192
9
Democratization in
Post-Communist Countries
Perhaps more than any other region of the so-called ‘third wave’, the
post-Communist world challenges the assumption that democracy is an
automatic result of the collapse of authoritarian rule. For, while political
change in some post-Communist countries ﬁts the lens of democratization
well, in others, the ex-Soviet Union and the Balkans most
notably, the collapse of Communism has led to the implosion of the
state, civil war and the rise of power contenders whose aim is state disintegration
rather than state building. Explaining why that should be so
is at the heart of this chapter. Has democratization in East and Central
European countries fared better because these countries exhibit higher
levels of capitalist development or more dynamic civil societies? Or can
the difference be explained by the fact that East and Central European
countries have greater state capacity or more uniﬁed states?
Alternatively, can the distinct trajectories be explained by political leadership,
statecraft or luck? Finally, can the different outcomes (different,
at least, so far) be explained by geopolitics: is the relative success of
countries such as Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary a
consequence of proximity to the democratic countries of the European
Union (EU)?
This chapter presents an overview of political change following the
collapse of Communism. The dominant theoretical approaches used to
explain those changes are also discussed. The chapter then moves on to
analyze post-Communist democratization in its three dimensions,
namely: the role of the state; the signiﬁcance of civil society and social
organizations; and ﬁnally the impact of global change, geopolitics and
external actors in determining the nature of post-Communist transfor-
mations.
Democratization in Post-Communist Countries 193
Democratization in the Post-Communist World
Communism in Crisis
Communism was established in Russia after the October Revolution of
1917 when the Soviet Union was created. The Soviet system extended
to the territories of East and Central Europe, which the Soviet Union liberated
from the Nazis, after the Second World War. This meant the creation
of Communist party-states across the part of Europe that was under
the control of Moscow. An alliance system was established through the
Warsaw Pact, which brought these countries together to ensure the
defence of Communism against the capitalist West and which also
created a hierarchy of domination in Eastern Europe under the aegis of
the Soviet Union. Similarly, Soviet central planning was extended across
Eastern Europe, with only partial exception being made for Poland.
Yugoslavia and Albania also went on to establish some diplomatic and
economic independence from Moscow.
The fall of Communism, symbolically at least, took place on 10
November 1989, when the Berlin Wall which divided Europe into East and
West was forcibly torn down. But the disintegration of Soviet control over
Eastern Europe had been signalled months earlier, by the Round Table
negotiations established between the government and Solidarity, the independent
trade union in Poland. Furthermore, the decision of the Hungarian
government to do nothing to stem the ﬂood of East Germans escaping to
the West via Hungary during the summer months of 1989 was a clear indication
that the Soviet Union was no longer in control of events in the region.
The collapse of Communism, then, was sudden. But it was the result
of a long-drawn-out, multi-layered crisis, which was a combination of:
● severe and prolonged problems with centralized economic planning;
● profound political exhaustion, state decay and public apathy; and
● imperial overreach – that is, the increasing incapacity of the Soviet
Union to rule legitimately outside the frontiers of the Russian heartland.
These three elements of crisis fed off each other. It is impossible to
understand the economic crisis of Communism without reference to the
political system. Communist political economy suppressed the market
and was based on public ownership, the command economy and centralized
planning. It was assumed that, together, these would unprob-
194 Democratization
lematically deliver a rational and efﬁcient system of production and a
just allocation of goods throughout the community. Communism’s
moral claim of superiority over capitalism rested ultimately on its
promise to deliver more, and better, in material terms. To some extent,
initially this seemed to be the case. Stalinism coincided with signiﬁcant
economic growth across the Soviet bloc. Industrialization, modernization
and investment made economic expansion possible. The 1960s,
however, witnessed serious problems with the planned economy inside
the Soviet Union and also in the Eastern European countries. The
emphasis on heavy industry, established during the 1950s, proved
difﬁcult to reorient towards the production of more consumer goods
partly because of bureaucratization. Supplying and distributing goods
was equally problematic. The situation worsened in the 1970s as consumer
expectations increased. As a member of Solidarity strikingly put
it, ‘forty years of socialism and there’s still no toilet paper’ (Garton Ash
1999: 16).
‘Politics in command’ and the planned economy worked best in its
initial phase in the Soviet Union, as Maravall (1997: 59) explains:
[t]he economic efﬁciency of the model was greatest when the main task
was accumulation, the level of development low and the priorities few
and simple. In these circumstances it was possible to mobilize domestic
resources, control popular consumption, generate high levels of
savings and investment and transfer resources towards high priority
objectives. But when the problem was no longer one of accumulation
and investment rate but the productivity of these, the rationality of
resource allocation and innovative activity, the model was inefﬁcient.
Central planning travelled very badly to East and Central Europe, where
it was applied almost in textbook form in the early 1950s. Its
inefﬁciency in the more industrialized countries of Hungary, Germany
(the German Democratic Republic) and Poland led to political dissatisfaction
which, in Hungary and Poland at least, diminished the control
Moscow exercised over national policies by the 1970s. The reforms did
lead to some economic improvement in Hungary, but they also increased
the spaces for dissent, as economic activities outside the state sector
were tolerated and the party loosened its hold over social activities. As
a result, the reforms led not to a re-legitimization of Communism but to
the emergence of opposition and the development of an independent
civil society (Lomax 1997).
In any case, partial reform such as that in Hungary and Poland was
simply not enough. Ultimately, the emphasis on heavy industry was
Democratization in Post-Communist Countries 195
impossible to reform. Enormous investments had been made in immovable
plants, machinery and production chains. Disrupting that system
would have caused an unacceptable and severe dislocation of the
economy. Furthermore, there were those who did not accept that there
was a need to shift towards a more consumer-based economy. In particular,
heavy industry was justiﬁed by the military and defence
complex. In fact, a signiﬁcant contribution to the structural economic
crisis besetting Communism was the high cost to the Soviet Union of
defence and security spending. Soviet economic problems were thus an
integral result of East–West tension. Indeed, Gorbachev’s foreign minister,
Edward Shevardnadze, attributed the economic stagnation of the
Soviet Union in the 1980s principally to the cost of defence. According
to Linz and Stepan (1996: 240), Soviet military expenditure was three
times that of the US and six times as great as the European Union
average. In the light of all of this, it is not surprising that the partial
reforms of the 1970s and the more radical attempts of Gorbachev in the
1980s were blocked. They were ambiguously received and there was
little incentive for party ofﬁcials to adopt them. As a result, they failed
to halt economic stagnation. All this suggests that, from the very beginning
of the Communist experiment until the 1980s, it is impossible to
separate purely ‘economic’problems of the command economy from the
‘political’ problems resulting from single party control, bureaucratization,
central planning and the Cold War.
