the other transition
Alina Mungiu-Pippidi
Alina Mungiu-Pippidi is professor of democracy studies at the Hertie
School of Governance in Berlin and president of the Romanian Academic
Society, a public-policy institute in Bucharest. She is the coauthor
of “Moldova’s 'Twitter Revolution,’” which appeared in the July
2009 issue of the Journal of Democracy.
As I crossed into what was then the Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) of
Ukraine from the SSR of Moldova, just one day after the August 1991
coup attempt in Moscow, I saw an old man by the road having an argument
with a militiaman. We were near a small starving village, and the
old man had tried to set up a folding table to sell some seeds that he was
collecting from sunflowers that had fallen to the ground. The militiaman
objected on the grounds that the sunflowers were public, not private
property; that the old kolkholznik was engaging in an unlicensed commercial
activity; and that one of the militiaman’s superiors might drive
past and discover this act of sabotage against the command economy.
The old man promised to cut him a share, but the matter was by no
means settled by the time I drove away.
When I returned about a week later, Ukraine was independent, the
folding table was in the middle of the road, and the militiaman was
proudly sitting next to it, acting as a self-appointed border guard. He
was still trying to figure out at that point how much passage tax he
could extort from drivers crossing into Ukraine. We were the first, so
we donated five dollars to the newly independent state. The old man was
nearby. He had spread his coat on the ground and piled on it corn and
sunflowers gathered from the field behind. He was selling these in full
freedom—no license was needed and no tax had to be paid. The two men
looked to me to be strangely reconciled to the new capitalist order. Only
one element was missing (particularly since it had been so prominent the
week before)—the state. It had all but vanished.
The postcommunist transformation has generally been seen as a dual
process: 1) the shift from a command economy to a market economy,
Journal of Democracy Volume 21, Number 1 January 2010
© 2010 National Endowment for Democracy and The Johns Hopkins University Press
Twenty Years of Postcommunism
121Alina Mungiu-Pippidi
and 2) the transition from authoritarianism or totalitarianism to democracy.
Some countries have fared well in both the political and economic
arenas, while others have had more success in one or the other of the two
domains. Behind these two formal transformations, however, a shadowy
informal struggle was fought, with a determinative effect on their outcome:
the battle for social control. The recent history of Eastern Europe
can best be understood as a transition to a new social contract between
the postcommunist state that emerged from its communist predecessor
and the postcommunist citizen who evolved from the communist subject.
The instant dissolution of the old communist contract was striking
that day at the Ukrainian border, and eighteen years later a new social
contract has yet to fully replace it in Ukraine and many other places.
Scholars of the state have largely ignored postcommunism.1
The
postcommunist state is conspicuously missing from the literature on the
state and society, which is hard to explain.2
Postcommunism offers an
alternative set of cases to Joel Migdal’s “weak state–strong society”
model, as communism was defined by a strong state and weak society.3
But a strong state based on coercion alone is not sustainable, as it is not
based on a social contract. Repression is costly, and once the global
order of communism broke down, communist regimes, lacking legitimacy,
vanished. As Ghita Ionescu observed as early as the 1960s, the
people would have torn down the Berlin Wall with their bare hands had
it not been defended by Soviet tanks.4
There was a permanent absence
of popular consent to the communist regimes in Eastern Europe. What
varied over time and among countries was the state’s capacity to sustain
surveillance and repression—the extent to which the state managed to
control society.
It is the relationship between state and society under communism
that best explains the divergent paths taken by the former communist
countries after 1989. The communist state’s strength and the extent to
which it invaded the private lives of its citizens varied greatly across
cases; so did the autonomy of the society (see Figure on p. 122). This
was no simple linear relationship: There were countries such as Poland,
where both state and society were reasonably strong and in competition
with each other; others where the state was weaker and had to accommodate
a strong society, as in Yugoslavia; still others where the state was
much stronger but the society remained in competition with it, as in the
Baltic states. Finally, in countries such as Albania, Romania, and Russia,
the state was all-powerful, intervening in the most private aspects
of people’s lives. Over time such pervasive social engineering reduced
society to absolute dependence.
The Figure places nine postcommunist countries along two axes representing
the state’s power over society and the society’s level of autonomy
under communism. Where the countries lie largely explains the
type of transition that they would experience. In countries where levels
122 Journal of Democracy
of state power and individual
autonomy were fairly
close, the state and society
managed to arrive at a new
social contract relatively
soon after 1989. In those
countries where these levels
diverged dramatically,
the transitions resulted in
regimes that were high
on informality and low on
democracy. There are, of
course, in-between cases
such as Romania and
Bulgaria, where for years
the state and society had
fought over control.
