The Basic Structure of Unseparated Spheres in a Demo- a Demo-cratic Frameworka Demo-cratic Framework

In some post-communist countries, dictatorship has not ended. Particularly, China has maintained a one-party system that is nominally communist even today, although we regard it as “post-communist” because it is not a communist dictatorship anymore but can be bet-ter conceptualized as another ideal type regime (see below). However, afbet-ter the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the countries of the three historical regions experienced regime change from communist dictatorship to electoral regimes.⁷⁴ The collapse of the Soviet Union created a power vacuum in the region: the liberated coun-tries of the former Soviet empire had to build new political systems—and the obvious model was Western-type liberal democracy. The euphoria of “the end of history” was inferred from precisely this: former communist systems did away with totalitarianism and the principle of bureaucratic state ownership, signifying the historical victory of “the West” over “the East.”

71 Hale, Patronal Politics, 460–61. Also, see Bunce and Wolchik, Defeating Authoritarian Leaders in Postcommunist Countries, 59–78.

72 Greenslade, “Regional Dimensions of the Legal Private Economy in the USSR.”

73 Weber, Economy and Society, 233.

74 Huntington, The Third Wave, 23–26.

1.5. Thesis D: Democratization Did Not Change the Separation of Spheres • 51 Yet this victory was true only as far as the end of dictatorship and

central-ly-planned economies went. The consequence of breaking free of totalitarianism was not that countries universally adopted Western principles, but that civilizational patterns began to effect countries more freely. Thus, they started to “bubble up” as soon as the repressive political lid of communism was removed, in different forms in different regions and under different influences. This leads us to Thesis D, concluding our set of theses and also reca-pitulating the stubborn-structures argument.

Thesis D. In post-communist times, regime changes involved the change of the formal insti-tutional setting but not of the actors’ informal understanding of the separation of spheres of social action. Liberal democracy was feasible only in countries where the actors’ informal understanding was to separate the spheres of social action (Thesis A). The more unsepa-rated spheres were produced by civilizational belonging (Thesis B) and the influence of the communist regime (Thesis C) on the level of actors, the more patronal regimes came into being. Whether the regimes became democratic/multi-pyramid or autocratic/single-pyramid depended mainly on two factors: (1) the presence or lack of presidentialism and proportionate electoral system and (2) Western linkage and leverage.

The general point is that, on the level of actors, the level of separation of spheres of social action is stubborn: it does not change easily in a society, and certainly not on its own, without targeted intervention and/or gradual reform. Naturally, elements of each civiliza-tion may change, like the character of religion or its role in personal identity.⁷⁵ National identity, too, was subject to tremendous change as the Soviet empire collapsed, forcing scholars to recognize post-communist regime changes as “triple transitions” of not just allocation (economy) and constitution-making (politics) but of nationhood (identity) as well.⁷⁶ But the level of separation of spheres has historically been a slowly moving part.

Formal institutions may be able to affect the level of separation over time, as they did in the West and elsewhere,⁷⁷ but the people cannot be changed simply by placing a new formal institutional setting upon them. Instead, it is the people who will settle in these institu-tions, and—in case their understanding of separation is different from what the institutions presume—the informal interpretation of formal institutions that will dominate in the polity.⁷⁸ True, the top-down imposed communist dictatorships had a long-lasting influ-ence, but mainly because of their aggressive and pervasive nature, forcing their ideological program of merger of spheres through societies and maintaining it for decades.⁷⁹ But even here, we can observe that if the communist regime takes over societies that are advanced in the separation of the spheres of social action, while resulting in a regression, some of the earlier civilizational legacy is nonetheless passed on. The Baltic states exemplify this:

nearly five decades under Soviet occupation could not eliminate their Western-Christian

75 Hale, “Civilizations Reframed: Towards a Theoretical Upgrade for a Stalled Paradigm.”

76 Offe, “Capitalism by Democratic Design?”

77 Stefes, “Historical Institutionalism and Societal Transformations.”

78 Sztompka, The Sociology of Social Change; Elster, Offe, and Preuss, Institutional Design in Post-Communist Societies.

79 Pop-Eleches and Tucker, Communism’s Shadow.

52 • 1. Stubborn Structures

roots and transform them into highly patronalistic countries like Russia and the Orthodox successor states. Integrating them in the Soviet Union did not result in their assimilation into the Eastern-Orthodox civilization.⁸⁰

