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The Collapse of Socialism, the Soviet Bloc and Socialist States: An Institutional Account
Research Group in International Security
Why did socialism, the Soviet bloc and socialist states end-and do so when they did and in such a rapid-fire manner? The easy answer to this question is to point to the most obvious proximate cause: the Gorbachev reforms. In deregulating state socialism in the domestic realm and in the bloc, it can be argued, Gorbachev weakened the regime, the bloc and the Soviet state, and thereby provided to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe an easy exit-from state socialism, the bloc and the state.
While appealing in its simplicity, this answer begs a number of important questions. Why did Gorbachev, a seemingly rational politician concerned with maximizing his power and protecting the system he led, introduce such destabilizing reforms? Why were publics in these states and, in many cases, party elites as well, so willing and able to respond to Gorbachev's ideas and policies by carrying the reform process faster and further and in far different directions than Gorbachev intended? Why was defection both ideological and spatial-that is, involving the dissolution not just of regimes, domestic and international, but also, in some instances at least, of states? Why did socialist regimes outside the Soviet sphere of influence and, thus, presumably outside the perimeters of the Gorbachev reforms, participate in this quick exit from socialism? Finally, and most generally, what were the connections among the collapse of regime, state and bloc in the eastern half of Europe-connections that are strongly suggested by the obvious commonalities they shared of socialism, geography and time (Beissinger 1996)?
The purpose of this paper is to provide answers to these questions. 2 I will do so by focusing on the interaction between two factors. The first is the institutional design of socialism-understood here not just as a domestic political economy common to the entire region, including Yugoslavia, but also as two other well-defined political-economic arenas of socialism: the Soviet bloc and socialist federations. As we will see, the structure of socialism, whether we focus on the regime, the bloc or the federal states, had several similar and increasingly self-destructive consequences over time. In particular, this structure functioned to undermine economic growth and to redistribute economic and political resources from the strong to the weak; that is, from the party to the society in general, from the Soviet Union to Eastern Europe in the case of the bloc, and from the center to the republics in the case of the socialist federations. The end result was that socialism was, in effect, hoisted by its own petard. It deregulated-over time and certainly by accident-the economic, political and spatial monopolies upon which it was based, and it undercut as well its other necessary condition for survival-economic growth.
While socialism was undermined by its very design, however, it did manage to survive for many decades and only departed from the European stage at the end of the 1980s. This would seem to suggest a second and more short-term set of causal factors at work-in particular, the rapid expansion over the course of the 1980s in the opportunities for systemic transformation. To borrow from social movement theorists (e.g. Tarrow 1994), anger and resources are usually insufficient for massive change; the political opportunity structure must also expand in ways that divide elites, redistribute incentives, reapportion resources and produce in the process a more malleable political environment.
The events of the 1980s in the eastern half of Europe provided in effect a textbook case of expanding political opportunities, given the combination during that decade of the deaths of three long-serving leaders and, from a regional perspective, critically placed communist party leaders (or Tito, Hoxha and Brezhnev); a sharp decline in economic performance, leading in some cases to a prolonged decline in economic output and the standard of living; and sharp divisions within communist parties in response to these developments, leading to either a stalemate over power and reform, or to the introduction of major liberalizing reforms. In either case, however, the result was the same. Resources were redefined and redistributed, and the stage was set for an unraveling of political authority along ideological and geographical lines. The regional reach of these developments, in combination with the similarities among all the socialist regimes with respect to their deficiencies in politics and economics, meant that all of the communist parties in the region lost their hegemonic position and exited, as a result, en masse from the European stage; all of the Eastern European states were liberated from Soviet rule, with the end result that the Soviet bloc collapsed; and all of the republics within the socialist federations left the state and became, as a result, newly-sovereign political units. 3
Institutional Design: Domestic Socialism
As developed first in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s and then exported in "ready to wear fashion" (Brus 1977) to Eastern Europe after World War II, European socialism came to be defined in terms of five interrelated characteristics: state ownership of the means of production; central planning; isolation from the global economy; rule by a single, dictatorial Leninist party; and deep commitment to rapid socioeconomic development. 4 These five traits created a political economy that was distinct from both capitalist liberal democracies and authoritarian systems, whether pre-capitalist or capitalist. First, state socialism erased the familiar boundaries separating politics from economics. As a consequence, authority relations were merged with exchange relations. The economy was fully politicized and, less often noted, the polity was fully "economized" (Bunce 1985; Harding 1984; Vajda 1981). In this sense, state socialism resembled in certain respects pre-capitalist state formations.
Next, European socialism combined this "old-fashioned" characteristic with a number of others that were distinctly modern. In particular, to use Michael Mann's (1987) useful distinctions among states, European socialism combined despotism-a trait common to all dictatorships-with another trait that set it apart: an historically unparalleled degree of organizational penetration. At the same time, because of this, state socialism managed to erase not just the already noted boundaries between politics and economics, but also a series of other boundaries that are central to most other political-economic systems; that is, the boundaries separating the public from the private, the state from civil society and the regime from the state. This meant that the public sphere swallowed up the private; civil and political society was either destroyed or prevented from developing; and the state was intertwined with, and quite dependent upon, the regime. When combined, these traits had one core consequence: the governing party in these dictatorships functioned simultaneously as an economic, political and social monopoly. These parties had no economic, political or social competitors, and they were guaranteed-through their monopolistic position and their institutional reach-ready access to economic, political and social resources.
These resources, moreover, were substantial. This was because state socialism was "ultra-modern" in its commitment to rapid development. This goal, when combined with the characteristics already listed, meant that these systems were propelled by a need to expand. Here, I do not refer to the familiar argument, made by conservatives in the United States during the Cold War era, that "communism" was a system driven to seek world domination. After all, during the Cold War, both liberal democracies and communist dictatorships strongly preferred an international system "on their side," whether that meant, simply, an expansion in the size of their alliances or, less simply, an expansion in the number of regimes that were located within their zone of influence and that emulated their particular political-economic model. Rather, I refer to the considerable pressures within these systems for domestic expansion (Kornai 1979; Csanadi 1997). These were dictatorships that could never rest on their laurels. Just as there was never enough growth, so there was never enough power. And the two were, because of the structure of these systems, highly intertwined. Small wonder, then, that state socialism was notable for its "excesses" (Cohen 1985), whether exemplified by the extraordinary rates of capital investment, urbanization and literacy produced by these systems in their early years; by their addiction to big projects, big farms and big enterprises (Graham 1993; Gaidar 1995; Gaidar and Yaroshenko 1988); or by the terrible human costs produced by their rush to the radiant future.
