(chap. 20). Thus, the inability to satisfy our definition of democracy was not
overdetermined in Estonia. The major problem Estonia (and even more, as we
shall see, Latvia) had on its transition agenda was how to handle its large Russianspeaking
population. The Baltic Republics thus present us with a particularly interesting
area in which to explore, in demoi that are actually multinational, the
possibilities of transcending (and the costs of not transcending) the sometimes
conflicting logics of nation-state-building and democracy-building .
We conclude the book with a broad-ranging and necessarily tentative analysis
of the democratic prospects of post-Communist Europe from the perspective of
modern democratic theory and practice. In chapter 21 we include in the analysis
all of the states of post-Communist Europe, both to document and to begin to explain
their variations in terms of democratic efficacy and legitimacy .
15
Post-Communism's Prehistories
ANY SERIOUS comparative political analysis of the inter-regional differences
between democratization in southern Europe, South America, and postCommunist
Europe and the great intraregional differences within post-Communist
Europe must pay special attention to the stateness issues we discussed in
chapter 2. In addition, comparativists must consider carefully how three of the
variables that we discussed in part 1 inter-relate. These variables are international
influences, the political economy of coercion and legitimacy, and the special legacies
of totalitarian and post-totalitarian regimes .
INTERNATIONAL INFLUENCES AND TRANSITION
When we place in comparative perspective the transitions in the Soviet Union
and the ex-Warsaw Pact countries of East Central Europe (Poland, Hungary,
Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, Romania, and Bulgaria), one
of their most distinctive qualities concerns the variable we call international influence.
One of the editors of the classic four-volume study of the transitions in
southern Europe and South America, Laurence Whitehead, argued that "in all the
peacetime cases considered here internal forces were of primary importance in
determining the course and outcome of the transition attempt, and international
factors played only a secondary role ." I Clearly, such a judgment would obviously
be unwarranted for East Central Europe, given the speed with which Communism
collapsed in 1989 and the fact that Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria
began their transitions almost before any significant domestic changes had occurred.2
Many scholars have documented the prolonged economic stagnation
and legitimacy problems of most of the region. However, economic stagnation
and weak legitimacy alone (which had existed for a long time before 1989) cannot
explain the rapidity of the domino-like collapse of the countries . For this we need
,. Laurence Whitehead, "International Aspects of Democratization," in O'Donnell, Schmitter, and
Whitehead, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Comparative Perspectives, 4.
2. Adam Przeworski captures how these regimes were swept away as if by a dam breaking in Democracy
and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, i99í), 4-6. See also Samuel P Huntington's discussion of"snow-balling" in The Third Wave :
Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 33•
236 Post-Communist Europe
to explore the special linkage in the region between international and dome
politics.
Indeed, in Eastern Europe between 1948 and 1989, the very use of the words'
dependent, sovereign, and domestic to describe politics is strained, given the i
ological, political, military, and economic linkages between the Soviet hegem
and its East Central European "outer empire ."3 The nature of these linkages '
turn reduced the normal international influence of major democratic and mar
polities of the sort that were significant, though not determinative, in south
Europe and South America . Here we must pause, therefore, to discuss how co
parativists should and should not approach the question of the international
fluence of the Soviet Union.
Much of the pre-1989 literature of the countries of the region suffered fr
two analytic problems. Initially, a major strand of the literature began with s
an exclusive focus on the region's shared status as "satellites" that the signifc
heterogeneity of the pre-Communist and Communist state-society relations
each country was played down. Later, many scholars, in a reaction against Co
War excesses, began to emphasize the uniqueness of the countries on which th
specialized. In the process important commonalities in the economies, polite
and societies of the entire region were understressed . However, as comparatives
interested in problems of democratic transition and the tasks that must be fa
before democracy can be consolidated, our conceptual endeavor must be to sho
how, why, and with what consequences elements of commonality and elements
difference can be simultaneously present.
The Soviet Union was not just a system or the center of an empire, but the emanating
source of a major utopian vision . During the post-World War II phase o
Soviet expansion in Eastern Europe, there were important military and economič
gains for the Soviet Union . However, power relations within the bloc were reinforced,
during the period of "high Stalinism," by the claims of ideology. Indeed',
the 1968 Brezhnev Doctrine of limited sovereignty, which was used to justify thé
repression of the Prague Spring experiment, was explicitly based on such claims :
"The sovereignty of independent socialist countries can not be set against the interests
of world socialism and the world revolutionary movement ."4
Limited sovereignty was reinforced by a regionwide trading, planning, and
investment network (the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, CMEA) centered
around Moscow and a regionwide military alliance (the Soviet-led Warsaw
Pact) . In addition, the Soviet Politburo's strong involvement in leadership
3. See, for example, the use made of the concept outer empire in Alex Pravda, ed., The End of the Outer
Empire: Soviet-East European Relations in Transition, 1985-go (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs
and Sage Publications, 1992) . The term inner empire is now increasingly used to describe relations between
the USSR and the fifteen former soviet republics .
4. For this quotation and a discussion, see Mark Kramer, "Beyond the Brezhnev Doctrine : A New Era
in Soviet-East European Relations?" International Security (Winter 1989-90) : 25 •
Post-Communism's Prehistories
	
