can still discern patterns of origin and historical genesis behind the different business groups (e.g. traditional sectors of industry, such as, on the one hand, military and industrial complexes and the raw materials industries, and, on the other, financial groups and the media) when divided into statistical groupings linked to various commercial and social areas with a respective weighting for age group (cf. Table 20.6). In any case, the few examples available from Hungary, Poland and Russia clearly show the need for comparative transformation studies in eastern Europe and show just how fruitful this area of research could be. However, this would then require the availability of the necessary material, financial and personnel resources – and what is more, there would need to be a parallel academic impetus to establish a theoretical and methodological basis for such comparative studies.

Notes 1 G. Eyal, I. Szelenyi and E. Townsley (2000) Making Capitalism without Capitalists. The New Ruling Elites in Eastern Europe (1998). London – New York: Verso 2000. Since the start of the 1990s, numerous articles in specialist journals and collections have appeared by I. Szelenyi on precisely this topic. 2 J. Kornai The Socialist System. The Political Economy of Communism (1992). Princeton: Princeton University Press 2000, pp. 72, 84. 3 An interesting analysis and typology of the differing methods used for privatising state property in central eastern Europe (i.e. unfortunately excluding Russia) has been provided by D. Stark and L. Bruszt (1998) Postsocialist Pathways. Transforming Politics and Property in East Central Europe Part II (Cambridge), pp. 51–105. 4 For the particularities of the processes in Russia cf. H. Steiner and V. A. Yadow (eds) Rußland – wohin? Rußland aus der Sicht russischer Soziologen (Berlin); H. Steiner; “Privatisation and Emergence of New Business Elites in Russia.” 2001. WZB Paper. P 01–04. 5 Cf. B. Kagarlitzky (2002) Russia Under Yeltsin and Putin. No Liberal Autocracy (London). 6 Cf. H. Steiner (2002) “Transformation und Gesellschaftstheorie. Theoriegeschichtliches und Aktuelles zur sozialökonomischen Transformation”, in St. Jordan and P. Th. Walter (eds) Wissenschaftsgeschichte und Geschichtswissenschaft (Waltrop), pp. 244–58 7 T. I. Zaslavskaya (1997) Rossijskoe Obschtschestwo na sozialnom islome: wsgljad isnutri (The Russian Society in Social Upheaval: A View from Inside) (Moscow). J. Lewada (2000) Ot menij k ponimaniju (From Opinions to Understanding) (Moscow). V. A. Yadow (ed.) (2001) Rossija: transformiruju schtscheesja obschtschestwo (Russia: a Society in the Process of Change) (Moscow). G. W. Osipow (2000) Sozialnoe Mifotwortschestwo i Sozialnaja Praktika (Forming Social Myths and Social Praxis) (Moscow). S. G. Kirdina (2000) Instituzionalnye Matritzy i Rawitie Rossii (Institutional Matrixes and Russia’s Development) (Moscow).

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8 G. Konrad and I. Szelenyi (1978) The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power (New York & Brighton, UK: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich & Harvester, 1979). German original: Die Intelligenz auf dem Weg zur Klassenmacht (Frankfurt/M). 9 I. Szelenyi: “Preface”, p. xiv, in Op. cit. 10 I. Szelenyi (1983) Urban Inequalities under State Socialism (Oxford). 11 I. Szelenyi (1988) (in German as) Sozialistische Unternehmer. Verbürgerlichung in ländlichem Ungarn (Hamburg, 1989). 12 Op cit. pp. 16/17 (pp. 4–5 in the English version from 1988, Socialist Entrepreneurs. Embourgeoisement in Rural Hungary (Cambridge, UK: Polity). 13 G. Eyal, I. Szelenyi and E. Townsley (1998) Making Capitalism without Capitalists. Class Formation and Elite Struggles in Post-Communist Central Europe. (1998). London – New York 2000. 14 Cf. for example: W. A. Adamski (1993) Societal Conflict and Systemic Change. The case of Poland 1980–1992 (Warsaw). 15 Cf. E. Wnuk-Lipinski (ed.) (1995) After Communism. A Multidisciplinary Approach to Radical Social Change (Warsaw). 16 Cf. W. Wesolowski u. a. (1978) Social Mobility in Comparative Perspective (Warsaw) (eds with B. Mach et al.) Social Structure and Change. Finland and Poland. Comparative Perspective. Warsaw 1980 (eds with E. Allardt). Swiat Elity politycznej. Warsaw 1995 (ed. with I. Panków). Polityka i Sejm. Formowanie sie˛ elity politicznej. Warsaw 1998 (with B. Post). Partie: Nieustanne Klopoty. Warsaw 2000. Obcia˛zeni Polityka˛. Poslowie i Partie. Warsaw 2001 (red.). Power and Social Structure. Essays in honor of W. Wesolowski. Ed. by A. Jasinska-Kania, M. L. Kohn, K. M. Slomczynski. Warsaw 1999. 17 Jadwiga Staniszkis’s general theoretical works on “post-communism” give a representative example in this instance. Cf. e.g. J. Staniszkis (1989) Post-Communism the emerging enigma (Warsaw). J. Staniszkis (2001) Postkommunizm. Próba opisu (Gdansk). J. Staniszkis (1998) “Postkommunismus. Versuch einer soziologischen Analyse” Prokla, H. 112, N. 3. (Post-communism: An attempted sociological analysis). 18 Cf. also J. Frentzel-Zagórska and J. Wasilewski (eds) (2000) The Second Generation of Democratic Elites in Central and Eastern Europe (Warsaw). 19 Cf: T. I. Zaslavskaya, including: Soziologija Ekonomitscheskoj Schisni (Nowosibirsk, 1991) (jointly with R. W. Rywkina). Rossijskoe Obschtschestwo. Na Sozial’nom Islome: Wsgljad Isnutri (Moscow 1997). Sozialnaja Traektorija Reformirnemoj Rossii. Issledowanija. Nowosibirsko Ekonomiko-Soziologitscheskoj Schkoly (Nowosibirsk, 2001) (ed. jointly with S. I. Kalugina). Sozietal’naja Transformazija Rossijskogo Obschtschestwa. Dejatel’nosti Strukturnaja Konzepzija (Moscow, 2002). 20 Cf. V. A. Yadov, including: Soziologija Perestrojki (Moscow, 1990) (ed.). Soziologija w Rossii (Moscow, 1998) (ed.). Rossija: Transformirujuschtscheesja Obschtschestwo (Moscow, 2001) (ed.). 21 Cf. J.. A. Levada including: Die Sowjetmenschen 1989–1991. Soziogramm eines Zerfalls (1991) (Berlin, 1992). Stat’i po Soziologii (Moscow, 1993). Ot Menenij k Ponimaniju. Soziologitscheskie Otscherki 1993–2000 (Moscow, 2000).

21 Third-way politics, sceptical voters, insecure societies Christopher G. A. Bryant

Preamble I am honoured to participate in a book in memory of my old friend and colleague Edmund Mokrzycki but I must begin with a confession. I am currently writing a book not about civil society and democracy East of the Elbe but rather about the nations of Britain. As I do not want to repeat ideas about civil society West and East of the Elbe which I have already published, I will instead do something I did with Edmund Mokrzycki on numerous occasions over many years – discuss politics. To be specific, I will offer some speculations about one form of contemporary politics, third-way politics, and its consequences for democracy. I shall argue that the competition for votes in democratic elections tempts politicians to claim to be able to do more than in practice they can in a risk or insecure society, thereby generating the sceptical disengagement of voters. Third-way politics compounds the problem by its very acknowledgement of the complexities and contingencies with which governments have to contend and its commitment to (incalculable) balances and trade-offs. The prospect for voters is increasingly unattractive. Many continue to vote but remain sceptical. There are also markedly more non-voters than there used to be, and there are some voters who look for simple alternatives to the prevailing politics of complexity. It is possible that there may be some lessons here for those building democracy East of the Elbe – some aspects of the Polish case come to mind – but I will leave it to others vastly more qualified than I am to enlarge on whether this is actually so.

Introduction: politics without passion In the British general election held in May 2001 the governing New Labour party was re-elected with another huge majority but without the popular enthusiasm that had marked its initial victory in 1997. In particular the turn-out at 59 per cent was 13 per cent down on 1997 and the lowest since 1918.1 Why should this have been? The sociologist Anthony Giddens, author of The Third Way, and a key contributor to new Labour thinking, has noted that a subsequent survey in May 2001 found that the percentage of non-voters who said they would have

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voted New Labour if they had gone to the polls was greater than the 42 per cent of voters who did so vote (Giddens, 2002, p. 77). This suggested to Giddens that there had been a free-rider effect among an electorate that thought New Labour was bound to win. He may have been right about free-riders but I am going to speculate that this is not the whole story. I shall suggest that it diverts attention from something much more profound and much more challenging for the future of democracy, namely that the politics of the centre-left, or the new middle, is intrinsically unlikely to sustain voter enthusiasm. This is not because, as some critics in Britain would have it, it is all spin and no substance, but rather because it is inseparable from a commitment to ‘what works’ when, in practice, it is hard to be sure what does work, or what works best, and harder still to be sure what will deliver desired outcomes beyond the short-term. Complexity and contingency are everywhere and they constitute a disincentive to vote. The politics of the centre-left is basically technocratic, in effect a politics without passion, but it is also one without any guarantees of success. In February 2001 Prime Minister Tony Blair made a speech announcing the ‘Third Way, Phase Two’ (Blair, 2001). The thinking behind the developing new Labour agenda which prompted it was much more substantial than his critics would admit, but the very proclamation of anything entitled ‘Third Way, Phase Two’ is indicative of the recherché character of the new politics. Turn-off lowers turnout. Ours is a risk society, or more accurately an insecure one, in which coping rationally with risk and uncertainty is so fraught with difficulties as to prompt among many citizens, especially the young, a new fatalism, a new hedonism, a scepticism about political deliverability, and a consequent disregard for politics. I should add that scepticism is different from cynicism, even if voters often combine bits of both. For the cynic, the problem with politicians is their insincerity, their dissembling; for the sceptic it is their capacity to deliver what they promise. For the cynic the issue of trust is moral, for the sceptic it is practical. I shall proceed by first asking whether theories of why citizens vote cover the circumstances of polities like Britain today and the politics of the centre-left as articulated, in particular, by Anthony Giddens. I shall then comment on contemporary risk society, as described by Ulrich Beck, or insecure society, as I prefer, and on the shift of emphasis from politics to sub-politics and government to governance, and the implications of these for voting. Next I shall pose the question of whether the British and other western experience has any relevance to the post-communist polities in central and eastern Europe – but leave those who know them well to answer it. Finally I shall note that some aspects of contemporary politics were anticipated two centuries ago by Henri de SaintSimon, even if others are disquietingly novel – in fact post-modern.

Why citizens vote No one would deny that there is more to political participation than voting, and more to democracy than elections. So does non-voting matter? It has usually been assumed that it does. Active citizenship demands that citizens have the

Third-way politics 327 resources, the opportunities and the motivation to act as citizens. The resources include civil, political and legal rights as well as economic and social resources such as sufficient levels of income, education and health. The tradition of liberal individualism supposes that citizens will do what they must to live their lives, and pursue their interests, without undue let or hindrance. They will support only a minimum government, which guarantees a framework of law and protects them from internal and external forces that would deprive them of their liberties. The constant need to secure just such a government and none other, however, provides them with enough of a rational self-interest to participate in politics and, above all, to vote. For the liberal individualist, citizenship is an ascribed status with attendant rights. The main alternative to liberal individualism, civic republicanism, treats citizenship and active citizenship as one and the same thing: ‘individuals become citizens by taking their civic duties seriously. Individuals are eligible for the status of citizen by virtue of being born and living within some territory, but they only achieve the status by acting accordingly’. For civic republicans, as Oldfield (1990, p. 159) goes on to say, the very notion of a ‘private individual’ is an oxymoron – a contradiction in terms. Civic republicans tend to suppose that the public life of the citizenry is more self-fulfilling than the private life of the family and household, but they also laud the civic education, which teaches individuals the value of the communities of which they are a part and the duties which they owe to them. These include political participation, and, above all, voting. For the civic republican, active citizenship, the only citizenship worthy of the name, is an achieved status with attendant duties. Either way, non-voting matters because it is irresponsible. In the former tradition it leaves the defence of individual liberties to others; in the latter it leaves the well-being of the community to others. It is doubtful, however, whether the liberal individualist tradition is right to assume all citizens have enough of an incentive to participate in politics and to vote. It would seem to offer little defence against the selfish free rider. Similarly, it is doubtful whether the civic republican tradition is right to assume that civic education will be effective enough for all individuals to want to be true citizens and so participate in politics and vote. It would seem to offer little defence against the impervious free rider. Non-voting has long been a feature of national elections in America. In presidential elections, half of the citizenry do not vote, and in Congressional midterm elections two-thirds do not vote. Indeed, turn-out has been so low for so long it would be no surprise if there were a crisis of legitimacy in America; instead, the surprise is that there is not. In some Continental countries, too, turnouts have been a cause for concern. In the 2002 French presidential election it would appear there were enough socialist non-voters (as well as defectors to far left parties) for Jean-Marie le Pen from the extreme right to displace Lionel Jospin, the socialist prime minister, from the second round run-off against the incumbent president Jacques Chirac (although the turn-out of 72 per cent, albeit over 8 per cent down on 1993, was not low by American standards). Turn-outs in central Europe are also sometimes low, most notably in Poland where turnout in the 2000 presidential elections was 61 per cent and in the 2001

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parliamentary elections just 46 per cent. Many reasons have been given for low and falling turn-outs in different countries. I want to concentrate on one that is largely unconsidered; it is absent, for example, from the possible reasons for non-voting in British general elections discussed by Heath and Taylor (1999) but would seem relevant to the British case, and possibly to others. It pertains to the contradiction between the complexities and contingencies with which politicians necessarily contend and the simplicity and clarity which voters demand. The contradiction is exacerbated where the advocates of a particular politics acknowledge the complexities, as is the case with the Third Way.

The global third-way debate Anthony Giddens published The Third Way in the autumn of 1998 in an attempt to define a politics ‘beyond left and right’ for New Labour in Britain (Giddens, 1994; 1998). Much of the force of Giddens’s argument, and much of its appeal to Tony Blair and to politicians abroad, lay in the claim that socialism and the Old Left had died of exhaustion and maladjustment to a changed world, and their successors, neoliberalism and the New Right, unable to sustain the contradictions between market fundamentalism and conservatism, were now dying too. So what did a successor third-way politics have to do? According to Giddens (1998, p. 64), ‘The overall aim of third way politics should be to help citizens pilot their way through the major revolutions of our time: globalisation, transformations in personal life and our relationship to nature’. This is anything but simple. Nevertheless, in all three cases, wise action on our part can, it is asserted, make a difference to how these revolutions work themselves out. Giddens’s claim that Labour values remain constant, but the policies which give effect to them do not and should not, is intended to afford a flexible politics without cynicism. His 1998 third-way programme had the following components: the radical centre, the new democratic state (the state without external enemies – very much a pre-9/11 formulation), an active civil society, the democratic (non-patriarchal) family, the new mixed economy, equality as inclusion, positive (enabling) welfare, the social investment state, the cosmopolitan nation (which balances cultural pluralism and solidarity), and cosmopolitan democracy (which engages fully with the wider world in its many manifestations). An active civil society is a society of citizens able and willing to pursue their individual and shared interests. It is distinguished by vibrant civil association, significant social capital and, where necessary, community renewal. Positive welfare enables active citizens to work and participate in social life where sometimes they would not otherwise have been able to (start to) do so, but active citizens will also seek to avoid state dependency (one of the lessons of Thatcherite Britain being that no one could depend on the welfare state). Giddens acknowledged in The Third Way that ‘No issue has polarised left and right more profoundly in recent years than the welfare state, extolled on the one side and excoriated on the other’ (Giddens, 1998, p. 111). In The Third Way and Its Critics Giddens (2000), returns, among other things, to the question of

Third-way politics 329 inequality in the context of new patterns of family and work. Basically Giddens supports moderately progressive taxation, equality of opportunity and the redistribution necessary to give effect to it, social solidarity and social inclusion, and an active and autonomous citizenry. The means to these include public and private welfare mixes, which enable and empower all citizens to respond to opportunities, take initiatives and bear responsibilities. In Giddens’s view this takes us beyond the welfare state. The state does not leave citizens to their own welfare devices, but nor does it deliver all welfare itself. Its role is to sustain a debate about welfare with the citizenry and with business and to take the lead responsibility in identifying, securing and overseeing whatever configuration of public and private welfare is appropriate in an ever-changing risk society. Giddens’s state has a lot to do in making social investments, in regulating capitalism at home and in reforming and devising the international institutions with which to combat market fundamentalism globally (cf. Stiglitz, 2001). Giddens has repeatedly discussed the latter with George Soros and has included an essay by Soros (2000) in a book about it, On the Edge: Living with Global Capitalism (Hutton and Giddens, 2000), edited with Will Hutton (cf. Bryant and Jary, 2001, pp. 237–42). For Giddens, the large-scale street protests first seen at the World Trade Organisation’s failed attempt, in Seattle, in November 1999, to embark upon another round of free trade measures only confirmed the urgent need for new institutions of global economic governance. Hutton and Giddens want to supersede not only the old ideologies of neo-liberalism and socialist internationalism but also ‘the old framework of nation-states’ which is deemed unequal to the task of regulating a globalised economic and political order. Not all the concepts and ideas in Giddens’s 1998 version of the Third Way figure in Tony Blair’s similarly titled Fabian society pamphlet, published shortly afterwards (Blair, 1998). In particular, Blair refers disparagingly to the ‘fundamentalist Left’, but it is market fundamentalism and especially the minimal regulation of international capital markets which disturbs Giddens more. Giddens’s ecological concerns also do not make it into Blair’s pamphlet, and nor does his critique of the self-exclusion of the privileged from the social mainstream. Unsurprisingly, Blair’s use of Giddens is selective, and his vision is less radical. Be this as it may, third-way thinking – recast as the ‘new middle’ by Chancellor Schröder in Germany (Blair and Schröder, 1999) – has made headway in most of the European Union and beyond, thereby justifying Giddens’s invocation of The Global Third Way Debate (Giddens, 2001). By the time new Labour was re-elected in 2001, Giddens had already responded to criticism in The Third Way and its Critics (Giddens, 2000). Like Blair he was now anxious to develop further a political agenda for the centreleft, and this he did in Where Now for New Labour? (Giddens, 2002). His answers, however, largely amount to more of the same; they are also worthy, evidence-based, and often complex – essentially decent but uninspiring. The same can be said for the numerous policy initiatives proposed by the contributors assembled by Giddens in The Global Third Way Debate. Giddens argues that late modern states have to balance meritocracy and equality, pluralism and

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solidarity, economic development and environmental protection. There are, however, contending ways of trying to do so, none is easy and it is hard to know which offers the best chance of success. In a similar vein, Latham (in Giddens, 2001, ch. 1) wants to reconcile a growing market economy with a good society, and economic competition with social cooperation. In terms of public policy priorities, the third way engages in: cooperating internationally, investing in education, boosting savings, investing in infrastructure, strengthening workplaces and devolving public services. In each case Latham gives examples, but it is not difficult to think of alternatives and quite what to do then becomes hard to determine. Assessing the pros and cons of different models of money market regulation, public–private partnership, employment protection, health care delivery, pension provision, etc, is equally challenging. And informing all of these, there turns out to be not one third way, but, according to Merkel (in Giddens, 2001, ch. 3), four alternative third ways of social democracy (the marketoriented way: New Labour; the market- and consensus-oriented way: the Dutch ‘polder model’; the reformed welfare state: Sweden; the statist way: the Parti Socialiste Français’) (Merkel, 2001, p. 51). Such complication can be expected to enthuse the expert more than the voter. The time for what Giddens had earlier called ‘emancipatory politics’ would seem to have passed (Giddens, 1990, pp. 156–7). No third-way politician, it seems, is going to thrill the people by declaring, ‘I have a dream’. Giddens seems to realise that this is a problem. In countries other than Britain, variations of this failure to stir the voters have contributed to the recent electoral reverses of the centre-left. Knowing this, Giddens (2002, pp. 33–7) is prepared to speak again of ideology and the good society but not in ways that are distinctive, let alone resounding. One could sum up his advocacy as ‘social democracy in the public interest’, although he does not himself offer anything so terse. Instead what he has to say about balancing the state, civil society and the market and about differences between government, the state and the public interest is still decidedly cerebral. It is ironic that Giddens, the originator of the notion of utopian realism, should offer a politics in which realism (and pragmatism) are, with one exception, to which I shall come, much more obvious than any utopian vision. Newman and de Zoysa (2001), albeit referring more to Blair than Giddens, have written of The Promise of the Third Way. Is that promise high promise, empty promise, false promise or unfulfilled promise? Their answer is highish but largely unfulfilled promise. But without a dream, what is there to sustain voter support when delivery of third-way goals is not just protracted but uncertain? That the devil is in the detail is more damaging when there is only detail. Perhaps the most striking chapter in The Third Way and its Critics is the one entitled ‘Taking globalisation seriously’, which argues that Keynesianism in one country, or region, is an impossibility. Trying to combat inequality in one country, for example, will never be enough. The Third Way will, it is clear, have to go global. Endorsements for the book from Tony Blair, Romani Prodi, President of the European Commission, and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, (then)

Third-way politics 331 President of Brazil, are a start. How timid were the ambitions of Durkheim and Weber by comparison and how local their connections! But for voters the scale of what is proposed is more likely off-putting than inspiring. This is, however, where Giddens does have a dream – world governance – and he supports the European Union as a ‘bridgehead’ to it (Giddens, 1999). But he denies, contra Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister, that this bridgehead is, or should be, an emergent federal state. Instead he describes it as ‘an experiment in transnational governance’ and a novel political form with lessons for the rest of the world. It should, he adds, ‘contribute to the restructuring of nations, as they become less concerned with territory and more with peaceful collaboration’ (Giddens, 1999). I agree about the novelty (cf. Bryant, 1991; Rumford, 2002) but suggest support for it cannot easily be mobilised. Advocates of the nationstate have their clarion calls, supporters of federalism their models (America, Germany, etc), and admirers of superstates their ideals. But how is anyone supposed to campaign for ‘an experiment in transnational governance’ whose current form is hard to describe (but which includes a formidable democratic deficit), whose future form is unclear, and whose ultimate objective, the evercloser union envisaged in the Treaty of Union, is proffered as a stepping stone to something else even more speculative – world governance. I have argued that third-way politics are intrinsically unengaging. This does not mean debates with third way politicians are invariably dull. Passion can be brought to the new, passionless, third-way politics of the ‘radical centre’ or the ‘centre-left’ by opposing it to the Other. Giddens argues that the distinction between left and right still reflects differences in political values. To be on the left is to want a society that is solidary and inclusive, such that no citizen is left outside. It is to have a commitment to equality and a belief that we have an obligation to protect and care for the more vulnerable members of society. As a crucial addition it involves the belief that the intervention of government is necessary to pursue these objectives. Rightists are liable to deny each of these propositions. (Giddens, 2001, p. 5) There are, of course, many conservatives and Christian democrats who would agree with these three propositions, particularly as Giddens’s approach to equality emphasises civil rights and equality of opportunity. The centre-left, so defined, is quite spacious and the rightist sometimes a straw figure. But in contemporary polities there will still be Others to oppose, even on occasions to demonise. There are first the partisans of the Old Left wedded to exaggerated expectations of the state as an instrument for the delivery of social justice and of redistribution as the means to achieve equality, and of the New Right wedded to their exaggerated expectations of the market as an instrument for the rational allocation of resources and of competition as the means to achieve efficiency. Then there are nationalists with outmoded ideas of the selfsufficiency of the nation-state, racists with false notions of the superiority and

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inferiority of people, and the usual cast of fools, rogues, egomaniacs and misfits who can colour the life of any party and heat up politics anywhere. Third-way politics may be intrinsically unengaging but they are never the whole story in any polity. There are also extrinsic clashes with the Other.