Federalism and the Bloc
These, then, were the core institutional traits that all of the European socialist systems shared. Before we assess their consequences over time, however, we need to look at two other socialist playing fields. The first was international: the Soviet bloc, which included all of the states in the region, except Yugoslavia and Albania. The second was domestic: the socialist federations of Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia (as opposed to the remaining states in the region which were unitary in structure). Both of these institutional arenas shared the defining characteristics of "generic" socialism as outlined above, but added an additional tier to the basic socialist system. This meant in turn that the units of interaction and bargaining were also different.
The Soviet bloc was a hierarchical regional system. In practice, this meant that it featured relative isolation from the international system; extraordinary redundancy with respect to the domestic political economic structure of the member states; high levels of intra-bloc integration, including considerable coordination of the foreign and domestic policies of the member states; and a single and powerful regional hegemon, the Soviet Union, which dominated the smaller and weaker states located within the regional system (Bunce 1985).
The final trait requires some elaboration. Hegemon in this case referred to the powers enjoyed by the Soviet Union as a consequence of the absence of multilateral ties within the bloc; Soviet domination over the bilateral relations within the bloc and between the bloc and the international system; and Eastern European dependence on the Soviet Union for power, security, markets and primary products. As regional hegemon, therefore, the Soviet Union enjoyed sufficient economic, ideological and military resources to function within the region as the mediator among states and between these states and the international system, and, at the same time, as the guarantor of political stability, ideological purity, national security and economic growth.
There were a number of striking similarities, then, between the structure of state socialism as a domestic political economy and the structure of the Soviet bloc. For instance, just as these parties could be said to have enjoyed a domestic monopoly because their systems fused economics, politics and society, eliminated any competitor to the party and provided a rich array of institutions to facilitate party control over the production and distribution of power and privilege, so the Soviet Union could be said to have enjoyed a regional monopoly by virtue of the very same features defining inter-state relationships within the bloc. Moreover, just as "consumers" were captive at home within socialist regimes, since they had to "buy" whatever power and privilege the party chose to dispense, so Eastern European states functioned within the bloc as "captive consumers" of the goods, power and policies the Soviet Union chose to distribute. Finally, just as the joining of monopoly with the commitment to rapid growth led to continuous pressures to expand power and growth in the domestic sphere of socialism, so a regional monopoly and a commitment to rapid growth at home and in the region led the Soviets to continually pressure for expanding power and plenty in Eastern Europe.
A final similarity between these two spheres of socialism was that they both featured a dichotomous bargaining structure. The key players in domestic socialism were, essentially, two (the party and the society), and the bloc featured at any given point two players as well (the Soviet Union and one or another Eastern European state). However, there was one difference. The bloc featured two levels of politics, or the usual domestic "game" involving the party and the society, augmented by an international "game" involving the Soviet Union and the Eastern European states. And these two tiers of socialism, not surprisingly, were closely intertwined, such that the dependence of Eastern European publics on their parties was combined in turn with the dependence of these parties on the Soviet Union. In this way, it must be recognized, the Soviet Union as an imperial power seemed to avoid the familiar costs of indirect rule. The Soviets were in a position to exercise control over both the governing parties and the societies within their colonial domain.
This leads us to the third and final institutional arena of European socialism which is important for this analysis: the federal states of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. Federalism emerges as a key factor in this analysis for several reasons-because federalism was one of the few things these three quite different socialist states had in common; because these were the only federal states in the region; and because it was these three states and no others that dismembered. The best predictor of state collapse after state socialism, then, was federalism.
Like elsewhere, federalism in the socialist context involved an additional layer of political and administrative institutions that were sandwiched between the center and the localities; that shared power with the center with respect to decision-making and implementation; and that featured a full complement of political and administrative officials. To this basic federal structure, however, socialist states added three more characteristics that were, especially in their combination, most unusual. One was that these were dictatorships, not democracies. Virtually every federation, it must be noted, has been a democracy-for the obvious reason that federalism is assumed to be a threat to dictatorship, because it opens up the possibility of heightened competition for, if not increased fragmentation of, political power or, to use the language of institutionalists, the potential for a distancing between principals and their agents. 5 Another distinguishing feature was that federalism in the socialist context applied not just to political institutions, such as the party and governmental representative bodies, but also, because of the expansive understanding of what constituted the political sphere in such systems and the virtual absence of either civil or political society, to economic, social and cultural institutions-including the media, academies of sciences, schools and the like. Finally, as in Belgium, India and one province in Canada, the federated units-or republics in all three socialist cases (along with a group of lesser units within some of the Soviet and Yugoslav republics)-were based upon territorial concentrations of national communities. All the socialist federations were, in short, national federations-in contrast to, for instance, Germany and the United States (Brubaker 1996; Roeder 1991; Slezkine 1994). 6
While federalism was a domestic construct and the Soviet bloc an international one, they nonetheless greatly resembled each other in their basic structures. In both cases, the core structure was radial (with each lower unit linked to the center and not to the other like units), and relations between units were conducted on a bilateral basis. Moreover, both were cultural, as well as political-administrative and geographical constructs, and this affected not just the structure of bargaining, but also the development of identities. For example, just as the bloc featured Poland, Czechoslovakia and the like as its corporate units, these states had cultural, as well as political, spatial and juridical meaning, and interactions within the bloc reinforced these designations. Thus, the socialist federations were constructed on the basis of cultural-political-spatial units, such as the Ukraine and Ukrainians, Slovenia and Slovenes, and bargaining within the federations reinforced these designations. In both cases, the result was the same. The second tier of the system was well positioned to function in effect as repository of power, money, identity and the like. In addition, just as the Soviet Union functioned as the regional hegemon within the bloc and enjoyed a monopoly, so the center-or the central party-state apparatus-was in a position to dominate the republics with respect to both politics and economics. Finally, the dependency chain in both structures was two-tiered. Whereas in the bloc Eastern European societies were dependent upon their ruling parties for all that they wanted and needed and these parties were in turn dependent upon the Soviet Union for the same and this dual dependency guaranteed in effect two-tiered compliance. Thus, society in the federal context was dependent upon republic-level parties that were dependent in turn upon the central level party-state apparatus.
This brief overview of the institutional design of European socialism in its several arenas points to three conclusions. One, most obviously, is that the design of socialism was remarkably similar, whether we focus on regimes, states or the bloc. All that differed was the number of tiers in the system and the names of the particular units that defined interactions. Another is that each of these systems depended for their functioning and their survival on the continuation of growth and monopoly. Finally, this dependence seemed to be a strength, rather than a weakness insofar as compliance and systemic survival was concerned. These systems were ideally structured to maximize growth, monopoly and compliance. This was because their institutions fused politics and economics and forged a remarkable convergence between ideological mission and organizational control. Put more simply, interests and capacity served the same end: the dominance of the center over the periphery.