237
changes in Eastern Europe and their external monitoring of ideological frameworks
and party-state administrative structures gave the Eastern European Warsaw
Pact countries an unusually high degree of regional commonality and dependence
on a common hegemon .s
Furthermore, Soviet military presence was a clear and determinative factor in
beating back the impressive range of heterogeneous resistance these "satellites"
still managed to generate. Soviet troops were garrisoned in four of the seven Warsaw
Pact countries, namely Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the German
Democratic Republic . In three of the four, during the GDR riots in 1953, during
Hungary's Revolution in 1956, and after the Prague Spring of Czechoslovakia in
1968, Soviet troops were used to alter the course of domestic politics. In Poland in
1981 the perceived threat of the use of Soviet troops played a critical role in the
regime's ability to impose martial law and to repress Solidarity forces, which in a
Gramscian sense had become hegemonic within Polish civil society . If we consider
these countries independent, then the "irreversibility of Communism"
much proclaimed by thinkers such as Jeanne Kirkpatrick was obviously wrong .
Hungary in 1956 was, as Joseph Rothschild correctly says, a "victorious revolution
[that] was defeated only by overwhelming foreign force ."6 If Hungary had been
located in a geopolitical space analogous to Spain or Brazil, Communism would
have almost certainly stayed reversed and a democratic transition might have
begun in 1956. Likewise, if the Prague Spring of 1968 had occurred in such a space,
Czechoslovakia might have evolved from a post-totalitarian to an authoritarian
regime with the wider range of transition options such a regime type represents .?
5- On the embeddedness of Eastern Europe in such structures, see Robert L. Hutchings, Soviet-East European
Relations : Consolidation and Conflict (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), and Christopher
D. Jones, Soviet Influence in Eastern Europe : Political Autonomy and the Warsaw Pact (NewYork : Praeger Publishers,
1981) . Western democracies, especially the United States, certainly played a covert or even overt role
in the subversion or overthrow of democracies in such countries as Brazil (1964) or Chile (1973) . However,
Western support for Pinochet in Chile and for the military in Brazil was never unequivocal because the
coups were rationalized in the name of democracy even by coup defendants and were opposed in the name
of democracy and human rights by sectors of opinion and some powerful political leaders . Even more importantly,
the democratic opposition to rulers such as Pinochet normally could mobilize extensive political
alliances in Italy, Germany, and even the United States that had a major influence inside countries such as
Chile . The domestic democratic opposition had no such comparable networks inside the Soviet empire .
6. Joseph Rothschild, Return to Diversity: A Political History of East Central Europe since World War 77.
(Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1989),160 .
7. For speculation on how Czechoslovakia might have evolved, see H. Gordon Skilling, Czechoslovakia's
Interrupted Revolution (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1976) . Skilling argues that "there was a powerful
dynamic at work, within the party and in society at large, which suggested that, barring outside intervention,
the process of change would have been accelerated rather than slowed down or blocked, and
would eventually have produced a thoroughly revised socialism, democratic in form, and national in content.
. . . The Prague experiment seemed doomed to failure for external reasons rather than inherent domestic
ones" (pp . 842-43) . However, as comparativists we believe that there is no evidence to suggest that
Alexander Dubček wanted a Western-style democracy . Dubček never proposed multiparty politics. He did,
however, clearly favor liberalization . Given Prague's history and setting, we believe that this liberalization
might well have created a context in which other forces could have been energized and could have pushed
for a democratic transition .
238 Post-Communist Europe
Instead, as Timothy Garton Ash, writing in 1986 observed, "one spring was followed
by fifteen winters."$
The outcomes in the GDR in 1953, in Poland in 1956 and 1981, in Czechoslovakia
in 1968, and even more emphatically in Hungary in 1956 did not illustrate the
irreversibility of Communist-style regimes . The outcomes did reveal, however,
that the presence of foreign combat troops, controlled by a Communist hegemon
that was ideologically confident and geopolitically willing to use force, could
thwart potential transitions to democracy.
Why was the Soviet hegemon willing, again and again, to use force? Partly because,
from the Soviet perspective, the use of force had so few costs . Given the balance
of nuclear terror in existence, the West allowed the Soviets to use force to repress
Hungary in 1956 and to build the Berlin Wall in 1961 . Until Gorbachev, the
Soviet Union did not want Western direct investment, so negative Western reaction
to the Soviet use of force did not raise any significant perceived opportunity
costs for the Soviet Union . The Soviet leaders also still believed (or at least articulated
the belief) in the inevitable global victory of their socioeconomic and doctrinal
system. In this East-West calculus of interests, the costs of Soviet repression
of Eastern Europe did not exceed the costs of toleration .
The international embeddedness of the Warsaw Pact countries of Central and
Eastern Europe and their dependence on a hegemon were thus unlike anything
center-periphery theorists encountered in the politics of the peripheral states of
Spain, Portugal, or Greece or what dependency theorists could document for Argentina,
Chile, Uruguay, or Brazil .9 In this context, without a domestic change in
the hegemon-and here domestic factors in the USSR were crucial-it was extremely
difficult for either Central and East European elites (dependent on Soviet
political control) or Central and East European masses (coercible by domestic
elites credibly supported by the hegemon) to initiate new political processes that
might have led to democratic transitions.
Yugoslavia was not in the Soviet bloc, but Tito's "straddling" between East and
West weakened international pressures toward democracy as we have defined it .
United States foreign policy-makers, largely for "divide and rule" reasons, accorded
Yugoslavia a de facto "most favored Communist" status . Likewise, democratic theorists
put Yugoslavia in a different category from all other Communist systems because
they believed that worker self-management was a form of democracy and
could evolve positively. A widely used external "exit" option, particularly to Germany,
also released some pressures for democratization . The significant degree of
liberalization-especially concerning travel and many university freedoms-lessened
Western criticism of Yugoslavia's still considerable "democratic deficit ."
8. Timothy Garton Ash, "Czechoslovakia under the Ice" in The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of
Central Europe (New York: Random House, 1989), 62.
9 . However, U.S. use of force in the Caribbean and in Central America under the ideological guise of
first the Monroe Doctrine and later counterinsurgency and low-intensity warfare is another matter.
Post-Communism's Prehistories
	
239
When 1989 arrived, many of those holding power in the different republics could
resist full democratization and liberal values on the basis of their nationalist stand
vis-a-vis their neighbors and internal minorities . Thus, the independence of majoritarian
ethnocratic "nation-states" increasingly became privileged over liberal
democratic values and democratization as we have defined them. to
THE ALTERED POLITICAL ECONOMY OF COERCION
AND LEGITIMACY IN THE SOVIET UNION
AND ITS INTERNATIONAL CONSEQUENCES
What led to domestic changes in the hegemon, and what effect did these
changes have vis-A-vis the West and vis-A-vis the cost of maintenance of the outer
empire in Central and Eastern Europe? Hundreds of articles and books, by scholars
better qualified than we, have been and are being written on this question .
However, as comparativists interested in shifting power relationships, we maintain
that some changes seem to be fundamental .
The initial change occurred within the ideology and power structure of the
hegemon. In 1985 the new leader of the Communist Party, Mikhail Gorbachev,
and his core supporters were convinced that the Soviet Union was in a state of
dangerous stagnation requiring far-reaching restructuring ." Gorbachev's vehicle
for change was perestroika and later glasnost . But both strategies fundamentally
altered the place of Eastern Europe, the West, and the political economy of coercion
in his calculations . To be successful, perestroika needed to enhance flows of
investment and technology and indeed to build a much closer network of relations
with the public and private sectors of the United States and the European
Community. This network of relations and resource flows could be accomplished
much better in a post-cold war environment than in a cold war environment .
Furthermore, the greatest single source of potential savings to be used for new
investment in the Soviet Union was decreased military expenditures . Indeed,
early in the Gorbachev period his advisers came to the conclusion that the size of
the Soviet GNP was smaller than previously estimated and that military expenditures
were greater. 12 In a spirited defense of Gorbachev's reforms against party
hardliners, Foreign Minister Shevardnadze at the 199o Party Congress defiantly
lo. For the emergent ethnic nationalist dictatorships in parts of the former Yugoslavia, see George Soros,
"Nationalist Dictatorships versus Open Society" (New York: Soros Foundation, January 1993, pamphlet) .
11. Three basic sources for their widespread perception of stagnation and their strategies to overcome
this predicament are Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika : New Thinking for Our Country and the World (New
York: Harper and Row, 1987) ; Edward Wilkes Walker, "Structural Pressures, Political Choice and Institutional
Change: Bureaucratic Totalitarianism and the Origins of Perestroika" (Ph . D. diss ., Department of
Political Science, Columbia University, 1992); and the magisterial book by Archie Brown, The Gorbachev
Factor (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1996) .
12. This point was stressed in an interview with Stepan by one of Gorbachev's key advisors, Aleksandr
Yakovlev, in Moscow, October 24,1989 .
240 Post-Communist Europe
asked the congress whether the members really thought it was possible or indeed
in the Soviet Union's interest to continue its extremely heavy defense expenditures,
which in his judgment had led to the "economic and social ruin" of the
Soviet Union .
Having come to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and having obtained access to the appropriate
information, I learned that in the past two decades alone ideological confrontation with the
West added R7oo trillion rubles as the cost of military confrontation . . . .
The prospects have opened up the possibilities to enter a new era, and to build completely
new relations between the two superpowers. . . . But it is obvious that if we continue as we did
before, comrades-I state this with all responsibility-to spend a quarter, I stress a quarter, of
our budget on military spending-we have ruined the country-then we simply won't need
defense, just as we won't need an army for a ruined country and poor people .
There is no sense in protecting a system that has led to economic and social ruin . There is
just one way out: policy should take upon itself the task of creating a reserve of security with
accompanying reductions in defense spending. . . .
Our calculations show that in the current five-year plan period, the total peace dividend resulting
from the foreign policy line based on new thinking could amount to R24o to R25o billion.
Our country does not have a future outside integration into the worldwide system of economic
and financial institutions and ties . We need to get out of the self-isolation from the
world, and from progress, into which we have driven ourselves.13
The Soviet Union's defense expenditures were even higher than Shevardnadze
implied. From a comparative perspective the Soviet Union's security-related
expenditures were more than three times as great as that of the United States, six
times as great as the EEC average, and twenty times as great as that of Japan.
Furthermore, in all these open, high-information market economies, there were
greater spillovers between military technology and globally competitive export
industries than in the USSR. In comparative economic terms, therefore, the country
that stood to benefit most from the "end of the cold war" was the Soviet
Union. See figure 15 .1, which also shows that Soviet defense expenditures were also
at least three times higher than any South European or South American case we
have considered in this book.
When it came to Eastern Europe, influential Soviet analysts believed that the
entire Council of Mutual Economic Assistance would benefit economically and
politically from shifting in the direction of perestroika and glasnost . 14 In an important
mid-1988 document, significantly written for a conference on "The Place
and Role of Eastern Europe in the Relaxation of Tension between the U .S.A. and
the U.S.S.R.," authoritative Soviet specialists advanced the argument that eco-
13. See Shevardnadze's speech on July 3,19go, at the 28th Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU)
Party Congress, reprinted in Foreign Broadcast Information Service, Daily Report, Soviet Union, July 5, 199o,
pp. 7-10. Note that he speaks not so much of military confrontation but ideological confrontation .
14. Well before Gorbachev, some important analysts in the Soviet Union and the United States had also
argued that the "outer empire" in Eastern Europe had changed from an asset to a liability for the Soviet
25 -
20 -
15 -
10 -
5
o
0.7 .o
2.4
Post-Communism's Prehistories
	
