Thanks to the generous financial support of the Henry
M. Jackson Foundation, the Russian, East European and Central
Asian Studies Program of the University of Washington Jackson
School of International Studies (REECAS) hosted a symposium, "Changes
in the Legal Environment and International Business in Russia
and the Former Republics" on February 2, 1993.
The symposium attracted a broad audience that included
professionals in the local business and legal communities as well
as faculty, students and staff of the University of Washington.
In addition to the papers published here, those given by Robert
Brumley (Managing Partner, Moscow-Vladivostok offices, Pepper,
Hamilton, and Scheetz) and Vladimir Kuznetsov (Progressor Company,
Moscow), enriched the symposium.
I should also like to thank Dr. Nicholas R. Lardy
(Director, Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies),
Carol Vipperman (President, Foundation for Russian-American Economic
Cooperation, Seattle), Margaret Niles (attorney, Garvey, Schubert,
and Barer), and Dr. Judith Thorton (Economics, University of Washington)
for their valuable contributions tot he program. Professor Thorton
and Adele Barker (now of the University of Arizona) deserve thanks
for their enormous help in planning and organizing the symposium.
Special credit is due to Colleen F. Halley, graduate
student in the REECAS program, for her help in preparing these
papers for publication. Finally, thanks to Dr. Daniel C. Waugh,
Chair of the REECAS program, for the many ways in which he supported
the symposium and helped make possible the publication of these
papers.
Glennys Young
The Russian Legal Tradition
By Theodore Taranovski
The role of law and the concept of due process are
integral to Western civilization not only because they undergird
democratic politics and the notion of human rights. Law is also
fundamental to the proper functioning of our economic system based
on private property, free enterprise, and commodity exchange.
Today, when Russia and the former Soviet republics are striving
to overcome the legacy of communism and to become integrated into
the Western world economically as well as politically, the question
remains of whether the burden of the past, the heritage of what
has been called the Russian tradition, places insurmountable obstacles
to that goal. A key element of this tradition is the supposed
disregard for the rule of law and the absence of intellectual
and institutional frameworks within which it could flourish. Accordingly,
lack of an appropriate legal environment for the conduct of international
business might well loom as a significant obstacle to the normalization
of economic and political relations with the successor states
of the Soviet Union.
It is commonly assumed both among scholars and laymen
that the evolution of tsarist autocracy and its political culture,
with overweening state power and subservient society, can be at
least partially explained by the fact that Russia did not partake
of Western legal heritage, which was based on the principles of
Roman and Germanic law as shaped by medieval ideas and practices.
That is one of key reasons why Russia failed to develop Western-style
democracy and a free society. Absolutism, bureaucratic arbitrariness,
a nobility whose lives and property depended on the tsar's favor,
an embryonic middle class, serfdom and the peasant commune with
its collectivist mentality, economic backwardness and cultural
and religious differences, all separated Russia from the West.
Moreover, the October Revolution only intensified these historic
trends. The tsars were succeeded by the commissars and autocracy
by totalitarianism. Historians, political scientists, and popular
writers alike have tended to concentrate on those aspects of the
Russian past that underscored the differences with the West because
the victory of communism in 1917 seemed to justify them. Given
this traditional interpretation, how likely is it then that post-Soviet
Russia will be able to join the world community of nations and
the international economy?
Overcoming Legal Obstacles to Doing Business in
Russia
By Peter B. Maggs
A few months ago in Moscow a Russian businessman
suggested we celebrate his purchase through official channels
of $50,000 dollars at a highly favorable exchange rate of 423
rubles to the dollar. Since he was not a drinking man, we went
to McDonald's, and he went up to the counter and got a couple
of milkshakes with which we toasted his success. A lot of things
have changed in Russia. And it's not just that some people have
quit drinking vodka. First, private business is flourishing. Second,
foreign investment and foreign trade are going forward. Third,
Russians are no longer afraid that the KGB will get them if they
associate with foreigners. Fourth, most prices have been allowed
to float at market levels, which means that it is possible to
buy everything from milkshakes to dollars without waiting in lines.
Fifth, hyperinflation is threatening, which is why my friend was
delighted to turn his rubles into dollars at a good rate.
Prospects for Legal Development in Post-Soviet
By Kathryn Hendley
The development or evolution of a reliable and coordinated
legal system represents a threshold issue for those of us interested
in the interrelationship between law and the economy in Russia.
After all, it is difficult -- if not impossible -- to structure
a transaction if the parties are not relatively committed to obeying
rules that are well-known to both in advance. When that is not
the case, neither side can be sure of the rules of the game and
whether they are operating on a level playing field. These sorts
of questions become even more difficult when one of the parties
to the deal is a foreigner and, as a result, the parties base
their behavior on very different cultural assumptions.
The role of law in the Soviet Union was blatantly
instrumental. Law was regarded as a coercive instrument to be
used by the state and by the political elite. Society was acted
upon and, consequently, was generally uninvolved in the process
of creating law. Society was simply to obey unquestioningly the
law that was generated in this top-down fashion. In the public
realm, in terms of maintaining social order, law seemed to work
pretty well.
But the situation was more mixed in the realm of
private law. Here again, particularly in the economic arena, law
was very much an instrument of the regime. While fairly stable
statutory law existed on a variety of topics, it was subject to
alteration by administrative regulations issued by the ministries.
These were the so-called sub-legal acts or podzakonnye akty.
Within the context of the administrative command system that prevailed
during the Soviet period, this arrangement could be expected and,
indeed, was arguably even rational. From the point of view of
an enterprise manager, predictability stemmed not from the autonomous
force of law, but from the knowledge that the superordinate industrial
ministry could (and would) exert its influence on behalf of the
enterprise. Plan fulfillment, not profitability, represented the
key to success under this system. History demonstrates that the
economic plan was subject to its own rhythms and dynamics that
were often far removed from the dictates of the law.
But it is a new ball game now. The instrumental approach
to law that sufficed during the Soviet period is generally found
wanting in the new Russia. The introduction of market forces and,
perhaps more importantly, the collapse or unraveling of the administrative-command
system, have given rise to demands for law to serve as a societal
touchstone. The idea that the economy should be controlled administratively
has been rejected in favor of what is often referred to as economic
levers. This should not be interpreted as a call for a free market
run amok. There is a general recognition that a truly free market
exists only in theory and that modern economies, particularly
economies that operate on the scale of Russia, are necessarily
highly regulated. But the point is that these regulations now
need to be abstract rules designed to apply universalistically,
rather that the particularistic regulations (which often were
not even published) that were characteristic of the Soviet period.
The passing of Dr. Donald W. Treadgold in December
1994 is a reminder of the rich legacy left to us by this remarkable
scholar in Slavic studies. Those of us who were privileged to
have Dr. Treadgold as a mentor were deeply influenced by his integrity
as a person and his steadfast commitment to the highest standards
of academic and professional excellence.