Nationalism had been a
source of societal autonomy in all the former Eastern bloc countries and
helped to strengthen the hand of society over the state. The ugly face of
nationalism was revealed, however, in the former Yugoslavia, whose component
ethnic communities pulled the state apart at great cost. Without a
consensus over identity, the formation of a new social contract could not
be achieved, and thus all three postcommunist federations—the USSR,
Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia—collapsed. Even when the country was
dominated by a single national community, agreeing on the fundamentals
of a new regime was still challenging.
For a new social contract to emerge—one based not on coercion, but
on the good will of both state and society—agreement had to be reached
relatively quickly, so as to preserve some social order. Where the transitions
remained disputed, the state lost its capacity to enforce the rule of
law, even if it managed to hang on to power. Furthermore, the devastating
economic contraction that accompanied the transitions swept away
the state’s resources and reduced its capacity to offer any welfare; so the
state lost whatever residual legitimacy it possessed, and society plunged
into deep informality. This in part explains the popularity of Vladimir
Putin. Before he came to power, transition-era Russia seemed stuck in
this disastrous predicament. Putin managed, at least to some extent, to
redirect its course. At the other end of the spectrum were some former
Soviet republics (such as the Baltic states), where new elites took command
of the government, and some Central European countries, where
the communist regimes had been more humane and managed to sketch
out some sort of social contract even before 1989. In these countries, the
essentials of social order endured and gradually improved. No constituency
was alienated, and links remained between state and society.
10
6
8
4
9
5
7
3
2
1
10 42 5 73 6 8
StatePower
Societal Autonomy
Figure—The State/Society
Relationship Under Communism5
Albania
Romania Russia
Bulgaria
Hungary
Poland
Yugoslavia
Estonia
Czechoslovakia
123Alina Mungiu-Pippidi
Given its aftermath, particularly in Russia, it is questionable whether
communism, despite its aims of vast modernization, was a modern regime
at all. Despite its ambition to accelerate modernization, its plans
were subverted by the essential contradiction embedded in the communist
power structure, which allowed the nomenklatura to enjoy political
and economic monopolies. Under communism, the traditional forms of
social stratification were eradicated, and the possession of political power
became the main determinant of social status. Social and economic
equality existed only outside the confines of these essential power holders
and their patronage networks, which survived into postcommunism.
Where societies had been weak, these networks managed to capture
full social control during the transition, using their influence to appropriate
former state assets. Such cases resembled those of the postcolonial
world—countries characterized by inequality of wealth derived
from inequality of power, by informal economies, by state capture by
clans, and by networks of privilege. But in Eastern Europe, the failure
of modernization cannot be blamed on a lack of social control, which
communist regimes exercised in full. Political order requires at least
some consent and support from the ruled; therefore, where the gap had
been widest between the level of state power and the level of social
autonomy during communism, the most difficult transitions ensued, as
there was no ground on which to build a social contract. In these countries,
the new postcommunist state failed to protect people and property,
and the people reciprocated by not recognizing the state’s authority and
not obeying its rules.
Albania is perhaps the most dramatic example. Its troubled transition
cannot be explained by the usual political and economic reasons that
so-called transition experts often cite. Rather, its greatest challenge was
to mend the severed links between state and society—to agree on a new
social contract—in a country where the communist state had repressed
and alienated society to the greatest possible extent. In fact, both Albania
and Moldova have held repeated rounds of free and reasonably fair
elections and implemented all the IMF’s reform prescriptions, only to
see their transitions become permanently “defective.” For they still have
not addressed the fundamental problem of repairing the relationship between
the state and society, the only basis on which their transitions can
succeed.
At the other extreme, where society had been stronger and the state
weaker, the influence of patronage networks remained limited, and competitive
market institutions managed to take hold. Particularism and a
culture of privilege, on the one hand, and open competition and impartial
government, on the other, are the two extremes of the continuum defining
state-society relations. Estonia, for example, with a small (around
a million) nationalistic population that has been literate since end of the
nineteenth century, comes close to the ideals of good governance. More-
124 Journal of Democracy
over, because it did not grant citizenship to most of its Russian minority,
Estonia does not have to contend with residual communist attitudes on
the part of voters. Estonia comes the closest to the West European norm
of modernity, but its example is hard to reproduce elsewhere. At the
opposite end of the spectrum is Azerbaijan and countries like it, which
are almost wholly particularistic. The other postcommunist countries
lie somewhere in between—some still in transition, but most having by
now reached some sort of equilibrium.