241
3 .2 3 .3
	
3 .3
4.3
6.6
71
8 .8
23.0
Brazil
	
Japan
	
Spain Portugal
	
FRG Argentina Uruguay
	
U.S.
	
Greece
	
Chile
	
U.S .S .R.
Fig. 15 .1 . Defense Expenditures as a Percentage of GDP/GNP, 1983-1989 .
Sources : The 1989 data for the Soviet Union are from Dimitri Steinber, "The Soviet Defense Burden : Estimating Hidden
Costs," Soviet Studies 44, no. 2 (1992): 258. All other data are for 1984 (except Uruguay, which is for 1983) and are drawn
from Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, World Armaments and Disarmament : SIPRl Yearbook, 1984 (Stockholm:
SIPRI), 129-31, and 1986, pp. 243-47.
nomic and political liberalization would be a good thing for Eastern Europe and
the Soviet Union. The document was clearly critical of the intense level of previous
Soviet military and political intervention in Eastern Europe . We quote from
this document at length because it was written before the momentous changes in
Eastern Europe in 1989.
The administrative-state model of socialism, established in the majority of Eastern European
countries during the 195ós under the influence of the Soviet Union, has not withstood the test
of time, thereby showing its socio-political and economic inefficiency. . . . It was inadmissible
to extend the postulate of the primary role of the Communist party of the Soviet Union to
relationships among socialist states . . . . The model for the existing system was created in the
Soviet Union during the 193ós and 194ós. . . . The process ofperestroika is already shaping a new
multifaceted political reality, one full of contradictions and conflicts . In terms of the scale and
depth of integration processes and the intensity of the interweaving of economic, scientific and
technological interests and relations, the CMEA countries turned out to be far behind the
countries of the European Community. . . . Interest in preserving peace, a prerequisite for which
is the positive development of relations between the two systems, necessitates that new politiUnion.
See, for example, the extremely high estimates of Soviet subsidies by M . Marrese and J. Vanous,
Soviet Subsidizing of Trade with Eastern Europe: A Soviet Perspective (Berkeley: Institute of International
Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1983) . For a review of the evidence and much lower estimates,
see Charles Wolf, Jr., "The Costs and Benefits of the Soviet Empire," in Henry S . Rowen and Charles Wolf,
Jr., eds., The Future of the Soviet Empire (New York: Institute for Contemporary Studies and St. Martin's
Press, 1987),121-142.
242
	
Post-Communist Europe
cal thinking guide the policies of the great powers with respect to crisis situations in the whole
world, including those in the socialist countries of Eastern Europe. . . . It is inadmissible that
either side interfere in the internal problems of a country finding itself in a difficult position . . . .
Should crisis situations develop, they should under no circumstances be allowed to deter
progress in East-West relations, 15
Six months after that document was written, Gorbachev made his momentous
announcement in December 1988 to the United Nations that, by the end of í99o,
independent of Western action on arms reductions, the Soviet Union would withdraw
some 240,000 men, lo,ooo tanks, and 820 combat aircraft from Eastern Europe
and from the Western military district of the Soviet Union closest to Eastern
Europe. According to Charles Gati, "more than any other single event, that announcement
set the stage for the dramatic developments of 1989 . By suggesting
that Moscow was prepared to remove Soviet forces from its East European dominion,
Gorbachev put the region's Communist leaders on notice that Soviet
tanks would no longer protect their rule . It did not take long for the people of Eastern
Europe to understand that their leaders were therefore vulnerable-that some
of them were, in effect, on the run,"] 6 When Gorbachev made this statement the
Gang of Four, the Brezhnevite repressive leaders of Czechoslovakia, East Germany,
Romania, and Bulgaria, were all resisting and often censuring his statements about
glasnost, and only in Bulgaria had perestroika been approved even in theory.
We show, in following chapters, that in every single instance the regional hegemon
(the Soviet Union) took some specific action to weaken each one of the
Gang of Four. Unfortunately, we do not have data for East Germany, but we do
have data from a public opinion poll administered in 1986-87 in Bulgaria, Romania,
and Czechoslovakia that indicates that numerous citizens in these countries
felt that glasnost and perestroika would be good for these countries (table 15 .1) .
Though Gorbachev's preference was for Central and Eastern Europe to embrace
"within-system" Soviet-like changes, he gravely underestimated how illegitimate
and unpopular many of the regimes were and how destabilizing the combination
of his statements in favor of glasnost and perestroika and against Soviet
military intervention would be. 17
Given the hegemonic relations that the Soviet
Union had previously had in Eastern Europe, Gorbachev's endorsement of change
altered power relationships everywhere in the Warsaw Pact countries . It weakened
15 . "The Place and Role of Eastern Europe in the Relaxation of Tensions between the USA and the
USSR" was written by the staff of the Institute of Economics of the World Socialist System (Moscow) for a
conference in Alexandria, Virginia, and widely circulated because the Soviet authors allowed it to be published
in its entirety in Problems of Communism 37, nos. 3-4 (May-August 1988) : 55 -70 •
16. Charles Gati, The Bloc That Failed : Soviet-East European Politics in Transformation (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, í99o),166-67. Alex Pravda offers some evidence that East European leaders were
told, as early as November 1986, that the Soviet Union would not use force to uphold their rule . See "Soviet
Policy towards Eastern Europe in Transition," in Pravda, The End of Outer Empire, esp. 17-18.
17. For evidence and arguments on this theme, see Pravda, The End of Outer Empire, 1-34, and Gati, The
Bloc That Failed, 102-3.
Post-Communism's Prehistories
	