In May 1993 at the University of Washington, his
former students gathered for a conference in his honor on the
occasion of his retirement. The theme of the conference centered
on a topic at the heart of Professor Treadgold's area of academic
expertise and interest: "Religion in the Life of the State
in Russian History".
There can be no question but that an understanding
of the Russian Orthodox Church is critical to any perceptive assessment
of Russia's past, the dark night of Soviet communist rule, or
the prospects for Russia's future.
In this issue of the Treadgold Papers, Dr.
Robert L. Nichols skillfully examines the Russian Orthodox Church's
interactions with the state in Imperial Russia, while Dr. Henry
R. Huttenbach provides invaluable insights into the checkered
relationship between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Jewish
community.
In addition to these fine presentations from the
1993 conference, there were also notable papers given by: Kent
R. Hill, "The Russian Orthodox Church and Other Christian
Confessions in Russia Today"; Edward J. Lazzerini, "The
Islamic Peoples of the Russian Empire and the State"; and
John McErlean, "Prince Kozlowski and Catholicism in Early
19th-century Russia". These papers have been published elsewhere.
The contributions of Dr. Donald Treadgold to Slavic
studies are significant. But his influence is not just reflected
in his own extensive bibliography, but in those numerous and important
works by his students. The following papers are but two fine examples
of this legacy.
Kent R. Hill
Church and State In Imperial Russia
By Robert L. Nichols
In the eighteenth century the Russian Orthodox church
became an imperial institution, whose leadership sought to develop
the church within the framework of an expanding empire, relying
upon the emperor's traditional protection and promotion of Orthodoxy.
The new formulation of church and state inverted the traditional
Muscovite symbiosis of religion and the sovereign authority of
the tsar which had existed within an ecclesiastical framework.
In Muscovy, the patriarch's role had gone beyond taking part in
public ceremonies involving the tsar and his family and included
direct participation in legislation without regard for any distinction
between the temporal and spiritual realms. By contrast, in the
imperial period, the traditional symbiosis developed within a
secular framework, redefining the role of the church and carefully
compartmentalizing its "spiritual" activity. The change
produced a tension between churchmen ready to play their imperial
part and their royal protectors, whose political concerns increasingly
made them unreliable defenders and promoters of the Orthodox faith.
The tension provides the dynamic for Orthodoxy's development in
imperial Russia.
A growing fear that the tsar and his government might
sacrifice the spiritual well-being of Orthodoxy to the secular
interests of the state produced among churchmen a strong desire
to restate with greater care and clarity the central tenets of
the Orthodox faith, revitalize the charismatic transcendence of
Orthodoxy, and strengthen the church's ties with society outside
the limits set for it by Peter I and his successors.
By the time of the Russian revolution, Russian Orthodoxy
had not found a satisfactory resolution of the dynamic tension,
although some who have studied the religious renaissance of the
early twentieth century, believe it may have been on the way to
doing so. Its imperial role had been called into question by many,
including the episcopate. The church's reaffirmed claim to a transhistorical
charismatic truth limited its ability to make a close bond with
any nationalist or socialist redefinition of Russia. Its social
outreach did not stretch far enough to ensure continued public
support for its experiments in "this world" theology
and social action. As a result, the revolutionary events made
clear what had been achieved and what remained undone or imperfectly
done during the imperial era. Orthodoxy's rethinking of the imperial
relationship made it possible for the church to survive when the
empire collapsed. Its reclaimed charisma, for complex reasons,
impeded any efforts aimed at bringing the church closer to the
emerging liberal, nationalist, and socialist movements. Consequently,
the church's experiments in social Christianity had no opportunity
to continue after the victory of Bolshevik socialism. The new
communist government proceeded to restrict Orthodoxy's "spiritual
domain" exclusively to "cultic" activity, a limitation
far beyond anything ever imagined by Peter the Great and his supporters.
Today, after the collapse of communism, the history of the church
in the imperial era offers important experience to those who seek
to rebuild Russia on the basis of an historic Orthodoxy.
The Cross and the Star: Uneasy Neighbors - Jews
and
By Henry R. Huttenbach
A perennial theme in European history is the ambivalent
relationship between Jew and Christian. In the course of its evolution
it has led, for example, to elegant, harmonious cultural achievements
in Muslim Medieval Spain, to brilliant but controversial synthesis
in Wilhelmine Germany and in Habsburg Vienna and Budapest, and
to radical modernism in Weimar Berlin. At the same time the relationship
led to extreme intolerance and depraved criminality in the same
three loci: from mass expulsions, (beginning in England
in 1290 and culminating with the introduction of the Inquisition
in the Iberian Peninsula in the 1490's), to political, racist
antisemitism in turn-of-the-century Vienna and Paris, and climaxing
tragically with the German National Socialist conceived continent-wide
genocide in the 1930's and 40's. So, where does the Judeo-Christian
chapter in pre-1917 Imperial Russia fit into this polarized record,
in which moments of limited tolerance have led to unparalleled
human creativity, and moments of unrestrained intolerance have
given vent to ferocious Christian and post-Christian-inspired
forces of mass destruction?
No.3: Religion in Russia Since 1917
The passing of Dr. Donald W. Treadgold in December
1994 is a reminder of the rich legacy left to us by this remarkable
scholar in Slavic studies. Those of us who were privileged to
have Dr. Treadgold as a mentor were deeply influenced by his integrity
as a person and his steadfast commitment to the highest standards
of academic and professional excellence.
In May 1993 at the University of Washington, his
former students gathered for a conference in his honor on the
occasion of his retirement. The theme of the conference centered
on a topic at the heart of Professor Treadgold's area of academic
expertise and interest: "Religion in the Life of the State
in Russian History".
There can be no question but that an understanding
of the Russian Orthodox Church is critical to any perceptive assessment
of Russia's past, the dark night of Soviet communist rule, or
the prospects for Russia's future.
This issue of the Treadgold Papers features
Charles Timberlake's indepth research of Orthodox monasteries
and convents since 1917. In addition to this work from the 1993
conference, there were also notable papers given by: Kent R. Hill,
"The Russian Orthodox Church and Other Christian Confessions
in Russia Today"; Edward J. Lazzerini, "The Islamic
Peoples of the Russian Empire and the State"; and John McErlean,
"Prince Kozlowski and Catholicism in Early 19th-century Russia."
These papers have been published elsewhere. Additional papers
by Robert L. Nichols and Henry R. Huttenbach appeared in No. 102
of the Treadgold Papers.
The contributions of Dr. Donald Treadgold to Slavic
studies are significant. But his influence is not just reflected
in his own extensive bibliography, but in those numerous and important
works by his students. The following paper serves as yet another
fine example of this legacy.