Insecure society According to Ulrich Beck (1994, p. 10) Industrial society, the civil order and, particularly, the welfare state and the insurance state are subject to the demand to make human living situations controllable by instrumental rationality, manufacturable, available and (individually and legally) accountable. On the other hand, in risk society the unforeseeable side and after-effects of this demand for control, in turn, lead to what had been considered overcome, the realm of the uncertain, of ambivalence, in short, alienation. Beck’s concept of a risk society is an important one but there is a temptation to overextend it to include all instances of unanticipated outcomes even where these outcomes do not, in some way, rebound on us. To suggest that the outcomes of modern projects typically come back to haunt us is to over-dramatise. It is true, nuclear fission was supposed to give us cheap power but instead gave us Chernobyl. But very often what we have to come to terms with is banal difference – things not turning out quite as intended/expected. It is therefore better to speak of an insecure society, one in which complexity and contingency often make it hard to be sure where courses of action might lead. During the 2002 French presidential and parliamentary elections ‘insecurity’ was a major issue. It referred not just to the physical insecurity generated by crime, to threats to social security and to anxiety about job security, but also to a more pervasive sense that the familiar contours of French life were under attack from countless sources from globalisation to Muslim immigration. It struck a chord with citizens who felt they could not really be sure of anything anymore. In this French context insecurity is still a cause for alarm. But insecurity has to do with more than this. It is also about a lack of confidence in experts, in systems, in projects, in policies, in futures. It is not that we necessarily think something bad is going to happen, but more that we cannot be sure (that anyone knows) quite what is going to happen: good, bad or indifferent. Go back a couple of decades and there was much discussion in social science of the Frankfurt School’s critique of an instrumental reason which had squeezed out any other use of reason. The problem today is not one of too much instrumental reason, but too little. Third-way writing, whether from Giddens or contributors to The Global Third Way Debate, is all very rational. It addresses the issues large and small, and defines the balances and makes the estimates it deems necessary. These are balances and estimates, moreover, in an insecure society and an insecure world.

Third-way politics 333 Indeed there is an affinity between third-way politics and an insecure society. Third-way politics eschews simplicities, whether old left, new right or nationalist. Voters, especially the increasing numbers of politically dealigned or nonaligned voters, are expected to perceive the implausibility of simple politics in an insecure world. The problem for citizens and voters, however, is not so much disbelief that any of the often complex and challenging policy initiatives proposed by the centre-left will make any difference; it is rather uncertainty whether the differences will turn-out to be those intended. This discourages political participation, including voting. In some ways fatalism, hedonism (especially the non-postponement of gratification) and general short-termism fit the circumstances better. It is also possible that Beck’s sub-politics – participation in governance through civil association, which is also a form of public life – has more appeal to many citizens than anything to do with political parties and the government of the state. Certainly there is more to non-voting than the apathy of the voters, cynicism about flawed and self-serving politicians and the tedium of campaigns; there is also doubt about the capacity of politicians – of all parties and none – to deliver. In his ‘Third Way, Phase Two’ speech, shortly before the 2001 general election, Blair set six challenges that would have to be met if the renewal of social democracy were to succeed. The fifth is ‘the challenge of renewing democracy and overcoming the alienation and disconnection from politics that is a marked feature of our times. Democracy needs to respond to people’s demand that they have a right to be listened to even if decisions do not always go the way they want’ (Blair, 2001, p. 12). Clearly Labour’s general election campaign failed to effect a reconnection. MORI opinion poll findings shed some, but only some, light on why (MORI, 2001). MORI interviewed a sample of 1801 in the first week of the election campaign and a recall sample from the same group of 1472 after election day. 66 per cent of the recall sample disagreed with the statement that ‘It was an interesting campaign’.2 And of those who had declared in phase 1 that they were very interested in politics, 61 per cent said, looking back, the campaign had not been interesting. These and other findings led MORI to conclude ‘that declining turnout is not a function of declining interest in politics or elections but rather a failure of the campaign to connect to the electorate’, and that ‘a significant proportion of those who are positive about the efficacy of voting in general, were negative about it at this election’. (Voting was lowest among 18 to 24 year olds – where under-registration to vote was also greatest – at only 39 per cent.) It is significant that 32 per cent agreed that ‘none of the parties stood for policies I would like to see’, and 38 per cent agreed ‘that there was little difference between what the main parties were offering’. In general, respondents felt that they got enough information from all sources about the election in terms of volume but 44 per cent also said that they received too little about the policies of the parties (and 55 per cent too little about the candidates in their constituency). MORI’s questions did not allow any follow-up on the implication that many voters wanted not more information but different; instead, MORI turned to ideas for voting reform (by switching voting from Thursdays to

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weekends, having polling stations in supermarkets, providing for voting via the internet, etc). Interestingly, 58 per cent supported the idea that ballot papers should allow voters to tick a none-of-the-candidates option. A subsequent study by TRBI for the BBC (2002) used 500 in-home interviews of which 400 were with 16 to 44 year olds, as well as focus groups with 18 to 24 and 25 to 44 year-olds at four sites in England, to explore public disillusion with politics. The interviewees consisted of active non-voters (people who voted in previous elections but abstained in 2001), ambivalent non-voters (people who are indifferent to politics including some who have never voted), voters and issue active voters (people involved with particular causes). Among the findings were these. Active non-voters ‘are often issue champions. There is no perceived correlation between how important things are to them and the agenda of the powers that be’ (BBC, 2002, p. 5). Many ambivalent non-voters were proud of not voting, and many, too, would have liked an abstention option on the ballot paper. Voters often claimed that the media muddied the waters when what they wanted was clarity. And many issue-active voters favoured the use of referendums. Party politics were perceived negatively by a majority in all groups. Constant media criticism of politicians had undermined confidence in politics. Younger groups had little regard for parliamentary conventions. ‘Furthermore, they no longer feel respect for parliament but morally superior to those who seem to have forgotten that they are there to serve the people’ (BBC, 2002, p. 10). One reason for the disconnection of some respondents with politics is a perverse consequence of Margaret Thatcher’s rolling back of the state. Politics is associated with the state, the state is less intrusive than it once was, and politics is thus now thought less consequential. At the same time, European politics are seen as impossibly distant, and local politics often irrelevant insofar as local authorities have few powers. In many ways these individualists have the attitudes not of citizens but of consumers. Politics is a brand with negative associations and consumers choose whether or not to buy it. One woman expressed this with brutal simplicity: ‘I do think that [politicians] have to earn the right for us to vote. Just because you have a voucher, you don’t always spend it if the goods aren’t worthwhile’ (BBC, 2002, p. 19). Promoters of brands try to build brand loyalty, but consumers want to be able to switch brands when it suits them and dislike being stuck with politicians until the next election which could be four or five years away. Politicians are also grey. There are few you can empathise with. When it comes to getting things done, the discussion groups preferred figures like Bob Geldof and initiatives like Live Aid. Single-issue campaigners are more likely to elicit a response than party politicians. The TRBI researchers themselves commented that ‘Many people do not have a grasp of the basics of on-going political and news issues e.g. Middle East, Northern Ireland, Europe, or even democracy’s structure and workings’ (BBC, 2002, p. 4). No doubt the BBC will make remedying that a priority. But I think the more challenging aspects of the public disillusion with politics revealed by the TRBI study are these. Many people crave simplicity, clarity, and direct links

Third-way politics 335 between decisions and policy initiatives. Moreover they want clear evidence of the achievement of desired outcomes even in the short term. They would also like political heroes who exemplify and deliver these. If this is indeed their illusion of how politics should be, they are likely to remained disillusioned – unless some party or movement can persuade them it can deliver simple solutions and then actually do so. There is currently an advertisement on British television channels for Ronseal, a producer of DIY varnishes and sealants. The ad’s punchline has quickly become a national catchphrase: ‘It does exactly what it says on the tin’. Many citizens-as-consumers, especially among the young, want to be sure that parties will do exactly what they say they will before they will vote for them. They want politics made easy – and are thus doomed to disappointment. What has not happened in the British case is the growth of significant support for parties of the far left or far right offering simple remedies, although the farright anti-immigration British National Party has had some local successes where there have been race riots such as in Burnley and Oldham. The absence of proportional representation in Britain makes it harder, of course, for fringe parties to achieve a national breakthrough.

Voting in post-communist societies Edmund Mokrzycki and I never had much confidence in the idea of a transition in East-Central Europe after 1989 from communism to liberal democracy and a capitalist economy which supposed that the starting points in all cases were similar and that the end-states were both similar everywhere and guaranteed (Bryant and Morzycki, 1994). We expected the differing legacies of real socialism in different countries and the wide variations in democratic and capitalist forms found in the west to confound the transitologists. Clearly the countries of east-central Europe were being transformed, but quite how the transformation would work out was hard to foretell in any one case and exceedingly unlikely to be the same in every case. Ten years after the 1989 watershed, Dawisha’s (1999) account of the ‘Electocracies and the Hobbesian Fishbowl of Postcommunist Politics’ serves only to confirm how right we were not to get carried away. Dawisha argues that democracy requires the rule of law, a strong civil society and a democratic political culture characterised by trust, and that without them elections can yield undemocratic outcomes. Hence her rhetorical questions: ‘do free and fair elections that elect gangsters, anti-Semites, and anti-democratic communists and fascists really help democracy? Can such elections equally institutionalise both democracy and its opposite?’ (Dawisha, 1999, p. 258). Democratic consolidation has, she continues, been highly variable in post-communist countries, and too much has been expected of elections in isolation from everything else. Having taken an anti-transitionist line after 1989, and seeing no reason to depart from it now, I am most definitely not going to claim that the new thirdway politics of the centre-left in its British or any other variant necessarily has any bearing on developments in East-Central European societies although I do think these post-communist societies are also risk societies or, as I would prefer,

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insecure societies, and I did note how, following the September 2001 parliamentary elections in Poland, the new government led by the post-communist Democratic Left Alliance continued to develop a market economy, thereby seeking, in effect, a third way of its own (as have, Roger, 2001, notes, some post-communist parties elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe). Indeed the prime minister, Leszek Miller, claimed Tony Blair as his model. Instead I will just comment on one account of the absence of trust in Polish society and politics, and on two episodes in recent Polish political history, and leave those who know much more about them than I do to enlarge on their significance if they think it would be useful. Sztompka, writing in the mid 1990s, referred to ‘the pervasive deficiency of trust’ in Poland, and to the deep and widespread ‘syndrome of distrust’, where ‘trust is a bet on the future contingent actions of others’ (Sztompka, 1996, pp. 38, 47, 39) which agents are unwilling or unwise to make. In order to remedy this, the government could and should take the lead in putting in place structural conditions conducive to the reconstruction of trust. When forming and implementing policy, the government has to do battle on six fronts. (1) It has to display an unwavering commitment to building democracy. ‘People must feel that the authorities know what they are doing and where they are going, that they have a clear program and that they execute it persistently’ (Sztompka, 1996, p. 57). (2) It has to be accountable itself and insist on accountability elsewhere. ‘The key to this is the rule of law, constitutionalism, judicial control, as well as the efficiency of enforcement agencies of all kinds’ (Sztompka, 1996, p. 58). (3) It has to assure the fundamental rights of citizens, including the right to private property. (4) In its action it has to be as open and transparent as possible. ‘Pluralistic, independent media and autonomous institutions for gathering statistical data, census offices and reform-watch centers must be developed’ (Sztompka, 1996). (5) It has to support pluralism. ‘There is a need for consistent decentralisation, delegating competences to local authorities and providing local authorities with autonomy and self-rule’ (Sztompka, 1996). (6) It has to ensure the competence and integrity of the representatives of all expert systems, beginning with those who hold political office. On all six fronts the guiding principle is this: consistency and integrity generate trust and trust begets more trust. In addition there needs to be ‘a re-education for trust’ in families and schools, for which Catholic teaching on trust can serve as one resource. Finally, trust also needs instrumental reinforcement. ‘Trust must be rewarded and linked with selfinterest’ (Sztompka, 1996, p. 60); trustworthiness must be seen to pay off whether in business, politics or personal life. For Sztompka, Polish politicians were all too often self-serving, deceitful and incompetent. There can be no doubt he was right to rail against venality, inconsistency and ineptitude. After all, ‘trust implies that others will be trustworthy’ (Sztompka, 1996, p. 40), and if there is little such trust there is also little incentive to vote. What Sztompka does not consider, however, is that politicians and public alike expected governments to exercise more control over policy outcomes than is possible in a risk society and certainly more than Poland after 1989 allowed.

Third-way politics 337 It is also Poland that has provided one of the most striking instances of democratic immaturity in post-communist East-Central Europe. I refer to the first presidential elections of November 1990 in which a rich returnee from Canada and Peru, Stanislaw Tyminski, with the ultimate in unprincipled parties, Party X, but promising easy wealth, beat Prime Minister Mazowiecki into third place in the first round of the elections (taking 23 per cent of the vote in a 60 per cent turn-out) before losing to Lech Wale˛sa in the second-round run-off (Kowalik, 1991). Never has a craving for simple solutions and the great deliverer been plainer (though it could be argued that the economic shock therapy of Mazowiecki’s finance minister, Leszek Balcerowicz [1995], had already paved the way). Something of that craving persists. In the 2001 parliamentary elections in Poland, the turn-out at 46 per cent was low, though only 2 per cent down on 1997 (compared with 62 per cent, itself low, in the 1989 parliamentary elections which were the beginning of the end of communism in Eastern Europe). This ‘was interpreted as a sign of the political elites’ estrangement from ordinary voters’ (EECR, Fall 2001, p. 30). One of the new parties which nevertheless did well is Samoobrona (Self-Defence), a ‘far-right farmers’ union led by Andrzej Lepper, an advocate of direct action who faces 200 criminal charges for blocking roads, throwing manure at public officials and other incidents. ‘The party’s program is anti-European, antipathetic to market reform, and attracts people discouraged by the harsh economic conditions that prolonged reform and the transition to a free market economy have brought’ (EECR, Fall 2001, p. 30). Lepper ‘routinely calls all public figures crooks and thieves’ (Gebert, 2002, p. 88). The party had a simple message and won 10 per cent of the vote and 53 seats. Was the low turn-out in 2001 evidence of a widespread sceptical disengagement from politics? Was the support for Lepper evidence of a yearning for politics made easy and the great deliverer? It would seem only a minority of the electorate were willing to engage with the complexities of politics in a risk society. Echoing Sztompka as well as Dawisha, Mokrzycki (2000) describes some of Poland’s travails in terms of ‘Democracy in a Non-Democratic Society’. He argues that the consolidation of democracy through the 1990s as measured by honest elections and peaceful changes of president and government has not made Poland a democracy insofar as a competent but arrogant and corrupted political class disregards the weak and resourceless masses (or would-be civil society) and instead concludes deals with strong, aggressive and ruthless pressure groups which have little to do with the national interest however defined. In short, procedural democracy does not necessarily issue in responsible government. One might add that this does not provide much of an incentive to vote.

Echoes of Saint-Simon David Easton (1965) argued that any functioning political system combines three levels of decision-making. At the top level decisions are made about who

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gets what, when and how. Politics at this level is about the distribution of political power and economic resources, and it is driven by interests. Beneath this there is necessarily a middle level decision-making about rules, procedures and rights. These latter make up both the constitution and the institutional framework of the regime, and they are informed by reason. Then underpinning them there is the bottom level of decision-making; it addresses the composition of the ‘we’ whose polity has the constitution and the institutions within which normal distributive politics takes place. It is at this fundamental level that decisions are reached about identity, citizenship and territory, and about the very social and cultural boundaries of the nation-state. In play here are passions. Most politics have to do with the top level – who gets what, when and how. Sometimes the parameters within which normal politics is conducted are called into question and constitutional and institutional arrangements are amended, reformed or superseded. Only rarely, Easton continued, does politics address questions at the most fundamental level of all – who are we? – because answers at that level are usually taken for granted. The politics of early 1960s America were more stable than most, and middle, and even bottom, level political decision-making have been more common than Easton would have had us suppose. Indeed, shortly after he wrote his book the civil rights movement challenged, and in due course transformed, the bottom and middle levels of politics in America itself. But the scheme can accommodate that. More obvious today are the features that are missing altogether. First, Easton’s identity question has to do only with who we the people are – essentially the national question – not who I the individual am – the self-identity question. It is this latter which underpins what Giddens calls life politics or the politics of self-actualisation, and it finds expression as much outside party politics as within it. It is hard to insert it into Easton’s levels. Second, Easton’s decision-making has a static framework, whereas even more than the politics of self-actualisation, what I would call teleological politics is processual. In some ways it constitutes a level between the institutional and the distributive but it can also inform continuous questioning of the institutional. What I am referring to is the narrative dimension to politics, the future orientation, the pursuit of goals which inform the decisions made. Decisions are, after all, very often made with a view to achieving something in the future; this is politics driven by aspirations. One of the striking features of third-way politics is the emphasis on modernisation – this when post-modernity and post-modernism have, justifiably, been the talk of intellectual circles for the best part of two decades now. There is a confidence in the possibilities and benefits of modernisation that is reminiscent of the post-revolutionary positivity of Saint-Simon in the early nineteenth century (cf. Taylor, 1975; Bryant, 1985, ch. 1). When Giddens argues that wise action on our part can make a difference to how major revolutions – in our case, globalisation, transformations of personal life and our relationship to nature – work themselves out, there are echoes of Saint-Simonian technocracy and the motif that the application of positive knowledge transforms power over people into the administration of things. There is a passionless technocratic calculation.

Third-way politics 339 The preoccupation with work and the horror of idleness are also Saint-Simonian themes – as too are the belief that unequal societies are diminished by their failure to use the talents and capacities of all their members, the interest in European union, and the idea (in Giddens) of the state without enemies. Modernisation provides a narrative, a link to the future, goals worth striving for. Insofar as third way politics and policy-making is basically technocratic, however, its advocates and practitioners face a fundamental problem. They still buy into (their version of) the modernist dream when many voters do not. Those who do not can support third-way politics despite their doubts, they can engage with such alternative politics as may be available (of which those of the far-left and the far-right propose the greatest change) or they can refuse engagement with party politics and not vote.

Notes 1 All electoral statistics are taken from Keesing’s Record of World Events. 2 The MORI (2001) report on the web is unpaginated.

References Balcerowicz, L. (1995) Socialism, Capitalism, Transformation (Budapest: CEU Press). BBC (2002) ‘Beyond the Soundbite’: BBC Research into Public Disillusion with Politics (London: BBC). Beck, U. (1994) ‘The reinvention of politics’, in U. Beck, A. Giddens and S. Lash (eds) Reflexive Modernization: Politics Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order, ch. 1 (Cambridge: Polity). Blair, T. (1998) The Third Way: New Politics for the New Century (London: Fabian Society). Blair, T. (2001) ‘The third way, phase two’, Prospect, March, pp. 10–13. Blair, T. and Schröder, G. (1999) ‘Europe: The Third Way/Die Neue Mitte’, in K. Coates (ed.) The Third Way to the Servile State, The Spokesman, 66. Bryant, C. G. A. (1985) Positivism in Social Theory and Research (Basingstoke: Macmillan). Bryant, C. G. A. (1991) ‘Europe and the European Community: 1992’, Sociology, 25, pp. 189–207. Bryant, C. G. A. and Jary, D. (eds) (2001) The Contemporary Giddens: Social Theory in a Globalizing Age (Basingstoke: Palgrave). Bryant, C. G. A. and Mokrzycki, E. (eds) (1994) The New Great Transformation: Change and Continuity in East-Central Europe (London: Routledge). Dawisha, K. (1999) ‘Electocracies and the Hobbesian fishbowl of postcommunist politics’, East European Politics and Societies, 13, pp. 256–70. Easton, D. (1965) A Systems Analysis of Political Life (New York: Wiley). East European Constitutional Review (2001) ‘Constitution watch: Poland’, 10 (4), pp. 29–31. Gebert, K. (2002) ‘The Wages of Complacency’, East European Constitutional Review, 11 (1–2), pp. 84–9. Giddens, A. (1990) The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity). Giddens, A. (1994) Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics (Cambridge: Polity).

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Giddens, A. (1998) The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy (Cambridge: Polity). Giddens, A. (1999) ‘A third way for the European Union?’, in M. Leonard (ed.) The Future Shape of Europe (London: Foreign Policy Centre). Also accessible at: http://www.globaldimensions.net/articles/Giddens1.htm; . . . 2.htm; . . . 3.htm. Giddens, A. (2000) The Third Way and its Critics (Cambridge: Polity). Giddens, A. (ed.) (2001) The Global Third Way Debate (Cambridge: Polity). Giddens, A. (2002) Where Now for New Labour? (Cambridge: Polity). Heath, C. and Taylor, B. (1999) ‘New sources of abstention?’, in G. Evans and P. Norris (eds) Critical Elections: British Parties and Voters in Long-Term Perspective (London: Sage), ch. 5. Hutton, W. and Giddens., A. (eds) (2000) On the Edge: Living with Global Capitalism (London: Cape). Kowalik, T. (1991) ‘Socio-economic and cultural limits of market economy’, Sisyphus: Sociological Studies, 7, pp. 41–51. Latham, M. (2000) ‘The Third Way: an outline’, in Giddens (2001), ch. 1. Merkel, W. (2001) ‘The third ways of social democracy’, in Giddens (2001), ch. 3. Mokrzycki, E. (2000) ‘Democracy in a non-democratic society’, in Lord Dahrendorf et al. (eds) The Paradoxes of Unintended Consequences, ch. 6 (Budapest: CEU Press). MORI (2001) ‘Survey of attitudes during the 2001 general election campaign’ and ‘Attitudes to voting and the political process’ (London: MORI), http://www.mori.com. polls/2001/elec_com. Newman, O. and de Zoysa, R. (2001) The Promise of the Third Way: Globalization and Social Justice (Basingstoke: Palgrave). Oldfield, A (1990) Citizenship and Community: Civic Republicanism and the Modern World (London: Routledge). Roger, A. (2001) ‘The meaning of the third way in Central and Eastern Europe’. Paper presented to ECPR Joint Sessions, 6–11 April, Grenoble. Rumford, C. (2002) The European Union: A Political Sociology (Oxford: Blackwell). Soros, G. (2000) ‘The new global financial architecture’, in Hutton and Giddens (2000), pp. 86–92. Stiglitz, J. (2001), ‘Development in the twenty-first century’, in Giddens (2001), ch. 24. Sztompka, P (1996) ‘Trust and emerging democracy: lessons from Poland’, International Sociology, 11, pp. 37–62. Taylor, K. (ed.) (1975) Henri de Saint-Simon 1760–1825: Selected Writings on Science, Industry and Social Organisation (London: Croom Helm).