However, as we know from the events of 1989-1992 and, indeed, the earlier dress rehearsals in 1953, 1956, 1968 and 1980-1981, all three of these socialist systems-that is, the regime, the state and the bloc-failed to reproduce themselves. And a major reason why was the long-term and unintended consequences of institutional design.
The Costs of Socialist Institutions: Intra-Elite Conflict
The best-known cost of socialist institutions was their failure to maintain reasonable levels of economic growth following the initial period of forced draft industrialization. There were a variety of reasons why this happened-for example, the inability of planners to deal with more complex economies and more complex social and political, as well as economic objectives; the weakness of such systems with respect to technological innovation; and the disincentives for economic efficiency, given widespread rent-seeking behavior, planner, not consumer sovereignty and the absence of bankruptcy, competition, real prices or, for that matter, real money. Thus, in the early years of the socialist experiment, when creation and mobilization of capital and labor was the major task, these economies delivered impressive results-in large measure because of the convergence between ideology and political power. However, when the task shifted from extensive to intensive growth and when the focus shifted, as a result, from creation to efficient utilization of labor and capital, these economies were at a severe disadvantage (Nove 1980). To borrow from Charles Lindblom (1977), these economies were all thumbs and no fingers. Moreover, the sheer fact of their aging-or the hardening of priorities and the embedding of distributive coalitions (Olson 1987)-did not help (Colton 1986; Golubovic 1988; Bolcic 1989).
Neither did several other developments that appeared, beginning in the 1960s and 1970s. One was the growing pressures on many of these parties to prime public consumption as a way of both meeting ideological concerns and keeping restive publics quiet. The other was the decision of many socialist leaders, responding to economic decline, its translation into higher levels of intra-elite conflict and ever-higher bill of public consumption, to borrow abroad while rejecting as too risky needed economic and political liberalization at home (Bunce 1985).
It would be wrong, however, to reduce the problems of socialism to economics-not just because other factors were at work, but also because these other factors were both a cause and an effect of the economic dilemmas of mature socialism. Specifically, the other trend we find in the historical evolution of socialism, in addition to economic decline, was a subtle, but crucial and cumulative process of redistribution of political and economic resources from the strong to the weak-or, to return to our arenas of socialism, from the party to the society, from the Soviet Union to Eastern Europe, and from the center to the republics. This redistributive process occurred in large measure because the strong became more divided and contentious, while the weak became more homogenized. And the reasons why this happened were, again, because of the unintended and long-term consequences of institutional design.
Socialist elites became increasingly divided and contentious for a number of reasons. One was that the fusion of politics and economics translated into very high stakes attached to winning and losing. Fusion also meant that change in one arena led necessarily to changes in the other-which made politics and economics quite fluid and, at times, extraordinarily unstable. At the same time, the party's economic and political monopoly created a monopsony. Just as the party was the sole allocator of power and privilege, and that gave the party tremendous powers, so the party necessarily functioned as the market for any and all claims to power and privilege. With but one arena for the mediation of conflict, high stakes, and insecure politicians, the stage was set for an extraordinarily conflictual intra-elite environment. The mono-organizational character of socialism, as T.H. Rigby has put it (1990), concentrated conflict within that single organization that defined the system and its goals: the communist party.
In all political systems, of course, a divided elite has important consequences for public policy and regime-society relations, since elites make policy and a divided elite encourages defections from the elite stratum and expanded room for maneuver for the society in general and the opposition forces in particular. Indeed, as the literature on transitions to democracy, recently and long ago, has made clear, intra-elite divisions are crucial to the onset of both political liberalization and democratization (Moore 1966; O'Donnell and Schmitter 1987). However, socialist dictatorships were unusually "elite sensitive," because the system was composed of-indeed defined by-an elaborate tapestry of dependent relationships that ran from its very bottom (local neighborhoods, schools, and the like) to its apex in the Politburo and the Central Committee of the communist party. Thus, if the elites were stable, so was economics, politics, power and personnel.
This can lead to incrementalism, or, from a less charitable perspective, stagnation. But if elites in socialist systems conflicted, as they often did, tremors were sent throughout the system and the result was extreme change. Whether these changes suggested innovation or chaos (again, depending upon one's perspective), the consequences were the same. Intra-elite conflict wreaked havoc on all, and made these types of systems unusually open to change-a process that was only reinforced by the ideological emphasis on rapid transformation.
Because they wanted to protect themselves and their system, though, the European socialist leaders devised means to reduce the costs of conflict. The Soviet case is instructive. After Stalin (and Beria) died, the Soviet leadership decided to eliminate death as a punishment for ending up on the wrong side of a political battle. After all, they knew that victors one day could be victims the next-as readily evidenced by their experiences during Stalinization. Providing security of life, of course, merely increased intra-elite conflict by keeping winning just as attractive while lowering the costs of losing. Moreover, conflict came to be expressed in other unsettling ways-for instance, the hare-brained schemes and radical shifts in policy and leadership of the Khrushchev period. This led the Soviet political elite to depose Khrushchev and install Brezhnev-who only went further in creating a more secure and, thus, contentious elite environment by agreeing to stability in cadres and policies and by using the social surplus as a key mechanism for neutralizing conflict. What this meant in turn was that intra-elite conflict was still encouraged, not just because of job security, but also because money, like power, was scarce and, in addition, had a visible metric. Moreover, with the constriction of mobility opportunities brought on by Brezhnevian policies (which were applied as well in Eastern Europe, even in Yugoslavia), elites outside the charmed circle of the Politburo and Central Committee became quite frustrated, quite entrenched and quite resistant to central control. This was a sure formula for both conflict and failures in policy implementation-which, by their necessary interaction, generated a vicious circle.
The problems of implementation and control within the European socialist dictatorships needs somewhat further elaboration. The problem was that socialist bureaucracies were built to maximize the power of the top leadership, not to maximize efficiency (though the two could go together, as they did in the early stages of socialist construction). As Elemer Hankiss (1988) has argued, such bureaucracies were set up to protect and expand the power of the top leadership. Patronage as a method of allocating bureaucratic positions, provisional mandates extended to those at the top of the hierarchy to all those below them and the sheer size of the nomenklatura all served this function, as did the absence of either a rational bureaucracy or rule of law.