243
Table 15 .1 . "Do you believe that Gorbachevs leadership is good or bad for [respondent's own
country]?"
Source . East European Perceptions of Gorbachev and Soviet Reforms (Munich: Radio Free Europe, Audience and Public Opinion
Research Department, July 1988). Reprinted in Gati, The Bloc That Failed, 68 .
antiglasnost Communist Party leadership in Bulgaria, Romania, East Germany,
and Czechoslovakia, it strengthened reform wings of the Communist Party in
Hungary and Poland who wanted to establish a new relationship with the democratic
opposition, and it emboldened the democratic opposition in all countries
of Eastern Europe .
Two fields of force were felt by actors in mid-1989 . First, the ideological selfconfidence
defined by the Brezhnev Doctrine, in the Soviet Union's right of intervention,
had been steadily waning . This waning force was felt by the Soviet
leadership, by East European heads of government, and by the opposition . But
there remained a second countervailing force . Key democratic activists, especially
in Poland and Hungary, insisted that they could not count on nonintervention by
the USSR. They awaited, in effect, the proof of an actual case of Soviet nonintervention
at the moment of regime change away from Communism. Among the
reasons they cite for their caution and their reluctance to mobilize force was that
there was always the possibility that Gorbachev would fall and that hard-liners
and/or nationalists would assume power. As the coup attempt in the Soviet Union
in August 1991 and the December 1993 election results in Russia showed, their apprehension
was not unfounded . I"
Whatever Gorbachev's initial calculations were, by the fall of 1989 Soviet policy
had already profoundly changed relations of power in the bloc . Existing Communist
governments were weaker and the democratic oppositions were stronger . 19 In
18. For informative studies of the Brezhnev Doctrine of "limited sovereignty" and how and why it was
changed by Gorbachev, see Robert A . Jones, The Soviet Concept of "Limited Sovereignty" from Lenin to Gorbachev
(New York: St. Martin's Press, í99o), and Mark Kramer, "Beyond the Brezhnev Doctrine : New Era
in Soviet-East European Relations?" International Security (Winter 1989-90), 25-67 •
19. However, some of the elites still believed in the ideology of socialism and in the possibility of economic
and social reforms allowing them to stay in power and incorporate moderate oppositions as long as
they did not need to use massive violence . This meant that, with the exception of Hungary, and in a unique
way in Poland, Communist rulers in the Warsaw Pact did not initiate a reform type of transition to democracy,
as in Spain or Brazil . The transition to democracy was forced on them: in Germany, not by the round
Reply
Percentage of Respondents
Bulgaria Czechoslovakia Romania
Good 64 53 40
Bad 8 8 10
Neither 24 34 38
Other/no answer 4 5 12
Number of cases 556 436 541
244
	
Post-Communist Europe
this context, Soviet use of armed force to crush change would have dramatically
altered the course of perestroika in the Soviet Union . Economic and financial relations
with the West would have experienced a grave setback . Gorbachev's hopes
for reductions in military expenditure would have been cancelled . In the fall of
1989, to paraphrase Robert Dahl, the cost of intervention was greater than the
costs of toleration .20
LEGACIES OF (COMMUNIST-STYLE) TOTALITARIAN AND POSTTOTALITARIAN
REGIME TYPES FOR DEMOCRATIC CONSOLIDATION
Many analysts have correctly noted that a major difference between East European
and post-Soviet transitions on the one hand and those in southern Europe
and South America on the other is the "simultaneity problem ." In Eastern Europe
and in the Soviet Union, in addition to making a political transition to democracy,
the countries have simultaneously had to make a transition to market
economies.21 We obviously agree that both of these profound changes are necessary.
However, the analysis must go much further.
All of the regimes in the region, with the partial exception of Poland, which we
will argue (controversially) was never a completely installed totalitarian regime,
were at one time "totalitarian." Some later became "post-totalitarian ." As we specified
in table 1.1, there are five reinforcing arenas of a modern consolidated democratic
polity concerning civil society, political society, rule of law, the state apparatus,
and economic society. We further specified, in table 4.3, that, when a
specific transition starts from a prior base that approximated our totalitarian or
post-totalitarian ideal type, this necessarily implies a very distinctive and difficult
set of tasks in each of the five arenas, tasks that must be accomplished before that
polity can become a consolidated democracy .
Since none of the nondemocratic regimes we have considered thus far in southern
Europe or South America was totalitarian or post-totalitarian, the challenges
table but by exit to West Germany and by voice in the streets of East Germany . In Czechoslovakia the events
leading to regime collapse were even less expected . The fact that these regime leaders did not plan for a transition
to democracy has contributed to the use of the word revolution (as in "velvet revolution") . The word
revolution is not used to describe any of the southern European or South American transitions we have discussed
except that of Portugal, which was a revolution unleashed after a nonhierarchical military coup .
20 . Robert Dahl's famous axiom about the costs of toleration is found in his Polyarchy: Participation
and Opposition (New Haven : Yale University Press, i97í), i5. In China, which is also in some ways an empire,
the cost of repression in its periphery (such as Tibet and Sinkian) is not, as of this writing, higher than
the cost of repression . This is partly due to Tibet's and Sinkian's great geographic and cultural distance from
the West . Also, given the size and growth of the Chinese market, the cost of resistance by the West is perceived
as too high by many powerful actors . In addition, there is latent ethnocentric feeling in much of the
West that nondemocratic rule is "intolerable" in the West but "tolerable" in other parts of the world.
21. Claus Offe goes further and speaks of the triple (political, economic, and socioterritorial) transformations
that are necessary. See "Capitalism by Democratic Design? Democratic Theory Facing the Triple
Transition in East Central Europe," translated by Pierre Adler, Social Research 58 (Winter í99r) : 865-92.
Post-Communism's Prehistories
	