Similarly to the previous two figures, we can present as a series of interrelated phe-nomena what basic structures resulted from combining pre-regime change societal and rulership structures with post-regime change formal institutions (Figure 1.4). The starting point is the lack of separation of spheres, which now existed in a formally democratic en-vironment. This is not to mean that post-communist development ended up with model liberal democratic institutions at once—on the contrary. What happened was an attempt by post-communist countries to adopt formally Western institutions, including multi-party elections, the constitutional separation of the branches of power, and the legal recognition of the free enterprise system (as well as human rights). Yet the question was whether the democratic breakthrough was accompanied by anti-patronal transformation or not [à 7.3.4]. The lower boxes of Figure 1.4 represent, in an ideal typical fashion, what formal institutions became in the absence of anti-patronal transformation, that is, when the rudi-mentary or lack of separation prevailed on the level of actors. This shows how the inherited societal and rulership structures started to live freely from the bureaucratic edifice that communist systems had been.

Figure 1.4. Schematic depiction of the effect of the stubborn structures. Dark grey represents the root cause, medium grey represents the consequences for personal relations, light grey represents institu-tional consequences, and the lightest grey represents the systemic distortion following the two lines of consequences.

After the fall of communism’s bureaucratic machinery, which had framed personal re-lations before the regime change, rere-lations began to operate in the new institutional framework:

80 Tiido, “Where Does Russia End and the West Start?”

Lack of separation of spheres of social action (in democratic environment)

Patrimonialization Adopted political families

(informal patronal networks) Root cause

Societal structures

Rulership structures

Centralized/monopolized forms of corruption Systemic

distortion

Power&ownership Informal networks

1.5. Thesis D: Democratization Did Not Change the Separation of Spheres • 53

◆

Informal networks. In both feudal and communist times, the lack of separation of the spheres of social action and the formal institutional setting overlapped. In pre-communist times, feudal institutions (including the state and the church) were reinforcing reflections of the pre-modern society, whereas the communist bureaucracy explicitly merged the spheres of social action and managed the peo-ple accordingly. Thus, pre-regime change polities could be characterized by the supremacy of formal institutions, and informal relations, important though they were, either appeared within formal hierarchies—as among formal lords—or they were formed on the basis of the formal status and power of the respective individ-uals—as in cases of the corrupt networks forming around distributive positions in the communist era (blat) [à 5.3.5].⁸¹ After the regime change, a gap appeared between the newly established institutions, representing the separation of the spheres of social action, and social reality. This is well demonstrated by the cul-tural map of Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, presented in Figure 1.5 for the year 1996.⁸² The dimensions of survival versus self-expression on the map can equally be interpreted as the scale of closed versus open societies, that is, societies less versus more compatible with Western-style liberal democracies. As we can see, every Western democracy is located on the right half of the scale—nearer to the self-expression end—whereas every post-communist country is located on the left half of the scale—nearer to the survival end.

For engrained societal structures were respected over the culturally rootless framework of liberal democracy, formal institutions were systemically circum-vented, and occasionally transformed, in line with the informal social context. This means supremacy of informal institutions, or the above-mentioned dominance of informal interpretation of formal institutions. On the level of ordinary people, this has manifested in widespread corruption⁸³ and lack of trust in formal institutions, which typically could not even develop to a degree that people could have started to trust them.⁸⁴ On the level of the elites, the supremacy of informality has meant that formal (state or party) positions per se are secondary and it is the position in informal networks what defines real power.⁸⁵ As Vladimir Gel’man confirms, we can see “a sustainable dominance of informal institutions both on the level of policy making and in the everyday life of ordinary citizens,”⁸⁶ a situation that has been particularly visible in the Eastern-Orthodox and Islamic historical regions in general (Thesis B) and in countries that spent decades under Soviet patrimonial communism in particular (Thesis C). Huseyn Aliyev reports, “unlike informality of Central European and Balkan post-communist societies, the post-Soviet informal institutions and practices are more widespread, more significant for the population and more closely associated with political and socio-cultural spheres. […] In most

81 Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favours.

82 “WVS Database–Findings and Insights.”