Nevertheless, despite these problems, the depth of the Communist
crisis was only evident in hindsight. The implosion of Communism was
unforeseen by either academics or policy-makers, in the East or West.
Most believed that a reform of the Communist leviathan state was possible.
This suggests that the Soviet Union had, in fact, been chieﬂy sustained
by the bipolar antagonism that structured the international system
between 1945 and 1989, allowing its faults to be hidden from view and
encouraging the West to inﬂate its economic and political strength.
Communism actually survived far beyond its ‘natural’ lifetime.
The Disintegration of the Soviet Union
The vast underlying structural crisis which beset the Soviet Union and
its satellites was only revealed after Mikael Gorbachev became
Secretary General of the Soviet Communist Party in 1985. Gorbachev
is often credited with being the author of Communism’s demise. His
plan was to confront the economic crisis through reform (perestroika).
Reforms aimed to increase the ﬂow of investment in the public sector
196 Democratization
and in industry, expand external trade and introduce new forms of technology.
He recognized, however, that economic reform would not
succeed without some democratization of power. In the early 1980s, as
a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Gorbachev
had advocated political opening (glasnost). Neither the economic
reforms nor process of political liberalization were designed to bring
about a liberal democracy; Gorbachev’s intention was to introduce a
programme of reforms in order to preserve the Communist system (Gill
1995). What happened was that in the process the reform movement
gained its own momentum.
According to Sakwa (1996), the reforms can be divided into three
distinct phases: rationalization (1985–6), reform (1987–90) and transformation
(1990–1). Rationalization stopped short at identifying and
acknowledging the economic problems affecting the Soviet Union. It
promised moderate reform and some openness as solutions. This was not
enough to rein in those radical members of the Communist Party who
had taken heart from Gorbachev’s initial statements, or to solve the
material problems in the system, and more far-reaching reforms, political
and economic, were attempted. In 1988, Gorbachev promised to
reform the political institutions. As a result, the elections in March 1989
were freer than ever before and some non-Communists were elected to
the new legislative chamber, the Congress of People’s Deputies. This
new agenda of reform changed the balance of power within the
Communist Party. As more radical reforms were introduced, Soviet politics
was caught in a struggle between radicals, committed to seizing the
moment for reform, and conservatives, who wished to stop it completely.
None of the party elite was, of course, committed to democratization in
the sense of the introduction of liberal democracy. However, by 1990, a
combination of popular pressure, from within Moscow especially, and
events elsewhere in the Communist bloc began to drive the pace of
events. In the course of this, a liberal parliamentary system emerged as
an option for the ﬁrst time. The governing elite, in attempting reform
from above, found itself outpaced by pressures from inside the
Communist bloc itself.
In particular, the tensions between centralization of decision-making
and the demands for autonomy by the republics that made up the Soviet
Union were the cause of the ﬁnal dissolution. The ﬁrst republics to
demand greater autonomy, then independence, were the Baltic states.
Meanwhile, Russian nationalism also re-emerged as a separate force.
Boris Yeltsin was elected Chair of the important Russian Congress in
1990. Under Yelstin’s leaderhsip, the Congress asserted Russian state-
Democratization in Post-Communist Countries 197
hood by adopting a declaration of sovereignty in June 1990. This was
followed by yet more nationalist demands from other parts of the Soviet
Union. The Ukrainian declaration, the most radical of all, called for
democracy and the creation of an Armed Forces under Ukrainian, not
Soviet, control. It was thus pressure for self-determination, rather than
democracy, which drove politics between 1990 and 1991. Increasingly,
each component part of the nominally federal but in fact highly centralized
Soviet Union was beginning to search for its own response to
the disintegration of central control. Furthermore, as power shifted to the
republics, it drained energy and authority from the centre and, crucially,
from the Party itself. The shift was not orderly or controlled; nor was it
clear which institutions or organizations of civil society would be
empowered by the collapse of the centre. In the worst of cases, power
leaked from the Communist Party to maﬁa networks and ‘uncivil’
nationalist groups; in almost all cases ‘the media, the black economy
and corrupt networks also became residual legatees of the declining
system’ (Sakwa 1996: 9–10).
Gorbachev accepted that reform had to go further and he offered a
renegotiation of the terms of federation, as well as a series of economic
reforms designed to increase the role of the market. But by this time, the
Soviet Union was suffering a crisis of credibility and Gorbachev’s promises
were simply not enough either to halt the economic crisis, or to
stem the collapse of the Communist Party. Consequently, the political
crisis worsened. In August 1991 the opponents of reform attempted a
coup while Gorbachev was away from Moscow. The August coup was
a last-gasp attempt to save the Soviet Union from disintegration. Its aim
was to turn the clock back. Yelstin, as President of Russian Federation,
led a successful counter-coup, and, at the time, was hailed internationally
as the saviour of the tentative process of democratization. The
success of the counter-coup sealed the fate of the Soviet Union. It
showed clearly that the forces of centralism did not have sufﬁcient
resources to resist the nationalist demands for autonomy. Rather belatedly,
democratization was then grafted onto what was essentially a set
of nationalist aspirations.
As the Soviet Union disintegrated, its component parts, the republics,
found themselves effectively in a political vacuum. The way forward
was not clear, either to society at large or to political elites. There was
no clear political project beyond independence. Of course, in theory, the
republics were free to attempt the transition both to statehood and to
democracy. But there were – and are – considerable obstacles to democracy.
In many independent territories of the ex-Soviet Union, there are
198 Democratization
neither social structures supportive of democracy nor a state tradition
that can assist the process of political transformation. Democratization
appears neither as a project from above nor from below. Furthermore,
the way that new states emerged, by default almost, scarcely increases
the chances for democratic outcomes. Indeed, it would be hard to disagree
with Sakwa’s assessment:
the break-up of the Soviet Union fragmented the single large dictatorship
into numerous small dictatorships, many worse than the
decayed communist regime because of the energy with which they
imposed themselves on the population, demanding conformity to
communities deﬁned by culture and ethnicity. (Sakwa 1996: 367)
Russia itself is struggling with severe economic restructuring, problems
of political leadership, the difﬁculties of creating a democratic party
system, the legacy of the strong state, revanchist nationalism and unresolved
issues relating to where its legitimate borders should be – leading
to a bloody war in Chechnya, which claims independence from Russia.