245
for all the countries we consider here in part 4 (including Poland) are thus different
in kind than those considered heretofore . While our argument has been laid out
also in tables 1.1 and 4.3 (and we urge the reader to consult those tables again) and
will be explored empirically in the chapters to follow, it might be useful to pause at
this point to illustrate some of the generic problems that are particularly salient in
each of the five polity arenas, given a totalitarian or post-totalitarian legacy .
Civil Society
The classic approach is to include in this term organizations and groups that
are relatively independent of the state . If we use this definition, the key observation
to make is that, with Poland being a partial exception, the overwhelming majority
of unions, agrarian collectives, cultural societies, communications systems,
and other organizations in Eastern Europe and the USSR existing at the time of
transition were originally created in the totalitarian period and were maintained
by the party state even in the post-totalitarian period. The hidden, but known and
in some cases parallel, presence of intelligence agents further weakened these organizations
and often compromised their leaders' capacity to play a role in the
transition. This phenomenon was most important in the GDR, Czechoslovakia,
Romania, Bulgaria, and the USSR. In contrast, in the authoritarian regimes of
southern Europe and South America, though many of the trade union, entrepreneurial,
and newspaper organizations were brutally repressed, they were not totally
penetrated by an official party or even by police and intelligence agents .
Religion needs special discussion . In all societies religion is the social reality
most difficult to control by those in power . Communism, with its commitment to
atheism, was particularly committed to limit as much as possible the role of religion
in civil society. There were, however, important differences between religions.
Orthodox Christianity, with its legacy of caesaropapism and therefore its
tendency toward dependence on the state and toward being a national church, did
not serve as a basis for oppositional activity . At best it was a small source of limited
cultural dissidence . As a consequence, it has not, except for nationalism in the
post-Communist countries, been a source for major new leadership or issue articulation.
The presence of the internationally organized Roman Catholic Church
(especially in Poland and Lithuania) and Protestant dissidents (especially in East
Germany in the late 198os) contributed to a different civil society .
In democratic societies, religion, the churches, and the voluntary groups
linked with them play an important role in bringing people together, articulating
moral positions (that often have political implications) and helping in organizing
a variety of interests. In this respect massive secularization may weaken an active
society. Communism made a deliberate effort to secularize societies, persecute religious
organizations, control and infiltrate them, and bar from elite postions and
education those loyal to the churches . The data collected by Richard Rose show
246
	