The end result was that bureaucrats were quite insecure, since they depended on capricious officials above them in the hierarchy and since they were, at the same time, mired in conflicts with each other as a consequence of having neither job security nor standard operating procedures. Such bureaucratic arrangements also left the public in a highly vulnerable position. They were held hostage to capricious officials who were in turn hostages themselves. In this way, the costs of uncertainty were passed from the top down, first to bureaucrats and then to the clienteles they purportedly served. Socialist elites, therefore, derived much of their power from manipulating uncertainty-a point that has been made not just for European socialism, but also its Chinese equivalent (Whyte 1989; Bunce 1991).
This arrangement did concentrate power at the top in the short run, but in the longer run it eventually had the opposite effect. One problem was that battling bureaucrats do not tend to be very good at implementing policy. Another problem was that this system encouraged bureaucrats to seek some insurance as a guard against uncertainty. This meant, for instance, a marked propensity to squelch "bad news," to carve out islands of autonomy wherever possible, to resist any and all changes in policy, to engage in corruption (which was made all the easier by the decline of mobility and the increase, as a result, of "mestnichestvo," or localism) and, finally, to pass all these costs on to their clienteles (Bruszt and Redi 1989). Their clienteles, in turn, engaged in similar behavior in order to ward off intolerable levels of uncertainty. In this way, the "insecurity blanket" of European socialist dictatorships functioned over time to undermine efficiency and the control of higher over lower levels of the system. In the process, the party became weaker-with respect to itself and to society.
This leaves us with a final elite asset, turned liability in socialist regimes: socioeconomic development. As Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan (1996) have argued, while development is never a problem for democracy, it is often a problem for dictatorship. In the socialist cases, development did not just render the economy less "plannable" and less capable of generating growth (Nove 1980) and, thus, the major source of intra-elite conflict. It also increased at the same time the party's dependence on experts and societal claims on the surplus. With industrialization, education and urbanization, these were no longer simple economies or simple societies that could be directed "from above."
Thus, what appeared to be elite assets in European socialist systems became in fact liabilities as these systems matured. What socialist leaders thought they created was a system that maximized their powers by combining certainty in political and economic outcomes-or planned economics and politics, both of which were insulated from competition-with uncertainty in political and economic procedures-or such characteristic traits as atomization of both publics and elites, the absence of rule of law, standard operating procedures, and, thus, rights, and the capricious exercise of both economic and political authority. In joining uncertain procedures with certain results, however, socialism created, instead, a system that generated intra-elite conflict, dramatic oscillations between systemic rigidity and systemic crises, and a decline in the control the party in general and the leaders in particular could exercise over the system.
Socialist institutions, therefore, encouraged compensatory behavior. This made economic and political outcomes more and more uncertain over time, while generating pressures to make political and economic processes more certain. The system was liberalizing in spite of-or in reaction to-itself.
Homogenized Society
Mass publics did not stand idly by while these developments were taking place. Rather, they took advantage of the situation. Declining regime autonomy and rising societal autonomy are, after all, two faces of the same coin. But the ability of society to capitalize on elite weakness and, indeed, atomization, was greatly enhanced by the unanticipated and cumulative impact of socialist institutions on societal resources. Society benefited, in particular, from the homogenization of their resources. Here, I refer not just to the constraints on income differentiation which were typical of socialist systems, given, in particular, the absence of income based on wealth. I also refer to the ways in which socialist systems placed members of society in an unusually (though not completely) similar structural location.
Everyone within these dictatorships was an employee of the state, and everyone lacked economic and political resources. Moreover, each member of society was dependent upon the party-state for access to all scarce goods, including not just salaries, but also jobs, apartments, health care and political rights. Also, when policy changes came, they affected everyone everywhere in the same way and at the same moment. All this meant that socialist publics were quite willing and able to hold the party responsible for everything that happened-even when much of what happened was, as already noted, increasingly outside the party's control and a byproduct of institutional design. Societal values and interests, then, were homogenized and similar. The weak, as a result, had a crucial weapon, to borrow from Scott (1985): they had a great deal in common.
Similarities were only enhanced, moreover, by the success of European socialism in promoting literacy and urbanization, two catalysts for collective action. Socialist development also led to rising expectations. The party had promised rewards for the sacrifices of rapid industrialization, and the regime had sold socialism on its economic and social, not political merits. At the same time, younger generations expected improvements in their material conditions equal to those that had been enjoyed by their parents and grandparents. But the system had aged, and mobility opportunities had dried up.
All this translated into anger and a widespread sense of injustice-a feeling of being denied what was understood to be one's due (Moore 1977). This also translated into declining compliance in both economic and political terms. This reflected in part the power society derived from full employment and the labor hunger of enterprises (Kornai 1979). It also reflected the fusion of the economy and the polity. Such a "visible hand" rendered the party responsible for whatever happened in economics and politics. Socialism had married economic to political dissatisfaction-within the society and within the elite. Especially in the less politically oppressive and more economically developed countries in the socialist region, such as Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia (and, to wander for a moment into the federal cases, Slovenia, Croatia and the Baltic republics), society began to break out of the confines of its "Stalinist britches" (Lewin 1988; Kubik 1994; Link 1989; Lapidus 1989).
In this sense, the role of the party and that of the society were reversed from what the socialist model of dictatorship would have led us to expect. Over time, it was the party, not the society that was atomized, and it was the society, not the party that was cohesive. This generalization was particularly apt for those systems that combined ethno-religious homogeneity with soft dictatorship-most notably Poland. It is not surprising, therefore, that this was where protests were the most common and where the party was the weakest-although what helped, of course, were the historical traditions of anti-Russian sentiment and Polish protests against alien rule.
Regional and Federal Parallels and Reverberations
The redistributive and, at least at first glance, seemingly counter-intuitive dynamics of domestic socialism had their direct equivalents in intra-bloc and intra-federal dynamics. Here, I will be more brief. The strength of the Soviet Union within the bloc, like the strength of communist parties at home, led over time to weakness. This occurred precisely because the Soviets were in the same position within the region as communist parties were within their domestic spheres. The Soviet regional monopoly had created a monopsony, and Eastern European demands converged on the Soviet Union as a consequence of Soviet control over all those resources that these regimes needed to meet their goals of national security, economic growth and domestic political stability. The Soviets, moreover, could hardly ignore such demands, since they had the most to lose if the weak rebelled.
At the same time, the regional "game," like the domestic "game," was one of high stakes, nervous politicians and but one arena for the mediation of conflict. This generated a lot of disagreements between the Soviets and the Eastern Europeans. Moreover, given the structure of the bloc, these disagreements were at once political and economic and translated quickly into dramatic shifts in power, policy and personnel. This, in turn, stoked conflicts within these parties and between these parties and their societies; placed these parties in the unenviable position of being caught between the demands of their publics and the demands of the Soviet Union; and undercut, as a consequence, Eastern European compliance with Soviet expectations.