Democratic institutions are only weakly legitimate, leaving a vacuum in
politics that the Russian state, and the local elites who represent it, ﬁnd
all too easy to ﬁll. Civil society is undeveloped, and the market is both
contested ideologically and practically unrestrained. The conditions for
democratization, at least in the short term, are poor.
East and Central Europe
The distinguishing feature of the collapse of authoritarianism in East
and Central Europe, is its simultaneity: all the national communisms of
‘the outer empire’collapsed at more or less the same time (Pravda 1996).
This suggests a single common cause. The reforms introduced in the
Soviet Union, and especially the beginning of perestroika, were important
catalysts for change in East and Central Europe. The withdrawal of
Soviet support was the most important of the multiple causes of the collapse
of Communism in Eastern Europe (Waller 1993; Pravda 1996).
Quite rapidly, however, the pace of change in East and Central Europe
outstripped events in Moscow.According to Linz and Stepan (1996: 235)
the ‘domino-like collapse’ of Communism in East and Central Europe
was so swift that in some countries, such as Czechoslovakia, Romania
and Bulgaria, there was no signiﬁcant domestic pressure for change and
transition was driven simply by the ripples from the regional wave.
Democratization in Post-Communist Countries 199
Nevertheless, underlying the collapse of Communism in East and
Central Europe lie popular and elite aspirations suppressed over generations
– for economic reform, social freedoms and, most important of
all, national self-determination. If democratization was driven in the ﬁrst
place by Gorbachev’s reforms, then it was immediately nourished by
deeply felt national demands to make nominal sovereignty real. The
mode of transition, however, was principally determined by the extent
to which even an embryonic opposition had existed prior to 1989 and
the different national experiences of Communism. In Czechoslovakia
and East Germany, some degree of material prosperity under
Communism was able to mask mass discontent, preventing the development
of strong opposition. Furthermore, in Czechoslovakia, the
Soviet invasion in 1968 to crush ‘socialism with a human face’, froze
the totalitarian system in place and the system largely was maintained
through fear and mass disengagement with the public sphere. In the
German Democratic Republic, in addition to relative prosperity,
the trauma of division from West Germany, front-line status in the
East–West conﬂict, a rigid surveillance state and a policy of allowing a
few dissenters periodically to leave, together kept levels of opposition
low. These options were not possible in Poland. Here, periodic economic
crises had driven the leadership to seek closer collaboration with the
West from the 1970s. And Poland, like Hungary, has incurred substantial
foreign debts during the 1970s and 1980s, a result of their strategy
of introducing market mechanisms into the production system. So, in
Poland and Hungary, inroads had already been made into Communist
domination before Gorbachev came to power. In short, the distinctly
national post-Communist patterns were shaped by differing patterns of
national history and culture, different levels of economic prosperity and
degree of crisis, and patterns of state–society engagement opposition.
As the ﬁrst of the East and Central European transitions, the Polish
experience merits particular attention. Unlike some other postCommunist
transitions, the Polish experience was not simply the result
of the collapse of the Soviet empire. Democratization in Poland was,
instead, the culmination of a process of sustained social opposition
across the country through the 1980s. Its uniqueness, as it seemed at the
time, brought the anti-Communist opposition unprecedented international
support and media interest. Hence the Polish transition also
beneﬁted from the attention it received abroad. For the Western press,
the leader of Solidarity, Lech Walesa, a Catholic, a nationalist and a
trade unionist, came to embody in one person the differing strains of
Polish opposition to Communism. International interest offered him a
200 Democratization
degree of protection. By the end of the 1980s, it was simply no longer
possible for the Polish regime, dependent on external ﬁnancing and
weak internally, to break Solidarity up or to imprison Walesa.
Solidarity was born in 1980, under Walesa’s charismatic leadership,
and had a membership of 10 million. From the ﬁrst, Solidarity was more
than a trade union. It made political claims: for national self-determination,
for freedom and for civil liberties. It received the blessing and
support of Western politicians and of the Catholic Church and the Polish
pope, John Paul II. Initially, the government attempted to suppress the
organization through the introduction of martial law. This failed,
however, and Solidarity survived. Unable to eradicate it, General
Jaruzelski’s government was eventually forced into negotiations in
February 1989. The vitality of Solidarity had made the task of political
and economic governance impossible. But even more surprising than the
fact that negotiations took place at all was the outcome: the government
agreed to the creation of a parliamentary democracy and to elections for
June of that year. Quite incredibly for a social movement with no experience
of electioneering, Solidarity won the elections. Just as signiﬁcant
was the fact that the Communist Party recognized that it had lost them
(Garton Ash 1999). A few months later, a government was formed, led
by Solidarity activists, supported by the Communist Party, which chose
working with the new government as the best option for stability.
Tadeusz Mazowiecki became Prime Minister. Walesa, meanwhile, was
elected to the presidency a year later, in 1990. To all intents and purposes,
then, the transition moved smoothly along the path laid down in
the Round Table talks.
But there were important signs as early as 1990, that, despite the pact
between Solidarity and the Communists, building democracy would not
be an easy task. Some of the difﬁculties stemmed from the nature of the
transition. Solidarity was a movement born in civil society, with a very
loose structure, and it was ill-adapted to government. Furthermore, it
rested overwhelmingly on the personal authority of Walesa, who, as far
as it was possible to tell, was really more of a nationalist that a democrat.
By 1990, competition between groups within Solidarity meant that
it had effectively ceased to be a national movement. Thus, within a year,
not only had Communism collapsed but Solidarity, which had shaped
Polish politics through the 1980s, has disintegrated as a uniﬁed organization.
At the same time, it became evident that civil society in Poland
was not as strong or as dense as it had ﬁrst appeared. Levels of electoral
absentionism, for example, even in the key election of 1989, were also
quite high. This was a worrying sign of public apathy. It was the ﬁrst
Democratization in Post-Communist Countries 201
indication that perhaps the peak of civil society activism had passed; it
seemed that Polish society had been prepared to mobilize against
Communism but it was less sure that the new system was the solution.