22 National myths, pro-socialist capitalism, and the old and new mythmakers Joanna Kurczewska

Peter Berger was right when he wrote that “the insight that an enduring human community requires a belief in its essential rightness long antedates modern social science . . . This age-old insight is more or less, what modern social scientists mean by the concept of ‘legitimation’. . . . Thus, a legitimation is any answer, on whatever level of sophistication, to the question as to whether this or that institutional arrangement is morally just or proper.”1 The concept of legitimisation is society’s implicit cohesive component, but only if we assume that individuals’ beliefs, not their practical needs, are the factors that justify that society’s particular social order. Legitimisation has many origins, and it is also formulated on many different levels of reality. Legitimisation can be quite mundane when the habitual structures of everyday life are its objects. This is what happens when we inquire about the meaning of a particular institution in daily practice, or when we feel that some institution has been with us “forever”, and that its existence does not have to be justified at the level of individual or group beliefs. In addition to this “ordinary” form of legitimisation there are also other forms. These forms assume at least trust (complete and unconditional) in institutions and their representatives or which even demand that the individuals and groups involved in these institutions not only have trust in them, but also act in ways that demonstrate that the object of their trust is worthy of the ultimate sacrifice. This second form of legitimisation of institutions or, more generally, the institutional order which defines the logic of development of social order, is what George Sorel calls social myth.2 Many researchers claim that when dealing with social myth the content of the myth is insignificant. What is important is the fact that the myth encourages individuals and groups to become fully involved or even to make sacrifices. I would prefer not to join the knotty debate on the concepts of underdevelopment and social myth at this point. There are many inspiring theoretical discussions on underdevelopment, especially within the framework of social development theory in general and theory of social and political modernisation in particular. For the purpose of analysing the most recent systemic transformations in Central and Eastern Europe and especially in Poland, it is sufficient to focus on the following two interpretations: one refers to underdevelopment and the other refers to the concept of social myth.

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Like Tismaneanu,3 I believe that today, after a radical systemic transformation, nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe is a substitute for socialism. In other words, at the ideological level (i.e. the level of beliefs), socialism was used to legitimise the civilisational institutions of a planned economy, which was a strategic project for civilisational and economic emergence from civilisational and economic underdevelopment vis-à-vis the West. Post-communist nationalism, the form of nationalism that we have today, is meant to legitimise (in no simple way) the new order of civilisational institutions, that is, capitalist institutions such as market regulation and institutions that emulate the patterns of economic growth based on the late industrial economy and whose effectiveness has been confirmed in Western Europe and the United States. Capitalist order, as it is understood at the institutional level, exposes what used to be hidden in the socialist order. On the one hand, it discloses the powerful dependency on the Western economy and the fundamental civilisational regulations of the Western world, while on the other hand, by comparing the effectiveness of Western civilisation with the ineffectiveness of socialism as an institution, it reveals the extent and intensity of underdevelopment in Central and Eastern Europe. This is why it is so important to know what individuals and groups believe in, provided we accept the fact that civilisational underdevelopment is a very significant element of “post-communist” capitalist institutional order. Contingent on these beliefs, institutional order may or may not make sense to these individuals and groups, and may or may not motivate them to take action, even if it means risking their lives. As I mentioned before, I believe that national myths are the main source of the legitimisation of the new order. The reason for this, as Berger accurately observed, is that “capitalism as an institutional arrangement, has been singularly devoid of plausible myths; by contrast, socialism, its major alternative under modern conditions, has been singularly blessed with myth-generating potency”.4 However, I tend to disagree with this great analyst of capitalism and democracy. In my opinion, this mythological inequality between the two institutional orders (capitalism and socialism) is evened out (but not reduced) by a third factor. This factor is nationalism, and it is understood as a complex entirety of interests and values relating to integration and homogenisation at the national level and at the level of the nation state. Both in socialism (as an institutional order) and capitalism it serves to integrate, consolidate and control. In both cases, nationalism is treated instrumentally: it is used to strengthen one or another order. There is a difference, however, between the nationalism that legitimises the socialist order and the nationalism that legitimises the capitalist order. In the latter case, nationalism is an explicit, official and unofficial form of legitimisation (significant albeit incomplete) of the state, society and culture, whereas in the former case nationalism legitimises society and culture but not the state.5 In the capitalist order, which began to develop in the 1990s, nationalism was – I repeat – a political and cultural form of legitimisation but not an economic one.6 In order properly to understand these processes it is necessary carefully to observe and analyse the relations between the long-standing underdevelopment

The old and new mythmakers 343 caused by the local and regional history of Central and Eastern Europe and the social myths that legitimise the new order. However, I would nevertheless like to focus on only one type of social myth that contributes to nationalism – national myths. These are myths that limit the role of underdevelopment (and its derivatives) in the new capitalist institutional order or even eliminate it altogether. I believe that as far as post-communist Central and Eastern Europe is concerned, the further one is from the West, the more the national myth (a) contributes to the legitimisation of the new order, (b) is used to conceal the intensity and extent of inherited underdevelopment (especially from one’s own community), and (c) is used to conceal this underdevelopment from the international community by allegedly evening out the civilisational opportunities vis-à-vis the West by pointing out the values of other national cultures. Hence, the following assumptions serve as the foundation for the discussion. First, capitalism as such (as a general or Western formation) has failed to generate social myths of its own. Instead, it “borrows” its myths (which are indispensable for development and success) from other sources. Second, the form of regional, civilisational underdevelopment, which can be found to some extent in Central Europe, and to an even greater extent in Eastern Europe, and which is one of the constituents of pre-communist and post-communist capitalism, has not succeeded in creating its own civilisational mythology, i.e. its own justifications in the realm of ideas and values pertaining to material civilisation and the ensuing spiritual values. In other words, it has failed to develop a justification rivalling the ones that the West has developed to legitimise its own form of capitalism (market economy). Third, post-communist capitalism, which is reproducing its own previous civilisational underdevelopment (both local and regional), is being legitimised by national myths, that is, myths referring to a part of the institutional and value-related order other than politics or culture. The logic of this national myth consists in reducing the inequality between Western capitalism and post-communist capitalism. Fourth, this logic also includes levelling the “mythological inequality” between the socialist institutional order and the post-socialist (capitalist) institutional order. The national myth is therefore a substitute for the socialist myth on the one hand, and a continuation of some of the elements of socialist mythology, i.e. the mythology of moral and political unity, on the other hand. Many researchers focusing on Polish society point out that the latter mythology has become the foundation for the legitimisation of the Third Republic of Poland. Due to the length of this article, it is not possible to reconstruct the complexities of the various connections between underdevelopment in a broad sense and social mythology. I will focus almost entirely on the preliminary and preparatory analysis of national mythology, its makers and carriers. I will discuss, above all, the subjective aspect of national mythology, i.e. the social actors in Central and Eastern Europe who are projecting the standards of involvement in national myths. I intend to focus on all those people who create the ravishing national slogans praising new capitalism which are most appropriate in the times of systemic transformation.

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In the region under study, civilisational underdevelopment7 determines the social structure, the division of social labour, and the distribution and redistribution of goods. It also determines the nature of political privileges and the characteristic features of the dominant culture. Moreover, it is closely related to stability of the intelligentsia, which is the opinion-setting stratum in the fields of politics, culture and the economy. This connection helps preserve the delayed development with respect to the West and its structural and economic models, which are only slightly strained by the socialist economy but reinforced by the state redistribution of material goods. This has assisted the intelligentsia with retention of its social significance and functions. The intelligentsia continues to set the trends with respect to the values that integrate the society and the state. The intelligentsia encompasses various occupational and psycho-cultural categories. These are defined on the basis of the ways in which they delineate and implement various socially universal goals and the extent to which they are able to co-operate with other social groups in the name of a common good, that is, the ways in which they understand and practice their civilisational and social mission. The intellectuals, artists and the clergy have been its stable components since the nineteenth century. The new intelligentsia, which emerged when Poland regained independence after the First World War and again in 1989, consists of politicians and clerks, i.e. socio-occupational categories connected with new or resuscitated state institutions. Analyses of the political discourse which appeared in the 1990s and includes such countries as the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland but also Ukraine, Lithuania and the Baltic States (changes in Bulgaria and Romania are heading in the same direction), draw attention to the decline of the social authority of the intellectuals and artists, and to the fact that these groups are being “pushed” towards the political back-burner. One of the reasons for this is that they are leaving the stage of their own free will by becoming civil servants, limiting themselves to working on a small scale in self-government institutions, becoming frustrated with the current situation, or devoting themselves entirely to their occupational roles. In this way, they no longer think about how to help their country or act on behalf of their country. Another reason, which was very prominent at the beginning of the 1990s, is that the ideological projects of a “good state”, good economy or modern and active national community, initiated by a few groups in opposition to the socialist state, failed to win general approval and their authorities were quite helpless when confronted with reality (in Poland the opposition had a wider social base but only after martial law was lifted). An additional factor was that some circles of intellectuals and professionals, which had remained on the periphery of the official scene prior to 1989, later changed their basic social roles and became MPs, high ranking officials and party functionaries and joined the ranks of the political class. In other words, rather than witnessing a repetition of the 1920s, i.e. the early years of the construction of the Second Republic when the intelligentsia gained a privileged place in the independent state, we are observing the revival of the social

The old and new mythmakers 345 mechanism that has divided the intelligentsia into experts versus politicians and which has elevated the latter to privileged positions on the public scene to reward them for their real or imaginary contributions. The most recent history of the Central and Eastern European intelligentsia, and particularly of their role as trendsetters, has provided material for many good case studies of cultural determinism. These studies help to explain why certain political structures and forms are developing in this region of the world, particularly structures and forms referring to national values and institutions of national significance.8 Hence, they are a source of valuable empirical data for a detailed characterisation of the intelligentsia’s national myths. Thanks to this social agent of national myths, we are able to gain new insight into social politics in this region. It is worth noting that in the most recent conceptualisations of social theory, politics and its actors are discussed in terms of cultural analysis, e.g. in terms such as cultural capital, social identity, cultural experience, etc. These discussions take into consideration a much wider cultural and civilisational context, one which reaches much further than state or local politics to encompass, for example, the creation of well-being and long-standing cultural values. In this part of the world, the intelligentsia (cf. convincing discussions of their role by Konrad and Szelenyi, and by Bauman)9 have analysed and are still analysing nationalism of the Eastern type (cf. Hans Kohn’s ideas on this) in less abstract and macro-social terms and more in concrete and micro-social terms. I agree with Brubaker that in the studies of nationalism conducted by sociologists and political scientists we can detect a tendency to be too abstract, to ignore concrete events and to lean too heavily towards structural and cultural generalisations.10 It is precisely this stratum-related, or rather socio-occupationally-related category that has been considered as the dominant social agent in the realm of national values and interests by several of the most important variants of the constructivist perspective in the theory of nation. According to the advocates of this perspective, the intelligentsia is the category that determines the shape of the nation, the dynamics of national processes, and the nature of the national, global and particular ideologies that legitimise them. We are talking about individuals and groups whose ideas and values, and the strategies whereby these ideas and values are transmitted, determine the national attributes that are ascribed to the state, culture, and society at large. However, here we also encounter a considerable disagreement between the facts and their interpretation. In all walks of life and at all levels of its institutionalisation such agents create national myths. Depending on the particular area and on the particular moment in the history of the development of market and democratic institutions, the intelligentsia has created either (a) myths that excuse civilisational backwardness by blaming it on the lack of a state of one’s own and bloodshed in various uprisings and revolts, (b) myths of spiritual community, devoid of any political or economic references, (c) defensive myths protecting against both the trendsetting West and

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East and leading to national accord (antemurale, buffer, protection against alien threats, etc), and (d) myths that homogenise and invalidate class and stratum divisions. However, these activities are not always effective, and they are not properly reflected in current academic discourse. A lot depends on the local context. Some of them are downright pathological. Public discourse in most of these countries has shown that the legitimisation of capitalism and democracy is often manipulated in this part of Europe and that the role of the traditional elite, the intelligentsia, is often invalidated. (I am not talking about individual public authorities – these continue to exist, only that today, people more than before are viewed as authorities. Media celebrities, especially politicians and experts rather than distinguished writers, musicians or painters who have contributed to the development of Polish or European culture, are now attributed with authority.) Generally speaking, in post-communist societies, politicians are the ones who have the privilege to create national myths and the patterns of influence on the nation’s sense of community. Why them? In short, it is they who govern political structures according to the will of their electorate and influence the new economic networks. It is also they who, thanks to their dual political and economic role, can effectively enforce their own way of thinking and acting on their fellow citizens. And how is this possible? It is because groups that are closely connected with the market economy (substitutes for the Western middle class) are incapable of developing their own myths and, more importantly, because the middle class, i.e. the socio-cultural representation of capitalism with its institutional ties, is weak. This is by no means a repetition of the nineteenth-century “rule of souls” with its various forms of social pressure, often cryptic and always paternalistic with respect to the poorer classes, both rural and urban. It is precisely because politicians are elected by the nation, i.e. by the democratic machinery of the sovereign state, that they, not the intellectuals, are the ones who are privileged. It is they who occupy that particular place in the social space that allows them to influence their fellow citizens, their beliefs and bonds, effectively and on many different planes. I must admit that it is not fashionable today to focus on this type of national mythmaker. The trend today in world scientific reflection on the nation is to substitute elitist conceptions with more “socialised” ones.11 I am drawing on those important elements of the Polish sociological tradition that underscore the national role of the intelligentsia and also from those elitist approaches that focus on the selection (and justification) of specific cases for their national analyses. I believe, incidentally, that the selection of a particular elite may prove to be a good point for departure, even for researchers who reject elitist assumptions. One should first obtain a firmer or weaker grasp of the “construction of national myths” and the nature of the elites, the way they are recruited, their intended and actual functions, etc, before one withdraws from elitism. Therefore, if one chooses to take a more elitist rather than socialisation approach in the elitism–socialisation debate (and one does so because this part of the world emulates both the West and the East), it is important to start with a special type of

The old and new mythmakers 347 intelligentsia in the analysis of the national myths that are used to justify “new capitalism”, i.e. the politicians and how they construct national values, symbols and traditions. Only then will it be possible to reconstruct other mythmaking projects – other groups, communities, strata, or perhaps even society at large. What do we mean when we say that the politicians will be treated as members of the intelligentsia? First and foremost, this is a theoretical and methodological postulate. It determines the nature of the concepts and thought schemata (and perhaps even the language) used to analyse the politicians’ experiences. It also draws attention to the topicality of the perspective which has traditionally been adopted in Polish sociology and which consists in viewing the cultural pattern represented by the intelligentsia or “thinking class” as an important factor in the change of not only the cultural order but also the social and political order. In other words, the suggestion that we see the politicians as national mythmakers flows from the nature of the power they wield in society and in the state and from the fact that in the post-communist countries the state authorities are not satisfied with economic legitimisation alone (it is not important whether the legitimisation is effective, but what is important is the type of arguments used). Nor will they be content with political legitimisation, which refers to political and economic liberalism or to social solidarity. The new authorities “need” to be trusted by the masses. They also need powerful values. All this can be found in national slogans and arguments, strong and weak, simple and complex, which refer to the untestable “community”, to national tradition inherited from their forefathers or to contemporary models in the form of neighbouring nations or, finally, to more distant models. For these reasons, I do not see politicians as ordinary actors-cum-mythmakers; instead I see them as front-stage actors in the democratic political process, largely because of their education, profession, responsibilities and expectations on behalf of the society and culture. The addressees of my questions on the modelling functions, relations with society, the shape of the visions serving as a frame of reference for group and individual values are “other members of the intelligentsia” rather than some other socio-cultural category within the social structure. In other words, the basic questions on this matter are repetitions of the questions of the “mythmaking capacities” and “mythmaking efficacy” which society and researchers used to ask the artists and intellectuals who comprised the collective authority of the dependent, underdeveloped and peripheral nation. In what ways do today’s politicians differ from the artists and intellectuals of yesterday? And how do they also differ from those more recent ones who have created visions of political unity in the times of real socialism? Or, when do we submit our sociological analysis to the intelligentsia’s visions, beliefs and responsibilities? The basic difference is that, as opposed to their predecessors, they are less aware of their modelling functions and of the social and cultural consequences of these functions. Very often, they are quite oblivious (just as Monsieur Jourdain was oblivious to the fact that he “spoke prose”) to the fact that even if they do not create the basic images of national pride, of their country’s social achievements, and its place in Europe (in the past, present and

348 Joanna Kurczewska future), they organise and propagate them in a privileged way compared with other social actors. Florian Znaniecki’s ideas will help us to link the role of contemporary politicians with the role and responsibilities of the intelligentsia, the traditional national mythmakers.12 It is worth noting that Znaniecki developed a project of a detailed theoretical description of the intelligentsia as a group and as a personality, as demonstrated in his book Contemporary Nations. He defined the intelligentsia’s structural features and social functions, he paid attention to the importance of their political personality (one of their many partial personalities), and he emphasised the importance of national ideals and the rationality principle. Above all, he saw the intelligentsia as both innovators and order makers; it is an institution and a means whereby the nation becomes a reality (he claimed that “nationality . . . becomes nation when it organises itself socially”)13 and whereby, with the help of cultural leadership, it helps bring order to the relationships within the national society.14 However, Znaniecki not only juxtaposed the principle of leadership and the principle of political power, but he also valued leadership more highly. This article distributes the accents differently. I do not think that political leadership and political power rule each other out. On the contrary, I think that they are complementary. I also assert that the political power system is more than just a context for the institution of leadership; it is one of the mechanisms of leadership and one of its justifications. Besides being viewed as a member of the intelligentsia, and therefore automatically being invested with cultural leadership, a politician is a part of the political power structure: one of the elements of the democratically elected legislative authorities and the political parties that allow him to take the lead. One of Ernest Gellner’s suggestions concerning the marriage between culture and politics also confirms the feasibility of this approach. According to Gellner’s conceptualisation of nationalism, the power-education-culture “triune”15 has its equivalents in Znaniecki’s theory: Znaniecki’s idea of leadership has its counterpart in Gellner’s idea of power, which he relates to the domain of culture only. I draw upon Gellner’s postulate in my own analyses. I do so based on the assumption that politicians also have power (or leadership) within the domain of culture itself. In this way, it is possible to support Znaniecki’s theory, i.e. to combine the roles of a member of the intelligentsia and politician and the institutions of leadership and political power. In doing so, it is also possible to combine inquiries into politics with inquiries into culture in the post-socialist reality and determine the relations between the realm of politics and the realm of patterns of national culture. However, when I refer to Znaniecki in my analyses of the beliefs of politicians-cum-intelligentsia and to the principle of cultural leadership in particular, I shall pay more attention than usual to reconstructing politicians’ ideological practices rather than to their constructions of consensus, because consensus is rooted in the institution of leadership. It follows from this that, like Znaniecki, I

The old and new mythmakers 349 assume that the principle of leadership expresses cultural specificity in its entirety and its superiority with respect to other social systems, resulting from its greater capacity to induce society to better itself and be more creative. The concept of leadership draws attention to the nature of cultural initiatives, to the ideals that underlie these initiatives, and to the mechanisms whereby these ideals can be imposed on society. Thanks to this concept, politics becomes more than just a profession, it becomes a calling. Civil institutions help to consolidate and organise this calling. Generally speaking, the concepts of Znaniecki’s have allowed me to interpret politicians’ beliefs and behaviours in terms of the “deposition of the accumulated richness of cultural values, elaboration of new ideals with the help of planned or vicarious co-operation, and the recruitment of the passive majority in the service of these ideals”.16 “Contemporary nations” in particular both justify the significance of such leaders as “statesmen and lawyers” and point out the importance of the questions we want to ask them, questions such as those concerning the structure of basic myths addressed to the public, their nature (autotelic versus instrumental), the meaning of national continuity and distinctiveness, the open versus closed nature of the image of the state, society and nation which they are constructing, and whether this image is based on the principle of inclusion or on the principle of exclusion.17 In his book, which has still not been fully appreciated by national constructivists and proponents of various natural historical conceptions of nation, Znaniecki formulated an interesting list of cultural leaders but, above all, he provided the rationale for placing these groups and he situated national ideologists at the top of the pyramid.18 In this chapter I will try to demonstrate that in civilisationally underdeveloped regions the category of best leaders or national ideologists refers to the best mythmakers. It is important to remember that, according to Znaniecki, these include not only leaders who develop various patriotic programmes but also a much broader category of members of the intelligentsia: those who are active and construct systems of ideas and institutions that are meant to serve the entire national society. These may include both politicians and economists or artists, provided that the principles and values they develop and propagate contribute to the welfare of the nation, its state and culture. Thanks to references such as these, we should be able to determine whether politicians are the most refined mythmakers of all, whether they are national ideologists (in Znaniecki’s sense) or “value philosophers”19 – future oriented and formulating ideals for the entire nation. In other words, thanks to Znaniecki, we should be able to gain a clearer view of how specific representations of national ideals simultaneously refer to the states’ axiological and institutional plane, to civil society and to national culture. In my opinion, if we view the politicians as part of the intelligentsia, with all the concomitant roles and obligations, we will be able to see them not only as participants of the political process, e.g. decision makers or pragmatists, but also as depositors of the resources of national culture with which they enter state politics to develop patterns that influence the rest of the nation and the state.