Moreover, just as all of the socialist parties in Europe seemed to wreak havoc on their systems at home as a consequence of the system's "elite sensitivity," so the Soviet Union wreaked havoc on the bloc as a consequence of the region's "Soviet sensitivity." The westward movement of ripple effects from Moscow to, say, Warsaw, Prague and Budapest, then, were considerable, and rarely in a form either communist parties wanted at home or the Soviets wanted in the region. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Soviet Union usually seemed to influence Eastern Europe more when it did not want to than when it did; that unrest in Eastern Europe took place primarily when the Soviet leadership was divided; or that one reason for the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 was Soviet fears of Slovak nationalism spreading to the Ukraine (Hodnett and Potichnyj 1972).
The Soviets also paid a price for creating a bloc that had the sole purpose of maximizing Soviet control over the region. The decision to place power over performance had predictable effects. Just as the bureaucracies within socialist systems sought to reduce the costs of dependence and uncertainty, so Eastern European parties responded to Soviet power and caprice by creating islands of autonomy and by resisting Soviet demands for greater bloc integration, higher energy prices and higher contributions to the regional defense burden.
The capacity of Eastern Europe to benefit when bargaining with the Soviets grew, of course, as Soviet control over the region declined. But the structure of the bloc also allocated to the Eastern Europeans some independent resources that allowed them to exploit the Soviet Union. Like the role of society at home, so Eastern European regimes within the bloc were homogenized. Moreover, they could present a united front with respect to their needs, their interests and their demands when bargaining with the Soviets. If nothing else, geographical proximity and redundant domestic structures, assets and liabilities made it very easy for the Eastern Europeans to convince the Soviets that problems in one Eastern European country could very easily become problems in all, unless the Soviets extended help to everyone in crisis, or, purportedly, on the verge of crisis.
The structure of the bloc also married politics and economics. Because politics was less and less effective as a promoter of political stability (its exchange rate had been devalued), economics became the basis for regional as well as domestic stability. Thus, just as publics at home gained autonomy and raised their economic expectations and demands, so Eastern Europe did the same within the bloc. "Weakness," in short, had become a strength, and the Eastern European regimes, like publics within the domestic arena, had to be bought. And the pattern over time of Soviet gains from empire, like the pattern over time in economic performance within the European socialist dictatorships, testified readily to this (Bunce 1985). The "social compact" in the domestic sphere (Pravda 1981) had its equivalent in a "bloc compact."
The federal story was no different (Bahry 1987; 1991; Beissinger 1995). Rather than repeat the story of redistribution from the center to the republics, let me note the following. First, the homogenization of society in general under domestic socialism was packaged differently in the federal cases, as it was in the bloc, because of the different definition of key units. Thus, what was homogenized in the bloc was, for example, Poland and Poles, and what was homogenized in the federal cases was, for example, Estonia and Estonians, Slovenia and Slovenes. In this way, identities as well as units, cultural as well as spatial divisions, were constructed by the institutions of the bloc and the federations (though the historical evolution of these entities played a critical role as well). Second, when the center divided, the republics became more assertive and autonomous-as we saw, for example, with the regions in the Soviet Union even during the early Stalinist era (Harris 1998) and the Croatian spring of the early 1970s in Yugoslavia. Put succinctly, then, the structure of socialism produced an unpeeling of the regime and the federal states-with the latter made easier by geographically concentrated minority populations that had a strong sense of national identity, whether because of history even predating the federal structure (as with the Slovak case of 1967-1968) or a combination of history and federal administration (as with Croatia in the early 1970s). 7
All of this led to increasingly problematic control of the center over the periphery-in the federations, in the bloc and, more generally, in socialist systems. As a result, even a good fifteen years before their collapse, virtually all of the socialist regimes in eastern Europe were in a difficult bind. An expanding surplus was vital to the survival of the regime, because it had become a major component of both regime legitimacy and political stability-the former because of regime ideology and the latter because of the need to keep intra-elite conflict within bounds while pacifying a restive and expectant public. However, precisely because the party had pluralized and the public had homogenized, the demands on the surplus had increased, economic growth was further undermined, and the possibilities for needed economic reform-with all their implications for sacrifice on the part of the party and the society-were dim indeed. The response, as I and others have detailed at length elsewhere, was quite variable, including, for instance, various combinations of choices between the following strategies: integration with versus continued isolation from the global economy; introduction of market-oriented reforms versus continuation of central planning; and liberalization of domestic politics versus continuation of a hard-line dictatorship. Whatever the choice, however, the result was the same. By the 1970s, socialist economies were in decline and this jeopardized their political future in the short and the longer-term.
The Expansion of the Political Opportunity Structure
Crisis is one thing, though, and regime and state collapse another. As students of revolution and social movements have both argued, a "spark" is needed that redistributes resources and incentives and that advertises in dramatic and decisive fashion the weakness of the government and its openness to new directions. As Mark Beissinger has argued, for example, with respect to the Gorbachev reforms in the Soviet Union and the expansion of the political opportunity structure:
The easing of repression, disarray within ruling circles, moments of state weakness, the example of successful challenge by other groups in analogous situations, or even a sudden loss of accustomed group status all encourage challenges to the ways in which the existing political order defines its physical and human boundaries. These conditions make challenges appear possible, not only by providing counter-elites with the political space necessary to mobilize populations. They also do so by providing weakened targets: on the one hand, the state, whose existing definition of the boundaries of the community-itself a central part of the political order-is never fully accepted by society; on the other hand, other grups whose status and position depends upon the authority of the state and its rule-enforcement capacity (Beissinger 1995, 4).
Usually this spark comes in the form of major changes in the structure and stability of the international system; in political leadership; or in public policy (as with, for example, "great reforms"). What is striking about the decade of the 1980s in the eastern half of Europe is that all three of these conditions materialized. What is more, they exhibited regional reach-an important consideration when considering the puzzle of the region-wide collapse of socialism. Let us now turn, briefly, to an overview of what happened, beginning with changes in the international system.