By the 1990s, civil society had been further weakened by the combined
consequences of demobilization, the residual cultural and political
effects of Communism and the social consequences of economic transformation
(Bernhard 1996).
In fact, the economy had been moving towards a severe crisis at the
time of the Round Table talks. Indeed, at the time even the Communists
reportedly favoured the rapid introduction of market mechanisms in an
effort to dynamize the economy (Gentleman and Zubek 1992)
According to Zubek (1997) there was broad support for economic liberalization
in Poland from the mid-1980s, mainly because it was interpreted
as the key to unlocking Western support and to moving Poland
out of the Soviet sphere. As a result, the ﬁrst grand debate in post-1989
politics revolved around how to manage the economy and, in particular,
who could manage the transition to a market economy more efﬁciently,
the nationalists or the technocrats. Political debate, whether about how
to deepen democratic culture or how to implement much-needed social
reforms, was pushed into second place to these more urgent questions.
To some extent, this was a reﬂection of the fact that the transition had
been opened through elite negotiation. Space was not created during the
transition for popular debate. At the same time, the outgoing regime was
able to impose conditions for its withdrawal. These included amnesties
for Communist misdeeds in the past; the unimpeded transformation of
the Communist Party into a ‘social democratic’ party; the uncontested
right of ex-Communists to participate in national politics; and protection
for the state-created Communist labour union, which had been
designed to sap strength away from Solidarity in the wake of the 1982
strikes. Together, these conditions guaranteed a presence in Polish politics
for individuals associated with pre-1989 politics and a substantial
Communist legacy for post-Communist politics.
As in Poland, the introduction of Western-style institutions in
Hungary – democracy and the market – was part of a package to save
the economy and secure Western aid. Affected by events in Poland and
the Soviet Union, as well as by evidence of its loss of internal legitimacy,
the Hungarian Communist Party dissolved itself in October 1989. The
following month the Czechoslovak Communists, who had resisted liberalization,
were brought down in a week by the hastily organized oppositional
Civic Forum. In both countries, Round Table negotiations based
on the Polish experience were arranged as a device to ensure some form
202 Democratization
of stable government. Party systems quickly emerged. Most parties were
elite groupings of power contenders, with little real contact with the
electorate. At the same time, the civil society option, which had seemed
so vibrant during the early months of the transitions in both Hungary and
Czechoslovakia began to fragment and weaken (Kopecky 2001). For the
German Democratic Republic, the emergence of open opposition in the
summer and autumn of 1989 was the signal for its unlamented demise.
By November, half a million people felt conﬁdent enough to demonstrate
against the regime in Leipzig. In the same month, the Party leadership
resigned and the by now established formula was put to work:
Round Table negotiations were held with the opposition. The end of
East German Communism also meant the possibility of German
reuniﬁcation. As a result, East Germans re-entered the West, not as citizens
of a post-Communist state, but as members of a new Germany.
The Balkans
The Balkan countries (Rumania, Bulgaria, Albania and the independent
states of the ex-Yugoslavia) have followed different, and somewhat less
successful, post-Communist paths. In all these countries, Communism
had adapted more to local traditions than in East and Central Europe. At
the same time, distance from Moscow and from the front-line of
East–West conﬂict helped seal off these countries to some extent.
Nevertheless the reverberations of events in East and Central Europe
were also felt here: the Communist regime was removed in Bulgaria in
November 1989 by reformists from within the governing party; in
Rumania, the personalist Communist leader, Nicholai Ceauscescu, was
forced to ﬂee and was executed in December 1989; and Albania
embarked upon a transition a year later. Unlike in East and Central
Europe, these transitions were not the result of pacts between oppositions
and governing elites; nor were they the result of unstoppable social
pressure. So, although the new constitutions proclaimed a new era of
liberal democracy, the terms of transition were unclear. In most countries,
nationalism, or more properly conﬂicts between groups over who
would successfully lay claim to representing the nation, initially deﬁned
the terms of democracy. Ethnic tensions shaped the new systems much
less in Bulgaria or Slovenia, but elsewhere, politics became, to one
degree or another, a ﬁght for spoils between different groups.
The centrality of nationalism in contemporary Balkan politics is of
course partly the result of its forcible suppression under Communism.
It has become a tool for elites, through which they can create new bases
Democratization in Post-Communist Countries 203
of post-Communist legitimacy and ensure continued access to the state.
Appeals to ethnic nationalism are possible, furthermore, because the
terms of transition involved no inducements for elites to compromise
(Gallagher 1995). But is also the result of the absence of failed statebuilding
and in particular of the fact that the Communist states could
never accept the development of civil society in the region. As a result,
ethnic struggles slip easily into open conﬂict. In Yugoslavia, there were
three wars following the collapse of Communism, between Serbia and
Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia and Serbia and Kosovo, as well as thirteen
years of dictatorship in Serbia by Communist-turned-nationalist
Slobodan Milosevic who used the wars to stay in power. The bloody
nature of these wars overshadowed ethnic and nationalist conﬂict elsewhere.
But Gallagher (1996; 1998) shows how similar tensions dominate
politics elsewhere in the region.
The national problem in the Balkans is, furthermore, intensiﬁed by the
social and economic legacies of Communism. Stalinism had meant the
introduction of heavy industry into what were mainly peasant
economies. This created enormous social and economic change and has
left a destabilizing legacy for transition politics:
Stalinist heavy industry…left a class of ex-peasant factory workers
in derelict industries lacking markets, who were ripe for populist
mobilization just as landless peasants had been in the 1930s.
(Gallagher 1995: 355)
These social problems tend to map, albeit unevenly, onto ethnic conﬂicts
in the region, making liberalism and tolerance difﬁcult to achieve and
the creation of a national civil society almost impossible.
Theorizing Democratization in the Post-Communist World
The key questions for democratization in the post-Communist world are:
● Why did the transitions occur?
● What kinds of democracies are taking shape? and
● How can we explain the different post-Communist trajectories?
The starting point for answering these questions has, logically enough,
been the frameworks inherited from studies of earlier transitions.
Schmitter and Karl (1994) maintain that theories of democratization can
204 Democratization
be adapted to ﬁt East and Central Europe. Higley, Kulberg and Pakulski
(1996) advocate adopting the elite agency approach, developed for
Southern Europe and Latin America, to explain the initiation of transition
in East and Central Europe. They argue that in particular ‘a desire
among elites for greater security’ was behind the turn towards democracy
in post-Communist societies (Higley, Kulberg and Pakulski 1996:
134). It was not, then, simply a consequence of the Gorbachev effect.