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Generally speaking, the end result is that we should see in the politicians the principle by which the nation is organised and the strategies that make them effective and privileged executors of their own national projects. It is because of this formula that we not only know what is going on deep down in the “souls” of the studied politicians, but we also gain an initial approximation and a specific form of insight into the social programmes, real and imaginary, of our own country. In other words, I believe that this research approach, which consists of applying Znaniecki’s method, albeit in somewhat modified form, to the politicians will be the first step on the road towards developing a map of the basic national myths that are used to justify the powers of new states and new societies. I believe that thanks to a meticulous, and therefore rather tedious, reconstruction of the values relating to national ideals (one which supplements the principles that organise them), it will be possible to learn quite a bit about the basic social myths developed by the politicians and about the structures of their social identities. More than anything else, I hope to be able to determine whether politicians view national values merely as instruments carried over from national culture to the realm of politics in the narrow sense of the word, or whether, on the contrary, they view them as autotelic values. In other words, by conducting an indepth analysis of the connections between the values relating to the national principle, I hope to arrive at an answer to the question of the nature of national identity-cum-national ideology and cum-national culture or -political nation and to see how the politicians view them. It will be important to find out whether their instrumental or autotelic nature is implicit or explicit and what pattern of values makes them that way. When analysing national myths it is significant to focus on how national values are instrumentalised. The way in which values are instrumentalised, not the degree to which they are rendered autotelic, is a factor that determines the form and content of politics, whatever their type – be it a profession or calling. Most of the politicians who played an important part in the systemic transformation defined themselves as pragmatists. Integral national ideologists, situated on the periphery of official politics, can rarely be found in the governments of emergent states. It was they who tended to treat national myths in an autotelic way. I must add that the main interpretation rule says that the value systems that are reconstructed according to the national principle should refer to the principles and means of the construction of political and social trust or those according to which the common good (communitarianism) is recognised and achieved. In other words, it is important to emphasise the relational nature of national values and never to cease to expose their incompleteness (i.e. the need to make them more precise by relating them to other communitarian or individualistic, cultural or political, moral or civilisation values, etc). All this leads to the diagnosis that the strictly defined fragment of social reality, which has been Central and Eastern Europe from the beginning of the

The old and new mythmakers 351 1990s until now, i.e. a fragment framed according to the assumptions of modernisation theory, is underdeveloped and dependent on the West and the West’s justifications and specifications, and is formulated in the language of some precious national success by the intelligentsia, i.e. the politicians. Let us briefly consider the question of the specification of the intelligentsia as a socio-occupational category. It is now possible to add to our earlier observations, deduced from Florian Znaniecki’s conception, and divide the intelligentsia into sub-categories, not on the basis of social status (differences in social status are caused above all by the level of civilisational underdevelopment and the extent and intensity of its dependency on Western values and institutions), but on the basis of the nature of the ideologies that they accept. If we use the latter ideological criterion, we can differentiate among individuals ascribed to this socio-occupational category on the basis of the ideologies with which they respond to the social problems of their nation and state. Using this criterion, we can follow in Jerzy Szacki’s wake and distinguish a separate category of “political intellectuals”.20 How can we define the political intellectual? According to Szacki,21 the political intellectual not only produces ideas, he also strives to find the “material” force with which to implement them. . . . Ordinary intellectuals . . . self-attribute not only the knowledge which ought to be implanted into the consciousness of less scholarly people, ones who are incapable of crossing the horizon of their everyday life and elevating themselves to the position from which they are able to see the whole. They usually attribute to themselves a quite different skill, i.e. the ability to articulate the feelings or hazy thoughts of the uneducated, ones which the uneducated are unable to verbalise and organise properly. This political intellectual is an interpreter. He interprets the values and interests of those who are less competent than he, ones relating to various social issues, both group and individual, which he not only tries to translate into the myths of that society but also perfects by introducing order and clarifying their ideological premises. Liah Greenfeld has written in a similar vein. According to Greenfeld, “the architects of nationalism who expressed and popularised new ideas, were undoubtedly intellectuals – those who express and popularise ideas by definition – whether or not they made a living of mental work and no matter what their social background”.22 The differentiation of the intelligentsia-cum-mythmakers according to their material properties, ideological criteria and focus on the political intellectuals will allow us to compare the different Central and Eastern countries. It will also serve as a point of departure for a comparison of their attitudes and the functions they serve in society as well as their specific tasks and the outcomes of their mythmaking activities, both national and others. In order to acquire a firm grasp of the “multiplicity” of the intelligentsia’s activities and then to focus on the

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“multiple forms” of underdevelopment and dependency, I will conduct four basic comparisons:23 a

b

c

d

an individualising comparison, i.e. juxtaposing special cases of a phenomenon so as to discover its properties (phenomena such as underdevelopment, the intelligentsia, political intellectuals and national mythology are some examples); a universalising comparison, i.e. demonstrating that every individual case of a particular phenomenon is governed by the same principle (e.g. legitimisation); a comparison involving the search for variables that could lead to the discovery of the principle governing the mutability and intensity of the phenomenon in question; an “embracing” comparison, i.e. placing different cases in the same system so as to explain their properties in terms of the function of their approach towards the system understood as a value.

It is worth considering these variants of the comparison method more closely, particularly when we want to test the various theories of underdevelopment, intelligentsia or mythology using as many examples as possible within strictly defined limits. Individualising comparisons are especially well suited for the purposes of this research. However, universalising comparisons can also be made provided that appropriate data are available. The success of these strategies in general, and each of them in particular, largely depends on the way of selecting the cases for analysis and on the arguments used to justify this particular method of selection. First and foremost, it is necessary to define carefully the basic unit of comparison: in this case it will be the underdeveloped national society described in terms of culture, society and state. The following criteria should also be considered in the selection of specific cases: not being a part of the West, remaining within the limits of the socialist block at least from 1945 to 1990, belonging to a universal religion whose centre is situated neither in the Soviet Union nor in Russia, and belonging to a structure larger than a nation, i.e. a pan-European structure. These criteria were chosen in order to reduce the number of “historical” and “cultural” variables that might otherwise confound the picture of the society in question. However, even if these criteria are met, this does not mean that the selected societies and members of the intelligentsia are completely homogeneous because several important “parameters” (Smelser’s term) are involved, which means that the object of analysis will be analysed in a rather heterogeneous cultural and civilisational context. The most important parameters are religion, cultural circle, state tradition, the level of urbanisation in the nineteenth century, and the level of urbanisation in the twentieth century. From what was said earlier, it follows that three cases are worth selecting for further analysis: the Catholic-Poles with their strong national bonds, strong state tradition, and

The old and new mythmakers 353 lack of urbanisation in the nineteenth century; the Slovaks with their strong ethnic bonds, lack of state tradition and lack of urbanisation in the nineteenth century; and the Protestant-Czechs with their nineteenth-century urbanisation and lack of state tradition. Postulates such as these guarantee that the comparison of the selected cases of civilisational underdevelopment with respect to the West, the role of the intelligentsia and the nature of national myths will yield an explanatory reconstruction that is empirically and theoretically sounder, thanks to references to the assumptions of historical sociology. Having exhausted the discussion on the intelligentsia, its categories, tasks and sources of prestige, let us now focus on the issue of underdevelopment. The intelligentsia’s mythmaking takes place in local contexts, national and regional, which can be grouped under the umbrella term “civilisational underdevelopment”. Descriptions of underdevelopment, in all possible meanings of the term (and Mokrzycki24 was correct when he said that “underdevelopment is a hopelessly ambiguous word”), are always relational: they constantly refer to the West and they do so in such a way that Western standards of civilisation are viewed as universal, as applying to all non-Western cultures and all non-Western civilisational circles. The Western standards of the quality of civilisation (and the West acts a bit like the Sèvres Standard) are ideal rather than empirical. Mokrzycki25 was also right when he said that “no matter which perspective we take when we write about development – right or left, the perspective of the Marxist doctrinaire, the academic sociologist, the person who keeps track of social indices, or the Latin American critic of economic dependency in international relations – it is always believed (assumed) that the industrialised West is the developmental Mecca”. In other words, no matter how it is defined, development is measured according to one standard, the Western one, and any departure from this standard is an indicator of underdevelopment. In modernisation theory, social, or rather civilisational, underdevelopment is thought to be an inalienable feature of other, non-empirical Western countries. This leads to the acceptance of (attributed) Western “cultural imperialism”, even in academic research on social change (this tendency is particularly conspicuous in non-European theories of revolution in the sphere of material civilisation). What does this mean? The aforementioned tendency to make the values of Western civilisation absolute and universal gives way to two comparative frameworks for other civilisations, one positive and one negative. It eventually leads to two different social and cultural effects. When Western standards are thought to be positive, and when they are viewed as the ideal that ought to control social processes throughout the world, then the helmsmen and active participants of these processes try to identify their own civilisational standards in relation to these countries and regions with Western standards. Hence, in the long run, both the leaders and the social masses strive to identify their own standards with Western standards. For example, in Poland the elites disapprove of slogans such as “return to Europe”, because they say that Poland, with its Latin culture, has always been in Europe.

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Thanks to these positive references, the elites (and not only they) are rediscovering their civilisational identity with the West. This has fundamental importance for the nature and functions of the national myths that these elites are creating: myths that either globally or locally emulate the respective national myths of, for example, the Golden Age, the national hero, or ideal national politics created by Western intellectuals. In this case, nationalism, which legitimises and excuses underdevelopment, belongs to the family of Western nationalisms. (Reference is made to two models of widely accepted nationalism that are taken for granted: Western nationalism and Central and Eastern European nationalism). This nationalism is either intellectually rooted in the West or is a new development of the elites themselves who treat Western nationalism selectively and select certain themes and arguments from the repertory of Western-type nationalism. It always, however, refers, like its Western model, to state nationalism, i.e. the kind that is more concerned with the nation state and sovereignty than with its own ethnic roots or cultural background. More importantly, “vernacular” nationalism is always imitative. Questions arise as to how it can be considered imitative, what is imitated, under what circumstances, etc. The implications of the second comparative framework, i.e. the negative one, are quite different. In this case, Western European standards are by definition viewed as “alien” or “different” by the appropriate elites of the underdeveloped societies and the masses who follow them. Even radical advocates of the European Union and defenders of a liberal economy claim that their society does not belong to the West, and although they are familiar with Western standards, they also view them as “not theirs” or even “alien”. Here the goal is not to seek a common civilisational plane, something like the civilisational identity between Western Europe and for example Russia or Ukraine, but to discover the right excuses for one’s own form of collective existence, independent of “Western imperialism”. To meet this goal, the advocates of remaining different or unique try to stress that for many generations their society has been generating an original system of all possible values, including civilisational and national ones. This is why, in the second case, the goal is not to “catch up with the West” and to equalise the civilisational opportunities, for example by copying Western nationalism, but to deprive the West of the right to imperialism by developing a new, independent frame of reference such as a non-European one or a cultural one based on the principle that “peripheral” cultures and civilisations are more original than Western ones. This kind of nationalism has a different approach to the legitimisation of its level of civilisation and its underdevelopment. The latter is measured against its own material standards and it hails the principle of the moral and intellectual primacy of its own value systems by defending either their originality or their superiority. It attacks the foundations of Western cultural imperialism and elevates national values relating to the process of acquiring a state of one’s own or taking separatist action against multi-national empires. (This is an Eastern form of nationalism, one that uses secession to develop its own statehood.) In each example, the nature and application of national myths is different. In

The old and new mythmakers 355 the first case, the national myth emulates Western standards structurally and functionally, while in the second case it is completely original because it is generated by relatively autonomous and unique value systems and is used to highlight the distinctiveness of mythmaking rather than to point out what needs to be equalised, e.g. to reduce the differences in the level of development of Central and Eastern Europe compared with Western standards with the help of “national myths”. The analysis of national myths is no easy feat, but it is most certainly a fascinating one. Special attention should be paid to the ways the myths refer to the imponderables of the society being analysed, not only those that are expressed in national terms, but also those expressed in exceptional events, types of activities on behalf of the nation state, the national heritage, the relations between the vernacular and the alien, personal models and, last but not least, the means resorted to in order to “improve” the nation’s image at home and abroad. All these references may be strongly or weakly articulated. In their stronger version they are simply ways in which a given social actor instrumentalises certain values or interests with respect to a social domain which he believes to be important. A researcher who is looking for patterns should focus on these forms of instrumentalisation. There are many of them; some are very similar to autotelic values, particularly with respect to their style of presentation and justification. Instrumentality in this broad sense, and its graded perception, should be more convincing than “forced” attempts to find signs of autotelism in national values or excessively doctrinaire approaches to resolving the following question: “Are national values merely an instrument in the hands of political intellectuals or the politicians, or are they autotelic values?” The search for various signs of instrumentality in national myths is, I repeat, the most important because “the devil hides in the details”. In this case we want to determine who is instrumentalising national values, in what context, and – above all – to what ends these values are being used and what other values and myths they accompany. In my preparatory analyses, which I intend to carry out before attempting a more systematic reconstruction of the relationships between civilisational and social underdevelopment on the one hand and nationalism as one of its major forms of legitimisation on the other hand, I am not going to assume that those beliefs of the mythmakers in which national values are autotelic are more precious than those in which they are not and which, for example, are applied in the service of other values that may be equally valuable from the point of view of social well-being. The fact that the intellectuals or politicians adopt an autotelic approach to national values may cause us to praise highly the values themselves and those who implement them, but this need not necessarily be so. All depends on the particular case in question (country, type of member of the intelligentsia, type of myth, etc). I will pay attention not only to the way particular national values are understood, but also to the way they are related to other values, instrumental or autotelic, e.g. ones that refer directly and powerfully to economic growth, level of civilisation, or the moral condition of the country or social actor. In other words, the theory of values which the researcher chooses to

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adopt cannot, by itself, decide whether any national myth is superior to other values or independent of other values. This needs to be demonstrated by adopting a complex strategy of comparisons and gathering as much empirical data as possible that attest to the complex relations between values and their various types. One of my basic tasks will be to determine the patterns of values and find out how these “national instruments” or national myths are interpreted. It will be necessary to group these partial tasks on the basis of separate, well-defined criteria. I will separate myths in which national values serve the individual, e.g. his or her dignity or freedom, from those which serve a political or cultural community or group, e.g. democracy, the reasons for state or national culture. I will also distinguish between myths generated by the current political system, including the interests of parties and party leaders, and those that are the national deposit of previous generations, i.e. “long-lasting” values and ones that refer to the deeper layers of political culture or public morality. I am particularly interested in how various categories of myths can be distinguished depending on (a) their ideological consistency (do they add up to an ideology at all and does society see them as such), (b) the degree to which the majority of society or the elite accepts them as current models (from the point of view of for example the interests of the state, international organisations, a particular social stratum, or from the point of view of tradition or economic growth), (c) the degree to which society or the elite, e.g. the political intellectuals, view them as “natural”, “obvious” and take them for granted. From the perspective of ideological consistency, it is possible to distinguish a wide range of ideologies: from scattered myths, through various types of ideologies associated with specific socio-historical situations, to myths that are well integrated and incorporated in complex ideologies, consolidated on the basis of national or other criteria. The remaining criteria mentioned above have more to do with social engineering (whatever their object), which can assume the form of mild persuasion, propaganda or manipulation based on physical coercion. In other words, it is possible to classify national myths according to their nature and range of effectiveness into three basic spheres of articulation of nationalism26 (no matter which type): (a) co-ordination of social, civilisational, political or cultural activities; a variety of “research objects” fall into this class and they can be owned by the political intellectuals, the intelligentsia or the entire state; (b) mobilisation, i.e. efforts to implement one’s own national vision by means of the social activities of those actors – these can vary in their degree if institutionalisation from ad hoc activities to formalised political movements aimed at assuming power in the state and securing the legitimisation of the nation to organise it; (c) legitimisation (by national values and interests) of the state’s short-term or long-term, internal or external tasks (note that we are talking about state legitimisation of nationalism and not about nationalism as a form of legitimisation of civilisational underdevelopment; this subservience of nationalism to the state is a necessity and it must precede the legitimisation of underdevelopment by nationalism).

The old and new mythmakers 357 When investigating national myths according to these criteria, it is important to focus on those forms that serve as powerful evidence. This particular type of myth is socially conspicuous. Not only is it the object of various public debates at the level of the elite or, more broadly, the intelligentsia (understood as a stratum), but it is also the object of great controversy and affects the ideological condition of the whole society. In addition, it is recognised by the majority of the national society, and society’s attitudes towards these myths help to organise the way that society behaves and the way it thinks about its present, past and future. In other words, myths such as these, i.e. ones that are visible and publicly salient, become a widely recognisable signpost. The above presentation of national myths and earlier reconstructions of nationalism suggest that, as far as nationalism is concerned, it is incorrect to say that mythmaking is a deficiency. This conclusion is supported by both theoretical diagnoses (not mentioned in this article) and by social practice and Central and Eastern Europe’s recent history. On the contrary, every nationalism has the “systemic willingness” to produce myths, in every historical and civilisational context and every form of social organisation (both researchers and the actors themselves will support this claim, whatever their overall axiological approach and their opinions concerning the durability of national phenomena and the academic importance of efforts to explain them). This peculiarity, comparable only with utopian socialism and state socialism (whose ability to produce myths was based on principles other than the ones we have been discussing here – the former on the moral strength of prospective utopia and the latter on the strength of organised coercion), is shared, I repeat, by all types of nationalism. Nationalist mythmaking is certainly not a barren amusement. On the contrary, if anything, it is associated with embarras de richesse. It has many hues and many grades, from the poetic to social engineering, from the autotelic to instrumentalised beyond measure. One may say that it can be used to legitimise every possible form of organised social order. Because of their nature, many social actors feel that national myths are quite natural and obvious and do not need to be legitimised, either on the mythological plane or on any other plane, that nationalism “is good for everything”. It can therefore be used to justify all guises of capitalism, and particularly that form of capitalism that has emerged from the organised experience of socialism (cf. the similarities between socialism and nationalism)27 and which has many elements of civilisational and social underdevelopment in its pre-socialist social deposit, both at the structural level and at the level of awareness.

Notes 1 Peter Berger (1986) The Capitalist Revolution. Fifty Propositions about Prosperity, Equality, and Liberty (New York: Basic Books), p. 194. 2 George Sorel (1908) Reflections sur la violence (Paris: Marcel Riviere), p. 17. 3 V. Tismaneanu (1998) Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy, Nationalism and Myth in Postcommunist Europe (New York: Princeton University Press).

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4 P. Berger (1986) The Capitalist Revolution, op. cit. p. 195. 5 I would like to point out that in several phases of state socialism, nationalism was officially incorporated into the fundamental systemic legitimisation by the state authorities. However, it never became a dominant principle. 6 This does not refer to economic nationalism; cf. J. Kofman’s (1992) analysis in his Economic Nationalism (Warszawa: PWN). Kofman was referring to pre-war capitalism in Central Europe but the patterns of civilisational development he reconstructed can be extrapolated to the society inhabiting this region at the end of the twentieth century. According to Kofman, Polish forms of economic nationalism are a reaction to the civilisational underdevelopment of this part of Europe. Central European economic policies show signs of economic protectionism, which can be viewed as a form of a reaction to European markets and cross-national economic institutions. 7 Marcin Kula (1992) Narodowe i rewolucyjne [National and Revolutionary] (Warszawa: PWN). 8 Cf. for example, George Schoepflin (1993) “Cultural identity in Post-Communist Europe”, in: S.White, J. Batt Judy et al. (eds) Developments in Eastern European Politics (London: Macmillan), pp. 18–20; also George Schoepflin (2000) Nations, Identity, Power. The New Politics of Europe (London: Hurst and company). Judt Tony (1996) A grand illusion? An Essay on Europe (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books), p. 47. 9 Cf. Georg Konrad and Istvan Szelenyi (1991) “Intellectuals and domination in postcommunist society”, in P. Bourdieu and J. S. Coleman (eds) Social Theory for Changing Society (Boulder: Westview Press), and also Z. Bauman (1987) Legislators and Interpreters (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). 10 R. Brubaker (1994) “Nation as institutionalized forms. Practical categories, contingent events”, Contention, 4 (1). 11 One of the authorities in the research on nationalism, Anthony D. Smith, is heading in this direction, cf. A. D. Smith (1999) Myths and Memories of the Nation (Oxford University Press), particularly pages 163–86. 12 I discussed this issue at length in the book edited by E. Halas (1999) Florian Znaniecki’s Sociological Theory and the Challenges of the 21st Century (Lublin: TN KUL). 13 Florian Znaniecki (1990) Wste˛p do Socjologii [Introduction to Sociology] (Warszawa: PWN), p. 72. 14 Florian Znaniecki (1990) “Sily spoleczne” [Social forces], in: Wspólczesne narody [Contemporary Nations] (Warsaw: PWN), p. 368. 15 Andrzej Walicki (1999) “Nacjonalizm i spoleczenstwo obywatelskie w teorii Ernesta Gellnera” [Nationalism and civil society according to E. Gellner’s theory], in: E. Nowicka and M. Chalubinski (eds) Idee a urza˛dzanie swiata spolecznego. Ksie˛ga jubileuszowa ku czci Jerzego Szackiego [Ideas and the organisation of social reality. Jubilee book in honour of Jerzy Szacki] (Warszawa: PWN), pp. 257–72. 16 Florian Znaniecki, Wspólczesne narody [Contemporary Nations], p. 3. 17 As far as this problem is concerned, we can (without going into details, however valuable they may seem) look for ready-made projects in Contemporary Nations. To do so we should pay particular attention to the chapters on social groups which act “on behalf of national culture societies”, “the dissemination of national consciousness and solidarity” or “co-operation among national culture societies”. 18 F. Znaniecki, Wspólczesne narody [Contemporary Nations], pp. 42–85. 19 Ibid., p. 61. 20 This category is basically identical with the principle whereby national ideologists, i.e. value philosophers, are distinguished but it applies to a wider spectre of events and it uses not only national myths but also political ones. 21 Cf. J. Szacki (1991) Dylematy historiografii idei oraz inne szkice i studia [Dilemmas of the Historiography of Ideas] (Warszawa: PWN), p. 396.

The old and new mythmakers 359 22 Cf. L. Greenfeld (1993) Transcending, p. 53. 23 At this point I am reconstructing Charles Tilly’s (1984) postulates set out in his Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York: Russell Sage Foundation), pp. 81–3. 24 E. Mokrzycki (2001) Bilans niesentymentalny [Unsentimental Balance] (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IFiS PAN), p. 109. 25 Ibid., 117. 26 John Breuilly (1993) Nationalism and Politics, 2nd edn (Harmondsworth: Manchester University Press). For definitions see pp. 21–53. 27 Roman Szporluk (1988) Communism and Nationalism. Karl Marx versus Friedrich List (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

23 Civil society The concept and the European level Hartmut Kaelble

Civil society has become an important new concept for social scientists and historians. Books on this topic are written, conferences are organized, and research networks are established. Even the European Union has chosen the term in the catalogue of target topics of the sixth framework for research. There are various reasons why the term ‘civil society’ has become widely discussed and used. One major reason was the rising interest in democracy and human rights during the 1980s and during the transformation in the Eastern part of Europe after the upheaval of 1989/90. It was important for the popularity of the term that it came from the Central European milieus of dissidents, even though the original Central European meaning of civil society was much more linked to the situation of dissidents in dictatorial regimes than the actual more general notion of social and cultural implication of democracy beyond constitutions, party systems and elites. The wide use of the term civil society was also the reaction to the traumatic experience for Western social sciences of the upheaval of 1989/90, since they could not predict the fall of the Soviet empire. As a consequence, this led them to work on the transformation of Central and Eastern European politics and on civil society as a major precondition of democracy. A further reason for the rise of the term is the return of non-state violence in Europe, especially in South Eastern Europe and the continuity of violence in Northern Ireland and in Northern Spain. The concept of civil society contains non-violence as a crucial element and is a reaction to the new violence. The term emerged also at a time when, in many disciplines of human sciences, the interest in ethics and in values, in global confrontation and transfers of values, rose. Civil society is also linked to this rise of the issue of ethics, since it often implies moral questions and values. The term civil society appeared also in a time of advanced internationalization of scientific and public debates. It can be easily translated in many languages and it covers an issue that is not only local and national, but also European and global in recent times.

The concept What does civil society mean? In spite of the wide variety of meanings produced by experts, journalists and politicians, their definitions usually share some common elements.