Post-Communist Europe
the effect of those policies, which failed only in some Catholic countries, like
Poland. The percentage of respondents saying that they never or rarely went to
church was 71.1 percent in Belorussia, 6o percent in Ukraine, 68 percent in the
Czech Republic (where secularization was already advanced before Communism)
66 percent in Bulgaria, and 66 percent in Hungary, contrasting with 41 percent in
Slovakia, 46 percent in Romania, 44 percent in Slovenia, and 16 percent in
Poland.22
Not only were most organizations, normally considered in other settings part
of civil society, integrated into the party-state in Communist Europe, but they
had a material presence that was, and often still is, the beneficiary of a series of
state subsidies. It is not necessarily therefore in the perceived interest of such potential
actors in an autonomous civil society to want to become autonomous . In
post-Communist Europe, many workers in Bulgarian collectives, Polish mines,
and Russian factories; intellectuals in the massive Academy of Science systems in
all the countries ; or people in hundreds of other state-subsidized organizations
worry that they will be voting against their material self-interest if they support
the proposed utopian alternatives offered by most market-oriented democrats .
It is important to stress that this legacy extends well beyond the nomenklatura.
Many citizens in Eastern Europe live every day in some tension between their
goals for the future and their present material interests .
One of the leading analysts of this legacy, the Polish sociologist Edmund
Mokrzycki, argues that it is a mistake not to understand that "so-called real socialism-that
is, the system that took shape in the Soviet Union and in European
socialist countries-is a social system in the strong sense of the term ; it has its
own equilibrium mechanisms, its own dynamics, and the ability to reproduce its
constitutive characteristics ."23 The continued strong showing in two consecutive
elections of groups associated with the old regime in Bulgaria and Romania and
the return to power in 1992-94 of parties associated with the Communists in
Lithuania, Poland, and Hungary, show how sociologically grounded in real interests
are groups associated with "real socialism." Elsewhere, Mokrzycki and a coauthor
take much of the "democratic transition" literatures to task for failing to
incorporate this issue into their analyses:
In the process of rejecting "really existing socialism," democracy was proclaimed the promised
land. . . . A critical paradox, however, has emerged since 1989 . Whereas in the West European
and American experience, democracy was proclaimed and institutionalized by the same social
groups, in Eastern Europe-most vividly demonstrated by the case of Poland-the social
groups that articulated democracy are the very groups threatened by the institutionalization of
22 . For church attendance data see Richard Rose and Christian Haerpfer, "Adapting to Transformation
in Eastern Europe : New Democracies Barometer-11," Studies in Public Policy no. 212 (1993) : table 35.
23. See his thought-provoking "The Legacy of Real Socialism, Group Interests, and the Search for a New
Utopia," in Walter D. Connor and Piotr Ploszajski, eds ., Escape from Socialism: The Polish Route (Warsaw:
IFis Publishers, 1992), 269 .
Post-Communism's Prehistories 247
democracy in its liberal capitalist form . . . . None of the existing approaches to transition has
paid adequate attention to the socio-economic structures that evolved under Leninism and the
impact they have on the processes of political democratization .24
Political Society
When we turn to political society, the tension between future utopian desires
and present material interests, in the context of the relatively flattened landscape
left by post-totalitarianism, creates problems for political representation . Politicians
frequently claimed in the founding elections to represent independent entrepreneurs
and independent trade unions, groups that in most countries in Eastern
Europe did not yet exist . Democratic political society, moreover, is not only
about political representation; it is also about political parties . But forty-five years
of party-state rule in Eastern Europe and more than seventy in the Soviet Union
have given the very word party a negative connotation throughout the region . Indeed,
almost none of the major political movements in Eastern Europe called
themselves parties (viz. Solidarity in Poland, Civic Forum in Czechoslovakia,
Hungarian Democratic Forum in Hungary, popular fronts in the Baltic countries,
and Union of Democratic Forces in Bulgaria) . Furthermore, the charismatic leaders
in the region, Walesa in Poland, Havel in Czechoslovakia, and Yeltsin in Russia,
refused to join and lead political parties .
Here a comparison between Communist Europe and other areas is useful . In
sharp contrast to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, the opposition parties in
Spain, Uruguay, and Chile struggled to create a more solid and autonomous civil
society, but most of their energies were devoted to the articulation of an alternative
political future, a future in which parties would play the leading role .25 These
parties, before the transition to democracy began, had developed competitive alternative
political programs, spelling out what they intended to do when they
came to power via democratic elections . In some countries the entire spectrum of
political parties continued in existence underground, and thus an "a-legal" or "illegal"
but real and visible political society existed even under the nondemocratic
regime.2ó
24 . Edmund Mokrzycki and Arista Maria Cirtantas, "The Articulation and Institutionalization of Democracy
in Poland," Social Research, 60, no. 4 (1993) 787-819.
25. As we have seen, the major exception to this was Brazil, where civil society was the celebrity of the transition
and parties, while they existed and played a significant role, were constantly changing their identity.
26. See Juan J . Linz's discussion of tolerated, illegal, but especially a-legal opposition in Spain in the late
Franco period, "Opposition to and under an Authoritarian Regime : The Case of Spain," in Robert A. Dahl,
ed., Regimes and Oppositions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973),171-26o, esp. 216-30 . In Chile and
Uruguay a foreign political analyst in the course of a two-week visit could, and normally would in the
decade before the transition, meet with representatives of virtually every political party that later emerged
as politically meaningful (either by themselves or as a member of a multiparty coalition) in the founding
elections . As we shall see, in all of Eastern Europe only Hungary (after December 1988) approximated anything
like this degree of development of political society in the period that preceded the transition .
248
The Rule of Law
We next turn to the arena of rule of law and its primary organizing principle,
constitutionalism. There is, of course, no consolidated democracy without a relatively
autonomous rule of law. Some of the legal traditions and norms that help
create and sustain the relative autonomy of law are that legal codes are developed
to a significant degree on the basis of precedent or their own internal logic. Furthermore,
an independent judiciary plays a crucial role in interpreting old laws,
the constitutionality of new laws, and the state's implementation of law.
Under high Stalinism, the conception of law was totally different . Indeed,
the first president of the USSR Supreme Court wrote in 1927 that "Communism
means not the victory of socialist laws, but a victory of socialism over any law ."27
Under Stalin, the leading legal theorist of the regime, E . B. Pashukanis, advanced
principles that were totally dependent on the revolutionary mission of Communism.28
One of Pashukanis's central tenets in effect was that "under developed socialism,
policy and plan would replace law."29 For our analytic purposes, since the
leader and party-state create both policy and plan, there is no space for a legal system
to constrain or bind the leader or the party-state . This, of course, is consistent
with the ideal type of totalitarianism, in which one of the four defining characteristics
is that a leader "rules with undefined limits.,
A system in which the leader rules with "undefined limits" is the conceptual
opposite of modern democratic constitutionalism, which entails that elected political
leaders, the state, and even the sovereign citizenry have agreed to a complex
series of "self-binding" mechanisms.30 Part of this self-binding quality of a lawbound
democratic polity is that there is a clear hierarchy of laws, with pre-established
and relatively rigid norms and procedures for their change.31
To be sure, in those countries in which politics evolved in a post-totalitarian
27. For an analysis of law in the totalitarian period, see Harold J . Berman, Justice in the USSR (New York:
Vintage, 1963) ; quotation is from p. 26. Berman's book was originally published by Harvard University Press
in 1950.
28. In this respect Hitler's and Stalin's legal codes were similar in their disdain for precedent or the internal
principles of legal logic . Article 1 of the Nazi-drafted Volksgesetzbuch ( Peoples Code), which was to
replace the nineteenth-century civil code Bargerliches Gesetzbuch, stated the following: "The highest law is
the welfare of the German People." (article 1) "German blood, German honor and hereditary health are to
be kept pure and to be defended. These are the basic forces of the German People's Law." (article 2) "The
judge in his decision is not subject to any instruction. He dictates law out of free conviction derived from
the total factual situation and according to an interpretation of law supported by the National Socialist
world view." (article 20) Volksgesetzbuch: Grundregeln and Buch L Entwurf and Erlduterungen, presented by
Justus Wilhelm Hedemann, Dr. Heinrich Lehrmann, and Dr. Wolfgang Siebert (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1942).
29. See the entry under law in Tom Bottomore, ed ., A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1983), 276 .
30 . For a rich discussion of the "self-binding" dimension of democratic constitutionalism, see Jon Elster
and Rune Slagstad, eds., Constitutionalism and Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988), esp. the introduction by Jon Elster, pp . 1-18.
31. For example, all long-standing continental European democracies have virtually the same fourfold
hierarchy of laws which is supported by the judiciary and, if it exists, by the constitutional court . In dePost-Communist
Europe Post-Communism's Prehistories 249
direction, socialist legality became somewhat constraining on the state apparatus.
However, the "leading role" of the party in the party-state still rendered most laws
instrumental and heavily dependent on the party's initiative and interpretation .
The distinguished Australian scholar, T. H. Rigby, writing in í98o, underscored
the weakness of "self-binding" in post-totalitarian socialist legality : "The Soviet
Constitution, even in its latest variant, is a notoriously misleading and incomplete
guide to the distribution of power in the system . . . . [The] core aspect of the Soviet
system, the party-state relationship, is regulated, as it always has been, by discretion
and not by law. . . . The Soviet regime . . . has never been prepared to limit
itself within the rules which it itself prescribes ."32
Some of the most important new norms to emerge in the post-Stalinist period
were aimed less at creating a generic rule of law for all the citizenry than at creating
specific procedures to limit the leaders' freedom to control other party elites .
Important generic binding procedures occurred only in mature post-totalitarian
regimes concerning specific issue areas where the party had made a prior decision
in favor of extending legal rights (e.g., private property rights in Hungary after
1983) . The central point is that legal culture, especially a "self-binding" democratic
constitutional culture embedded in a hierarchy of laws, must be the creation of
the new democracies .
Once again, in comparison to post-Communist Europe, some of the long-standing
authoritarian dictatorships we have considered in Franco's Spain, Salazar's Portugal,
and Pinochet's Chile left more to build on in the way of a constitutional culture.
In all these countries the law schools maintained their traditional approaches
and students were exposed to the legal scholarship of other countries-including
the democracies . In all three cases most of the principles of Western democratic law,
while abused or put in abeyance in practice, were not fundamentally challenged
normatively or theoretically by a completely new system of law and legal thinking .33
Usable State
The next task relates to a usable state bureaucracy. What does a totalitarian or
a post-totalitarian legacy imply about the availability of a usable state bureauscending
hierarchical order they are (1) the constitution, which can be changed only by pre-established, relatively
rigid rules that call for special majorities; (2) laws passed by the parliament but that cannot violate
the constitution; (3) decree laws issued by the cabinet which normally have a limited duration and, to remain
valid, have to be ratified actively or passively by the parliament; and (4) administrative orders, which
can be issued by ministries but which cannot violate any of the above.
32. T. H. Rigby, "A Conceptual Approach to Authority, Power and Policy in the Soviet Union," in T .H.
Rigby, Archie Brown, and Peter Reddaway, eds., Authority, Power and Policy in the USSR (New York: St.
Martin's Press, 198o), 12.
33• In Spain the Franco regime paid at least formal respect to article 3 of the 1889 Spanish Civil Code,
which established the legal hierarchy of norms complemented by the general principles of law . In addition,
particularly in the late years of the regime, the subjection of the administration to legal controls and administrative
courts was expanded in comparison to the pre-Franco past . The last dictator of Portugal was
250 Post-Communist Europe
cracy at the beginning of a possible democratic transition? We believe, with
Joseph A. Schumpeter, that modern democracies are best served when elected
politicians (often amateurs) are supported by a strata of professional bureaucrats .
Per se, bureaucrats are not democratic, but they have a function in making democracies
effcacious .34 However, to the extent that the bureaucracy of the previous
nondemocratic regime has been recruited by political criteria defined by
the old regime and to the extent that the political leadership of the old regime has
deeply colonized the bureaucracy, the bureaucracy presents problems of serviceability
to a new regime . Among the potential problems that will be present at the
beginning of the transition from a totalitarian or post-totalitarian ideal type of
regime are the following: (1) The lack of a clear distinction between the party and
the state (indeed, the party generally dominates the state)35 means that the collapse,
disintegration, or massive rejection of the party can also disrupt much of the
normal functioning of the state bureaucracy.36 (2) Efficacy is damaged when many
the law professor Marcello Caetano . In the standard legal text he wrote, he paid extensive homage to western
principles of jurisprudence .
34. While we do not necessarily subscribe to everything he says, the classic observations by Joseph A.
Schumpeter are worth quoting at length : "Democratic government in modern industrial society must be
able to command . . . the services of a well-trained bureaucracy of good standing and tradition, endowed
with a strong sense of duty and a no less strong esprit de corps. Such a bureaucracy is the main answer to
the argument about government by amateurs . Potentially it is the only answer to the question so often
heard in this country: democratic politics has proved itself unable to produce decent city government . . . .
It is not enough that the bureaucracy should be efficient in current administration and competent to
give advice . It must also be strong enough to guide and, if need be, to instruct the politicians who head the
ministries. In order to be able to do this it must be in a position to evolve principles of its own and sufficiently
independent to assert them . It must be a power in its own right." From Joseph A . Schumpeter, Capitalism,
Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 293-
35. The most copiously documented case is East Germany. Especially telling and authoritative self-descriptions
may be found in the two-volume handbook of the GDR published by the regime itself in 1985 as
the DDR Handbuch . Particularly revealing are the entries under S .E.D. (the official party, the Socialist Unity
Party of Germany) and the "Staatsapparat" (state apparatus) . Top state officials sat in the Partieleitung
(party-leadership), and top party officials attended Sitzungen (meetings) of state bodies. Politburo and
Central Committee decisions were completely binding on the state . The handbook of the GDR regime explicitly
stated that "leading functions in the state are exercised by members of the S .E.D. which de facto perform
state functions as commissioners of the party" (2:1274). Indeed, the state apparatus is accorded no
professional bureaucratic autonomy at all and is depicted explicitly in the handbook as an instrument of
the party. "The party apparatus [of the S .E.D.] shall lead the state as the most important instrument of the
party" (2 :1275). Party structures inside the state and the secret police completed the control mechanisms
(2:1188-89) . In the state apparatus, 2,125,054 East Germans worked directly for their government, [Klaus
Kónig, "Bureaucratic Integration by Elite Transfer," Governance 6, no. 3 (1933) 386-96], of whom approximately
500,000 were vetted by the party as nomenklatura appointments, [Gerd Meyer, Die DDR Machtelite
in der Ara Honecker (Tiibingen : Francke,1991), 89] . Research on the GDR before the 1989 regime change
concluded that the nomenklatura covered all middle- and top-level jobs, a small number of which were reserved
for members of the non-SED parties in the National Front [Gero Neugebauer, "Die fůhrende Rolle
der SED," in Ilse Spittmann, ed., Die SED in Geschichte and Gegenwart (Deutschland Archiv,1987), 70] .
More than 99 percent of army officers belonged to the SED (ibid., 69) . The Kleines Politisches WSrterbuch
(Berlin : Dietz,1973) defines Kaderpolitik (cadre policy), therefore, quite broadly as the "selection, education,
qualification, as well as deployment of capable cadres devoted to the task of the working class and its
Marxist-Leninist party in all realms of societal life" (p. 390) .
36. The most extreme examples of the implosion of the party occurred in the former Soviet Union and
Yugoslavia . We discuss the fragmentation of the party-state in the USSR in chapter 19 .
Post-Communism's Prehistories
	