Different outcomes are attributed to different terms of transition. So, the
persistence of ‘semiauthoritarianism’in some new systems is due to ‘the
lack of turnover in top-level political positions’ (Higley, Kulberg and
Pakulski 1996: 138) and more successful outcomes, such as post-1989
Czechoslovakia, are the result of elite power-sharing (Higley, Kulberg
and Pakulski 1996: 141–2).
But a number of studies have questioned the extent to which the transition
framework constitutes an adequate lens through which to view
post-Communism. It has been suggested that borrowed frameworks misrepresent
the nature of the crisis which gripped the region in the late
1980s and which led to the collapse of Communism. Bunce (1995a;
1995b) argues that the nature of Communism means that comparisons
with Southern Europe and Latin America are misleading. The role of
society and the masses, she argues, was generally far more signiﬁcant
in Communist transitions than in Latin America. At the same time, the
importance of geopolitics is certainly more immediately striking in postCommunism.
The way out of this impasse is to adopt a middle position
(see Sakwa 1996). This means that the differences between the postCommunist
transitions and the earlier examples of Southern Europe and
Latin America are important and are essentially ones of context (Gill
2000). In other words, understanding outcomes – or what kinds of new
systems are being created – necessarily means paying attention to the
economic, cultural, ideological and geopolitical legacies from
Communism as well as to the behaviour of elites during the immediate
transitional period.
Where democratization has been most successful, that is in East and
Central Europe, theories of change borrow most heavily from the
agency-centred perspectives. So there is a signiﬁcant volume of research
on pact-making and the terms of transition in East and Central Europe.
Munck and Skalnik Leff (1997: 345), for example, argue that the degree
to which the transition is the result of pacts ‘affects the form of post transitional
regime and politics through its inﬂuence on the pattern of elite
competition, on the institutional rules crafted during the transition and
on key actors acceptance or rejection of the new rules of the game’.
Democratization in Post-Communist Countries 205
There is also a literature on institution building, parties and electoral
systems ( Lewis 1997; Kopecky and Mudde 2000). This literature sees
the experiences of East and Central Europe as part of a data pool on
democratization in general.
However, where the democratization project has run into problems,
or where it hardly forms part of the political agenda, an array of competing
perspectives has emerged, all of which assert the speciﬁcity of
political, sociological and economic change in the region. Perhaps the
most notable has been the political culture argument, an approach muted
in studies on Southern Europe, Latin America and Africa. The legacies
of Communist, Asian or an undeveloped mass culture have been used to
explain the weak civil societies and low levels of independent political
activity that can be found. A focus on culture also pays attention to the
persistent or resurgent ethnic identities that split society and the state,
and cause state and social crises or even ethnic violence and war in some
parts of the region. Indeed, such are the problems posed by nationalism
in the region that there have been calls to (re)introduce a focus on statebuilding
into the literature on transition in post-Communist countries
(Kopecky and Mudde 2000).
In terms of explaining outcomes, the culturalist approach should be
complemented by a political economy focus, that explains the ‘dual transition’
problem – the impact of the establishment of markets alongside
new political institutions. How has the need to restructure the economy
created constraints or opportunities for democratization (see, for
example, Stark 1992; Balcerowicz 1994; Bryant 1994; and Keman
1996)? Has the creation of markets made civil societies stronger? Are
post-Communist states able to adapt to the very different functions they
now have to carry out? In general, this research points to the vital importance
of state capacity and social cohesion for successful democratization
and those countries which are experiencing some success with
democratization enjoy aspects of both.
The State
Democratization in ex-Communist countries implies a transformation of
the role and competencies of the state. It is not simply a case of creating
a more efﬁcient state; democratization implies changing the rationale
of state activity. This involves challenging cultures of secrecy and
non-accountability and building a consensual relationship between state
206 Democratization
and society-based actors. But in the ﬁrst place, of course, the postCommunist
state must be able to claim uncontested sovereignty. A sine
qua non of democratization, and one that cannot be taken for granted
under post-Communism, is the legitimacy of the nation state.
The ‘Stateness’ Problem
Perhaps more than any other area of ‘third wave’ transitions, the question
of nationalism and the stateness problem pose a question mark over
democratization in post-Communist states. While some countries have
coped strikingly well with this issue, more have been unable to do so.
We analyzed above the extent to which nationalism has derailed democratization
in the Balkans. But nationalism does not only affect democratization
negatively when it leads to open war. The problem with any
ethnic deﬁnition of the nation is that by creating insiders and outsiders
within the same territorial unit, some groups are deﬁned as beyond or
outside citizenship, or at best as only having limited citizenship rights.
In these cases, nationalism becomes a vehicle for policies of exclusion
that are, at the same time, socially legitimized. This kind of nationalism
is, in fact, far more endemic in post-Communism than is open warfare.
Examples of this include ethnic Russians who suffer systemic discrimination
in the Baltic states; and the growing numbers of Romany from
the Czech and Slovak Republics who face social and political exclusion
of such magnitude that they migrate in huge numbers.
The failure to challenge racist concepts of nationhood and to build
societies based on tolerance and ethnic pluralism bodes ill for improving
levels of participation, welfare and development in the long term.
Moreover, the difﬁculties with the transition to market-based economies
that many post-Communist countries have experienced have created
communities who regard nationalism as the only way to express opposition
to what are increasingly seen as policies of impoverishing
Westernization. A defence of local traditions, the appeals to ‘traditional’
ways of life and the exclusion of ‘the other’ is the result. Western aid,
even in defence of democracy, can actually provoke an even greater
nationalist backlash in these circumstances. Of course, some of these
problems are undoubtedly only short-term and it is possible to exaggerate
the threat that ethnic nationalism presents. But it is also important
to recognize that democracy requires communities to live together
peacefully, even if it cannot force individuals to accept each other fully.
This means that, in multi-ethnic states, policies and institutions must
manage difference effectively. So far, however, post-Communist states
Democratization in Post-Communist Countries 207
have shown a real reluctance to create institutions that guarantee multicultural
social and political rights.
State Capacity
The state tradition in Eastern Europe is very different from that of the
West. These differences pre-date Communism (Anderson 1974) and are
discussed in Box 9.1.