Kent R. Hill
The Fate of Russian Orthodox Monasteries and Convents
Since 1917
By Charles Timberlake
Because monasteries were major custodians of Christian
spiritual and cultural values and were significant autonomous
centers of wealth and economic enterprise, the Bolsheviks launched
a direct attack against them on November 8, the first day of Soviet
power, in the Decree on Land. This act, which nationalized monastery
land and all other forms of property, was but the first salvo
in a long barrage of legislative acts with the ultimate objective
of rooting monasteries and convents completely out of the old
Russian culture that the Bolsheviks despised and sought to annihilate.
Building on legislation enacted from 1917 to 1924
that stripped monasteries not only of their land and buildings,
but also of the consecrated objects they used in their religious
services, Lenin's successors added legislation that deprived monasteries
of income, that imposed exorbitant taxes on income and property
of monks, nuns, and priests, and simultaneously deprived them
of government-subsidized social services. Implementation of these
laws justified imprisoning and beating some monks to death and
shooting others. As a result, by 1939 the Soviet government had
abolished--so far as can presently be determined--every monastery
and convent inside the boundaries of the Soviet Union.
For the same reason that the Bolsheviks exterminated
the monasteries--i.e., that they were major custodians of Russia's
spiritual and cultural values, and were autonomous economic centers--the
Russian populace, of virtually every political stripe, had concluded
by the mid-1990s (the date of this writing) that Orthodox monasteries
and convents should be returned to the Russian Orthodox Church.
The forces at work are well illustrated by events surrounding
Patriarch Aleksii II's visit on August 15, 1992, to the Kirillo-Belozersk
Monastery-Museum in Vologda Province. He accepted an invitation
from local political figures to visit the monastery, but insisted
on calling it "an unofficial side trip" en route to
visit other monasteries of the North, and especially to commemorate
the 600th anniversary of the death of St. Dmitrii of Priluki,
patron saint of the city of Vologda, and the reopening of Spaso-Prilutskii
Monastery which Dmitrii founded on the bank of the River Vologda
some twelve miles NE of the provincial capital, Vologda.
A welcoming party from Kirillov met Patriarch Aleksii
at nearby Ferapontov Convent-Museum (Denisov, 606-09), where a
bell-ringing ceremony was performed for him on bells loaned by
Kirillo-Belozersk Monastery-Museum (Denisov, 583-85) for the occasion.
He climbed the scaffolding being used by artists restoring the
frescoes that Dionysius (Dionisii in Russian) painted here in
the last half of the fifteenth century and studied at eye-level
the original frescoes recently revealed by cleaning that removed
later restorations, and then went with the welcoming party to
Kirillo-Belozersk Monastery and walked through a well orchestrated
program.
After a tour of the monastery grounds, viewing of
the restoration work being done by the Ministry of Culture and
Tourism, and a mid-day meal in the monastery's refectory, a group
of local officials--including heads of the Kirillov Village Soviet,
the Kirillov County (raion) Soviet, Vologda Province Soviet,
and a personal representative of President Boris Yeltsin--formally
presented him a request, supported by some 2,000 signatures of
local residents, to accept the Ministry of Culture and Tourism's
proposal to transfer Kirillov Monastery from its jurisdiction
to the administration of the Russian Orthodox Church which would
convert it into a functioning monastery. The Patriarch graciously
declined, citing as his reasons inadequate financial and human
resources to support such a large monastery (the largest territory
enclosed by monastery walls in the former Russian empire). He
warmly thanked everyone for the invitation, praised all the scholars
and artists for their careful restoration work, and asked them
to continue it. The group invited him to return in 1997 for the
commemoration of the 600th anniversary of the founding of the
monastery. He promised to give the invitation serious consideration.
The local officials pledged more money to complete the restoration
for the 1997 event.
The year 1997 will also mark the eightieth anniversary
of the Bolshevik Revolution. Where the Bolsheviks used the State
in the first decade of their rule to wrench the monasteries from
Church control, state officials now plead for the Church to take
back the monasteries and to revitalize the culture and economy
they once nurtured. Russian history has gone full circle in this
highly visible and emotional arena of human activity. The values
imbedded in monasticism are once again more popular than the values
espoused by the Bolsheviks, and many segments of a bewildered
and socially fragmented population hope the monasteries will become
an instrument for rooting out the remnants of Bolshevik values
and restoring the Russian spiritual and material culture that
the monasteries once perpetuated. As surviving cells, these monasteries
can, in the right combination with other surviving cells and with
aid from local and central government, help rejuvenate a once-robust
Russian civilization and help provide social services so woefully
lacking in the Russian village today.
The first part of this paper establishes some quantitative
and qualitative descriptions of Russian monasteries and convents
that the Bolsheviks acquired when they claimed possession of the
former Russian empire in 1917. The second part of the paper analyzes
the means by which the Bolsheviks nationalized monastery property.
The third part identifies some of the uses the Soviet government
made of these monasteries, with the particular objective of determining
whether those uses preclude readaptation of those buildings and
grounds to typical monastery purposes when, and if, they are returned
to the Church and the latter decides to reopen some, or all, of
the monasteries.
The fourth part of the study illuminates the numbers,
geographic location, and types of religious communities returned
to the Russian Orthodox Church since World War II and their fate
to 1985. The fifth, and final, section of the study examines the
numbers, types, and geographic distribution of monasteries returned
to the Russian Orthodox Church since 1985, and offers some observations
about the roles these monasteries and convents are playing and
are likely to play in the foreseeable future.
No.4: The Mennonites and the Russian
By Terry Martin
Russia's brief experiment with constitutional monarchy
and a national parliament has received contradictory evaluations.
A single large question has focused this debate: did the Duma
period witness a reduction or an increase in the estrangement
between government and society? This question has usually been
addressed by focusing on class and soslovie (status) divisions.
However, there were other important axes of conflict. Constitutionalism
raised doubts about the status of the Russian empire and so highlighted
issues of national and ethnic conflict. The new order also challenged
traditional definitions of Russianness, in particular its link
to autocracy and Orthodoxy, which in turn raised the question
of religious toleration. Finally, responses to the Duma experience
also varied regionally.
In this paper, I will examine the question of popular
reaction to the Duma experience and the issue of society's estrangement
from government though an in-depth case study of the Russian Mennonites'
response to the Duma system. Although the Russian Mennonites were
a very small community, with a population of about one hundred
thousand, they allow one to examine all four axes of conflict
outlined above: religious, ethnic, class (soslovie), and
regional. The Russian Mennonites left behind an extremely rich
source base. They published two national newspapers, almost the
entire population was literate, and an unusually large segment
of the Mennonite community took part in political debates. Therefore,
they provide a unique opportunity to undertake a detailed case
study.