The concept and the European level 361 Civil society is always seen as different from the state and from political power. It has its own particular values and unwritten norms such as charity, altruism, civility, responsibility for others and for the common good, mutual recognition on equal terms, sometimes also civil courage. Civil society is frequently also seen as different from the market and different from the private sphere. Civil societies are not centrally organized, but consist of many associations, movements, projects, networks and individuals. Norms and values are not established and secured by a single visible hand. Hence, civil society is vulnerable and fragile, also accessible to dictatorship. Civil societies are linked to the public sphere. The public sphere is often seen as crucial for the impact of civil societies on politics and on public administration. Without the public sphere and the access to politics civil society does not exist in the full sense. It is only a society. The public sphere is often not only local and consists not always of face-to-face encounters, but is working on a larger geographical level. Civil societies are to be autonomous in relation to governments and public administrations. This autonomy covers not only the specific values and activities of the civil society, but also the access of civil society to the public space and its impact on politics. However, various elements of the definition of civil society are controversial. One major controversial point covers the moralistic implications of the concept of civil society. Some scholars argue that the concept is overloaded with moralistic overtones and too much linked to values. The definition of civil society based on civility, non-violence, and charity is seen as a vision rather than a scientific analytical term. These scholars prefer either a more neutral technical term or they rather define civil society as a term that also includes negative sides such as fragility, exclusion, totalist views, and the misuse by dictatorships. Other scholars argue that almost all terms in human sciences have this problem and that a careful application of the term avoids the difficulty. Another controversial issue is the link between civil society and politics. Some scholars make this link very strong and see the link with the state and the impact on politics as a major element of any civil society. Other scholars see the separation from the state as well as from the market and the private sphere as crucial and see the specific norms and values of civil society as the most important characteristic. A third controversial point is whether civil society is a specific social sector consisting mainly of associations, movements, networks, and individual projects neither linked to power nor to profit nor to family and friendship relations. This is often called the third sector, alongside the state and the economy. Other scholars see the civil society more as a mode of action, which might be carried out by charity organizations, NGOs and churches, but also by politicians or businessmen acting outside the realm and values of politics and the economy. A final controversial point covers the application of the concept of civil society to post-communist and other non-Western societies. Some scholars

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believe that the concept is too much linked to Western origins and that it should be applied only to Western societies, leading to misunderstandings and erroneous conclusions if applied to post-communist or non-Western societies. In Central Europe, the concept of civil society often became too much linked to the activities of Western NGOs and government programmes. Hence, it is not used for the third sector in post-communist societies. In addition, the specific Indian or Japanese or Chinese or African or Latin American way of civil society cannot be understood since crucial characteristics differ from the West. Other scholars argue that the concept has become a global concept and that it is extremely fruitful for Western civil societies and Western scholars to learn from non-Western meanings and experiences of civil societies. In spite of these controversial points, the concept of civil society has various advantages and strong points. The concept makes highly specialized research more important, more accessible for the large public or even for experts from adjacent fields, linking specialized research to larger issues. It also has the advantage of an interdisciplinary concept, bringing together scholars from various disciplines such as sociology, political science, history, ethnology, law, and philosophy. It is obvious that each discipline has its own idea of civil society and a particular history of research on this topic. But this is at the same time a topic around which interdisciplinary debates are crystallizing. Moreover, civil society is an international term, bringing together scholars from all over the world, not only from Europe and America. It was introduced in languages in which for a long time no corresponding term existed, such as German or Swedish. Finally, this is a highly productive human science concept, which is provocative and produces debates, disagreements, various approaches, and also reflections on varying modernities.

Civil society on the European level The term civil society is usually used in relation to nations and nation states. It is understood that only in the framework of national states do civil societies develop in the full sense with all advantages and shortcomings. Can this term also be applied to transnational levels? This is not a pure academic question. In the debate on the democratic deficit of the European Union the question of the weakness or strength of European civil society is an important aspect. The success of the enlargement of the European Union to include Central European countries will partly depend on the reduction of the democratic deficit. European civil society in the sense of associations, movements, individual projects, which influence the decision-making of the European Union, is often underestimated. It is often not taken into account that a large number of associations and initiatives are active on the European level. This is not only true for the present situation, but also for the last 50 years or so. This history of civil society on the European level has three main periods (for further references cf. Kaelble, 2001, chapter 11) The first period was the era of the emergence of European civil society during

The concept and the European level 363 the beginnings of European integration in the 1950s and the early 1960s. This early civil society on the European level faced major difficulties in a Europe still divided in three ways: divided into nations, full of distrust, especially because of the two wars; divided by the cold war into a camp following the Western model and a camp oriented towards the Soviet model; and still divided into Catholic and Protestant milieus. The deeply rooted distrust between these political and religious camps made it extremely difficult for a transnational civil society to bridge these divisions. In this era, civil society on the European level consisted of two very different elements: on the one hand what remained from the idealistic, but declining European movement, which was active all over Europe and which was rooted in the resistance against the Nazi occupation of Europe; and on the other hand the pragmatic interest groups of industrialists and farmers that emerged in relation to the Iron and Steel Community of 1950 and the European Economic Community of 1957. These interest groups were confined to the six Western European countries which started the European integration process. They depended to a large degree upon encouragement from the European institutions. A second period lasted from the late 1960s and early 1970s to the early 1980s. This is the period of expansion of civil society on the European level. Not only were many more European interest groups, including trade unions, established on the European level but also many associations with cultural, scientific and charity goals were founded on the then European level. The European movement had a certain revival. But also associations with few links to the European Economic Community, such as the European football association UEFA, emerged. In this period the initiatives for the founding of these associations came more than in the first era from within the civil society rather than from above, i.e. from Brussels. This expansion of civil society occurred in the context of the first enlargement, of a decline of distrust between European nations, of a rising communication between European elites, citizens, students and pupils, of increasing transfers between European societies due to mass consumption, due to the changes in communication and mass transport, e.g. the rise of the modern automatic telephone service and motor cars. A third period covers the era of the 1980s and the 1990s. The expansion of the associations and projects continued in this period, but became more professionalized and more diversified. Civil rights, peace, environmental, and feminist associations, along with church associations and associations of experts, emerged. The European parliament became somewhat more important as a reference point for civil society on the European level, which also widened geographically with the various further enlargements of the European Union. This expansion of civil society happened in the context of the rapid deepening and increasing power of the European Union, but also in the context of the rising mobilization of the public by the European elections and by various referendums on European treaties. However, the rise of the European civil society, which was less continuous than it seems at first glance, did not simply lead to a rapprochement with the

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civil society on the national level. Civil society on the European level remained different. It would be erroneous to interpret, as often happens, the differences from national civil society simply as shortcomings or weaknesses of the civil society on the European level. European civil society has so far remained special in at least three respects. First of all it remains a somewhat asymmetric civil society in the sense that in spite of the expansion of all kinds of interest groups and associations, the farmers and the industrialists remain disproportionally powerful. This asymmetric element has weakened, but it has not fully disappeared. This particularly strong influence can only be explained by the history of the European integration and the fact, that for a long time the main goal of the European Community was the creation of a common agrarian and industrial market. In addition, European civil society was not and still is not very present in the public sphere. Public mobilization in the sense of demonstrations, strikes, publicity projects or any other action in public has remained rare, much less frequent than in national civil societies. Civil society on the European level is unusually cautious and keeps a low profile. The main reason has been a strong orientation towards the European Commission, i.e. the bureaucratic part of the European Union. Pressure on European civil servants was usually brought to bear at meetings, by telephone calls, by committees, by essays and by memorandums rather than by public acts. European civil society has much less often than its counterparts on the national level aimed its activities at the parliament, even though the latter’s power was on the increase. A further particularity of civil society on the European level was the indirect relationship with European citizens. Many associations on the European level have not had direct membership. They have been mostly federations of national associations. For this reason, citizens have rarely had a direct influence on European politics via the civil society in which they were active. Interventions have been much more frequently made by professional lobbying, which contacted national associations rather than individual citizens. So civil society on the European level often has had no local roots. Sometimes these have not even been federations, but simply strong national associations on the European level representing only some countries of the European Union. To conclude, civil society on the European level has to be open for new members as it opened itself before in former enlargements. To be sure, for the new member states of the European Union, civil society on the European level currently is not a key topic. The economic consequences of the entrance into the Union and the change of national sovereignty are the issues that are at the centre of the debate. Nevertheless, accession to the European Union is also an accession to European civil society. This, however, is not a matter of membership negotiations. It depends on the openness of the European civil society and on the active engagement of citizens and associations from the new member states.

The concept and the European level 365

Bibliography Gellner, E. (1994) Conditions of Liberty: Civil society and its rivals (London: Hamish Hamilton). Hildermeier, M., Kocka, J. and Conrad, C. (eds) (2000) Europäische Zivilgesellschaft in Ost und West. Begriff, Geschichte, Chancen (Frankfurt: Campus). Kaelble, H. (2001) Wege zur Demokratie. Von der Französischen Revolution zur Europäischen Union (Stuttgart, München: DVA). Keane, J. (1988) Democracy and Civil Society (London: University of Westminster Press). Taylor, C. (1991) ‘Die Beschwörung der “civil society” ’, in K. Michalski (ed.) Europa und die Civil Society, Gastelgandolfo-Gespräche 1989 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta). Walzer, M. (1991) ‘The idea of civil society’, Dissent, Spring, pp. 293–304.

Part V

Democracy East of the Elbe Problems and prospects

24 Institutional modernization A third stage of Polish transformation Lena Kolarska-Bobinska

Integration as an modernization process1 In Poland, integration with the EU will be a stimulus, a driving force behind several changes in the social structure, interests and institutions. It will be, in effect, the third and final stage of transformation started in 1989. And this is also how integration is perceived by society. Consequently, referenda conducted in Central and Eastern European countries had more to do with acceptance of the transformation process and consent to its continuation than with the essence of integration, i.e. construction of a common Europe. At the first stage of transformation after Poland regained independence, reformers focused on economic changes such as the rules of conducting business, ownership transformations and privatization, financial infrastructure, the nature of taxation, etc. However, no attempt was made to overhaul the welfare state or the social policy. The slowdown of reform in the mid-1990s and the growth of support for transformation called for quicker changes. In 1999, Poland entered the second stage of transformations: it started implementing the welfare state and territorial reform. The welfare state reforms were affecting social insurance, education and healthcare, and the territorial reform meant not only a fundamental change in the power structure but also entailed reorganization of the police, school system and social and health services. The process of adjustment to EU requirements is bringing an acceleration of transformation in the steel industry, mining and agriculture. Also, opening Polish markets to competition after Poland joins the European Union will cause significant changes in the structure of small and medium size enterprises. The integration with the European Union will also cause further changes in the social structure. For example, by changing the structure of agriculture it will thoroughly change the life of farmers – a group that gave in to market transformations to a much lesser degree than others. Therefore, it can be said that the changes that will take place in the coming years will encompass entire branches of the economy and social strata, and will contribute to the creation of strong divisions within groups that already exist. Therefore, a third stage of modernization will be taking place in Central and Eastern Europe.

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Integration was also perceived by society as a continuation of transformations and not as a process independent or parallel thereto; more as a continuation of market reforms than only a cosmetic and superficial adaptation to the principles and institutions of European Union. This can be observed on the level of: • • •

relations between social attitudes toward market economy and toward European integration, distribution of social support, that is comparison of groups that support market transformations and EU integration, perception of winners and losers of both processes.

A study conducted by the Institute of Public Affairs showed that the support for the principles and mechanisms of a market economy is closely related to the support for European integration.2 On the other hand, opponents to European integration shared a negative approach to foreign capital, privatizations, economic differences etc. The next finding leads us to a more general conclusion. Negative attitudes towards the European Union are strongly correlated with nostalgia for communist Poland while the conviction that “today’s Poland is a better country to live in than Poland before 1989” is positively related to an optimistic perception of the consequences of integration.3 These findings are reflected in the similar structures of social support for transformation and integration. Groups with higher social positions, which feel satisfied with their present economic and social situation, support the new system and transformation. They hope that European integration will contribute to a further improvement of their situation. Nostalgia for communism is related to a low social position and feelings of material and social deprivation. Respondents sharing that attitude assume that they have already lost because of transformations. In their opinion, integration is a continuation of that process and will have further negative effects on their lives. Another finding strengthens the conclusion that integration is perceived by society as a continuation of transformation and as a further step in the changes initiated 15 years ago. The perception of winners and losers of transformation resembles the perception of those who may succeed and fail as a result of European integration. Generally, the well-off are among the winners of both processes: the elites, well-educated people, big business and foreign capital. Average citizens, farmers and manual workers are among those who will lose rather than win as a result of European integration.4 It could have been expected that the close association between the perception of transformation and that of integration would be reflected in the European accession referendum, which is viewed as an expression of the public opinion on the consequences of transformation. If so, it could be assumed that a very high unemployment rate and stagnation of the economy in Poland, resulting in a decrease in social support for the market economy, would have a negative impact on referendum results. That was not the case, as the referendum results have proved. In spite of decreasing support for market reforms, the rate of

Institutional modernization 371 acceptance of EU integration was stable and high in public opinion – at the level of 76 percent among those who declared that they will vote.5 These results found expression in the outcome of the referendum, in which 77.45 percent of voters supported Poland’s accession to the EU. This can be explained in the following way: in Central and Eastern European countries, a significant segment of the population expresses dissatisfaction with the ongoing social and economic changes by refusing to participate in public affairs. Those who participate in democratic procedures are frequently supporting changes. In Poland, we observe a high level of abstention in general and regional elections as well as in referendums – around 50–60 percent of the population do not vote. The dissatisfaction with transformation is expressed in the form of withdrawal and passivity. In addition, in the European referendum, 41 percent of Polish society abstained from voting. The other important factor that contributed in Poland to high support for EU integration in the European referendum, in spite of a difficult economic and social situation, was a change in its perception that occurred in the period before the voting took place. As mentioned, integration was perceived as a continuation of unpleasant changes and not as a panacea for some of the problems of the country. As the level of pessimism about the future and dissatisfaction with government performance in 2003 grew, a part of the public started to perceive integration as a solution to Polish ailments leading to a lower unemployment rate, growing economy, higher standard of living and regional development, and not just a continuation of painful transformations. According to a certain proportion of the society, the beneficial influence of integration went beyond the economy. A good example of this way of thinking is the perception of the beneficial influence of European integration in the case of Polish democratic institutions. As the feeling of the crisis of the Polish state mounted, European integration started to be perceived by some groups as a solution not only for the Polish economy but also for Polish democracy or, at least, for its institutions.

Institutional Crisis The extent to which democracy has consolidated in Poland is a subject of a debate among sociologists. Based on topical literature, Miroslawa Grabowska6 distinguishes five aspects of support given to political systems, including democracy:7 • •

•

support for a political system (usually measured by the sense of belonging to a political community, national identity or pride); support for democratic values and principles measured by the level of acceptance of such values (e.g. freedom or human rights) or by the conviction of the supremacy of democracy over other systems; level of satisfaction with the performance of the system (measured by any selected performance assessment method);

372 • •

Lena Kolarska-Bobinska trust in main political institutions (such as the government, parliament, courts, etc); and trust in political players (politicians and specific leaders).

In her presentation of data taken from various public opinion polls, Grabowska argues that as far as the attitude to the democratic system and principles is concerned, their acceptance level is slowly growing: there continues to be a stable majority which believes that it is worth defending our current democratic system, the number of people convinced that democracy is superior to all other systems of governance is on the rise and, in 2001, 70% of respondents conceded that, although democracy had problems, it was a better system of governance than any other. This growth of acceptance of the democratic system and principles occurred in spite of the fact that the level of satisfaction with the functioning of democracy in Poland had dropped considerably between 1997 and 2001. It seems that Poles are convinced that democracy is a good political system which lately has not been producing expected results in our country. This assessment comes as no surprise given the deteriorating economic situation and growing unemployment. If its interpretation is correct, then Poles – similarly to citizens of stable democracies – recognize the difference between principles and their implementation.8 Grabowska also backs her optimistic conclusions with studies showing that, in 2001, 44 percent of respondents considered that their views were represented by a political party and that successive cabinets had the support of a significant proportion of respondents at the time of their establishment. In her opinion, the sudden drop of that support from approximately 50 percent to a dozen percent or so signifies that “the problem does not lie in a radical rejection of the democratic government as an institution but in dissatisfaction with the performance of specific governments and specific politicians.”9 However, one may question the vision of a society that is becoming “accustomed” to democracy and is more disappointed in politics than in the system. Is the group as low as 31 percent, which asserts that democracy is superior to all other systems of governance, indeed large enough to conclude that the democratic system is accepted at the level of its most general values? After all, the group of respondents that would “sometimes” prefer a non-democratic government and that is indifferent to the system is larger and amounts to almost one half of the population (Table 24.1). What is more, the level of satisfaction with the functioning of democracy has been steadily dropping to a record low in 2003 and 2004 (Table 24.2). Still, the most worrisome is the data concerning confidence in the institutions of the democratic order or, to put it more widely, public institutions. On one hand, the manner in which these institutions operate and, on the other, the soci-

Institutional modernization 373 Table 24.1 Attitude to the principles of the democratic system (percentage)

Democracy is superior to all other forms of governance Sometimes a non-democratic form of governance is more desirable than a democratic one For people like myself there is no fundamental difference if the government is democratic or not

1992

1995

2001

2003

31

35

40

31

13

16

17

19

40

37

32

40

Source: CBOS. Note The “hard to say” response was not considered.

Table 24.2 Level of satisfaction with the functioning of democracy (in percent)

Satisfied Dissatisfied Hard to say

XI ’93

V ’95

X ’97

XII ’99

X ’00

III ’02

IV ’03

V ’04

36 52 12

24 67 9

40 50 10

35 56 9

37 51 12

24 64 12

20 71 9

21 68 11

Source: CBOS.

etal assessment of their performance, give grounds to conclude that Poland is presently undergoing an institutional crisis. During transformation, Polish elites neglected the need to strengthen public institutions and secure their apolitical status. The short-term perspective and political goals have dominated over the long-term perception of the common good and party interests over public ones. With time, the institutional order began to be used as an object and goal of political games instead of being consolidated. Today its stabilizing and regulating roles are diminishing, and it is becoming itself a source of uncertainty. This and institutional ineffectiveness result in a negative social assessment and mistrust. 1

The law, which should be creating stable and clear behavioral norms has gradually stopped playing its regulatory role and is losing its authority. In 2001, almost 150 statutory laws were passed, in 2002 – 240. For 150 statutory laws passed in 2001, over 80 were amendments, in 2002 – 180. The same laws can be amended several times in just one year. In 2000, the code of civil proceedings was amended 13 times. Jerzy Pilczynski writes: (. . .) The public opinion is getting increasingly anxious about inflation of

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the law, of it being treated instrumentally, of its poor quality. (. . .) The excessive number of unharmonized legal regulations, irrelevance of adopted solutions, their complexity and illegibility have reached such a degree that even courts are not able to deal with the law and complain about it out loud. Professor Andrzej Zoll shares this view and adds that the output of the Polish Lower and Upper Houses is gigantic and absolutely unnecessary. The Spokesman for Civic Rights points out that the 2002 issue of the Legislative Journal was 15,000 pages long! More than 400 executive acts have been waiting to be passed for a long time, which may mean that resolutions which they should accompany are either totally unnecessary or ignored.”10 2

Trust in the justice system (which has fallen from 30 percent in 1997 to 23 percent in 2002) is weakened by the politicization of the General Prosecution office as well as difficult access to courts with cases waiting for years to be resolved. Public trust in the courts has fallen from 30 percent in 1997 to 17 percent in 2004 in the case of the public prosecutor’s offices.11 Every democratic system is founded on the population’s trust in the law and the administration of justice. However, building and maintaining that trust is particularly important in a society which, for many years, has been breaking the law, treating it instrumentally as a set of principles imposed by a hostile communist authority. The fall of trust in all public institutions can be observed in the past few years except in the cases of the president, radio and television, the Church, the army and the police. Trusted institutions are thus those perceived as standing guard over order and law, including the moral law, or those that are sources of information and entertainment. Particularly worrying in this context is the falling public trust in the Upper House of Parliament (from 28 percent in 2002

3

100 90

Percentage

80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 II VI IX XII V IX I VI ’98 ’99 ’00

X I IV VI IX I IV VII X I III V VII IX XI I III VI ’02 ’01 ’03 ’04

Negative

Positive

Figure 24.1 Opinions about the Sejm (Source: CBOS).

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4

5

6

to 9 percent in 2004), government (from 48 percent to 20 percent) and local authorities (from 60 percent in 1997 to 52 percent in 2004).12 Local authorities gained the most during transformations by showing that as a democratic institutions they were representing local interests. The conviction that local councilors acted for the benefit of, and in the name of, local residents, citizens, etc has also weakened in the past year (Figure 24.1). Trust in politicians has also been falling. Opinions about what motivates politicians have crystallized during the past two terms of the Polish parliament (since 1993). The proportion of respondents convinced that politicians are driven by their hunger for power and money has grown substantially. In 1993, 22 percent of respondents believed that people became politicians out of altruism, today – 6 percent.13 According to the outcome of another study (June 2003), “81% of Poles consider that political parties serve only the interests of their activists . . . As many as 88% of respondents have no doubt that politicians are concerned only about their own careers. . . . Only 3% give a good mark to politicians’ performance and believe in their honesty.”14 There is a strong belief that politicians, or the elites in general, including public servants, are corrupt. The public is increasingly convinced that privatization benefits crooks and civil servants. There is a strong societal belief that corruption reigns everywhere, even within vocations and spheres of life which, up to now, were perceived as free from such pathology. The fact that there is a great deal of societal permissiveness with respect to this type of behavior and a general belief that people involved in dishonest dealings are certain of their impunity is particularly worrisome. The highest degree of consent to corruption exists among groups that shape the public opinion, university graduates and affluent individuals. The state administration is politicized and inefficient. In Poland after 1989, reforms were prepared and introduced by the state administration, mainly because other institutional players were either too weak or busy building their own identity. However, the state administration was introducing reforms while it remained itself unreformed for many years. There were various reasons for this. On one hand, in the initial years of transformation, while the state had to cope with a growing number of tasks, there was a pervasive belief that the state administration was infected with the original sin of communism and so maximum effort should be made to limit its role. On the other hand, the pace of changes and the degree of resistance encountered on the way took so much energy out of the elites that they had none left to improve the efficiency and quality of functioning of the state administration. As time passed, successive governments consciously stayed away from reforming the state administration because they used it as a base in their struggle for resources, power and influence. The establishment of an apolitical, independent, effective and strong administration would impede political and individual corruption. The politicization of the state administration, its inability to take on new tasks, its low salaries and insufficient qualifications

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7

8

Lena Kolarska-Bobinska caused the executive branch of government to stop fulfilling its role in ensuring a proper preparation for the use of opportunities presented to Poland. The rate of public involvement, including involvement in civic-society institutions, is falling. Thus, not only is voter attendance low, but so is public involvement in non-political organizations. It is particularly worrisome to see a declining trend instead of the expected increasing involvement and gathering of strength accompanying the construction of a civic society. It involves a group that constitutes a natural base for public life – the middle class. After 1990, Poles became convinced that qualifications and education were the best tools for climbing the social ladder and building a professional career. But in the past few years people started to believe in the primary role played by non-substantive selection criteria (based on political, family or clan connections). This undermines trust not only in democratic principles but also in market regulations.