83 Karklins, The System Made Me Do It.

84 Kornai, Rothstein, and Rose-Ackerman, Creating Social Trust in Post-Socialist Transition.

85 Hoffman, The Oligarchs.

86 Gel’man, “Post-Soviet Transitions and Democratization,” 97.

54 • 1. Stubborn Structures

of non-Baltic former Soviet states, informality not only constitutes a part of pop-ular social culture, but it also provides indispensable social safety nets and serves as everyday coping mechanisms, equally important in economics, politics, civil association and in inter-personal relations. According to the ‘Life in Transition’

survey […], over 60 per cent of post-Soviet households currently rely on informal Figure 1.5. Cultural map of World Values Survey wave 4 (1996) with post-communist countries encircled.

Traditional values emphasize religion, parent-child ties, deference to authority and traditional family values; secular-rational values represent less emphasis on religion, traditional family values and authority;

self-expression values give high priority to environmental protection, tolerance, and rising demands for participation in decision-making in economic and political life; and survival values place emphasis on economic and physical security. Source: “WVS Database–Findings and Insights.”

1.5. Thesis D: Democratization Did Not Change the Separation of Spheres • 55 private safety nets. In contrast, only 30 per cent of households in Central European

post-socialist countries and around 35 per cent in Balkans employ private safety nets on a daily basis.”⁸⁷

◆

Adopted political families (informal patronal networks). A corollary of the previ-ous point (as well as the countries’ patronal legacies, mentioned above with respect to Table 1.2), patronalism, which had been exercised through formally imposed relations, feudal and bureaucratic subjugation, extends far beyond any single for-mal institution in a democratic setting. In other words, inforfor-mal networks take over formal institutions and use them as façades, whereas the positions within an informal patronal network do not necessarily converge with the formal ad-ministrative positions. Power is based on the merger of political and economic resources (that is, power&ownership), as well as the position one has in the pyr-amid-like, hierarchical chain of command of the informal patronal network.

Such a network can also be called an “adopted political family,” which is a spe-cific patronal network that is kept together not by formal institutional hierar-chies—like feudalism or the nomenklatura—but by informal kinship and qua-si-kinship relations, as well as by personal loyalty to the chief patron (in line with the cultural patterns of patriarchal families [à 3.6]). In other words, a “hier-archy of elite relationships exists in which small groups of powerful elite individu-als know one another through direct personal contact and experience. These circles of elite relationships interlock: all elite individuals know and are associated with other elite individuals above and below them in the social hierarchy,” which is also

“highly centralized, with a pyramid structure vertically descending from a central […] court.”⁸⁸ Describing adopted political families as “clans” [à 3.6.2.1], Kathleen Collins explains that “clan norms demand strong loyalty to and patronizing of the clan, [and] these norms can conflict with the identity of a modern bureaucratic state. Clans turn to the state as a source of patronage and resources […]. Clan members with access to state institutions patronize their kin by doling out jobs on the basis of clan ties, not merit. Clan elites steal state assets and direct them to their network. […] The politics of clans is insular, exclusionary, and nontransparent.”⁸⁹ The regime change also brought about, beyond mere survival, a transformation of the in-herited institutional structures:

◆

Power&ownership. The dismantling of the monopoly of state property took var-ious courses in different post-communist regimes. In most of them, as a result of privatization the private sector’s share of GDP ranged between 60% and 80%

by the 2000s.⁹⁰ However, while in the West privatization is a market transaction that constitutes an alternative field of investment for the existing wealthy strata,

87 Aliyev, “Post-Soviet Informality,” 187. Also, see EBRD, “Life in Transition.”

88 North, Wallis, and Weingast, Violence and Social Orders, 36.

89 Collins, Clan Politics and Regime Transition in Central Asia, 52–53.

90 Lane, “Post-State Socialism.”

56 • 1. Stubborn Structures

in post-communist regimes it was a matter of creating the property owners.⁹¹ Yet the waves of privatization that took place in these countries were not usually conducted through a transparent, legitimate process.⁹² In Chapter 5, we examine forms of privatization and its relation to elite survival [à 5.5.2]. At this point, we just illustrate the phenomenon by invoking the Russian term widely used for it:

prikhvatizatsiya. This term is a conflation of the Russian word for privatization and the Russian verb “to acquire, to grab.” A literal translation into English would yield something like “grabitization,” which also alludes to the arbitrary, aggressive aspect of the process.⁹³