No.5: Corporate Russia: Privatization and
By Leslie Dienes
The far reaching economic changes engulfing Russia
can be evaluated from contrasting vantage points. Anders Aslund,
Senior Economist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,
provides an evaluation from the perspective of Poland and Ukraine
in a recent article for the Aspen Institute. Aslund takes note
of the strikingly different transformations of the Polish and
Russian economies and writes, "[i]n many regards, Russia
seems to fail where Poland succeeded and vice versa."
He goes on to detail the respective failures and successes of
the two transformations. For the purpose of my paper, the most
relevant contrast with the Polish (but also Czech and Hungarian)
experience concerns the very different results of privatization.
The development of small scale enterprises in Russia is hardly
impressive when compared to the size of the country and its economy.
(These enterprises are also under criminal control to a lamentable
degree). On the other hand, in Russia huge conglomerates
emerged rapidly and in remarkable numbers, combined with a much
swifter development of the capital market than in Poland.
Advocates of radical reforms should have been on
guard. Even to casual students, it is obvious that Russian history
has not been an evolutionary, organic development. Convulsions,
whether from above or below, have been the nation's experience,
but seldom have they pushed the country onto a higher plane. Thus,
in that experience Russia differs greatly from France, for example.
Two native scholars, Yuri Lotman and Boris Uspenskii, recently
contended that the dynamic fusion of opposites into a new higher
state of social organization (the synthesis of Hegel's tripartite
model) has not been the norm of Russia's history. Rather, an oscillation
between opposite poles, between opposite states of being, has
been the rule: "When the 'new' emerges, it mythically defames
the 'old,' thus changing its valence (what was once positive is
now negative), but also assimilates it" (my emphasis).
If this is true, the convulsive changes happening in Russia today
may again be a manifestation of that historical oscillation. Specifically,
in this writer's view at least, the corporate "empires"
that are emerging today as a result of the "astounding success
of privatization," as described by western pundits, actually
embody the structures of the now defamed but assimilated "old."
The Russian command economy, quasi-feudal in nature,
has transformed itself into a "corporate" state. Its
socialist patriarchal elite has been reconfigured. Some of both
its least energetic members and those still committed ideologically
to the past have doubtless fallen out. Yet, on the whole, the
same class continues to exercise control today as the new owners
of large chunks of the economic sphere. In the past, this elite
exploited the state by virtue of its political-administrative
position; it now exploits the wealth, which it did not create,
through a proprietary relationship. Much of this elite consists
of a parasitic rentier class, but part of it is energetic and
entrepreneurial. The latter would be capable of significant wealth
creation in a Rechtsstaat, in which sufficiently transparent
legality reigns. However, the breakneck speed that destroyed the
old controls precluded the possibility of transforming the country's
mentality and of building institutions for legal controls that
are respected and obeyed. As a result, the parasitic and entrepreneurial
members of the new elite are both overwhelmingly corrupt. They
are also lamentably criminalized, with professionals of the underworld
themselves prominent within the class. Accordingly, time horizons,
analyzed so wonderfully by Alexander Gerschenkron in the Russia
of early capitalism, are even shorter today, which rules out a
commitment to the future.
This monograph has three aims: the first is to sketch
in broad stokes the shift of the Russian oil and gas sector to
the new corporate structure; the second is to assess whether corporatization
has improved production prospects in these key industries; and
the third is to appraise these prospects in their relationship
to the economy as a whole and to the world beyond the borders
of the Russian Federation.
No.6: Post-Communist Transitions: The Rise of the
By Andrii Deshchytsia
The countries of Eastern Europe have recently faced
serious challenges in the process of transition from totalitarian
communist regimes with state-controlled economies to free-market
pluralistic democracies. Dramatic political change began in Eastern
Europe in the late 1980s after three years of Gorbachev's policies
of perestroika and glasnost. The Polish "round
table" discussions of 1988-89 signaled the initiation of
new politics in the former Soviet bloc countries. Over the next
few years the situation changed to such an extent and so unpredictably
that even now it is still difficult to say what the results of
the new East European "revolutions" will be. Nevertheless,
some things are clear: in addition to beginning the aforementioned
move toward a western-style democracy with a market economy, the
dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the USSR has both reshaped
the international order and led to the emergence of new values
and new political institutions in Eastern Europe.
Certain countries, namely Poland, the Czech Republic,
and Hungary, have been proceeding through the transition to a
market economy and a democratic political system rapidly. They
have emerged as more advanced than countries such as Romania,
Bulgaria, and former Soviet republics such as Ukraine and Belarus,
which have been less successful in post-totalitarian development.
Different aspects of post-communist development in Eastern Europe
have become the subject of a vast amount of current scholarly
research. Some recent studies on the East European transitions
have focused on the problem of looking for a pattern that could
apply to all post-communist transitions and stand as a universal
recipe or model for a peaceful and painless transition.
Finding such a model is not an easy task due to the
complex nature of the transitions. Transitions can be similar
and yet manifest certain differences. If we compare only the results
of each individual country's reforms after a lapse of five years,
we find remarkable differences among the former "socialist"
countries in almost all spheres of political, economic, and social
life. If, however, we analyze the specifics of each country's
developmental path, we find that the patterns of development are
to some extent uniform, with a number of smaller tactical differences.
Why then do countries which followed seemingly common routes to
achieve change now find themselves in drastically different situations?
The answer to this question lies in each country's
"starting point." By this, one should understand the
political, economic, social, and cultural conditions that each
country inherited from the previous regime. Proving this point
would require a comparative study of all East European countries.
Such a study has not yet been attempted. Furthermore, time is
needed to allow for more stabilization and for the countries'
new situations to become clarified. Only with time will prime
conditions for scholarly research emerge: the availability of
complete access to communist party archives, KGB documents, opposition
materials, and private collections.
Although framed within the larger question of the
importance of a starting point, the aim of this study is to analyze
Poland and Ukraine in order to examine the transition from totalitarian
communist regimes to western-style democracies, with special reference
to the formation of pluralist political party systems.
An examination of Poland and Ukraine, moreover, is
a comparison of two different blocs: Poland as a former part of
the broader Soviet bloc and Ukraine as a former part of the Soviet
Union. The differences between these two blocs were always significant.
Poland, as other countries of the Soviet bloc, experienced domination
by the Soviet Union for a period of forty years, but enjoyed a
relatively high degree of sovereignty; it had more similarities
than differences with other former socialist countries when changes
began in the late 1980s. Ukraine, by contrast, belonged to a different,
though related, system under virtually absolute control from Moscow.
It should also be noted that Ukraine gained independence only
in 1991; before that time it had developed as an integral part
of the Soviet Union, directly influenced by developments that
took place in Moscow.