Therefore, to sum up, instead of a consolidation of democratic institutions there is a growing feeling of their inadequacy to the social aspirations and tasks facing the state. The conviction of the low effectiveness of public institutions, their politicization and, in effect, their low legitimization is accompanied by a growing feeling of apathy and alienation from public life. This is good nourishment for all kinds of populist attitudes and movements. These movements and their leaders direct their attacks mainly at the institutional order of the state, which is not difficult considering its weakness and susceptibility to criticism. Therefore, politicians of various options who are fighting for control of public institutions are in fact helping populist leaders. The politicization of public institutions and their low legitimization, as well as the belief that corruption is omnipresent, has several negative consequences extending far beyond the functioning of these organizations. It undermines the trust in the values of the democratic and market system. Instead of supporting the best ways of using opportunities presented to Poland it hinders its adaptation to western structures.

Polish institutions versus Western Institutions Societal hopes for an improved performance of public institutions resulting from the process of adaptation to EU requirements and Poland’s future membership in the EU constitute an important capital that should be tapped into during the process of institutional modernization. According to studies conducted by the Institute of Public Affairs, the low level of trust in Polish institutions is accompanied by a high level of trust (declared by more than one half of the population) in international institutions:15 63 percent of Poles trust the United Nations; 62 percent, NATO; 56 percent, the European Union; and 39 percent, the World Bank. The level of distrust varies between 7 percent for the United Nations to 15 percent for the European Union.

Institutional modernization 377 Table 24.3 Evaluation of performance of EU and Polish institutions Polish state institutions Care primarily for average citizens Care primarily for government officials and civil servants Are efficient Are inefficient Are generally honest Are rather corrupt Usually take care of important matters Usually take care of unimportant matters

European Union institutions

4

39

89 7 80 8 78 21 60

32 50 15 51 18 66 10

Note The “hard to say” response was not considered.

Western institutions are perceived not only as more transparent and related to common people, but also as more effective (Table 24.3). The contrast between opinions about Polish and western institutions is even more striking when the assessment of specific areas of their performance is taken into account. As a consequence, Poles are convinced that Polish institutions will become similar to western institutions after Poland joins the EU: half, and in some cases 55 percent, of the society hopes that the impact of Poland joining the EU on Polish government, parliament, courts and politicians will be positive. About 20–25 percent believes that it will have no effect. Few people know how the impact of EU enlargement can change the performance of Polish institutions. What is important, however, is the hope of a large proportion of the society tired of the poor performance of the elites and institutions, that integration will force an adaptation of Poland’s institutional order to European norms and that the respect for the law and people’s needs in Europe will contribute to a similar situation in Poland. Strong institutions are key in Poland, not only for the purpose of taking advantage of opportunities created by integration inside the country. They are also important because of the role Poland might play in Europe’s politics. Besides, weak Polish institutions will become a subject of concern to other members of the European Community, thus ceasing to be solely an internal problem. By creating a new point of reference, a new legal framework and new expectations, integration imposes a different way of thinking and acting, and motivates and stimulates institutional reform. These actions must be taken up by politicians, but also by civic society organizations. Indeed, integration provides civic society with the institutional means to pressure politicians and the government into changing and adapting institutions and behavioral norms to European standards. Therefore, in addition to creating opportunities for reinforcing institutional order, integration also makes it possible to reinforce those functions of the civic society that have not

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been applied to date. Only time will show if these opportunities will be used to their full potential.

Notes 1 This contribution contains excerpts of a presentation given at the conference: “L’opinion publique en Pologne face aux enjeux de l’élargissement a l’Est de l’Union européenne,” Paris, 12–13 June 2003. 2 L. Kolarska-Bobinska (ed.) (1999) Before the Great Change (Warsaw: Institute of Public Affairs). 3 K. Jasiewicz (2003) Eurosceptycyzm, euroentuzjazm, euroapatia – postawy spoleczne przed referendum akcesyjnym, [w:] Przed referendum europejskim – absencja, sprzeciw, poparcie [Euro-skepticism, Euro-enthusiasm, Euro-pathy – social attitudes before the referendum] (Warsaw: Institute of Public Affairs, ed. Lena KolarskaBobinska). 4 L. Kolarska-Bobinska (ed.) (1999) Before the Great Change (Warsaw: Institute of Public Affairs). 5 Support for Poland’s integration with the European Union, CBOS report, Warsaw, June 2003. 6 M. Grabowska (2003) Zmiany w postawach Polaków wobec demokracji [Changes in Poles’ Attitudes Toward Democracy], presentation given at the Institute of Public Affairs conference “Poles and the European Parliament,” Warsaw, 20 April 2003. 7 D. Easton (1965) A Systems Analysis of Political Life (New York: Wiley) and D. Easton (1975) “A reassessment of the concept of political support,” British Journal of Political Science, no. 5, pp. 435–57; P. Norris (1989) Critical Citizens. Global Support for Democratic Governance (Oxford University Press). Also see H.-D. Klingemann (1965) “Mapping political support in the 1990s: a global analysis,” in D. Easton, A Systems Analysis of Political Life (New York: Wiley), pp. 31–56 and R. Dalton (1965) “Political support in advanced industrial democracies,” in D. Easton A Systems Analysis of Political Life (New York: Wiley), pp. 57–77. 8 M. Grabowska (2003) “Zmiany w postawach Polaków wobec demokracji” [Changes in Poles’ Attitudes Toward Democracy], presentation given at the Institute of Public Affairs conference “Poles and the European Parliament,” Warsaw, 20 April. 9 Ibid. 10 J. Pilczynski, “Gora˛czka legislacyjna” [Legislative fever], Rzeczpospolita, 19 May. 11 Opinie o dzialalnosci instytucji publicznych [Opinions on the performance of public institutions], CBOS Report, Warsaw, December 2002. 12 Pogorszenie ocen dzialalnosci parlamentu i prezydenta [Poorer results of the assessment of the performance of the parliament and president], CBOS Report, Warsaw, April 2002. 13 Ocena polskiej klasy politycznej [Evaluation of Polish political class], CBOS report, Warsaw, April 2001. 14 Results of an OBOP study, reprinted from Gazeta Wyborcza of 3 July 2003. 15 Poles and the European Parliament, Poles’ attitudes toward Polish and European democratic institutions, ISP Report, April 2003.

25 Threats to democracy On some Polish paradoxes Andrzej Rychard

I would like to address the issue of threats to democracy in the broader context of post-communist transition. My main assumption is that it is not the weakness or even absence of democracy that is the most threatening. It is rather its peculiar character or paradoxical “misplacement”. My point is that in post-communist conditions, especially in Poland, democracy is functioning well in the hands of those groups who are using it for opportunistic purposes, and as a result their performance does not contribute to the consolidation of the democratic order. On the other hand, those groups whose democratic participation could contribute to the process of democratic institution building do not use democracy extensively, or simply do not participate. I am aware that the thesis that it is the antidemocrats (or non-democrats) who are using democracy and that potential democrats are beyond it seems very provocative and normatively loaded. It contains a great dose of oversimplification as well, since there are groups of participants whose participation contributes to the democratic consolidation (generally the majority of well-educated, aware citizens) and there are groups who do not participate since they either have no interest in democratic politics or are not even aware of its existence (the marginalized, often belonging to the underclass). However, besides these obvious cases there are also the cases which contribute to the paradox mentioned above. In order to elaborate more on the nature of this paradox let me start with a short description of the beginnings of the Polish transformation. At the very beginning, in 1989, it was neither popular participation nor performance of democratic institutions that made the first phase of this transformation successful. It was the more passive tolerance of society. This was the reason why the first post-communist reforms were successfully implemented by the government. Edmund Mokrzycki (2001, p. 164) was of the opinion that the success of this first stage was possible as long as the strongest social groups who would be threatened by market transition did not recognize their interest and did not use democratic mechanisms to reject the changes. So this was a peculiar combination of demobilization, tolerance, and the role of the Solidarnosc trade union which served as an umbrella for the market transition. In a way it was more social demobilization than mobilization, which made the first stage of reform successful.

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After the first stage of reforms other mechanisms began to function. They finally led to the institutionalization of the democratic order. However, it is a peculiar form of institutionalization, as characterized by many authors. Let me list some of the most important peculiarities: 1

2

3

4

The weakness of the political party system (Wesolowski, 2000). According to Grabowska (2002) this concerns particularly the parties of the right which were not able to institutionalize the capital of social support they got. The low level of public participation, including political participation. This makes the dividing line between these who participate and those who don’t the most important cleavage in Polish society (Pelczynska-Nale˛cz, 1998). The superficial character of democratic procedures and institutions; they play the role of a facade and the real power games are hidden in various non-transparent informal networks (many writings of Staniszkis and Zybertowicz prove this convincingly). As a result, power is beyond politics, as Staniszkis (1999, p. 151) claims. Compared to the weak political participation, involvement in the market seems to be stronger. This concerns both participation in the role of producers (mushrooming small-scale entrepreneurship in the 1990s, many of the entrepreneurs being of working class origin – see Domanski, 1997) and the consumer’s role. This may lead to a question of whether it is the market that is better consolidated than democracy. In a way, one of the Polish peculiarities is that post-communist transformation is more based on consumers than on citizens.

To sum up: on the one hand we have a democratic mechanism that is not that frequently “used” – political and public non-participation is a problem, and other political forms of participation count more and more. On the other hand, the democratic mechanism is, to some extent, appropriated by strong corporatist groups, as Mokrzycki (2002) claims. He develops a concept of “negotiated democracy”, according to which the real political game is between a political class and strong pressure groups expressing the interests of various social strata (workers, peasants, etc). The weak civil society is, according to the author, left outside the game. We may add to this picture the fact that democratic procedures are quite often used by some almost anti-systemic political groupings (some actions of the radical populist party “Samoobrona” (Self-defence)). All this contributes to a situation in which the democratic mechanism is more abused than used: either by strong interest groups or by some anti-systemic political groupings. As the result, democratic procedures and mechanisms are modified and quite often spoiled. All these mechanisms, formulated on the bases of various readings among which the concepts by Edmund Mokrzycki are of special importance, contribute to the paradox mentioned in the beginning. On one hand social groups which could potentially contribute to the strengthening of democratic mechanisms are not actively participating, and on the other, democratic or pseudo-democratic

Threats to democracy 381 mechanisms are quite often used in order to pursue strong group interests or even ideas which are anti-democratic and “anti-modernization”. If this is the case, then the danger is not that “democracy” is missing. It would lie rather in the way that it is being used and neutralized.

References Domanski, H. (1997) “Mobilnosc i hierarchie stratyfikacyjne”, in H. Domanski and A. Rychard (eds) Elementy nowego ladu (Wydawnictwo IFiS PAN). Grabowska, M. (2002) “Ile cia˛glosci, ile zmian w systemie partyjnym”, in Przyszlosc polskiej sceny politycznej po wyborach 2001 (Warszawa: Instytut Spraw Publicznych). Mokrzycki, E. (2001) Bilans niesentymentalny (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IFiS PAN). Mokrzycki, E. (2002) “Demokracja ‘negocjacyjna’ ”, in E. Mokrzycki, A. Rychard and A. Zybertowicz (eds) Utracona dynamika? O niedojrzalosci polskiej demokracji (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IFiS PAN). Pelczynska-Nale˛cz, K. (1998) Postawy i zachowania polityczne – tendencje zmian w Latach 1988–1995, in W. Adamski (ed.) Polacy 95. Aktorzy i klienci transformacji (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IFiS PAN). Staniszkis, J. (1999) Post-communism. The Emerging Enigma (Warszawa: Institute of Political Studies). Wesolowski, W. (2000) Partie: nieustanne klopoty (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IFiS PAN).

26 Building civil society and democracy East of the Elbe Problems and prospects Kristian Gerner

My Polish perspective What is civil society? What are the prospects for stable democracy East of the Elbe after the eastward expansion of the European Union? The prospects for civil society and democracy East of the Elbe 15 years after the dissolution of the Soviet system in 1989, at a moment when the Baltic and Central European states have joined the European Union, remain an issue. The renowned “transition” finally has become the name of a distinct period in history. It denotes the transition of these states from the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet bloc to NATO and the European Union. Originally, “transition” was a term used only to denote that the former communist states in Europe were on the track towards establishment of a market economy in the ruins of the collapsed planned economy. Another connotation of the concept was democracy – or democratisation – and a third, which was introduced when it became obvious that institutions were important for the transition to succeed, the Rechtsstaat, translated into English as the legal state or a state of law. Now it is possible to state that the transition period proper lasted from early 1989, when the Round Table talks between the government and the opposition started in Poland, to late 2002, when the European Union decided to offer the Baltic and Central European states full membership in the Union. The theme of an exhibition in the premises of Gazeta Wyborcza in late September 2002, “Poland on Page One”, was the reporting in the leading US newspapers The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal on the Solidarity revolution in Poland in 1980–81 and the following period up to 1989. Fifty-eight articles were exhibited.1 The “Solidarity period” from August 1980 to December 1981 today stands out as the early beginning of the transition to democracy East of the Elbe. Possibly, the proper name for it, when seen in retrospect, should be “the grand rehearsal”. However, there was a moment when it seemed as if the early beginning was a dead end. On 13 December 1981, the Polish premier Wojciech Jaruzelski proclaimed stan wojenny, i.e. a state of emergency. He used the military and the infamous interior troops, the ZOMO, to crush the opposition by violent means. Democratisation was not only halted bu, so to speak, reversed. Dictatorship was

Problems and prospects 383 re-established. The Solidarity movement was suspended and many of its leaders were imprisoned, Lech Walesa and Adam Michnik among them. The fateful spirit of that moment in the snowy and cold Warsaw of December 1981 was preserved in a photograph by Chris Nedenthal, which was reproduced in Gazeta Wyborcza on 27 September 2002.2 The photo shows an armoured car, probably one of ZOMO’s vehicles, in front of the cinema Moskwa in Warsaw. Above the entrance of the cinema was a board advertising Czas Apokalipsy. Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now from 1979 was on show in Poland’s capital on the evening before Jaruzelski staged his coup. I was there at the time and left Poland that evening, but I did not notice that the movie was showing. On the other hand, I could feel a certain Angst when I listened to Polish radio the day before, broadcasting a statement by Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, “konfrontacja musi byc i be˛dzie”, i.e. a confrontation (with the government) must come, and it will. However, I did not understand the significance of a short notice in the Polish daily Zycie Warszawy on the same day, informing that for “technical reasons”, the bridges across the river Vistula would be closed on Saturday night . . .3 One should not miss the deeper significance of the fact that Apocalypse Now was shown in a cinema named after Moscow, the capital of the Soviet Union. The juxtaposition demonstrated that Poland culturally belonged to the Western world but politically to the East. Apocalypse Now is a film that is very critical of the United States – it is about the disaster of the Vietnam war – but its story is based upon a novel by Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, about the vices of Western colonialism in Africa. As is known, Conrad (1857–1924) was born as Teodor Józef Konrad Korzeniewski near the Polish town of Berdychev (at a time when Poland did not exist as a state). Although Conrad is an English writer, he is certainly regarded by most interested Poles as a representative of Polish culture. And for most Polish citizens in 1981, the Soviet Union stood out as the evil colonialist power. To suggest that Jaruzelski recalled the image of Kurtz, the dark protagonist in Conrad’s novel, portrayed by Marlon Brando in Coppola’s film, is to take the comparison too far. However, the photograph by Nedenthal, seen in its context, managed to capture an essential trait in the Polish predicament as culturally a Western country but politically belonging to the Soviet empire. It is noteworthy that the notions of civil society and democracy, which were paramount in the strivings of the Solidarity movement, were clearly linked to the ambition among its members to be released from the Soviet grip and become re-united with the democratic West. Civil society and democracy are something other than the nation and national liberation. The former concepts refer to universal principles. In distinction to what happened after the fall of the continental European empires, i.e. Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1917–18, developments in Central Europe after the fall of the Soviet Empire in 1989–91 have entailed the taming of nationalism in the region and not its incitement. What happened in Poland in 1980 with the establishment of the Solidarity movement thus first of all should be seen as important not for the establishment of independent nation states but

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for the process of political unification of Europe west of the river Bug.4 Incidentally, one recalls the pun of “Europe from Brest to Brest”. The concept of civil society is vague. It was launched and presented in Western mass media by dissident intellectuals in Central Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. The British historian and journalist Timothy Garton Ash played an important role in the distribution and popularisation both of the ideas and the individuals behind them, Adam Michnik, the Hungarian György Konrád and the Czech Václav Havel being the most prominent among these people.5 The Solidarity movement was an expression of civil society. In this interpretation, it meant organisation of people from below and the construction of an alternative polity. In Poland, it was possible to get inspiration from the experience of the organisation of the “flying universities” from the time of the Russian occupation in the late nineteenth century and under the German occupation in 1939–44. In this Polish context, the concept of civil society acquired an anti-state tinge. Under communism, the dissidents, the democratic opposition, equated the state with oppression. Polish political language has words for this contrast between society and state, i.e. spoleczenstwo and panstwo respectively. In German one may note a similar distinction. However, in German it is necessary to use two terms for each concept, depending on the denotation. Panstwo is in German both “Staat” and “Herrschaft”. Spoleczenstwo may be translated as both “Gemeinschaft” and “Gesellschaft”. The Polish word spoleczenstwo has the connotations both of community and of order, non-authoritarian order. A Pole is a citizen in society rather than of the state. Civil society thus is a concept that has a long tradition in the Polish political culture under the name of spoleczenstwo. The stan wojenny lasted from 13 December 1981 to 22 July 1983. Jaruzelski chose a symbolic date, the National Day of communist Poland, to give the signal that the period of repression had reached its aim.6 The Polish authorities named that period normalizacja, i.e. normalisation. A Polish sociologist, Andrzej Kutylowski, remarked sarcastically at the time that the Solidarity period was the only normal period in Polish postwar history, the adjective “normal” referring to the notion of a functioning civil society, a counterpart to West European democracy.7 One interpretation of what happened in 1989–91 in Central Europe thus is that it was a return to normality. The communist period seemed to have been an aberration. The dissolution of the Soviet bloc and the emancipation of the Central European states in 1989 was a swift process. However, this occurred after a lengthy period when the people had been subjects and not citizens. It was evident that there was not very much to “return” to in the form of institutions. Civil society had emerged as the victor, but it had basically been defined against the state and its institutions. Now the task was to build democratic institutions and a Rechtsstaat. The transition period was not a smooth process but a bumpy road, characterised by the social effects of the economic shock therapy and by corruption in different spheres of society and in the local and central administration. The Mokrzycki symposium in the Staszic Palace in Warsaw at the end of the transition period was above all noteworthy for the fact that it really was about

Problems and prospects 385 European problems and prospects. It was not an exercise in “Soviet and Eastern Europe” area studies. For one thing, it was in English. For another, one of the keynote speakers was Zygmunt Bauman, a Jewish Polish sociologist from Leeds in England. Zygmunt Bauman lecturing in the Staszic Palace was not noteworthy but for the fact that he is an internationally recognised grand old man of sociology. However, his lecturing was noteworthy as evidence of the fact that Polish society had recovered from communism. In 1968, during the anti-Semitic campaign under the official name of anti-Zionism, Bauman and a host of other scholars had been fired from Warsaw university on the pretext of having seduced the students and promoted revisionist and pseudo-scientific theories. The basic issue was that they were Jews.8 Although there is anti-Semitism in Poland, it is certainly not part of policy. In democratic Poland, the former distinction between scholars in the home country and their former compatriots who now live abroad is not significant. They all belong to the same Polish culture. The feeling of taking farewell to a historical era and viewing Poland as a normal country, a feeling that was a result of the atmosphere in the Staszic Palace in late September 2002, and at a moment when another Polish Jew who once had emigrated was also back in town, i.e. Roman Polanski, whose latest film, The Pianist, was shown in Warsaw,9 was reinforced by the way the exhibition of the American newspaper reports in the 1980s was presented in Gazeta Wyborcza. It was a signal saying that the 1980s really belonged to the past and had become history. The news articles bore the titles “Our decade on the other side of the ocean” and “Poland on page one. When Poland was news”.10 The presentation underlined that the fate of Poland had been a central concern for the leading American newspapers. One of the curators of the exhibition, Ewa Zadrzynska, informed that when she had searched for articles on page one of the three American newspapers about “the exceptional role of Poland”, she found 650 items.11 One must note in this context that there is a large Polish diaspora in the United States and that Polish intellectuals, ever since the partitions of Poland and during the Wielka emigracja period in the nineteenth century, when many emigré Polish intellectuals made important contributions to Polish culture, have taken it for granted that there is a deep concern for Poland in Western Europe and America. Michnik’s editorial about the exhibition repeated the title “Poland on page one”, with the addition “exhibition in the Gazeta”. The implication was obvious: Gazeta Wyborcza, which was founded by Michnik and friends during the election campaign for Solidarity in 1989, and whose editor-in-chief he has remained ever since, is a Polish counterpart to the prestigious American newspapers. In the 1980s, Poland was an object of curiosity and interest in the Western media; after 1989, she was back where she belonged. A newspaper article is a fragile thing. Especially if it is printed in the Polish language, its content is not easily accessible to the English speaking reader, even if she should happen to find back numbers of Gazeta Wyborcza in the web or in the local university or city library. Therefore, it is warranted to make, in this paper, a free translation of Michnik’s leading article from 28–29 September

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2002. The main reason, however, for including the article in the present text, is its exemplary character. In his short contribution, Michnik manages to present the central conditions behind Poland’s successful road to transition: I look upon these photographs as pictures in a family album. The Polish decade, that is the time when the most important newspapers of the world wrote about Poland on page one, that is the long road of struggle for dignity and freedom. Sometimes I think, that the decade had something from American movies: great passions, shooting with guns, as in a Western – a blackand-white world, a small minority takes up struggle. Over time, that minority becomes the majority and gives the impulse to the fall of the evil empire. I do not doubt at all that the collapse of the Soviet empire started in Poland and that the Poles were those who began to erase the Berlin wall. It was a road from hopelessness to hope. The communist system deprived people of hope and enforced conformity, flunkeyism and passivity. Compulsion and falsehood prevailed. The first impulse to resistance was the inner conviction of a small group of people that they could not participate in this compulsion and falsehood. The refusal to compromise with the dictatorship was the first seeds of hope. In the beginning it was an act of moral resistance. When in 1976 workers in Radom, Ursus and some other places went on strike against the price hikes, the authorities answered with brutal repression. As a reaction the Committee for Defense of the Workers emerged – the first public active, illegal institution in a communist dictatorship. Well, it was a reflex of moral protest. It was not already politics. The success of the protest was in a high degree dependent on the reaction from the public opinion in the democratic countries. This opinion was formed by the press. The communist regime could easily disregard the words from a handful of hotheads but it could not disregard what was published by The New York Times, The Washington Post and Le Monde. Those reactions returned to Poland thanks to the broadcasts by Radio Free Europe, the Voice of America or the BBC. In this way the protests became political facts, and we – the participants in these protests – learned the difficult art of political thought and action. The moral protest was transformed into conscious political action. On 17 October 1978 all the newspapers in the world published on page one the portrait of the new pope. The newspapers also published large photographs in June 1979, when John Paul II visited Poland for the first time. For us, Poles, it was an extraordinary experience to observe how the society freed itself from the corset of apathy and fear. John Paul II talked about the need for a new Europe with a free Poland on its map and ended the spiritual agreement of the partition of Europe in Yalta. In this moment especially, Polish society saw its true face. When in August 1980 the big newspapers showed the strike at the