The international system of the 1980s-which brought together a series of changes that first made their appearance in the previous decade-represented a marked departure from the structure and the norms that had defined the postwar international order. This, in turn, presented new pressures and new opportunities for the regimes and states in Europe in general and in the eastern half of the continent in particular. One change was the rise of détente-or what the Soviets termed, "razriadka." With that came recognition of the Soviet Union as an equal to the United States; a reduction of tensions between the two Super Powers; and increased and more regularized interaction between the two, including expansion of east-west trade, a key concern of the Soviet leadership, given the need for, but the costs of domestic economic reform (Volten 1982; Garthoff 1985). These changes rendered far more permeable the ideological, political, economic and cultural line that had long separated the eastern half of the European continent from its western half. Détente also weakened intra-bloc cohesion by virtue of removing to some extent a common and threatening enemy, while undercutting, because of relaxation of economic boundaries, the party's control over its domestic economy and Soviet control over the regional economy.
The importance of these boundary redefinitions cannot be over-emphasized. While détente was in effect a conservative strategy from the Soviet side, since it was understood to be a mechanism for shoring up socialism and avoiding needed economic and political reforms, it had one radical implication. It transformed these systems in both a spatial and an ideological sense from monopolies to oligopolies. The informal inroads into the party's power were, therefore, partially formalized. In this sense, détente was in fact the beginning of the end of the Cold War (Lynch 1992).
Part of the détente process involved passage of the Helsinki Final Act in 1975. While this, like the larger process of détente, involved explicit western acceptance of the postwar borders in the east and, more implicitly, dictatorship and the Soviet zone of influence, the Helsinki process also communicated quite the opposite set of messages. Because of the stress on human rights and the construction of institutions to monitor those rights in the signatory countries, Helsinki undermined the dictatorships in the east-by, for instance, creating a single standard for regime performance that the dictatorial east could not meet; by providing international resources to dissidents in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (which was particularly important for Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union-see Thomas 1997); and by introducing, even within the document itself, a tension, if not war between the long-established international norm of stable state boundaries in Europe versus a newer norm (which had been long lurking in the shadows) of the rights of all peoples to self-determination (Stanovcic 1989). This tension, of course, duplicated similar tensions within the European socialist order-between claims of democracy and the reality of dictatorship and between "national in form and socialist in content."
A final aspect of international change in the 1970s that shaped the political economy of eastern Europe in the 1980s was the energy crisis. In the Second World, as in the Third World, this set in motion a chain of events-for example, pressures on the global economy to recycle petrodollars, low interest rates attached to international capital, and recession in the west-that produced in the end the accumulation of extensive hard currency debts. This proved to be a particular problem by the end of the 1970s and throughout the 1980s for the small and partially liberalized political-economies of Poland, Hungary, and Yugoslavia. 8 What made hard currency indebtedness a particularly vexing problem for the Second World was, quite simply, the incapacity of these systems, given their institutional design, to either constrain domestic demand for capital or to expand exports to the west. Unconvertible currencies, the autarkic biases built into these economies, the necessarily combustible interaction between international capitalism and the inefficiencies of domestic socialism, then, made the adoption and implementation of domestic austerity measures quite difficult. When such measures were tried, as was periodically the case in Yugoslavia and Poland, moreover, publics and elites rebelled. And the focus of their rebellion was not the International Monetary Fund (Walton and Seddon 1994). Rather, it was, because of the institutional design of these systems, the communist party. In Yugoslavia, the federal design of the system ensured that the lines of conflict would be both horizontal and vertical; that is, publics against the communist party and republican party elites against the center and against each other (Woodward 1995).
What also made the eastern experience distinctive was that the Soviet Union was energy rich, and its client states were dependent upon it for their energy needs. In theory, this should have given the Soviets considerable leverage in bargaining with Eastern Europe, and it should have provided a significant boost to the Soviet economy. In practice, neither happened, because to exert economic pressure on Eastern Europe would be to introduce a series of disturbing, if not frightening possibilities. Given the barter structure of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance and the sheer size of the Soviet economy relative to its socialist trade partners, Soviet economic pressure on the client states would boost Soviet imports from Eastern Europe and thereby either greatly complicate intra-bloc financing of trade or flood the Soviet Union with inferior goods that the Eastern European countries could not export to the more exacting western hard currency markets. To echo an earlier observation: there were serious costs to being a regional monopsony, as well as monopoly.
At the same time, Soviet economic pressure on Eastern Europe-either in the form of diverting energy exports from inside to outside the region or moving intra-bloc energy trade towards world market prices (which the Soviets eventually, but slowly did)-would further weaken these already quite vulnerable economies and, perhaps, set off political protests. And such protests, Soviet leaders believed, could not just bring down the bloc, but also threaten Soviet domestic stability as well (Mlynar 1980). While that was not guaranteed, past experience was suggestive along those lines, and proceeding from the worst case scenario was far more rational than hoping for consensual elites and quiescent publics, or, if not that, a bloc that would limit the diffusion of intra-elite and public discontent. Thus, to return to an earlier theme, the Soviet Union was hoist by its own petard. It could not capitalize on its economic strengths, and its subsidies to the colonies increased substantially over the course of the 1970s and early 1980s. Eastern Europe was becoming, in short, an ever-more sizable economic and political burden on the Soviet Union (Vanous and Marrese 1983).
This development was paralleled, not surprisingly, in the domestic realm, where a rational economic response to low growth and high debts-that is, cutbacks in consumption and the introduction of thoroughgoing economic reforms-could not happen, because the party was too weak and both the party-state and the society too resistant. In the short term, then, political rationality was at variance with economic rationality. Short-term stability was purchased through extension of subsidies to party, state and societal interests and through avoidance of reform. This was at the cost, however, of undermining in the longer-term economic growth and, therefore, political stability.
There is a certain irony here. The logic of planning and single-party dictatorship (which, necessarily, went together-see Nove 1979) was in part to use politics to give the economy precisely what it lacked under capitalism; that is, direction and long-term horizons. Over time, however, this system shortened economic and political horizons. The end result was to undermine both economic performance and the control the party could effectively exercise over the economy, the state, the society and, indeed, itself.
All of these changes in international politics and economics over the course of the 1970s, then, functioned by the 1980s to render a bad economic and political situation in the east far worse. At the same time, these changes contributed to further diversification of political-economic trajectories-by country and, in the federal cases, by republic. In this way, the new international context introduced what were perhaps the three most dangerous developments for socialist dictatorships: the dependence of politics on economics, the creation of diversity among units in the place of uniformity, and the rise of alternatives to the status quo (on this final point, see Przeworski 1982). The ideological and spatial monopoly upon which all of the arenas of socialism were based had been deregulated.