All of the countries within the Soviet sphere learned
how to cope with the communist system, developing new methods
and tactics for future opposition activities. Polish society,
however, had better access to information coming from outside
the Soviet system and was more advanced in making use of this
information. Ukraine, by contrast, being behind the "iron
curtain," did not have access to such information and was
able to access it only partially, mostly by simply repeating and
copying Polish practices.
Before turning to the analysis of the socio-political
developments in Poland and Ukraine during the communist period,
it is necessary to define a point of comparative reference for
these two countries' recent developments. Undoubtedly, Poland
and Ukraine had much in common in the past, and, according to
Ivan Rudnytsky, "...when surveying the record of Polish-Ukrainian
interaction, one is often struck by the great similarity in attitudes
and behavior of the two communities." After World War II,
both states found themselves under the regime nouveau.
The communist regimes introduced in Eastern Europe were characterized
by one common trait in all countries: the similar form of interaction
between the regime and the opposition. It is this regime-opposition
interaction in Poland and Ukraine which will be examined in this
paper. Although an interplay between an opposition and those holding
power is common also to democratic societies, the nature of this
process was different in the "socialist democracies."
The main difference was the mechanism allowing the opposition
to come to power. Whereas in western-style democracies elections
serve as the main mechanism to change governments, in the Soviet-type
communist regimes, not only was the opposition unable to take
part in elections, but political freedoms were also limited or
in many cases non-existent.
Political, economic, and cultural conditions as well
as the nature of regime-opposition interaction were different
in Poland and Ukraine. Sometimes the regime's level of tolerance
for the opposition was high while on other occasions the regime
oppressed it.
Three distinct time periods divide this examination
of regime-opposition relations in Poland and Ukraine.7 The first
is the communist period, from the end of the 1940s to the early
stages of perestroika in 1986. The second time period,
from 1986 to 1989-90, is distinguished by the birth, or in some
instances renewal, of mass political organizations. The third
period, from 1989-90 to the present, has witnessed the rise of
multi-party systems and the formation of a juridical basis for
the parties' activities.
This monograph will first describe the general characteristics
of both societies during the communist period and then will concentrate
primarily on political developments in the period between 1989
and 1994. These dates were crucial for both Poland and Ukraine.
In 1989, round table negotiations between the ruling Polish United
Worker's Party (Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza, PZPR) and
Solidarity, the opposition movement, led to the first semi-free
elections in Poland and the formation of its first non-communist
government in forty years. In Ukraine, 1989 was the year when
the mass opposition movement the Ukrainian Popular Movement for
Perestroika (Narodnyi Rukh Ukrainy za perebudovu, NRU or Rukh)
was formed. At that time limited liberalization of society was
allowed when the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine
(Komunistychna partiia Ukrainy, KPU) Volodymyr Shcherbyts'kyi
was replaced with the more reformist Volodymyr Ivashko.
Over the next five years political transformations
and economic reforms reshaped Ukrainian and Polish societies.
These processes continue today, although some stabilization in
the political sphere has now been achieved. In Poland, this stabilization
was marked with a new election law, adopted in 1993. This law
allows only those parties with more than 5 percent of electoral
support to hold seats in parliament. In Ukraine, stabilization
has not occurred to the same extent as in Poland. It can be argued,
however, that Ukraine has achieved a certain degree of stability
in relation to other countries of the former Soviet Union.
The same understanding of opposition-regime interaction
is also useful for understanding the rise of new political parties.
The vast majority of currently existing parties in Poland and
Ukraine were formed during 1990-91, but they trace their roots
to either the regime or the opposition of the previous period;
consequently they can be divided into post-opposition and post-regime
parties. Undoubtedly, the programs of the new Polish and Ukrainian
parties, as well as the regime's and opposition's tactics and
aims in the recent past, have been different. These differences
were the result of each society's ability, or inability, to develop
independent political action in conditions of communist organizational
monopoly.
No.7: Russian Banking: An Overview and Assessment
by Kent F. Moors
Russian privatization has reached its most crucial
phase. While remaining the cornerstone in an entire process of
economic reform which began even before the collapse of the Soviet
Union in December 1991, it must now attract sufficient investment
or the government's sputtering move to transform the market will
grind to a halt.
Fundamental to the domestic orchestration of investment
is the Russian banking sector. Still feeling the crushing effect
of the collapse in the interbank credit market which began on
23 August 1995 and facing a wave of institutional bankruptcies,
declining depositor confidence, and genuine concerns about another
liquidity shortfall, its ability to organize and maintain a financial
infrastructure is open to serious question. There is, however,
no alternative. The future of the Russian market will be decided
by a small number of major commercial banks.
At stake is the only method to avoid a certain reversal
of economic priorities, the return of centralized planning, and
the failure of any genuine introduction of private market dynamics
in what remains the largest land-mass nation on the face of the
earth.
The December 1995 parliamentary elections signaled
the return to prominence of a renewed Communist Party of the Russian
Federation. Nationalism has been unleashed by Vladimir Zhirinovsky's
Liberal Democrats on the one hand and a charismatic general-turned-politician,
Aleksandr Lebed, on the other. In the middle, not a single free
market advocate remains in the Russian government.
The capitalization phase of Russian privatization
was to have been highlighted by a late 1995 series of tender auctions.
At stake were major government-owned blocks of primary industry
stock provided for badly needed credit to a deficit-driven central
government budget.
Foreign participation, however, was prevented in
the prized energy sector share transfers (both oil and electrical
power) and in the auctions of enterprises still considered basic
to national security (avionics, petroleum shipping, strategic
metals, and high-tech development). The one highly publicized
exception--an acquisition of a 25% share in Svyazinvest by the
Italian telecommunication giant Stet--was subsequently canceled
when the Russian government refused to reveal what the stock actually
represented in operational assets.
Three Russian domestic banks controlled these auctions,
to the extent of determining access and winners--Menatep, Inkombank,
and ONEKSIMbank. With foreign investment barred from the competition,
huge enterprises were won for a fraction of market value. When
the dust had settled, these banks emerged as the dominant players
in the Russian economy--effectively controlling major vertical
oil companies, the largest metallurgical combinates in the world,
shipping lines, converted military technology, mining, and the
previously government-owned trading outlets of their products
to the world.
These tender auctions produced a wave of protest,
but did demonstrate an unalterable reality of Russian investment.
For the foreseeable future, essential capitalization will be domestic
in source. It is the Russian banks, despite the problems continuing
in this sector, which will hold the key. Unless there is a release
of sufficient investment to produce some industrial stability
and retard the continuing decline in both productivity and employment,
reform will effectively be over.
The following study focuses upon the current situation
in this banking sector. As with any study, it has its own perspective.
It is a view resulting from both practical and analytical experience
inside the rapidly changing Russian market. Anybody involved in
that market over the past several years can attest to the remarkable
transition which has taken place. But all is likely to be for
naught unless an expanding domestic investment base emerges.