The Communist regimes used already existing state traditions to try
and promote modernization, rationality and progress. The strong state
was the means to carry through the Marxist project. It made the
command economy possible. But Communist states also went to inordinate
lengths to police the private sphere and to carry out policies of
social control. They tried to shape beliefs through education and penetrated
civil society by organizing leisure and cultural activities. Even
family life was not immune from the reaches of the state. Surveillance
was routinely carried out to ensure compliance, along with repression,
information-gathering and the inculcation of fear. Indeed, Communist
states depended on surveillance for their very survival. This has
inevitably left an important and uncomfortable legacy in state traditions.
Box 9.1 The State Tradition in the East
Historically, the state in Eastern Europe was much stronger than in Western
Europe. The state was important politically and economically, especially
since alternative power contenders from within society were much weaker,
mainly because economic development was slower, but also because of
geographic fragmentation and poor communications. The idea that law
enforcement should be independent of the executive, for example, was slow
to develop. The boundaries of state activities were never clear and the state
intervened in areas that by the end of the nineteenth century in the West
were regarded as the private sphere. For Schopﬂin (1993: 11–12) ‘the discretionary
power of the state’ in the East had its origins in ‘the principle of
the royal prerogative, [the idea] that the ruler has the right to take action in
any area of politics unless he is expressly prevented from doing so by law.
This principle enabled the state to retain and promote its autonomy in the
crucial ﬁelds of taxation and military organization. Society was too weak
to exercise control over these areas, whereby it could not sustain its autonomy
vis-à-vis the state.’ Communism drew on the established tradition of
the strong state, not only in Russia and the territories of the former Soviet
Union, but also in East and Central Europe.
208 Democratization
Civil society is regarded with suspicion. The state apparatus remains
primed for coercion, although in practice many post-Communist states
no longer have the resources to repress effectively. Communist legacies
such as these in Russia are discussed in Box 9.2.
Box 9.2 State Traditions in Russia
One of the characteristics of a democracy is an open and accountable state.
The Russian state remains difﬁcult to access and reluctant to offer information
to its citizens. There is also evidence that state ofﬁcials distrust the
public and do not always tell the truth. The culture of the Russian state,
then, is not radically different from that of the Soviet state. Government
and ofﬁcials have not caught up with changes made possible by the onset
of democratization, such as the fact that the public can now access information
from abroad. At the same time, the state, though it does not operate
democratically, is no longer monolithic, so information leaks out quickly
and incoherently. The events surrounding the sinking of the Russian
nuclear submarine, the Kursk, in the Barents Sea in August 2000 reveal
some of the pathologies of the Russian state.
The immediate government reaction to the accident was to lie. It
claimed that many of the submarine’s crew of 118 men had survived and
that the Russian Navy would be able to rescue them. Offers of assistance
from Britain and Norway were rejected. In fact, the Russian Navy did not
have the equipment to mount a rescue. Finally, after a week, British and
Norwegian teams were allowed in. This revealed what the government had
always known – that the accident had been far worse than had been
claimed and that most, if not all, of the men did not survive it. Meanwhile,
the government treated the families of the sailors who died with contempt
and disdain. No efforts were made to inform them before broadcasting
news of the accident in the media, so the families learned that their fathers,
sons and husbands had been in a serious accident from the television or
the radio. Relatives were not offered assistance of any kind to enable them
to travel to the naval base from where the rescue activities were supposed
to be being organized and to where the submarine would, supposedly, be
brought. They were given false hope that the men were alive, although
they could see that little or no effort was being made to save them.
Meanwhile, despite the crisis, President Putin remained on holiday, until
it was ofﬁcially announced that all the men were dead. There is, in all of
this, little to mark out the responses of the Russian state from that of the
Soviet state during the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986. Although
traces of contamination were found as far away as the UK, the Soviet
government denied that the accident was serious, restricted the ﬂow of
information to local inhabitants and effectively abandoned those affected
to their fate.
Democratization in Post-Communist Countries 209
Communist states were strong, but they were not efﬁcient. Strength
did not translate into capacity. The crisis of Communism, indeed, was
rooted in the very inefﬁciency of the state. Economies were bedevilled
by bottlenecks, shortages, under-production, antiquated machinery and
weak distributional channels; and secretive, irrational and bureaucratic
decision-making made by political elites who were out of touch with
popular needs and demands. The lack of a capable bureaucracy now a
real hindrance to the implementation of both political and economic
reform. Equally, traditions of secrecy and of corruption create obstacles
to the democratization and to mass support for the new systems. The
World Bank (2000) has expressed concern that the problem of the state
is at the heart of poor economic and political performance: ‘in many
countries, the public perceives corruption to be woven into the basic
institutional framework, undermining governance and weakening the
credibility of the state’. In particular, the Bank suggests that the postCommunist
state is captured by special interests and that policies are
shaped by restricted non-democratic networks.
Civil Society and Democratization in the Post-Soviet World
The impetus for democratization under Communism was national or
regional (Przeworski 1991). In some countries, society clearly rejected
Communism, sometimes via the formation of opposition organization
and, in other cases, through the more passive route of simply by-passing
the state. In East and Central Europe, in particular, the revolutions of
1989 were made in the name of ‘the people’. In these cases, the transitions
were taken to represent the triumph of the ‘civil society project’
(Smolar 1996). In contrast, in the ex-Soviet Union, the role of ‘the
people’ in bringing down Communism was rather more ambiguous.
Labour unions, religious organizations and human rights movements
emerged as signs of the development of civil society in East and Central
Europe before 1989. But the cohesion and inﬂuence of these organizations
declined after the immediate onset of transition. There are a
number of reasons for this. First of all, the strength of civil society in
1989 was actually exaggerated. For Marata (2000) civil society was able
to bring down authoritarian regimes but not strong or cohesive enough
to offer an alternative political direction. By 1990 when the state reorganized
following the Communist collapse there was already less space
for social dissent than had been expected. Secondly, the process of economic
reform fractured the civil society movements, making it difﬁcult
210 Democratization
for them to engage effectively with the state. Drawing on research in
Hungary, Miszlivetz (1997) attributes the loss of interest in participation
after the ﬁrst democratic breakthrough to the alienation that accompanied
market reform. Thirdly, civil society withered with the eruption of
revanchist nationalism. Nationalism not only offered an alternative site
of mobilization, it represents the denial of the civil society project and
the triumph of ascriptive identity (Seligman 1992). In Yugoslavia, civil
society was simply crushed in the early 1990s by the forces of nationalism
(see Box 9. 3).