By 1990, with very few exceptions, even the old nomenklatura had
come to accept the bankruptcy of the communist system. Thus transition
did not really involve a struggle over ideology. There were, however,
competing views on how best to approach economic reform and how to
handle the re-creation of private property. Seen in retrospect, the debate
over shock versus gradual therapy seems less consequential. Hungary
and Poland, for example, took different paths but in the end the result
was the same, because once the anticommunists in both countries won
the first elections and true competition was unleashed, top-down control
over the transition was lost. Similarly, it did not matter in the end
whether nationalized property was returned to its former owners or if
they were merely compensated. A stable property regime resulted only
where the solution was, again, based on a social agreement or contract.
The existence of an agreed-upon contract was more important than its
contents.
In Central Europe, consensus was easier to forge, because the communist
parties there had before 1989 already failed at a “third way”—
the reform of the socialist economy. Where they had not yet attempted
to reform the socialist economy, as in Romania, post-1989 governments
explored this “third way” in the first years of the transition, which only
made their economic problems worse. But as the old-guard communists
had not at any moment lost control, they were positioned to manage
political competition and to control the transformation even when they
had to engage in more than “partial reforms.”6
In other words, they won
at the capitalists’ game.
Before discussing the winners and losers of the transitions, however,
we must determine the extent to which “transition” is an autonomous
process that unfolds independent of the will of those who initiate it.
This seems to have been the case in only a small minority of the 28
postcommunist countries, mainly in Central Europe. Where such transitions
did occur, there were challenger elites who managed to replace the
Communist Party leaders in the first elections and then to set in motion
a process that could not be controlled by anyone—not even the communists
after they returned to power. This was the case in Czechoslovakia,
Hungary, and Poland. In most of the 28 countries, however, communist
elites themselves either implemented a fully controlled process of
transformation—ranging from a substantial transformation in Slovenia
125Alina Mungiu-Pippidi
to largely nominal ones in the Central Asian republics—or they managed
to control the change after an initial shock, such as the flight and
execution of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauºescu.
Tenuous Victories
Because former regime elites held far more power and economic resources
than the unorganized masses demonstrating in the streets at the
beginning of the transition period, some governments—Todor Zhivkov’s
in Bulgaria or Slobodan Miloševiæ’s in Serbia, for example—agreed to
liberalize their regimes and begin a process of reform that they hoped
they could control. Given the disparity in resources, these leaders fully
expected to win the first free elections, stop the challenge from the
streets, and gain international legitimacy. They calculated well and did
win initially, although the political challenge did not go away. For the
time being, however, they succeeded in becoming the “winners” and
keeping their hold on the state. Although some unpredictable developments
occurred in all the transitions, the “winners” were for the most
part predetermined; the leaders of the communist regimes themselves
initiated and managed the transformation for their own benefit, with the
goal being control, not reform.
The transition could thus yield a state with more autonomy and impartiality
toward various groups (the postcommunist variant of modernization),
or a state split into private, decentralized power fiefdoms
connected through networks in a feudal-like system. These different
outcomes were largely dependent on the capacity of society to mobilize
and organize politically against state captors (or would-be captors). In
countries where society had been strong before the transition, the vote
for change was massive and immediately swept aside the former political
establishments. In the rest, the political transition evolved (where it
evolved at all) by spreading independent pockets of political and economic
choice from the capital and other urban areas to the rest of society.
As the number of entrepreneurs slowly grew and the number of state
employees shrank, anticommunist oppositions eventually won elections.
This was the case in Bulgaria, Romania, and Serbia.
Data on democratic attitudes from the 1998 World Values Survey
confirm the cleavage between the urban, active population and the rural,
state-dependent one. It is young, urban, educated people who provide the
constituency for democracy in the postcommunist world. They believe
in individual rather than state responsibility for personal well-being.
State dependents—pensioners and employees in the state sector—hold
attitudes that are significantly less democratic than do people employed
in the new private sector.7
Strong proponents of modernization theory might argue that the balance
of power between state and society under the communist regime—
126 Journal of Democracy
which I have put forward in this essay as an overarching explanation—is
in fact a legacy of modernization, built through a succession of regimes.8
To some extent this is true: Communism, for example, took greater hold
in less modernized societies, whose underdevelopment provided the
perfect excuse for social engineering and state invasion of all spheres of
life. But other factors matter as well, particularly Western attention. The
level of interest displayed by Western policy makers in Central European
countries was far greater than it was in places such as Moldova or
Albania. Thus the communists had a freer hand in the latter countries.