If the reform is to succeed, it must produce genuine
private property--the kind that can be bought and sold and valued
at regular market prices. In short, without stable domestic sources
for ongoing enterprise development, privatization cannot hope
to withstand the assault from reactionary political and ideological
forces. The results to be experienced by the end of 1996 will
either place the Russian experience on the road to genuine capitalism
or backwards to a closed economic system. There is now no middle
ground.
No.8: Nationalism and Religion in the
By Peter F. Sugar
The demise of communist rule in the various states
of the Balkans was followed by steadily increasing tensions leading
to a bloody civil war. Some of the events which have attracted
world-wide interest began even before the critical years of 1989-90.
Clever and unscrupulous leaders using the tools which modern media
technology put at their disposal can channel and have directed
popular sentiment and feelings in directions which suited their
purpose. They did this during the long years of communist supremacy,
and even more blatantly during the last few years. Shaping public
opinion and action is easier when the direction in which the leadership
wants events to move coincides with and/or is based on the feelings
and wishes of the majority of those whom the leaders wish to mobilize.
Each group of humans, from the smallest (the nuclear family) to
the largest (nation) is held together by shared self-identifiers.
In the Balkans (except Albania) the most pronounced differentiation
separating the masses from those who ruled them for about a half
millennium was religion, the main if not only criterion accepted
and enforced by the masters of the Ottoman Empire. Has this enforced
self-identifier survived into the present, or was it changed and
if so why and how? This study attempts to answer this basic question.
By Grigorii Golosov
Preface
One of the most influential accounts of party system
formation in western democracies has emphasized the effects of
pre-existing social conditions on the development of party systems.
It has been argued that contemporary party systems structurally
reflect the social divisions extant at the time of mass enfranchisement.
Since universal suffrage is one of the most characteristic institutional
features of liberal democracy, this theory suggests that pre-democratic
conditions exert a decisive weight upon democracy that comes to
replace authoritarianism, particularly as far as the structure
of the emerging party system is concerned. The goal of this analysis
is to test this theory, which appears to be quite instrumental
when applied to western political realities, by examining its
applicability to the study of the post-communist polities of Eastern
Europe and the former Soviet Union.
The problem has already received some coverage in
the ongoing debate on the emerging party systems, but many questions
remain unanswered. In particular, the most explicit attempt so
far to open a "Rokkanian perspective" on party system
formation in Eastern Europe has been focused on the "survivals"
from pre-communist political conditions. Of course, it cannot
be denied that greater or lesser amounts of persistence of the
old parties exert some impact on the processes of party system
formation. These parties, however, do not dominate the political
landscape in any of the new democracies. To build a more comprehensive
explanatory model, it is therefore necessary to shift the focus
of analysis to more general patterns of pre-democratic development,
falling under the umbrella category of the mode of communist rule.
It is hypothesized that the mode of communist rule, if theoretically
reconstructed as a sequence of political choices made under structural
constraints specific for political regimes of this type, explains
cross-national variance among the emerging party systems of post-communist
democracies. This hypothesis, influenced by the "structured
contingency" approach developed for the study of democratization
in Latin America, requires undertaking in-depth analyses of several
cases of post-communist democratic transitions. Such analyses
will be provided for the cases of Hungary, Russia, Bulgaria and
the Czech Republic.
For the past several years, specialists on post-communist
politics have been looking at the role played by the "Leninist
legacies" in structuring the fields of political alternatives
with considerable controversy. Some analysts tend to consider
this role as negligible. They assume that post-communist Europe,
being in the midst of a profound political and economic transformation,
has little if anything to owe to the communist regimes. But the
predominant, although not necessarily well-articulated, assumption
is that the legacies of the past cannot be easily discounted by
those striving to attain a better understanding of the present.
The major difficulty with operationalizing this approach stems
from the fact that while the communist regimes were by no means
ignored by the political science community during the decades
of these regimes' existence, their collapse forced the scholarship
on the subject into a "bout of soul-searching." On the
one hand, the once dominant totalitarian model has been accused
of being a misleadingly static concept incapable of explaining,
and hence predicting, the process of political change under communism.
On the other hand, the alternative "modernization approach"
to the study of the Soviet Union and other East European countries has been denounced for misinterpreting the harsh realities of
communism in rationalistic, optimistic terms invented by western
social scientists. To be sure, the purpose of this study is not
to suggest a new grand theory that would eliminate gaps in theoretical
understanding produced by the turbulent state of the field. But
giving some consideration to the relevant theoretical problems
appears to be necessary.
The difficulties evident with both the totalitarian
model and the "modernization approach" may be related
to the fact that they were not sensitive to observable differences
among the communist regimes. The former model, with its vision
of these countries' societies as being atomized by the combination
of repressive and highly centralized state activities, obviously
left little space for any appreciation of the specificity of individual
polities. The latter approach, with its theoretical fascination
coming largely from the theories of convergence, also concentrated
on similarities in occupational and status structures engendered
by modernization rather than on those differences which, as the
logic of this approach implied, could be expected to gradually
lose their significance. True, many scholars objected to generic
characterizations of the East European polities, citing a range
of reasons from the diverse patterns of interest articulation
and institutions observable in the region to cultural differences.
Generally, however, it would not be an exaggeration to say that
the theoretical models which dominated the field of Sovietology
before the start of the processes of democratization tended to
emphasize the discontinuity between the communist regimes, viewed
in a relatively uniform way, and their obviously diverse predecessors.
In this sense, the current tendency to discount the continuity
between the communist dictatorships and the emerging democracies
appears to be entrenched in the intellectual history of the field.
It must be stressed that the theoretical vision that underlies
this study breaks with this tradition.
Of course, no claim is made that communist regimes
in different countries had little in common. Their similarities,
stemming from such fundamental properties as monopolistic political
control and the command economy, were sealed by the Soviet military
hegemony in the region. It is assumed, however, that the mode
of operation available to the communist regime in each of the
East European countries was strongly conditioned by the specific
environments intrinsic to the given society. These environments
not only persisted through the period of communist rule, but they
also influenced the regime itself, making it respond to societal
challenges and pressures with a specific combination of adaptive
measures and overt political repression. Furthermore, these environments,
even though transformed as a result of the regime's activities,
played a significant role in shaping both the process of democratization
and the institutional architecture of the emerging post-communist
polity. Thus, the theoretical perspective of this study may be
best characterized as that of continuity.
The notion of continuity, of course, is too general
to be immediately applied to the specific subject matter of this
study. To make such an application possible, it is necessary to
introduce those concepts which are expected to be instrumental
in examining the preconditions for post-communist party system
formation. Since the most inclusive answer to the question "what
are political parties?" might be that they perform the function
of communication between the elite and the masses it is only logical
to place these two principal political actors, and country-specific
patterns of interaction between them, at the center of the analysis.