Box 9.3 Civil Society and Nationalism in Yugoslavia
The collapse of the Eastern bloc led to the disintegration of Yugoslavia. A
new, smaller, Yugoslavia emerged, based on Serbian hegemony. Because
war broke out almost immediately, democratization in Yugoslavia lagged
behind the rest of the region. Aggressive Serbian nationalism led to the wars
that tore Bosnia and Kosovo apart in the 1990s. Milosevic was sustained
in power in Serbia by nationalism, which effectively curtailed opposition.
When NATO decided to intervene in 1999 to protect the Muslims in
Kosovo, Milosevic’s hold on power was strengthened. An intense wave of
nationalism swept the country. Serbians constructed the NATO attacks as
an attempt to destroy the country. Serbia suffered considerable material
damage (it was estimated that 62 per cent of Serbia’s transport system was
destroyed, 70 per cent of its electrical power stations damaged and 80 per
cent of oil reﬁneries were affected by the bombing), but support for the
government increased. Nationalism seemed to have eclipsed civil society
and Milosevic remained in power.
Once the war was over, however, the political climate was very different.
Forced to call presidential elections in September 2000 for reasons of
domestic and international legitimacy, Milosevic hoped that nationalism,
and electoral manipulation if necessary, would enable him to win. However,
during the campaign, opposition from society erupted so strongly that it
became clear he could only win by fraud. The opposition, with the support
of the few independent observers who had been present at the elections,
claimed outright victory in the ﬁrst round. Milosevic tried to use force to
quell the massive street demonstrations that erupted. A campaign of civil
disobedience began. Children were kept off from school, a transport strike
was organized in Belgrade and thousands of people took to the streets.
Miners went on strike in the huge mining complex of Kolubara in an attempt
to paralyze the economy as well. Journalists working for the state-controlled
television and newspapers joined the opposition. As the opposition
increased, so Milosevic’s grip on the state weakened and the police refused
to stop the strikers and the protesters. Milosevic was ﬁnally forced out of
ofﬁce.
Democratization in Post-Communist Countries 211
More fundamentally, however, civil society was bound to weaken
with the emergence of political society, as political parties coalesced
around local and national elite ﬁgures and organized for the purpose of
contesting elections and gaining power. Civil society was in effect
drained by political society. According to Ost (1993), the intelligentsia
in Eastern Europe had moved into the social movements as part of their
project of revitalizing civil society in opposition to state. They were thus
over-represented in the leadership of the 1980s social movements
(Kopecky and Barnﬁeld 1999). But when it became possible to join
political parties or even the government, they chose to do so, leaving the
social movements leaderless. At the same time, they had pushed the
social movements towards adopting high moral and political agendas,
rather than bread-and-butter questions of material improvement, making
it difﬁcult for the social movements to adapt to the new circumstances.
Once democratization had begun, it was not clear, even to the members
of the movements themselves, what further role they had to play.
Disintegration was almost inevitable. For Lomax (1997) this failure to
stay in civil society, rather than contributing to its demise, amounts
almost to a betrayal of democratic ideals by the intelligentsia.
The weakness of civil society in post-Communism is therefore a considerable
democratic fault line. Not only is it difﬁcult to imagine participation
and citizenship without vibrant social organizations, it is also
difﬁcult to imagine how pressures can be brought to bear to reform and
change the state. At the same time, in view of the disintegration of the
states and the collapse of state services in the former Soviet Union, civil
society organizations are desperately needed to keep communities
together and to provide the resources that allow people to survive physically
and psychologically. Political parties, which have emerged
strongly throughout the region, structure legislatures and elections but
have relatively few social linkages. They cannot be substitutes for civil
society.
Democratization and Globalization
The collapse of Communism in 1989 was a globalized event. In this
sense, it was not the intentional result of conscious pro-democracy
strategies planned over the long term. Rather it emerged out of the
results of unforeseen actions and the unintended consequences of reform
attempts, in a global context in which democratization was seen as the
only possible alternative alternative to Communism. As protesters were
212 Democratization
pulling down the Wall in Berlin, they knew they were being watched in
the world’s media and this was one of the reasons they had the
conﬁdence to challenge the East German state. Without the international
media, 1989 would simply not have happened. More properly, however,
it was the proximity of the West, the penetration of Western social identities
into the East and the pull of the capitalist economy which led to
the Communist disintegration and which provided alternative social and
economic models inside Communism. Put simply, it was no longer possible,
in Europe at any rate, to sustain closed national systems, especially
when they have long lost popular legitimacy.
How far post-Communism is shaped by its role within the global order
is a question of a different order. After all, we argued above that state
traditions in particular were important in understanding different postCommunist
trajectories. Nevertheless, the globalization of the world
economy is also a major determining factor, as Lewis (1997: 4) argues:
the international context was of prime signiﬁcance [for explaining
democratization ] and it was often through the combined effects of
modernization and global economic and technological developments
that the pattern of democratization has been determined.
In particular, joining Europe was a major driving force behind East and
Central European transitions. But Europe was not really seen as an
outside force in East and Central Europe. Democratization was about rejoining
the West from which the region had been severed. From this perspective,
democratization and Westernization, far from being global
imposition, actually constituted a process of normalization. According
to Milan Kundera (see Kearns 1996: 59), for the Poles, the Czechs and
the Hungarians,
their nations have belonged to a part of Europe rooted in Roman
Christianity. For them the word ‘Europe’ does not represent a phenomenon
of geography but a spiritual notion synonymous with the
West. The moment Hungary is no longer European – that is, no
longer Western – it is driven from its destiny, beyond its own history:
it loses the essence of its identity.
For Kearns (1996: 62) this is precisely why European (or Western)
advice was legitimate in post-Communist East and Central Europe, possessing
‘an almost magical quality’. Glasman (1994) explains how the
‘magic of the West’ shaped events in Poland following Solidarity’s electoral
victories in 1989 and 1990. Before taking ofﬁce, Solidarity’s pref-
Democratization in Post-Communist Countries 213
erence was for an industrial relations system which combined state regulation
with a social market system. Once in power, however, concerns
about the deteriorating economy, the need to create new channels of
capital investment and a desire to join Europe combined to lead the government
towards austerity measures, stabilization policies and a commitment
to rapid marketization. For the Prime Minister, Mazowiecki, it
was important that the transition to capitalism be validated by the experiences
of Western Europe. Nevertheless, whatever magic the idea of
Europe may have possessed, its role in the region was backed up by the
resource dependency of the East. Europe possessed credits, investments,
security, all of which were desperately needed.