This new, or at least considerably altered international order was joined in the 1980s, moreover, by another development with equally powerful and negative consequences for the future of the European socialist dictatorships: the onset of heated struggles over power and policy in response to the deaths of three exceptionally long-serving communist party leaders. Thus, in 1982, Brezhnev died, after having dominated Soviet politics for eighteen years, and in 1980 and 1985, respectively, Tito and Hoxha, the only political leaders socialist Yugoslavia and socialist Albania had ever known, finally departed from the political scene. In all political systems, whether democratic or authoritarian, leadership succession functions, at least potentially, as a major mechanism of not just personnel, but also policy change (Bunce 1981). However, in socialist systems, succession tended to be an even more powerful mechanism for innovation. This was not just because of the ideological commitment to rapid change and the centralization of political power-or, put more straightforwardly, the combination in such systems of strong desire and strong capacity for policy change. This was also because of characteristics specific to socialist succession dynamics-for example, provisional political mandates; the sequencing of winning power first and mounting a campaign second (in direct opposition to democratic practices); and the pressures on contenders for power to introduce new ideas, given the role of ambitious and expert elites, not less discriminating mass publics with no plans to win power for themselves, in determining winners and losers in the political battle. All of these factors were not just in place in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the 1980s; they were, if anything, exaggerated in their potential consequences. This was because socialist regimes were in trouble; because what followed the deaths of Tito, Hoxha and Brezhnev (and, for that matter, the departure of Husak from Czechoslovakia in 1987) was a change not just in leaders, but also in political generations; and because the exceptionally long tenure of these leaders had produced a backed-up policy agenda, rising corruption, resentful but long-ensconced lower level elites, and, finally, weakened control of the party over itself and over society.
Equally important, especially for our concerns here, was the regional reach of these successions. Major changes in Soviet high politics had, necessarily, powerful effects on all members of the bloc, especially since stability in cadres in the Soviet Union had translated into extraordinarily long-serving "shadow Brezhnevs" in Eastern Europe as well. That the only two countries situated outside the bloc (or Yugoslavia and Albania) also had successions-and, if anything, even more major ones-meant that the succession crisis managed to blanket the entire socialist region during the 1980s.
The resulting struggles over political power in Yugoslavia, Albania, the Soviet Union and, soon thereafter, in the client states in Eastern Europe, translated, very quickly, into major struggles over economic and political liberalization. Whether these struggles produced "great reforms," as in Gorbachev's Soviet Union, moderate liberalizing reforms, as in post-Hoxha Albania, or a protracted political stalemate, as most obviously in Yugoslavia and Poland throughout the 1980s, the consequences were surprisingly similar. The economy declined even further and faster, the center weakened and the periphery was empowered-whether we focus on the internal dynamics of the party, party-society relations, center-republican relations or Soviet-Eastern European relations. This had, of course, happened before-when political protests broke out in Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary and Poland following Stalin's death, and when the Czechoslovak party reformers misread the political signals emanating from Moscow during the struggle for power following the coup d'ƒtat against Khrushchev. What was different, however, was that socialism was older; the costs of its institutional design far more in evidence; and the willingness and capacity of the party and mass publics, the republics within federal states, and the states within the bloc, to depart from their respective socialist playing fields far more developed. This explains why, for example, Gorbachev was placed in the unenviable position of introducing major reforms that attempted to save socialism only to destroy it. Informal deregulation of the regime, the bloc and the state was joined in the 1980s, then, by formal deregulation.
Conclusions
We can now return to the questions posed at the beginning. Socialism, the bloc and the Soviet, Yugoslav and Czechoslovak states ended, and did so when they did, because of the combination by the end of the 1980s of two factors. One was the long-term and cumulative costs-with respect to economic performance and redistribution of power from the strong to the weak-of the institutional design of socialist regimes, the Soviet bloc and socialist federations. Depending upon the context, these costs deregulated the ideological monopoly of the communist party (as with all of these regimes, whether state socialist or self-managing pluralist); the spatial hegemony of the state (as with the federalized systems); and both the ideological and the spatial hegemony of the Soviet Union within the bloc. The other key factor, which was both short term and decisive, was the development of a more malleable domestic and international environment. This transformed what had been a largely informal process of deregulation into a formal one. The end result was that communist parties, the Soviet bloc and the socialist federations all divided into competing constellations of power, and new regimes and new states came into being.
Second, the collapse of socialism was region-wide for two reasons. The most important was the underlying similarities among all the socialist regimes, despite the claims of some, such as Yugoslavia in particular, to be "different and nicer." What was also important was that the developments of the 1980s-at both the international and domestic levels- had region-wide consequences. However, the Gorbachev reforms were also important, since they had automatic consequences for most of the region, and since they provided to those socialist regimes outside the bloc a concrete example of alternatives and, for socialist leaders in Yugoslavia and Albania, powerful and disturbing precedents.
Finally, the rapid-fire ending of these regimes, the bloc and the state speaks to striking similarities in these three socialist playing fields. All that was different among them were the core constituent units, and these differences spoke merely to whether the collapse of the system was, simply, political and economic, or, in addition, spatial in form. Equally important, however, were the interconnections among these three arenas of socialism-interconnections that spoke to the central role of the communist party in dominating, defending and, ultimately, destroying the regime, the bloc and the state.
These conclusions have implications, in turn, for our understanding of socialism, its collapse and what has followed. In particular, this analysis helps resolve many debates surrounding the collapse of socialism and the state by using institutions and political opportunities as a relatively parsimonious explanation. Thus, the collapse of socialism was both long in the making and sudden; it was a process that was, in all cases, political and economic, and for the bloc and the federation, spatial as well; and it was a product of both domestic and international factors. Most important, however, is the insight that, in the final analysis, this was a self-destructive system. This is a point that has been missed by many analysts-for instance, international relations theorists who have tended, mistakenly in my view, to focus either too much on Gorbachev or on changes at the international systemic level.
This analysis also helps us combine what have been relatively segmented stories-about the collapse of this or that regime, the end of the bloc or the dismemberment of this or that state (Dunlop 1993; Lampe 1996; Kubik 1994; Ekiert 1996; Lapidus 1989). In particular, by focussing on the various playing fields of socialism and their institutional similarities and then combining these stories with developments of the 1980s, we can see why all of these regimes collapsed and why this process extended to the Soviet bloc and to three states in the region.