251
potentially loyal and effective civil servants are fired due to guilt by association or
when administrative positions are immediately "colonized" by antiregime (but
possibly incompetent) forces . Both massive purging (as in East Germany) or the
absence of any significant change (as in Romania) will create problems for democracy.
(3) The informer legacy causes problems . Regimes that approximate totalitarianism
or even early post-totalitarianism have all-encompassing ideologies
and organizational schemes . There is thus the tendency in such regimes to induce
ordinary citizens (and not only intelligence specialists) to inform and spy on
other citizens.37 This legacy of the informer presents inevitable problems for the
new regime, most prominent of which is the demand on the part of many citizens
for "lustration" [purification] of the state apparatus, even if this violates due
process and civil rights and creates legitimacy problems.3S If new democracies engage
in large-scale lustration policies, another consequence might be that those
threatened by lustration and their families might turn to vote for the successor,
reformed Communist parties as a pressure group for their interests.
These totalitarian or early post-totalitarian legacies contrast sharply with the
legacies of the authoritarian regimes of the sort we considered in parts 2 and 3 .39
The informer legacy (and thus the lustration demand) was less severe because
most of the spying on citizens was done by members of the state intelligence or
coercive apparatus and not by ordinary citizens . To be sure, many authoritarian
regimes leave a difficult legacy of human rights abuses by the military, police, and
intelligence agencies. And, as we have documented, the new democratic governments
in Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile have had little success in imprison-
37. For example, in East Germany, out of a population of not more than eighteen million people, Stasi
intelligence files were maintained on six million subjects, of whom four million were GDR residents . Stasi
full-time employees (Hauptamtliche Mitarbeiter) were capped at 85,000 ; the precise figure for 1982 was
81,487, according to the Gauck Beh6rde, which occasionally cites the higher figure of 99,000 . David Gill and
Ulrich Schrdter, Das Ministerium fiir Staatssicherheit: Anatomie des Mielke -Imperiums (Berlin : Rohwolt,
1991), 34, 37 . Total informants (Informelle Mitarbeiter) numbered at least 109,000, most of whom signed
written statements of collaboration, but there could have been more, since many documents were destroyed
during the regime change. Gauck cited 150,000 in a television appearance. He also cites 100,000
Gehaltsempfánger (salaried persons) in his own book, Joachim Gauck, Die Stasi-Akten (Hamburg : Rohwolt
Taschenbuch,1991),27.
38. These problems were most severe in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and East Germany (all three of which
in 1989 approximated our description of "early" or "frozen" post-totalitarianism) . In Czechoslovakia, the
parliament passed a lustration law that violated many basic tenets of democratic law and civil liberties (see
chapter 17) . In Bulgaria the lustration issue split the Union of Democratic Forces between "revolutionary
democrats" and "procedural democrats ." Germany's ready-made "inheritor state" of West Germany has addressed
this legacy by purging of a sort that would be extremely difficult (and democratically dangerous)
in most new democracies . For example, 27 percent of all administrative-level employees in the ministries
of the new Bundeshnder were imported from the West, and 51 percent of the highest level appointments
were filled by such imports. In the Justice Department of Brandenburg, West German imports topped 70
percent . The GDR data were supplied to us by Daniel V Friedheim from his forthcoming Yale University
doctoral dissertation on the GDR regime change . Also see KSnig, "Bureaucratic Integration by Elite Transfer ."
39. However, regimes that approximate the sultanistic ideal type predictably will present grave problems
of the serviceability of the old bureaucracy because by definition the sultan did not respect any bureaucratic
norms . As we (and Weber) argued, there are no "state careers" in a sultanistic regime, only members
of the "household staff" of the sultan
252 Post-Communist Europe
ing human rights offenders. However, because the scope of these hierarchically
led military regimes was less extensive than in the totalitarian or even early posttotalitarian
regimes and because there were no official state parties in Argentina,
Uruguay, or Chile (and only a relatively weak official party in Brazil), many members
of the state apparatus were left in place, or positions were not completely
politicized in the authoritarian period, or both . In this respect, much more of the
state apparatus was "available" and usable by the new democratic forces during
and after the transition.40 In this regard, the contrast between the degree to which
the state apparatus was politicized in the period before the transition in East Germany
and Spain is particularly dramatic. In East Germany there were 500,000
nomenklatura jobs; in Spain there were almost none. In the decade before
Franco's death, entrance to the civil service was by a competitive exam in which
candidates were identified only by number. Indeed, by the 196os the only position
in the Spanish government that required membership in the official party, the
Movimiento National, was the post of provincial governor because the incumbent
of this post was also the head of the provincial Movimiento organization .41
Economic Society
We conclude with a brief discussion here of the last of our five tasks of consolidation,
which concerns economic society. We will not say much about what a totalitarian
regime of the Communist type implies about markets because this subject
has been written about extensively. However, we note here that, in our
judgment, most commentaries fail to highlight the crucial social, political, and
state requisites of modern market economies . Advanced market economics are
neither mechanistic nor spontaneous. The economic societies of the advanced
democracies, in their great diversity, have all been socially constructed by economic
incentives and a complex interplay of societal norms, governmental policies, and
state-sanctioned rules that regulate (among other things) contracts, the rights and
privileges of private (and public) property, and banking and credit systems .
In a totalitarian regime of the Communist type, noneof the above-listed (minimal)
components of an effective, socially constructed, economic society exist .
40. For example, though the military in Uruguay banned elections when they assumed power in 1973,
they did nothing to alter the traditional system of electoral registers or districts . They also left in place
Uruguay's highly proficient and neutral electoral court . Therefore, when the military decided to hold a constitutional
referendum in t98o, the professional bureaucrats implemented Uruguay's traditional and virtually
tamper-proof democratic voting procedures . In these circumstances, the democratic opposition were
able to profit by this "usable state" and defeat the military's proposal for a semiauthoritarian constitution .
41- Significantly, even in this one nomenklatura position, most appointees became party members only
after being nominated to the post of governor. Indeed, in one celebrated case in the early r9óos, the nominee
to Sevilla refused to join the party but was allowed to assume his position anyway . For the increasing
professionalization and independence of the Spanish civil service, see Miguel Beltrán Villalva, "Política y
administración bajo el Franquismo : La reforms administrative y los planes de desarrollo" in Raymond
Carr, ed., La época de Franco (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, forthcoming) .
Post-Communism's Prehistories
	