Geopolitics and Democratic Promotion
It was partly as a result of globalization that democratization became a
part of the political agenda under Communism. Furthermore, Western
inﬂuences shaped domestic actors’ identities and policy preferences, as
the Polish example above reveals. In fact, after 1989, conscious policies
undertaken by the West became a signiﬁcant factor in post-Communist
politics generally. For reasons of security, development and geopolitics,
Western (and particularly Western European) actors have developed
quite different agendas for East and Central Europe, the territories of the
former Soviet Union and the Balkan states. Different Western actors
have also focused on very different kinds of policies. Some are concerned
with establishing a market economy, and others primarily support
the creation of a democratic order.
The policies adopted by Western European governments and the
European Union towards post-Communist countries can essentially be
described as a mix of aid and advice. The option of rewarding favoured
countries with closer trade links or even integration constitutes the backdrop
that gives Western Europe a particular leverage. The PHARE programme
was created in 1989 as the aid arm of EU’s cooperation with
the East (Pridham 1999). PHARE established ﬁrm political conditions
for aid, relating especially to human rights and to the maintenance of
formal democracy. The Trade and Cooperation agreements created
shortly after gave way to the more complex Europe Agreements in the
mid-1990s, and set up areas of political dialogue as well as economic
and cultural cooperation (Hyde-Price 1994). Nevertheless, these programmes
have come in for considerable criticism for tying aid (Kearns
1996), for their small budgets and hyped programmes (Nagle and Mahr
214 Democratization
1999) and for mismanagement. According to some sources, up to twothirds
of the PHARE budget has gone in paying for consultancies rather
than to the countries it is earmarked for (Ost 1997). In conclusion, while
aid from the European Union aid has certainly been visible, its impact
is questioned.
In contrast to the European Union, US aid has primarily been destined
for the countries of the ex-Soviet Union and for Russia in particular.
Much of this ﬂows through the international ﬁnancial institutions.
Essentially it is economic aid, aimed at speeding up the transition to a
market economy, but it comes with political conditionality attached. For
Sharman and Kanet (2000), these policies actually hinder democratization.
In particular, they encourage technocratic and undemocratic policymaking.
Thus it is not only the social results of marketization in Russia
– increased hardship and inequality – that are questioned but
more…the manner in which decisions have been taken and implemented;
in effect to avoid those institutions of democratic government
that might slow, review or reject measures in line with societal
interests and thereby stymie technocratic prescriptions. (Sharman and
Kanet 2000: 236)
The limited success of these programmes is testimony to the ‘technical’
difﬁculties of supporting democracy from outside. But it also graphically
illustrates the problems inherent in trying to impose liberal democracy
as the only end-game in the messy and confused politics of
post-Communism.
Given the difﬁculties that beset aid policies, then, why were they put
in place and why do they continue? They are driven by a combination
of a security logic – a hangover from the Cold War – and a view that the
post-Communist countries represented almost virgin terrain for the
development of capitalism. According to Nagle and Mahr (1999: 271):
‘“Western” inﬂuence in post-communist Europe is part of a larger
emerging pattern of a liberated and adventurous global capitalism.’ In
other words, support for democratization is derived from the assumption
that the new political order will create trade and investment opportunities
which will beneﬁt Western companies and governments. Ultimately,
democratization programmes pull post-Communist countries into the
mainstream of the global political economy. The result is an uneven subordination
of the Eastern economies to Western Europe: the best-placed
economies will achieve some integration with the European Union while
the rest will become a hinterland. This pattern of integration into the
West through economic discipline and subordination will make it
Democratization in Post-Communist Countries 215
difﬁcult for the Eastern economies to close the gap with the West,
leading to the institutionalization of dependency on the West. For Kearns
(1996: 81), this dependency is maintained not only by the West itself but,
crucially, by the new political elites of post-Communist countries who
perceive short-term and personal beneﬁts from the prestige and legitimation
they are endowed with as a result of Western contacts.
Conclusion
This chapter has highlighted the complexities attaching to transition in
post-Communist countries and discussed the extent to which a strong
tendency towards democratization can be discerned. The varieties of
post-Communist politics are greater even than in Latin America.
Moreover, it is less possible to speak of a single regional pattern than in
either Latin America or Southern Europe. Three basic patterns of postCommunism
can be seen: stable, if limited, democracies in parts of East
and Central Europe, sustained by bumpy economic development; unstable
and contested democratization in Russia and the other territories of
the former Soviet Union, where de-territorialization of the state and
worsening poverty, this latter especially in Russia, undermine the
chances for deepening democratization in the short term; and ‘nationalism
in command’, that is the subordination of democratization in the
Balkans by elites who are able to manipulate nationalist and ethnic tensions.
The differences in regional experiences, then, are tremendous.
What accounts for these very different trajectories? We have drawn
attention in particular to the legacies of the Communist state and the
‘Eastern’ state traditions and to the general weakness of civil society as
factors constraining the democratization project. While civil society was
able to contribute to the demise of communism in innumerable acts of
resistance, great and small, it is presently weak, vis-à-vis both political
society and the state. Statecraft, which might have been expected to be
able to triumph over these unfavourable structural constraints, is, on the
whole, proving to be less decisive in determining outcomes than was initially
hoped. The very strong support the international community is
lending to the democratization experiments in the region is an attempt
to counter these obstacles. Indeed, generally, the processes of globalization
are forces for change across the region. However, the extent to
which they are supportive of democratization, especially in the sense of
creating inclusive societies, based on some recognition of rights and citizenship,
is rather more open to question. External assistance is tied, for
216 Democratization
the most part, to the development of trade and market linkages and citizenship
programmes receive relatively low priority in funding terms.
So, in the short term at least, the picture contradicts the excessive hopes
expressed in 1989 for a rapid democratization of the entire region.
Nevertheless, in some ways, the region has progressed towards democracy
more than might have been hoped for. The electoral processes are
for the most part stable, and international pressure, if nothing else, prevents
a return to old-style dictatorships.