Problems and prospects 387 Gdansk shipyard and its mustachioed leader Lech Wale¸sa, it was obvious for all, that the portrait of the Pope on the walls of the shipyard was a sign of the new identity of the Poles. The legalization of independent trade unions by the Polish workers led to the moral and spiritual de-legalization of the communist regime. During the following fifteen months of freedom, which later was called “the Carnival time,” the Poles learned independent thinking and organization. On 13 December 1981 Poland returned as news in the biggest newspapers in the world. The ruling Polish communists, terrified by the spectre of popular revolt on the one side and Soviet intervention on the other, introduced order with the help of tanks and armoured cars. The Polish prisons were filled with people from Solidarity. Communism had ended up with only rotten teeth. It did not succeed in paralysing Polish resistance and Solidarity, which endured underground. Repressed and driven underground it survived until a new turning point in the Great History. The Poles took advantage of the historical chance offered by Gorbachev’s perestroika. At the Round Table the Poles – from both the government and the opposition – managed to negotiate a compromise, which opened the road to democracy. Before the elections in June 1989, the Solidarity people marched under posters with Gary Cooper in the famous film High Noon. On 5 June 1989, the world received two pieces of news: in Beijing in the Tian An Men square Chinese freedom was murdered; in Poland in the parliamentary elections, the dictatorship was crushed. Our road to freedom was opened.12 Michnik’s article was addressed to a Polish readership. He had a frame of reference which revealed a double sense of being “Polish”: consciousness of Polish history and awareness that Poland had been and still was part of Western society, including sharing the latter’s mass culture. Concerning the meaning of High Noon, Fred Zinnemann’s classic Western from 1952, a reviewer has made the following observation: The Western as a film medium is by its very nature a remnant of America’s dirty little imperialist past. As a result the idea of the Western seems to connote ideas of prejudice and perhaps even genocide. High Noon, however, does not pander to the audience’s expectations of a Western; instead, we find a revisionist film with a female Mexican shopkeeper, few shootouts, and a hero whose intentions are unclear.13 The hero Will Kane, played by Gary Cooper, in High Noon is forced by circumstances to stand up and wage a struggle against criminals. Although his chances seemed to be small, he manages to subdue his sense of fear, face the enemy and defeat him in the obligatory gunfight. One recalls Lech Wale¸sa’s posture in 1981, “there must be a confrontation, and it will come”. In June 1989,

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Wale¸sa – Polish society – was ready for the final showdown in the same way as Will Kane in the movie. Solidarity’s poster with Cooper was a copy of the original advertisement for the movie. However, above the marshal’s star, Solidarity’s logo was inserted. The text read: “Solidarity at High Noon on 4th June 1989”14 Michnik’s tale of the period 1980–89 shows how Polish society, which had had the opportunity to reflect upon the message of the American film Apocalypse Now in 1981, in 1989 was sophisticated enough to refer to High Noon, i.e. a film pointing to the possibility of salvation from imperialism. This is an epitome of one aspect of civil society in Poland: self-defence, samoobrona. This image of conscious action stands in contrast to the images of desolation and catastrophe of Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now. The gist of Michnik’s analysis is that two factors of the Solidarity revolution were intimately intertwined: the mobilisation of Polish people through organisation from below and international attention to the events in Poland. The key words in the first dimension were “refusal to compromise with the dictatorship” and “the moral protest was transformed into conscious political action”. Michnik’s thesis is that the Solidarity revolution was a process of learning by action. In contrast to the ideologically based communist state and the similarly ideologically based market reform after 1989, Solidarity was not based upon ideology but upon values. Michnik mentions them: dignity and freedom. This is an oblique reference to Polish history, i.e. to a certain interpretation of it. For people like Michnik and other intellectual activists of Solidarity, such as Jacek Kuron, Bronislaw Geremek and Karol Modzelewski, civil society was a Polish tradition. The individual was taught by and inspired from examples in Polish literature to act as if miracles were possible and redemption a real prospect.15 However, this romantic concept was linked to another tradition, Polish positivism. In this tradition what counts is practical work, not hopes and dreams. Here Lech Wale¸sa and the creation of a network of independent trade unions enter the picture. The ground was prepared by the work in 1976 of the Committee for the Defense of the Workers, KOR, which was also mentioned in Michnik’s article. The election by the curia in the Vatican of a Polish pope, interpreted within the framework of Polish romanticism, was a providential event. However, it belongs also in the second dimension, that of international attention to Poland. Michnik points to the importance of another non-Polish site of power, the Moscow Kremlin. Here, as far as Poland was concerned, Mikhail Gorbachev fulfilled a role similar to that played by Gary Cooper in High Noon. The poster carried in the Solidarity demonstration in 1989 had also this connotation. Lech Wale¸sa and Mikhail Gorbachev both challenged the Soviet system. A wider perspective At its start in 1989, the transition period was conceived as a trajectory from one societal system to another. The impression was that scholars, journalists and politicians in the West imagined that there was a fixed “Western model”, which

Problems and prospects 389 should be implanted in the Baltic States and Central Europe and even in Russia. The dissident intellectuals and reformed communists in Central Europe were dismissed and the new leaders were regarded as servants who would take measures to ensure that the transition went smoothly. In the process, the egalitarian strivings behind the Solidarity revolution and the high value placed upon the concepts of dignity and freedom were all but forgotten. However, in step with new social problems emerging from the transition, or the change-over as some Hungarian sociologists called it, the concept of civil society regained its topicality. This time it was not an especially Central European concept any more but rather a concept of significance for developments in Europe as a whole. The American political scientist Robert Putnam’s work Making Democracy Work, which was a historical and sociological analysis of the Italian experience from the Middle Ages until the contemporary period, had great paradigmatic importance.16 The twenty-odd contributions to the Mokrzycki symposium by keynote speakers, paper givers and discussants showed both that civil society is a very vague concept and that the problematique as such is applicable to all democratic societies. This exercise in comparative studies highlighted the fact that there is, and must be, a tension in the social sciences between a nomothetic and an idiographic approach. On the one hand, central concepts of analysis in the nomothetic dimension with a bearing on civil society are those such as democracy, social capital and subsidiarity. On the other hand the analysis is often informed by lessons taken from unique historical phenomena. Solidarity belongs in the latter category. So do also the popular labour, temperance and confessional dissenter movements in the Scandinavian countries (including Finland) in the late nineteenth and in the twentieth centuries and the experience of religious congregations in the United States. The former have been very important for the peaceful and gradual growth of political democracy and social equality, merging traditional forms of organisation in the respective societies with new forms inspired by external influences. The latter have served as agents of popular commitment to communitarian values on the local level. Concerning the special experience of civil society in Central Europe, a point to be noted is that it was important for contributing to the collapse of the communist state but did not emerge as the nucleus of political life during the transition. The thesis of Michnik’s analysis of the 1980s as a learning period and as a period of preparation for democracy has been corroborated but also substantially refined in a recent study by a young American historian, Padraic Kenney. In the book A Carnival of Revolution. Central Europe 1989, he conceptualises civil society as a carnival, i.e. as a counter-culture. He challenges the notion that was popularised and spread by Garton Ash of the revolutions of 1989 as made by intellectual dissidents.17 Kenney’s creators and bearers of civil society are not Michnik, Havel, Konrád and the other famous old men but young people. In the 1980s and especially towards the end of the decade, the youth in cities such as Wroclaw, Prague, Cracow, Bratislava, Budapest, Lviv, Ljubljana and Leipzig staged

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public performances of different kinds. They did not assault the authorities but mocked them. The performances were different and adapted to the special local conditions and issues. The common denominator was that young people externalised the regime. They defied the police by non-violent manifestations. Bystanders were transformed into participants, because the onlookers became part of the show. Kenney argues that thanks to peaceful actions of this kind, the political order was ridiculed and thus de-legitimised. Kenney demonstrates that co-operation between youngsters in different countries made this carnival a common thing for Central Europe. It is of some interest that most of the cities he mentions once belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He does not refer to history. However, at the Mokrzycki symposium, the Czech historian Jir˘i Musil in his oral contributions referred to the traditions from life in Kakania and its Schlamperei as a contributing factor to the resilience of civil society in the successor states. Instead of referring to history, Kenney refers to the concept of networks. There were contacts and communications between youth groups in the different places. They knew about, helped and inspired one another. Departing from Michnik’s argument about the importance of learning by doing and from the idiographic dimension of historical analysis, it is possible to suggest a typology, where the former communist states in Central Europe are divided into three categories. The sample is confined to those states that have been invited to join the European Union. The presentation is a sketch, based upon the author’s personal judgments – which are inspired both by the reading of written materials and by personal experiences concerning the countries in question. The author is acquainted with them from visits beginning in the 1960s and has visited all except Slovenia and Bulgaria in the last few years. The first group consists of Estonia, Poland, Hungary and Slovenia, the second of Latvia, Lithuania and the Czech and Slovak republics, and the third of Bulgaria and Romania. In the countries of the first group, the demise of the communist system was prepared by parallel and sometimes even concerted actions by dissidents and reformist communists in leading positions. More than the subjects in other communist states, the people regarded themselves as citizens and they were to a larger degree than the others taking part in Western networks. It is significant that the Open Society foundations of George Soros – in Hungary, the initiative was originally named after Soros himself in order not to evoke suspicion – played an important role in the democratic mobilisation in the late 1980s in these countries. Already at this time a civil society emerged, focusing not only on democracy and freedom of expression but also on human rights in a broad sense, including environmental issues and women’s rights. The frame of reference, the standard of comparison, was not other socialist states but the respective neighbouring societies of Finland, Sweden, West Germany, Austria and Italy. These were also the four countries that constituted the avant-garde in the challenge to the Soviet system in the respective Baltic, Central European and Southeast European regions. Estonia, Poland, Hungary and Slovenia contributed

Problems and prospects 391 more than the rest to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the demise of the Soviet Empire, and the dissolution of communist Yugoslavia, respectively. Concerning the second group, the two Baltic republics of Latvia and Lithuania were viewed by other Soviet citizens together with Estonia as one entity, Pribaltika or “Our West”. Seen from their own angle, they were not so similar. Whereas the political mobilisation in Estonia in 1988 was preceded by the establishment of a civil society, in Latvia and Lithuania the popular fronts were ad hoc coalitions of different particular interests among the establishment. There were civil movements but not so much of a civil society. In Czechoslovakia, civil society was much weaker than in the neighbouring states of Poland and Hungary. The politicians who took power after the fall of communism had not contributed to undermining it. They did not belong among the dissidents or the reformed communists. They represented particular interests, much as their counterparts in Latvia and Lithuania. The third group of Bulgaria and Romania did not have any noteworthy dissidents or civil movements before 1989. The fall of communism in these states was the result of the collapse in general of the Soviet empire in Central Europe. Thus, in Estonia, Poland, Hungary and Slovenia, a civil society developed already during the last years of communism. A comparable development started in Latvia, Lithuania and Czechoslovakia only at the time of the breakdown and break up of the communist system. In Bulgaria and Romania, a civil society is still a thing of the future. A case in point is Christopher Adair-Toteff’s informative and touching report about his activity and experiences as a teacher of philosophy at the American University in Blagoevgrad in 1994–2001. His paper on “Weber, Eastern Europe and Civil Society” gives us an account of Weber as pivotal for teaching the students the basics of civil society, as the “bridge over Elbe, linking past and future”.18 Regarding Adair-Toteff’s conclusion, I could not help asking Nikolai Genov from the Free University in Berlin, but coming from Sofia, whether the bridge mentioned by Adair-Toteff might not serve as an one-way street for young Bulgarian intellectuals to the West, the idea of a civil society leaving the country with them. He answered that this was not only a possibility but also a fact. He knew, for he had been teaching at the American University as well. It was clear that he was not (only) referring to his own example, but to civic-minded Bulgarian intellectuals in general. Democracy East of the Elbe means that people are free citizens. However, there are important differences between the consequences for the countries involved. In the three Baltic and five Central European states, the likely prospect is that the nations as such will be integrated with Western Europe. However, concerning Bulgaria and Romania, there is a possibility that the states will not be able to become equal partners in the European Union but will have to see its most diligent young citizens emigrate instead to the West. The issues of civil society and democracy East of the Elbe cannot be viewed as local, national concerns. These issues belong in an all-European context. Within the wider community of the European Union, the historical conflicts

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concerning national minorities and state boundaries that resulted from the Paris peace treaties in 1919–20 and which were exacerbated during and at the end of the Second World War, finally can be laid to rest. This concerns the issues of the Benes decrees, which “legalised” the expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia at the end of the war, the Magyars in Slovakia and Romania, and the Slovenes in Austria and Italy. Concerning the German minority in Poland, it already is not an important political issue. In 1945, the majority of the Germans in the emerging reborn Polish state, which moved westward, were brutally expelled. Those who stayed in Poland were not recognised as a minority. However, in late 1989 Poland and Germany concluded an agreement where Poland recognised its German minority and granted them certain collective rights. It is estimated that half a million Polish citizens regard themselves as Germans. Concerning the Sudeten-German question, the descendants of them live as the fourth tribe in Bavaria. Most of the expellees went there in 1945 and were recognised in 1954 as a Stamm alongside the Old Bavarians, the Swabians, and the Franconians. They were guaranteed Schirmherrschaft, i.e. special protection by the Bavarian government. Their expulsion, which was cruel and cost many lives, has remained an important issue in both Czech and Bavarian politics.19 As for the Slovenes and Magyars on the far side of the respective state boundaries, there is not any reason to doubt that the rights and obligations of the individuals involved will be taken care of in the same way as similar issues are handled in Western Europe, i.e. concerning for example Germans in Denmark and Danes in Germany, Elsässer in Alsace/Elsass and Germans in Südtirol/Alto Adige. It does not seem likely that Europe East of the Elbe and West of the Bug will experience violent ethnic conflicts such as those in the Spanish Basque region, in Northern Ireland and in Corsica. The Sudeten-German question and the problems with the Magyar and Slovene minorities in the neighbouring states are examples of living history. The issues are the result of the two World wars in the twentieth century. The Paris peace treaties in 1919–20 aimed at avoiding international conflicts by granting collective rights to national minorities in the new national states. The expulsion of Germans from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia in 1945 aimed at evading international conflicts by extinguishing national minorities and the creation of “ethnically clean” national states. Germany has agreed to integrate the Heimatvertriebene, those people who were expelled from Czechoslovakia and Poland. However, the territories in question, i.e. Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia and East Prussia live on in German historical consciousness. They constitute an emotional basis for contemporary peaceful political and economic German commitment to developments in the countries in question. Concerning Hungary, the drawing of boundaries after the Second World War confirmed the boundaries of the Treaty of Trianon in 1920. The only change was that Czechoslovakia acquired a piece of territory facing Bratislava on the other shore of the Danube. It has been very difficult for Hungarians of all political colours to reconcile themselves with the boundaries of Trianon. However, the granting of

Problems and prospects 393 membership in the European Union made Hungary accept cancellation of its socalled status law, which was adopted in 2001 and had the implication that some rights of Hungarian citizens were extended to Magyars in neighbouring countries, with the exception of Austria. Now Hungarians can believe in a future “spiritualisation of frontiers”. This was the slogan of the non-revisionist leftist opposition in Hungary in the interwar years. The goal was to minimise the significance of the state boundaries instead of attempting to revise them. The expansion of the European Union from the Elbe to the Bug is a fulfilment of the project to create a peaceful Europe, which was attempted in Paris in 1919–20 and, as far as Western Europe was concerned, by the establishment of the EEC in 1958. Speaking in historical terms, the latter was a second Locarno. The original one, in 1925 was Germany’s recognition of the boundaries with France and Belgium. It was not followed by a similar agreement with Poland concerning its boundary with Germany. However, the eastern expansion of the European Union amounts to a “Locarno” for Central Europe. 1989 was not the final year of the short twentieth century, which began in 1914 with the outbreak of the Great War. 2004 is the final year, when the three Baltic and the five Central European states became members of the European Union. The prospects for democracy and civil society in Europe East of the Elbe are identical with the prospects for democracy and civil society in the European Union.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5

6

7

8

9

“Polska na pierwszej stronie”, Gazeta Wyborcza, 28–29 September 2002. “Nasza dekada za oceanem”, Gazeta Wyborcza, 27 September 2002. I did not even make a cutting – I can only refer to my memory. Iceland, Lichtenstein, Norway and Switzerland are firmly anchored in Western Europe and closely linked to it although not members of the European Union. The books by Timothy Garton Ash on the topic include: History of the Present: Essays and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s (1999); The File (1998); In Europe’s Name: Germany and the Divided Continent (1993); We the People: The Revolution of 1989 as Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague (1990); The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of Central Europe (1989); and The Polish Revolution: Solidarity, 1980–82 (1983). On 22 July 1944, a provisional Polish government was set up under Soviet tutelage in Lublin, the so-called Lublin committee. The date was celebrated as the day of conception of the People’s Republic of Poland. Jaruzelski’s choice of this day to end the stan wojenny carried the message that communist power had been secured in Poland. Remark in conversation with the author in Lund, Spring 1982. We were editing a book with contributions by Polish sociologists on the Solidarity period. See Bertilsson, M., Gerner, K., Kutylowski A. and Wiberg, H. (eds) (1983) Konflikt och Solidaritet i Polen (Conflict and Solidarity in Poland) (Stockholm: Prisma). Stola, D. (2000) Kampanja antysyjonistyczna (Warsaw: Instytut Studiów Politycznych Polskiej Akademii Nauk), pp. 319, 334, 351. See also, Zebrowski, R. (1993) Dzieje Zydów w Polsce. Kalendarium (Warsaw: Zydowski Instytut Historyczny w Polsce). Polanski was another celebrity emigrant who could return as a kind of national hero. Not only was he present at the premiere of The Pianist in Warsaw, he was also

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greeted with ovations by the audience. The film is based upon the real-life story of a Jewish musician Wladyslaw Szpilman, who spent five years struggling against the Nazi occupation of Warsaw. Polanski was also on posters all over Warsaw as playing one of the leading roles in Andrzej Wajda’s up-coming new film Zemsta (Vengeance), based upon a historical comedy by the nineteenth-century writer Alexander Fredro. See Notes 1 and 2. “Polska na pierwszej stronie”. Adam Michnik, “Polska na pierwszej stronie – wystawa w ‘Gazecie’ ”, Gazeta Wyborcza, 28–29 September 2002. Sean Lee, http://reviews.imdb.com/Reviews/174/17403 (10 January 2003). Solidarnosc w samo poludnie 4 czerwca 1989. For penetrating analyses of this dimension, see Törnquist-Plewa, B. (1992) The Wheel of Polish Fortune. Myths in Polish Collective Consciousness During the First Years of Solidarity (Lund: Lund University), and Kubik, J. (1994) The Power of Symbols against the Symbols of Power. The Rise of Solidarity and the Fall of Communism in Poland (University Park, Penn.: The Pennsylvania State University Press). Putnam, R. D. with Leonardi, R. and Nanetti, R. Y. (1992) Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Kenney, P. (2002) A Carnival of Revolution. Central Europe 1989 (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press). Adair-Toteff, C. “Weber, Eastern Europe and Civil Society”, Chapter 13 in this volume. See Koning, H., Germania Irredenta, The Atlantic Monthly, Digital Edition, July 1996 http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/96jul/germania/germania.htm (30 January 2003); Brown, M. D. and Hahn, E. (2001) “Sudeten Dialogues”, Central Europe Review, 3 (16), http://www.ce-review.org/01/16/odsun16.html (30 January 2003).