In broad terms, any relationship between the ruled and the rulers
may be described as a combination of conformity and dissent. While
the elite engages itself in the process of "authoritative
allocation of values," the masses either conform to or dissent
from the rulers' ideological goals and/or policy objectives. Due
to their authoritarian nature, the communist regimes embarked
on massive institution-building efforts intended to carry the
government writ into the farthest corners of the polity. At the
early phases of the regimes' existence, the scope and effectiveness
of these efforts were contingent upon the level of popular support
to the communist party at the moment of its advent to power. For
the sake of brevity, this factor will be further called the "level
of communist support."
The heuristic payoff of employing the level of communist
support as the basic variable is twofold. First, and most important
from the theoretical perspective accepted in this study, it allows
for establishing a structural linkage between the mode of communist
rule and the pre-communist political conditions in the country.
Second, since in several countries the communists came to power
after evoking relatively free elections, it allows for introducing
a reasonably large amount of the quantitative data into the analysis
of specific cases. At this point, it is still feasible to speak
of the level of dissent in terms of the numbers of votes cast
for non-communist parties. Of course, this becomes impossible
as soon as the study starts to deal with the established communist
regimes. However, the presence or absence of mass political protest
against the regime, as well as the presence or absence of meaningful
dissident movements in the given country, keeps us informed about
the overall balance between conformity and dissent in the popular
attitude towards the regime. It is also worth taking into consideration
that the manifestations of dissent did not remain without response
from the regime. Hence, the level of reform liberalization before
the beginning of political transformation is considered as an
important variable. Finally, during the initial phase of transition
to democracy the relationships between the dissatisfied masses
and the elite are expected to be conditioned by the role played
by the radical reformers within the top communist leadership.
Related to the basic notion of continuity, this study
examines the impact of the identified factors upon the processes
of post-communist party system formation. The choice of comparative
referents is motivated by the need to increase the variation of
the basic variables. It must be mentioned that, for the sake of
case comparability, Russia and the Czech Lands are considered
as nation states directly succeeding the former Soviet Union and
Czechoslovakia, respectively. Any discussion of questions related
to the disintegration of the quasi-federal communist states is
largely avoided, and the cases of other successor states (the
former Soviet republics other than Russia, and Slovakia) are not
discussed at any length. While it cannot be denied that this results
in some loss of information relevant to the purposes of the study,
the strategy of cross-national comparison of whole political systems
unambiguously requires that the units of analysis be uniform,
which cannot be achieved in any other way but by treating them
as nation states without further qualifications.
The case studies are preceded by an introductory
section explicating several theoretical assumptions about the
process of party system formation in post-communist democracies.
The rationale for discussing this subject matter is that, while
the process is hypothesized to be rooted in the pre-existing conditions,
it is also necessary to examine the impact of those conditions
which arise as a result of transition to democracy. To achieve
this, the introductory section of the analysis addresses the following
major questions: What are the likely initial configurations of
the fields of ideological and political alternatives that emerge
in the transformative polities? In what way does the introduction
of free electoral practices shape the development of party systems?
These questions grow in their importance as soon as a case study
starts to deal with the process of transition to democracy, and
they become absolutely unavoidable with the first free elections
held in the country under consideration. Clearly, the impact of
democratic conditions should be examined in a theoretically elaborated
and methodologically uniform way. The goal of the introductory
section of the study is to provide the adequate analytical tools
for meeting this requirement.
Choosing Hungary, Russia, Bulgaria and the Czech
Lands as comparative referents requires a word of caution regarding
the comparability of electoral outcomes in these four countries.
All of them employ electoral systems that include elements of
proportionality. In some important respects, however, these systems
are distinctively different. The data used in this analysis will
represent, unless otherwise stated, the results of the elections
to the Hungarian parliament, the State Duma (the lower house of
the Russian parliament), and the Czech National Council. In Bulgaria,
the Grand National Assembly (1990) had been elected under different
electoral rules than the parliament, Sobranie, first convened
in 1991.
"Pure" proportional representation systems
have been in use in the Czech Lands, and in Bulgaria since 1991.
The 1990 elections to the Grand National Assembly of Bulgaria
were held under a mixed system, with half the deputies elected
by a proportional formula and the other half by a majority system
in single-member districts. A similar system has been employed
in the Duma elections in Russia, with the only difference being
that there, a plurality formula has been used in single-member
districts. Obviously, it is the distribution of votes cast for
party lists which is relevant to this analysis. The Hungarian
electoral law is one of the most complex systems based on hybrid
principles. Three different formulae are used to allocate a total
of 386 seats in the national parliament. 176 seats are distributed
among single member districts through a majority formula with
the run-off. A maximum of 152 seats are distributed among candidates
from parties that have established regional party lists. Each
of the twenty regions is assigned a number of mandates that are
allocated through a proportional representation formula. At least
58 seats are distributed among parties that have established national
party lists. These seats, however, are allocated not by a proportional
formula properly, but in proportion to the parties' so-called
residual votes (those votes that are not enough to gain a seat
either in a single member district or in a regional contest).
From this description, it appears that the only data useful for
this analysis are the results of elections by regional party lists.
The comparative nature of this analysis entails certain
chronological limitations on the scope of the case studies. In
each of them, the examination of post-communist developments is
limited to the period between the event of regime change, often
but not necessarily coinciding with the earliest free parliamentary
elections, and the second free elections held in the given country.
As a result, the upper chronological limits for the case studies
are set at different points: in the case of Hungary, the May-June
1994 elections; in the case of Russia, the December 1995 elections;
and in the case of the Czech Lands, the June 1992 elections. It
is assumed that the period of time between the 1990 and 1991 elections
in Bulgaria was insufficiently long to allow for considering the
latter elections as the "second" ones properly. Therefore,
the analysis of the case of Bulgaria is extended to the December
1994 elections.
By Michelle Fuqua
Preface
As the basic unit of tsarist society, the family
was a traditional structure upon which were based the patriarchal
authority of the tsarist regime and the Russian Orthodox Church.
In the eyes of the early Bolsheviks the family was, furthermore,
an oppressive institution which subjugated women and children,
a place of male despotism and familial tension, especially for
the woman, that "slave of her family, slave of her hearth,
slave of her children." Considering patriarchy to be a product
of capitalist economic relations, the Bolsheviks viewed the private
familial realm as a sphere of bourgeois social and economic relations
which affected the mores and behaviors of the proletariat. Therefore,
the Bolsheviks believed that the familial sphere had to be transformed
and the party's influence over this realm increased as a means
to combat bourgeois influences within the new Soviet state. Otherwise,
the private, familial sphere, as a spontaneous generator of middle-class,
complacent values, could undermine the working class struggle
to create a new society.