253
The easiest component to create and the one that normally appears first is a degree
of market incentives . However, there are innumerable other problems that
must be addressed before an effective economic society is consolidated. There is
first and foremost the problem of an effective state.42 A revolutionary upheaval
can do away with a command economy, but if the party-state also implodes and
there is no effective political power, how will the new regulatory framework of
economic society be constructed? Witness Russia. There is also the problem of
property. If the right of private property is introduced, inevitably there are questions
of how the new rights of private ownership should be established. By restitution?
From what date? Before the Communists? Before the Nazis? How should
public companies be sold? By auction? Who has enough capital? Are there enough
effective buyers? Should foreign capital be assigned a fixed quota? Should there be
manager buy-outs? Will these be seen as nomenklatura buy-outs? Should spontaneous
privatization be permitted? Is this actually theft of public property? These
and a hundred other questions are predictably on the agenda in the aftermath of
a Communist totalitarian or post-totalitarian regime, and similar problems will
be the legacy in different ways of most sultanistic regimes . However, in an authoritarian
regime of the Chilean or Spanish sort, very few of these questions will
be found.
POST-COMMUNISM'S DIVERSE PATHS
In this chapter, we have sought to evaluate important Russian and especially
Central and East European commonalities because of their coexistence within the
coercive system of Soviet dominance and the fact that the Soviet Union attempted
to impose a similar social, political, ideological, and economic regime type on
them all. However, our primary task in the chapters that follow is to take this
common heritage as an important background factor and to explore the underanalyzed
variation within the region in democratic (or nondemocratic) transition
paths. We also want to explore the substantial variation in the tasks that polities
must accomplish if they are ever to become democratically consolidated . A
significant part of this within-region variation comes from their pre-Communist
histories and their geopolitical location . But an important part of this variation is
also explicable in terms of their distinctive regime types (or subtypes) and/or the
severity of their stateness problem.
The erosion of the Soviet Union's ideological confidence and geopolitical will
to use coercion to manage its outer and inner empires changed power relations
42. The role of the state in the transformation of post-Communist economies is a major research vacuum.
Indeed, when we asked a leading North American economist researching post-Communist Europe
for academic references on the subject, he commented that "neglect of the role of the state in the transformation
by economists borders on the criminal'
254
	
Post-Communist Europe
throughout the region. However, the consequences of this new international environment
varied greatly and comparative path-dependent analysis is called for.
For example, since the late i97os Poland, by our criteria, approximated an authoritarian
(not a totalitarian or post-totalitarian) regime . Given the changed Soviet
political economy of coercion, a democratic opposition in Poland that had
been blocked became unblocked. In mature post-totalitarian Hungary, a fourplayer
game of democratic opposition that would not have even started in the
past was allowed to play out to the end. In "frozen" post-totalitarian polities (e.g.,
the G.D.R. and Czechoslovakia), old guard Brezhnev era leaders who needed external
support to make their coercive threats credible collapsed when their middle-level
cadres either no longer believed in the regime's utopian ideological
claims or at least were unwilling to use large-scale violence against protesting
crowds. Regimes that had experienced virtually no domestic changes, such as sultanistic-totalitarian
Romania and barely post-totalitarian Bulgaria, were reconstituted
by nondemocratic elites after they divested themselves of their long-standing
leaders.
In most of the southern part of the Soviet Union's near totalitarian inner empire,
the stateness crisis of the Soviet Union allowed nondemocratic elites, who
were close to the levers of power in the republics, to shift from a party-state to an
ethnic state discourse without tolerating pluralism, respecting minority rights, or
building a democratic civil society . Such changes certainly relate to the literature
on post-Communist politics, but ethnoauthoritarianism, ethnic conflict, and
state erosion are more dominant features of many of these polities than is democratization
or even full liberalization. In fact, as we document in chapter 19,
the discourse of "national liberation" was privileged over democratization and the
discourse of collective rights of "titular nationalitites" was privileged over individual
rights. As our contribution to the new comparative politics of post-Communist
regimes, we will explore the sources and consequences of such major
variations.