In the communist system, state property belonged to the political body and thus was owned and managed by the nomenklatura. As a result of their positions as handlers, they disposed of it like bureaucrats rather than like private owners. In the course of regime-changing privatization, the spheres of politics and the mar-ket were separate only in appearance [à 5.5.2]. Not only did the political sphere designate and provide for the first private owners, but coupled with the economic sphere, members of the political sphere held each other hostage in the following sense: In post-Soviet autocracies, centrally-planned economies did not turn into market economies in the Western sense, but got entrenched along the way in a “re-lational economy” [à 5]. The system of power&ownership was reproduced in a new form, where there cannot be economic power without political power, or at least a stake in the political hinterland,⁹⁴ and political power cannot be without economic power.⁹⁵

◆

Patrimonialization. While in pre-communist countries the rudimentary or lack of separation of the spheres of social action resulted in patrimonialism in feudal institutions, the same phenomenon, in the form it was inherited from communist times, brought about the patrimonialization of the newly established demo-cratic institutions. As Oleksandr Fisun writes, the transformation in Russia was

“a process of direct patrimonial appropriation by the ruling elites (party/man-agement; second and third level nomenclature; and regional, republic-level sub-elites) of the state control machinery. […] This process transformed the elements of patrimonial domination of the semi-traditional type that existed in the depths of the Soviet system into a system of an updated and ‘modernized’ neopatrimo-nialism, one in which […] patrimonial relations lose their traditionalist character and acquire a modern economic dimension. […] The neopatrimonial system that emerged […] stimulated the development of post-Soviet political capitalism and endowed the workings of democratic mechanisms with a neopatrimonial logic,

91 Szelényi, “Capitalisms After Communism.”

92 For examples, see Hale, Patronal Politics, 95–115; Kryshtanovskaya and White, “From Soviet Nomenklatura to Russian Elite.”

93 Granville, “‘Dermokratizatsiya’ and ‘Prikhvatizatsiya’”; Wedel, “Corruption and Organized Crime in Post-Communist States.”

94 Mara Faccio found that politically connected firms represent 7.7% of the world’s stock market capitalization, while in Russia the corresponding number is 86.7%. Faccio, “Politically Connected Firms.”

95 Åslund, Russia’s Crony Capitalism; Åslund, Ukraine.

1.5. Thesis D: Democratization Did Not Change the Separation of Spheres • 57 one in which the actors’ behavior is guided less by traditional and/or not

ideolog-ical motives than by financial incentives of the rent-seeking type.”⁹⁶

In the post-communist regimes where the appropriation of public authority for private interests (in other words corruption) is typical, these are not the objectionable and super-ficial concomitant phenomena of the established system but constituent factors of the re-gime [à 2.4, 5.3]. For such systemic distortions follow from the sociologically grounded rulership structures: patrimonialization on the one hand, and informal patronal networks on the other hand. In other words, what we can see with these rulership structures are an evolutionary level of corruption that goes beyond free-market corruption—that is occa-sional and individual—and even beyond state capture, in which criminal or oligarchic groups and the lower- or mid-level state apparatuses are involved. When informal patronal networks patrimonialize state institutions, which are also intertwined with post-communist economy and property relations, corruption is not eliminated or treated as a deviation from the norms but monopolized and operated centrally. If a single adopted political family is able to achieve this on the national level of governance, that state of affairs can be dubbed a “mafia state:” a project giving sanction the pre-modern powers vested in the patriarchal head of the adopted family—that is, a mafia—on the level of a country.⁹⁷ In a mafia state, corrupt acts divide into authorized and unauthorized illegality, and it depends on the decision of the chief patron, or the loyalty of his clients, against whom will laws be enforced and who will enjoy impunity [à 3.6.3, 4.3.4].

It may be useful at this point, before going into the regional details of democratiza-tion, to sum up the three ideal typical models through an example. The transformation of patronal networks can most easily be followed in the case of Russia, where the tsar wielded most power before the 1917 Feburary Revolution, and the elite of his patronal network were formed from the service gentry and the feudal estates (Table 1.3). The revolutions of 1917 eventually ushered in a new form of patronal network led by the party general secretary and populated largely by the party nomenklatura. In the presidential system that followed the collapse of the communist system and that had stabilized by the end of the 1990s, the elite of the patronal network takes the form of the adopted political family. The term “ruling elite”

is a neutral expression, which in itself neither refers to the organizational makeup, structure,

is a neutral expression, which in itself neither refers to the organizational makeup, structure,

Im Dokument POST-COMMUNIST REGIMES (Seite 78-86)