If one controls for the relationship between the state and society, institutional
variables lose their significance. For example, in the postcommunist
countries, presidential systems were the result of state capture,
not the other way around. Even when presidential systems were
modified, nothing essential changed, as particularism was already enshrined.
Various electoral systems were tried across the region, but they
all failed to a great extent to produce stable, nationwide political parties
or stable partisan constituencies, even though voters do have clear political
values. Parties and legislatures are perceived as interest groups
and privilege seekers and enjoy very low levels of trust. This negative
image stems not from a lack of enlightenment among voters but from the
behavior of the parties, which grab for themselves the benefits of public
jobs, public money, and favoritism in public policy. Their conduct has
come at an electoral cost: Turnout has declined over the years, as voters
saw that no matter who won, the behavior stayed the same.9
The new East European democracies are conspicuously missing
strong political parties, and it is unlikely that such parties will emerge
in this era of postmodern political communication. The political arena
is dominated by public-relations spin, and the policy agenda is set by
consulting focus groups. After decades of living with only power monopolies
and minimal political communication, the region was thrust directly
into postmodern political life without ever having passed through
modernity, with its gradual development of collective action, political
parties, and constituency building. Instead, East Europeans have television—hundreds
of channels. In Albania, Macedonia, and Romania, several
all-news channels compete for political influence and make more
news than they report. Given the high price of television production,
one would assume that the entire advertising market of these countries
would not be enough to sustain even one channel. In societies based on
particularism rather than free competition, however, media outlets are
not ordinary business ventures. Rather, investors use these channels for
blackmail or for trading influence.
Today, many postcommunist countries can be characterized as captive
states—places where voters are alienated, political parties compete
only for spoils, the media are used as tools of corruption, and what passes
for political discourse is little more than a public-relations campaign.
127Alina Mungiu-Pippidi
Even the most advanced democracies in the region have their fair share
of treasure-hunting politicians and disaffected voters, no real political
parties, and little substantive political debate. Despite these shared
shortcomings, however, a crucial difference divides these countries: In
some, the state and society have been able to forge a new social contract,
and in others they have not. The difference between the two sets of cases
is striking, with the former boasting relatively stable democracies and
improving economies and the latter still struggling to make any progress.
Latvia and Moldova have ended up on different continents, even if
a paleontologist can still find the fossils proving that twenty years ago
they belonged together.
NOTES
1. See Venelin I. Ganev, “Post-Communism as a Historical Episode of State-Building:
A Reversed Tillyan Perspective,” Kellogg Institute Working Paper No. 289, November
2001; available at http://kellogg.nd.edu/publications/workingpapers/WPS/289.pdf.
2. See also Anna Grzymala-Busse and Pauline Jones Luong, “The Ignored Transition:
Postcommunist State Development,” Working Paper 02–02, Weatherhead Center for International
Affairs, Harvard University, March 2002.
3. Joel S. Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1988).
4. Ghita Ionescu, The Breakup of the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1965), 166.
5. This graphic is based on Ghita Ionescu, Comparative Communist Politics (London:
Macmillan, 1972) and Stéphane Courtois et al., Le livre noir du communisme: Crimes,
terreur, répression (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1999).
6. The term “partial reforms” is from Joel S. Hellman, “Winners Take All: The Politics
of Partial Reform in Postcommunist Transitions,” World Politics 50 (January 1998):
203–34.
7. World Values Survey, 1998, pool sample includes former Warsaw Pact countries;
see Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, “Fatalistic Political Cultures Revisited,” ch. 12 in Hans-Dieter
Klingemann, Dieter Fuchs, and Jan Zielonka, Democracy and Political Culture in Eastern
Europe (London: Routledge, 2006) and www.worldvaluessurvey.org.
8. See, for instance, Martha de Melo et al., “Circumstance and Choice: The Role of
Initial Conditions and Policies in Transition Economies,” World Bank Policy Research
Working Paper, no. WPS 1866, 1997; Herbert Kitshelt, “Post-Communist Economic Reform:
Causal Mechanisms and Concomitant Properties,” paper presented at the annual
meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, 2001.
9. See Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, “Understanding Balkan Particularism: The Ambiguous
Social Capital of South-eastern Europe,” Journal of Southeast European and Black Sea
Studies 5 (January 2005): 45–65.