27 Democracy, memory and forgiving Paradoxes of dealing with the past in post-communist transitional societies – the Polish case Marek Ziólkowski

In the following argument I will try to follow Edmund Mokrzycki’s approach to social reality, a approach that could be dubbed “a committed but sceptical sociological realism”. Mokrzycki’s contention was that the prospects for democracy are not decided solely by the developments in the political sphere (described, for example, in all those elegant schemes of the successive steps of democratic transition and democratic consolidation) but depend on a variety of factors at economic, social and cultural levels, and are linked with tangible interests and the sense of identity of various social groups. Starting from this assumption I would like to look at one aspect of democracy that is connected both with interests and identity, and analyse the question of how the post-communist transitional societies – taking Poland as an example – deal with the memory of the past. Democracy, after long years of dictatorship and hibernation of public discourse, ensures freedom of speech, and encourages expression of different beliefs and articulation of divergent interests; it should also create conditions for unencumbered dialogue, expression of pluralism and mutual recognition. An important aspect of this dialogue is the dialogue about the past. Two levels of dealing with the past must be taken into account. The first is concerned with the way in which new democratic states deal with the authoritarian legacy at the official level: how they handle perpetrators, how they view victims and their families and what regulatory framework they put in place to institute reparations. The core question here is whether the principle of accountability for the past should be adopted or rejected, or more precisely, whether accountability should be pursued to its logical conclusion of punishment, or whether the past should be forgotten for the sake of future reconciliation and reconstruction. The second is concerned with the collective memory of ordinary people and their way of coming to terms with the past. The opposite of memory is forgetting. Following Paul Ricoeur (2000), one can differentiate between passive and active forgetting. The first is based upon an avoidance strategy, motivated by unclear intentions, so as not to learn about evil committed by one’s community. Active forgetting, however, is of a con-

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sciously selective nature, based on banishing victims and their suffering from memory and on forgetting about one’s own participation in inflicting that pain. Atop grassroots, spontaneous processes of forgetting are then imposed by the conscious manipulations of information executed by various subjects, but especially state governments implementing their “politics of memory”. Let us now analyse the functioning of collective memory in post-communist Poland at the levels of both politics of memory and of popular consciousness. The Polish politics of memory and especially the handling of perpetrators, collaborators and victims of the communist regime was variable and not fully consistent, falling somewhere in between the two extremes of judicial punishment and forgiveness. It has been determined by a combination of truth seeking, administering justice, rectifying past injustices, reconciliation, political and popular pragmatism and finally political bickering and manoeuvring. The official politics of memory in Poland has been determined first of all by the nature of the democratic transition in 1989 and by the composition of successive governments. The Polish transition was a case of transplacement, i.e. democratization was produced “by the combined actions of government and opposition” (Huntington, 1993, p. 151) and the post-communists held important positions in many successive governments.1 Moreover, even when the top positions were – more or less temporarily – taken by the members of the former democratic opposition, the middle range offices were still held by the old cadres who successfully diverted all bolder initiatives. This has been visible in the functioning of administration, and especially so in the Polish judicial system which, being notorious for the lengthy and inefficient procedures, has in particular not been able to punish even the most evident political crimes of the functionaries of the old system. Inefficiency of both law-making and law enforcing mechanisms, combined with the weakness of the ruling elites and political bickering, contributed to producing the effect that, in Poland, official state politics of memory was variable, inconsistent and restricted in many ways. Let us take only three examples: lustration, fights around the Institute of National Memory and the problem of property restitution. In general terms, lustration aims to identify and denounce individual agents or whole categories of people, for example former high-level party officials, and bar them from holding government positions under the new political dispensation. This method was selected by most post-communist regimes in Eastern Europe as a way of policing the past. Chosen as more appropriate for dealing with former collaborators – as opposed to perpetrators of gross human rights violations – the method, in most cases, turned out to be rather ineffective, as well as legally unsatisfactory. Its objective to punish for association, and not for any specific infractions, has been open to misuse and has been criticized for different reasons. The case in point is well illustrated by the Polish example. Polish lustration was meant to deal with “secret agents”, defined as people who covertly cooperated with communist security forces, intelligence and counter-intelligence agencies. From the start, both the definition of the target group and the entire concept of lustration became hotly contested. For the anti-

Democracy, memory and forgiving 397 communist right the process was compromised because, as they pointed out, it was unlikely to punish the real culprits whose names were never documented, targeting instead people who were coerced to cooperate with the authorities, often by means of blackmail or intimidation. Democratic moderates found lustration both tactically harmful and unenforceable in practice, while postcommunists rejected it altogether. The process was seriously compromised in 1992 when the radically anticommunist government of the day in a dramatic exposé published an unsubstantiated list of “suspected” former secret agents, pointing fingers at some of the highest public figures in the land. This move brought down the government and opened an intense and protracted debate that eventually led to the ratification in 1997 of a new and milder form of lustration law. In contrast to that in Germany, the new law did not consider cooperation with the former communist authorities per se as punishable, only non-disclosure of this fact by top public office holders. Subsequently, the prosecuting office of the Spokesman for Public Interest identified several so-called “lustration liars” and brought them to the Lustration Court for trial. Among the accused were both old communists and members of the former democratic opposition. One of the most controversial cases – and one that perhaps best illustrates the legal and moral quagmire of the whole process – was the trial of one of the leaders of the Solidarity trade union whom the erstwhile regime forced into short-term cooperation by means of first threatening the lives of and later murdering members of his family. The man was found guilty but, unsurprisingly, the vast majority of Poles thought otherwise, believing his behaviour was morally justified. When a government with communist roots returned to power in 2001, it proposed to exclude from the process all those persons who had cooperated with the intelligence and counter-intelligence agencies. This was argued on the grounds that these agencies were not a part of the apparatus of oppression of the communist state, but were institutions serving the interests of a sovereign Poland. From there on, lustration was to apply only to those who had “created threats to freedom and human and civil rights” and “whose activity was detrimental to the Church and/or the democratic opposition”. The vague phrasing of the proposed bill would have made it nearly impossible to substantiate charges related to “threats” so defined. Even though the bill was ultimately vetoed, the lustration process has, to all intents and purposes, run out of steam. The process has produced little truth and has left the issue of accountability for the past largely unresolved. The winding path of Polish official politics of memory is illustrated also by the history of the Institute of National Memory. Created in 1998 by a centreright government, the Institute has been entrusted with continuing the work of the Main Commission for the Investigation of Crimes against the Polish Nation. Its task is to conduct scientific research into contentious historical events such as, for example, the Jedwabne crime of 19412 or the imposition of Martial Law in 1981, to centralize all archival documents, especially those of the communist

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secret services, and to make them accessible to the general public, and finally to conduct investigations into individual crimes. The overriding priority of the Institute is to reveal truth, even if this truth may be awkward for individuals, organizations, groups or the entire nation, as was the case with Jedwabne. In addition to historical research, the Institute has prepared several indictments, especially in cases of communist crimes committed prior to 1956; that is, in the years of Stalinist terror in Poland. It has also started investigations of cases from the more recent past. The general public approves of and supports the Institute, as do liberal and centre-right parties who are prepared to submit history to objective critical review. This is in sharp contrast, on the one hand, to some far-right parties that repeatedly accuse the Institute of falsifying history or even of conducting antiPolish activities, and on the other hand, to the current left-oriented government, which while paying lip service to the Institute, drastically cut its funding and threatens further to eliminate its investigation branch. The post-communists’ strategy of coming to terms with the past has been clear and consistent. They have fully recognized the obvious and undeniable facts, especially those from the more remote era (the Second World War, Stalinism). Their recognition of more recent facts has, however, always been more selective, and their assessment of these facts more blurred and ambiguous. On the other hand, they have used all possible obstructive mechanisms to delay, hinder or altogether block all the procedures that could determine individual responsibility and administer justice to the perpetrators, especially those still alive and active in public life. An important part of undoing past injustices is the restitution of property to their rightful owner. But restitution on historical grounds is never easy, with missing documents, conflicting claims and lack of funds being just a few of the practical difficulties to be faced by the state. It is always a search for a possible compromise between the general rule of rectifying past injustices, the aspiration to meet international legal standards, pressures of political and interests groups both at home and abroad, and finally the economic means of the state. In the case of Poland, restitution was further complicated by the border shifts that had occurred after World War Two and had brought massive expulsions, deportations, resettlements and migrations in their wake. As a result, restitution of property, or in the case of Poland re-privatization, became both an internal and external affair and involved questions of social justice as well as inter-class and inter-ethnic relations. No effort was made to tackle the issue until the late 1990s, and then only in response to legal suits brought against the state, first by a number of formerly dispossessed Polish citizens and later by members of ethnic minorities, in particular the Jewish minority. Following prolonged debates, a small centre-right majority vote in Parliament pushed through in 2001 proposal of a bill for re-privatization,3 but the proposal was subsequently vetoed by the President. Although the new post-communist government later announced its intention to formulate an appropriate policy of its own,4 at the time of writing steps in that direction have not yet been taken. This leaves Poland with a significant aspect of past injustices entirely unresolved.

Democracy, memory and forgiving 399 Memory is an object of the political game. Political parties are also strongly divided in their interpretations of specific historical events, as reflected in both parliamentary and press debates. Post-communists tend to hide, belittle or give a new and positive interpretation to their own role under the communist regime. But while they aim to make others, and no doubt themselves, forget certain aspects of the past, they are not averse to taking advantage of post-communist nostalgia when it comes to the polls. The centre-right and the far-right parties do the exact opposite when they capitalize on resentments against the old system, and for several rightist factions the memory of communist crimes and the absence of punishment for the same, remain a primary focus or even their sole raison d’être. The radical anti-communist right produced very strong rhetoric but very little action, making only a couple of badly prepared and clumsy attempts to implement for example, decommunization and lustration. On the other hand, the Bold Line idea,5 interpreted as a “forgive and forget” policy, was strengthened by the campaign led by some democratic moderates who assumed that the newly awoken nationalism and religious fundamentalism can be more detrimental to the consolidation of democracy than the old spectre of communism. A pragmatic argument was also added: the moral concerns used by the old Polish “ethical civil society”, seeking for the one and only truth and assuming the “us” versus “them” divide has to give way to the practical actions of a political society that is able to deal with group interests and lead to the institutionalization of compromise. Moreover, in post-communist Poland, the new democratic regime has to deal less with perpetrators than with collaborators whose crimes are generally deemed to have been less severe. Besides, to some people collaboration was a matter of degree. All these elements coincided largely with the general mood of a large part of the population. At the level of popular consciousness, there are two distinct frames of reference with regard to assessing the communist past, one concerned with the functioning of the communist system per se, the other referring to one’s own everyday-life experiences under that system. The former is usually much more negative, but gradually loses its importance, the latter is much more complex and ambiguous. Ordinary people view the communist past largely in terms of their present hardships. For some, the passing of “People’s Poland” has become a source of regret and the number of those who now idealize certain aspects of communism, such as equality, social security and full employment is growing. This is not to say that people long for the return of communism as a political system. It is rather a case of a peculiar type of nostalgia that coats the asperity of the past, while weaving the resulting perceptions of the past back into the present. This is somewhat related to a specific dichotomy in the popular memory of communism. On the one hand, when referring to the authoritarian past, people tend to forget their own participation in the old system. This is despite the fact that a vast majority at least acquiesced, if not fully cooperated, with the system. Forgetting and forgiving also serves as an instrument of self-forgetting and

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self-forgiving. On the other hand, people may discard the system, but they cannot discard or negate their own personal past lived under that system. To do so would be to lose the continuity that helps them try to make some sense of their lives, both in the past and in the present. These two opposing tendencies: to cast off one part of the past and to retain the other, might also explain the visible de-politicization of popular memories of the communist past in that they tend to focus on the former way of life’s everyday “normal” events and problems, or small pleasures, such as football matches, Sunday strolls in a park or rock concerts. As far as “de-politicized” memory is concerned, other factors may be at play. There is a change in values with a shift towards pragmatism as most people are more interested in solving their daily problems than in pursuing symbolic struggles over historical issues. Besides, many prefer to choose politicians whose experience and skills, however acquired, make them more likely to deliver the goods. In addition, there is a shortening of the time perspective (cf. Tarkowska, 1992), where people are interested neither in the past nor in the future, but in current events and in accomplishing as much as possible “here and now”. Seeking and expressing the truth is a significant element of liberty, but together with liberty this starts to lose its importance since, in the post-communist countries, liberty is already taken for granted and to some people is connected mainly with words and symbols. Equality, on the other hand, becomes increasingly an important practical everyday concern because of growing economic differentiation and the general feeling of deprivation. The disenchantment with the economic present leads to a more favourable assessment of the past and changes popular attitudes towards the collaborators of the old system. Let us sum up. In Poland, the historical truth (and also different truths) about communism has been more or less uncovered and also officially acknowledged. However, the main injustices of the past have not been rectified, neither by punishing the perpetrators nor by restitution of property. While it still matters to some Poles, the majority of both political elites and the general public are concentrated on practical current problems and do not seem to care much. At this point I would like to mention one additional, more general factor that seems to contribute to the situation described above. At stake in the field of social memory of the past is, on the one hand, group (especially national) identity and membership (see Szacka, 1990; Szpocinski, 1989), and, on the other hand, the realization of one’s own specific interests varying from those of other members of the society. Memory is especially crucial, when past events led to some consequences – especially negative consequences, such as harm or injustice – which are (to a greater or smaller extent) inherited and influence the current circumstances of the living descendants of both victims and perpetrators. If there exists a sense of inheritance, then one could always reason that: “They disinherited us, they persecuted us”. This reasoning works regardless of whether the recollected event took place 20 or 200 years earlier. The memories of communist crimes linked with the old cleavages between grandparents (“us” versus “them”) will perhaps still matter in the generation of

Democracy, memory and forgiving 401 their children (as some of them have benefited from the “Affranchisement of the nomenklatura”) but will largely be irrelevant in the generation of their grandchildren. Political cleavages within the same ethnic group constitute a very hot issue but they are less likely to be inherited – especially when there are many inter-group marriages – over more than two generations. They became more an object of history and less the problem of social memory and memory politics. On the other hand, memory of ethnic, religious or racial conflicts, which involve the sense of collective identity, collective pride, collective guilt and collectively suffered injustice, is inherited and internalized by still new generations for centuries (300 years after a given event, for example, the battle on the Boyne river, one can still hear: “they” defeated “us”). Consequently, in today’s Poland, the most currently debated past issues concern inter-ethnic relations of Poles and their neighbours: Jews, Germans or Ukrainians. One could claim therefore, that for the long run this layer of memory, which is linked with collective identity and inheritance becomes more important, while that level of memory that pertains to individual political crimes and cleavages slowly becomes less relevant (cf. Ziólkowski, 2002). Looking at the accountability of the communist past, I have every reason to be dissatisfied as a “committed citizen”. As a “sociological realist”, however, I have to admit that administering justice for past deeds is less and less probable. Many elements of the politics of memory have contributed to this effect: the acceptance of the noble ideal that sometimes the past should be forgotten (or at least forgiven) for the sake of future reconciliation and reconstruction, the pragmatism of democracy as the institutionalization of compromise, the successful delaying and hindering strategy of post-communists. They all have largely coincided with growing popular pragmatism at a grassroots level and – last but not least – with the mechanisms of the functioning of memory in the natural succession of generations. Many of today’s problems will both literally and metaphorically die out.

Notes 1

They were present in the first Solidarity cabinet in 1989–90, returned to power in the years 1993–97 and from 2001, and could use the presidential veto-power from 1995 onwards. 2 In Jedwabne in July 1941, when Germans entered Eastern Poland formerly occupied by the Russians, “ordinary Poles” took an active part in murdering the whole local Jewish community. 3 The 2001 bill proposal offered compensation of 50 per cent of the original value of the holdings to persons who on the day of losing their property were Polish citizens, or to their heirs. Germans expelled from territories taken over by Poland as per agreements signed at the Potsdam Conference, were not entitled to compensation, although Poles who were at the same time expelled from areas transferred to the Soviet Union, did qualify for reparation. Following heated parliamentary debates, a new proviso was subsequently added. This declared that only present-day Polish citizens were entitled to compensation. Excluded from the deal were a vast majority of the former Jewish (and now Israeli) citizens, so the proviso was strongly criticized by Israel and

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the USA, something that made it easier for the Polish President to veto the whole project. Radically diminishing the fraction of property to be restituted while at the same time widening the range of beneficiaries in order to avoid international legal suits. The Bold Line originally was to mean that the new democratic government is responsible only for its own actions and not for the sad patrimony of the past. From the very beginning, however, it started to be interpreted as the politics of “forgive and forget”.

References Huntington, S. (1993) The Third Wave. Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press). Ricoeur, P. (2000) La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli (Paris: Seuil). Szacka, B. (1990) “Spoleczna pamie˛c polskiej przeszlosci narodowej w latach 1965–1988.” [Social Memory of the Polish National Past in 1965–1988]. In B. Szacka and A. Sawisz, Czas przeszly i pamie˛c spoleczna [Past and Social Memory]. (Warszawa: IS UW). Szpocinski, A. (1989) Przemiany obrazu przeszlosci Polski. Analiza sluchowisk historycznych dla szkól [Changes of the Vision of the Polish Past] (Warszawa: IS UW). Tarkowska, E. (1992) Czas w zyciu Polaków [Time in the Life of Poles] (Warszawa: IFiS PAN). Ziólkowski, M. (2002) “Memory and forgetting after Communism”, Polish Sociological Review, 1 (137).

Index

1054-divide 5, 8 acquis communautaire 111 Adair-Toteff, Christopher 391 Adamski, Wladyslaw 317 Agenda 2000 158 ff Ash, Timothy Garton 384, 389 Åslund, Anders 288 ff ATTAC 18, 42 AUBG 196, passim Balcerowicz, Leszek 50, 337 Barber, Ben 19 Bauman, Zygmunt 7, 58, 153, 233, 242, 345, 385 Beck, Ulrich 326, 332 Berger, Peter 341 ff Bethnal Green 98 Blair, Anthony 326, 328 Bloch, Ernst 210 Blumer, Herbert 240 Bourdieu, Pierre 215, passim Brezhnev, Leonid 138 Brubaker, Rogers 345 Bruszt, Laszlo 127 Buffon, George-Louis 149 Bunce, Valerie 126 ff Bush, George 135 Castoriadi, Cornelis 215, 223 Catherine II 314 Chavez, Hugo 275 ff Chirac, Jacques 327 civic republicanism 42 civic republicans 327 Civil Society Internet Forum 145 ff, 157 Collins, Randall 22, 135 comprehensive revolution 126 Conrad, Joseph 383

convergence 147, 149 Cooper, Gary 387 ff Coser, Lewis 202, 207 Cox, Michael 135 Cummings and Nørgaard 121 Dahrendorf, Ralf 20 Dawisha, Karen 335, 337 decommunisation 231 ff disenchantment 239 ff Domanski, Henryk 119, 121 ff, 380 Dryzek, John 56 Durkheim, Emile 213, 240, 331 Easton, David 337 ff Economy and Society (Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft) 199 Eliaeson, Sven 124 embeddedness 64 embourgeoisement 316 Engels, Friedrich 6 Etzioni, Amitai 19 European social charter 111 Ferge, Zsuzsa 317 Fischer, “Joschka” 331 Fordism 34 Foucault, Michel 214, 240 Four stages (theory) 3 free rider 117 Gaber, Rusanna 124 Gaidar, Yegor 323 Gazeta Wyborcza 382, 385 Gellner, Ernest 41 ff, 348 Genov, Nikolai 123, 391 Geremek, Bronislaw 388 Giddens, Anthony 238, 242, 325 ff, 328, passim

404

Index

glocalization 146, 151, passim God 157, 256 Goethe 9 Gorbachev, Michael 134, 136 ff, 309, 312 ff Gottschalk, Louis 126 Grabowska, Miroslawa 372, 380 Greenfeld, Liah 351 Greenpeace 154 groupthink 253 Habermas, Jürgen 3, 20 ff, 44, 155, 238, 240 Harvey, David 151 Hausner, Jerzy 228 Havel, Vaclav 17, 389 Heimatvertriebene 392 Hennis, Wilhelm 3 Holmes, Les 126 homo duplex 121 Honneth, Axel 24 Horkheimer, Max 20 humanistic sociology 209 Huntington, Samuel P. 265 Ilves, Toomas Hendrik 6 Impulse 99 43 f Institute of Public Affairs 370 intelligentsia 53, 212 inter-elite struggle 130 “Jabloka” 312 Jagiello scandal 48 Jan Pawel II 2 Jaruzelski, Wojciech 382 Kaelble, Hartmut 9 Kakania 390 Kant, Immanuel 20, 150, 198 Keane, John 18, 24 Kenney, Padraic 389 ff Kocka, Jürgen 24 Kohl, Helmut 7 Kojder, Andrzej 121 Kolankiewicz, George 120 Konrad, György 17, 315 ff, 345 Konstancin 98 KOR 388 Kornai, Janos 125, 127, 308, 315 Krugman, Paul 151 Krushchev, Nikita 2, 135 Kubik, Jan 18 Kuron, Jacek 388 Kymlicka, Will 57

Kyrgyzstan 1 Laar, Mart 292 ff Lange, Oskar 255 ff Lanzmann, Claude 215 ff Latin America 17 ff Lazarsfeld, Paul F. 206 Lebenswelt 223, 240 Le Pen, Jean Marie 327 Lepper, Andrzej 337 Lerner, Max 102 Levada, Yurii A. 315, 319 Levi, Henri-Bernard 214 Liberman debate 308 Lijphart, Arendt 270 Linnaeus, Carl von 149 Lipset, S. M. 3 Luhmann, Niklas 240, 242 lustration 228, 396 Luxemburg, Rosa 2 MacIntyre, Alasdair 19 Mannheim, Karl 212, 216 Marody, Miroslawa 228 Marshall, T. H. 54 Marx, Karl 90, 317 Marxist class analysis 129 Mazowiecki, Tadeusz 89, 337 Meade, George Herbert 240 Mendel, Gregor 249 Merkel, Wolfgang 330 Metternich 8 Michnik, Adam 17, 383, 385, 387 f Mill, John Stuart 269 Millar, J. R. 133 Mills, C. Wright 92, 215 Milosevic, Slobodan 278 Mitteleuropa 157 Modzelewski, Karol 388 Mokrzycki, Edmund xxi, 56 ff, 119, 205, 325, 337, 379 ff, 389, 395, passim Montesquieu 270 MORI 333 Mosca, Gaetano 130 Multiple Modernities 6 Münkler, Herfried 20 Musil, Jiri 390 Nairn, Tom 157 Napoleon I 8 “Napoleonic” (civil society) 249, 251 NATO 313 ff, 382 negotiated democracy 56 ff NEP 308

Index 405 Neurath, Otto 7, 206 New Labour 325 nomenklatura 232 nomenklatura capitalism 310 North, Douglass 127 Offe, Claus 126 Oldfield, A. 327 Olson, Mancur 4, 8, 123 Ordynacka 50 Osipov, Gernadij W. 315 Ossowski, Stanislaw 7, 205, 208, passim Pakulski, Jan 128 pay as you go system (of pension) 108, 111, 115 perestroika 136, 308 ff, 312 ff Pipes, Richard 232, 244 Polanski, Roman 385 Polanyi, Karl xxi ff, 10 Polanyi, Michael 256 Polska Ludowa 90 privatization 115 Prodi, Romano 330 Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, The 198 Przeworski, Adam 64 Pufendorf, Samuel 3, 9 Putin, Vladimir 313, 323 Putnam, Robert 5, 389 race 149 Radio Maryja 56 rationalization trap 114 Rawls, John 29, 31 ff, 42 Redeker, Robert 215 ff Reichardt, Sven 40 ff Ricoeur, Paul 395 Risikogesellschaft 220 ff Rokita, Jan 48 rotary clubs 257 ff Rueschemeyer, Dieter R. 84, 129, 141 Rychard, Andrzej 58 Rywin affair 49 Sachs, Geoffrey 95, 148, 150 ff Saint-Simon 256, 337 ff Saint Simon/Comte 2 Samoobrona 380 Sandel, Michael 29 ff, 32 ff, 42 Savonarola 1 Scaff, Lawrence A. 40, 42 ff Schmoller, Gustav von 92 Schütz, Alfred 209

Shils, Edward 4, 43 shock therapy 97, 312 Skidelsky, Robert 95 Skocpol, Theda 61 social capital 238 social engineering 208 Socrates 200 soft budgets 116 Solidarity/ Solidarnosc 2 ff, 8, 53, 129, 309 ff, 312, 317, 388, 397 Sorel, George 341 Soros, George 390 “Soviet model” 307 spóldzielnia 103 spoleczenstwo 384 Stark, David 127 Sudeten-German question 392 symbolic interactionism 240 Szacki, Jerzy 351 Szelenyi, Ivan 130, 134, 315 ff, 345 Sztompka, Piotr 336 taxation 116 Taylor, Charles 30, 42 Thatcher, Margaret 89, 138, 334 Third Rome 6 third wave 272 Third Way 325, 328, passim three pillar system (of pension) 110 TINA 217 Tismaneanu, Vladimir 342 Tocqueville, Alexis de 4, 29 ff, 102, 258 Tönnies, Ferdinand 3 transitology 1, 6 transparency international 289 Treaty of Trianon 392 Trotsky, Leo 129 Tsar Peter (Peter I) 314 Tusk, Donald 49 Tyminski, Stanislaw 337 utopia 217 Veblen, Thorstein 207 Wale˛sa, Lech 337, 385 Walzer, Michael 19, 53 Warner, W. Lloyd 98 Wasilewski, Jacek 319 Waters, Malcolm 128 Weber, Max 2, 6, 58, 197, 207, 270, 317, 331, 391, passim Weberian 238, passim Weizsäcker, Richard von 4

406

Index

Wesolowski, Wlodzimierz 317 Western rationalism 200 Westphalian peace 157 Wielka emigracja 385 Wilson, Woodrow 248 win-win (position) 117 Wissenschaft als Beruf 200 Wnuk-Lipinski, Edmund 317

Wolfe, Alan 3 WZIOM 319 Yadov, Vladimir A. 315, 319 Yeltsin, Boris 137 ff, 309, 312 ff Zhirinovsky, Vladimir 312 Znaniecki, Florian 207, 348 ff

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