At the same time, this study carries a cautionary note for our understanding of postcommunism. The institutions of the socialist period were not just important when the communists enjoyed a monopoly. They were also important when that monopoly collapsed. Indeed, socialist institutions organized politics and economics in highly disorganized times, and we have, for example, twenty-two new states in the region-which have as their boundaries the republican boundaries of the socialist period-as clear testimony to that point. The reach of these institutions, moreover, seems to have continued beyond the period of destruction into the time of construction-as many scholars have observed, whether focusing on, say, the rise and design of electoral politics (Luong 1996; Kubik 1995); the implementation of economic reform (Burawoy and Kratov 1993; Tarkowski 1990); the patterns of postcommunist protest (Ekiert and Kubik 1997); the politics of crisis management (Ekiert 1996); the relationship between unions and the state (Iankova 1997; Crowley 1994); or the structure of bargaining between the center and periphery in the new Russian state (Treisman 1996). Postcommunism, in short, does not appear to be the great divide many assume it to be, despite its ambitious agenda (Bunce and Csanadi 1993). Here, I am reminded of the ruminations in Ivo Andric's novel, Bridge on the Drina, about stability and change in everyday life in Visegrad (a town in southeast Bosnia), following the seemingly dramatic shift from Ottoman to Habsburg rule:
But in the homes, not only of the Turks, but also of the Serbs, nothing changed. They lived, worked and amused themselves in the old way. Bread was still mixed in kneading troughs, coffee roasted on the hearth, clothes steamed in coppers and washed with soda which hurt the women's fingers. (...) But on the other hand the outward aspect of the town altered visibly and rapidly. Those same people, who in their own homes maintained the old order in every detail and did not even dream of changing anything, became for the most part easily reconciled to the changes in the town and after a longer or a shorter period of wonder and grumbling accepted them. Naturally here, as always and everywhere in similar circumstances, the new life meant in actual fact a mingling of the old and the new. Old ideas and old values clashed with new ones, merged with them or existed side by side, as if waiting to see which would outlive which. People reckoned in florins and kreutzers but also in grosh and para, measured by arshin and oka and drams but also by metres and kilos and grams, confirmed terms of payment and orders by the new calendar but even more by the old custom of payment on St. George's or St. Dimitri's Day. By a natural law the people resisted every innovation but did not go to extremes, for to most of them life was always more important and more urgent than the forms by which they lived (Andric 1945, 136).
This leads, in turn, to a final and more general set of observations. As with many other recent studies, so this one testifies to the powerful role of institutions in political and economic life. Indeed, what is striking about socialist institutions is the sheer reach of their impact. Thus, it was not just that socialist institutions, like other kinds of institutions, defined rules, roles and interests, while distributing resources. It was also that they defined, in addition, identities and the boundaries of political and economic activity. What is more, they redefined over time rules, roles, resources, interests, identities and boundaries. The end result is that socialist institutions in effect invented a new game, complete with new rules, roles and the like.
What all this suggests for our understanding of institutions is the following. Institutions can in fact have consequences diametrically opposed to those intended by their framers-and even by those unusually well-endowed with resources. Second, institutions can function as agents of both construction and destruction. Third, a key role of institutions is organizing politics and economics in disorganized times. Finally and most generally, institutions can have, as a result, a life virtually of their own.
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Notes:
Note 1: For helpful summaries of these developments, see Stokes (1993), Lampe (1996), Leff (1997), Suny (1993), Dunlop (1993). See Pusic (1997) for variations in political outcomes. Back.
Note 2: This is, of course, a considerable amount of theoretical and empirical ground to cover, and the analysis presented here, as a result, will be necessarily skeletal. For a more elaborate set of arguments and evidence, see Bunce (1998). In addition to the issues addressed here, the book also focuses on a variety of others related to the collapse of regime, bloc and state-in particular, the variations in the process, such as why regime and state collapse followed the temporal order it did, why some regimes ended peacefully and others through violence and why Yugoslavia ended through war and Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union through peaceful processes. The answer, in all of these instances, was in the details of institutional design with respect to regimes and states. Back.
Note 3: There was one exception to this: the continued political marriage of Montenegro and Serbia within rump Yugoslavia. However, it is within the realm of possibility that Montenegro will at some point liberate itself from Serbian domination and form its own state. Back.
Note 4: Two caveats are in order here. First, while these were the building blocks of state socialism in Europe, they were, of course, altered to some degree in some cases by time and events. Thus, for example, some of the states in the region, such as Yugoslavia, Romania, Hungary and Poland, did begin to "dabble" with participation in the global capitalist economy in the 1970s and even earlier (Bunce 1985). However, such shifts in socialist practices did not so much redefine what constituted the essentials of European socialism as hasten its demise-for example, by speeding up their economic and thus political decline. Second, Yugoslavia, with its development of an alternative to the Soviet model, or self-managing socialism, did deviate in three important respects from this model. It was more fully integrated with the global economy and did so earlier than its socialist neighbors; it featured a far more decentralized party, state and economy; and Yugoslavia was in practice a mixed economy, featuring planning and markets. However, as I have argued elsewhere in detail (Bunce 1998 and 1997), these distinctive qualities had the effect of not so much placing Yugoslavia on a unique historical trajectory as lending a familiar, but precocious quality to the decline of the Yugoslav regime and state. Back.
Note 5: It goes beyond the confines of this paper to discuss why the federal option was taken-first by the Soviet Union and later by Yugoslavia and then Czechoslovakia. Suffice to note here that the presumption was that: 1) the party's ideological, economic and political monopoly, together with the dependency chains within the party-state apparatus, would ensure central control, and; 2) representation on the basis of nations would win some support while countering the more threatening division along class lines. Back.
Note 6: I use the term, "national," because the alternative-ethnic-does not adequately describe the characteristics of the titular nations of all of these republics-for instance, the Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Back.
Note 7: The Slovak case brings up an important caveat. While national-federalism undoubtedly structured nations and proto-states and the cleavages of political conflict, historical development prior to federalism was also important-as was the sheer fact of territorial concentration of national communities (Leff 1997; Vujacic 1996). However, what was striking about federalism was that it proved to be decisive, even when the historical evolution of the nation and the degree of concentration of national communities did not push all that strongly in a nation-state direction. In addition, it is important to note how powerful these administrative lines were-as evidenced by, for instance, their continuing power in the Russian federation (Treisman 1996); their capacity to explain patterns of mobilization prior to the break-up of the Soviet Union (Beissinger 1996); and the correlation between their absence and limited mobilization against the state and regime along national lines (as with the cases, for example, of the Turkish minority in Bulgaria, the Hungarian minorities in Romania and Slovakia, the Russian minorities within the new states of Ukraine, Estonia and Latvia, and, finally, the Polish minority in Lithuania). Back.
Note 8: The political leaders in the remaining countries in the region either chose to remain outside the global economy (as in Czechoslovakia and Albania); avoided sizable debts because of energy endowments (the Soviet Union); or had the political and economic resources, given the absence of reforms, to respond quickly to debt accumulation (as in Romania and Bulgaria). Back.