As that part of the population which spent the overwhelming
majority of their lives within this private domestic sphere, women,
whom the Bolsheviks perceived as the most "unconscious"
element of the working class, were considered a potential hindrance
to the proletarian class movement. Women needed to be educated
and brought into the working class struggle, for, as Lenin often
reiterated, the proletarian revolution could not triumph without
the participation of the entire laboring population, including
women. For communism to be achieved, women had to be liberated
from domestic bondage and integrated into the working collective.
The basic tenets of Bolshevik theory on women and
the family were based upon Engels' The Origins of the Family,
Private Property, and the State, a tract written in 1884,
which compiled and elucidated earlier ideas of Marx and Engels.
The patriarchal family, Engels wrote, arose with the evolution
of private property, as the need to bequeath private wealth required
the woman to remain monogamous, enabling the male to identify
his heirs. Women were placed under the authority of the male head
of the household, who was free to conduct extramarital relations,
and the wife was regulated to the domestic sphere, where she became
economically dependent upon the husband. To regain autonomy and
social equality, as well as to combat the tyranny of private property,
women needed to be relieved of the duties binding them to the
family hearth. Once women become employed outside the home and
gain economic independence, the family as an economic unit (based
upon and contributing to the reproduction of capitalist economic
relations) will disappear. Yet, even as they emphasized the importance
of women's liberation as a weapon to combat the capitalist system,
neither Engels nor Marx furnished a specific vision of future
familial relations, which left plenty of room for future Communist
thinkers to extrapolate.
The zhenotdely, the Women's Sections of the
Communist Party, which existed from 1919 to 1930, were established
to bring women into the party's sphere of influence, to educate
women, and to make them productive members of the working class.
Included within this principal mission was the goal of economic,
social, and political liberation of women. The zhenotdely
endeavored to "liberate" women from the patriarchal
family, thereby enabling them to become active participants in
the revolutionary movement.
Significantly, the zhenotdely did not call
for a restructuring of private relations or for more involvement
of the husband in housework and child care (and the transformation
of gender roles which this would have entailed). Such a solution
would have left the private, familial sphere intact. Instead,
they demanded statist solutions, looking to the Soviet state to
direct and fulfill women's domestic duties. Thus, the zhenotdely
called for the transformation and reduction of the domestic realm
as the solution to "liberating" women from "household
slavery." In this manner, the reconstitution of the relationship
between the public and domestic spheres was essential for the
liberation of women: they could not be equal members of society
while they were tied to the kitchen hearth. Consequently, women's
liberation was a component part of the Bolsheviks' goal of increasing
the scope of the public sphere and party authority while reducing
the private realm in Soviet society.
This study traces changing party conceptions of and
policy towards the public and private domains in the years before
the Cultural Revolution (1919-1928), focusing upon the zhenotdely's
attempts to transform the private domestic sphere and to spread
party influence among women, goals which were considered crucial
for women's liberation and the communalization of society. I am
not writing a history of the Zhenotdel, the Women's Section
of the Communist Party Central Committee located in Moscow (the
history of the Zhenotdel and its relationship with the
party has been well documented by Carol Eubanks Hayden). Rather,
via the activities of the zhenotdely, I will examine the
party's implicit redefinition of and changing policy towards the
domestic realm during the 1920s, a policy which was based upon
a combination of ideological considerations and the party's need
to confront social realities.
For even as the zhenotdely attempted to transform
the domestic sphere and women's role within it, they had to contend
with the women they were nominally leading. As women attempted
to carve out a niche for themselves in Soviet society, the zhenotdely
ultimately had to negotiate with these women where the boundary
between the public, private, and domestic realms was to be located.
For the response of these women was crucial in shaping the work
of the zhenotdely; women's acceptance or rejection of zhenotdely
tenets, their reactions to and, in turn, their influence on the
party-state's attempt to redefine the relationship between the
public and the familial spheres were reflected in the changing
policy of the zhenotdely, which altered the meaning of
liberation and modified the image of the "new Soviet woman"
and her role within Soviet society.
Prior accounts of the zhenotdely have focused
upon either the success or the failure of these bodies to liberate
women. The basic premise of Western scholars is that the party
was not truly interested in liberating women, but rather in harnessing
their labor for the benefit of the new regime. Because of this,
the Women's Sections added significantly to women's burdens outside
of the home, while failing to "liberate" women from
their secondary status within Soviet society. According to Soviet
scholars the zhenotdely fulfilled their purpose, having
"solved the woman question" and the issue of women's
subordinate position in both the family and the community. Yet,
the real historical significance of the zhenotdely is not
whether they eliminated discrimination or transformed women's
social position, but how the zhenotdely attempted to redefine
and reconstitute the domestic sphere, placing women's traditional
family roles under state control. The zhenotdely have not
been studied from this angle, yet it is an approach which can
provide rich insights into both the history of the Women's Sections
and the relationship of the party to the public, private, and
domestic spheres during the course of the 1920s. It can furthermore
contribute to an evaluation of two competing and mutually exclusive
paradigms used to conceptualize NEP: the "creeping totalitarianism"
paradigm and the concept that NEP was an era of "pluralism."
As this study traces the shifting boundary between
the public, private, and domestic spheres, these concepts must
be defined at the outset. The public sphere often refers to the
governmental realm, but it can be wider than merely the governmental
sphere and can refer to the nation or people as a whole as well
as to services and activities which aid or otherwise affect a
community. In this sense, the zhenotdely endeavored to
establish public institutions or services, such as nurseries,
laundries, and cafeterias, which would not only transform and
reduce the domestic sphere, but also serve the working class,
especially women.
In a certain sense, the use of the term "public
sphere" can be easier to apply in Soviet Russia than in Western
democracies as the state endeavored to co-opt or eliminate independent
public (but non-governmental or non-party) groups and associations.
This is not to say there were no "autonomous social groups
that [did] not owe their existence to the state"; as historian
Glennys Young persuasively argues regarding the rural clergy under
NEP, "representatives of 'civil society'" did not simply
disappear, but rather found ways to continue their existence under
the new regime. Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks endeavored
to eliminate social structures beyond their control and the bourgeois
consciousness such structures produced. With the formation of
commissions for agitation and propaganda among women in December
1918 (which became departments, or otdely, in August 1919),
the party appropriated or disbanded other women's groups, eliminating
women's organizations which were not under party authority. Thus,
a definition of public as being of or related to the government,
state, or party is applicable to Soviet Russia and the history
of the zhenotdely; this is how I will use the term.
The private sphere is that which is unrelated to
or outside the state and can be a difficult concept to apply to
NEP Russia. As the party endeavored to aggrandize the public at
the cost of the private realm, boundaries between these spheres
were redefined and reconstituted. Webster's Dictionary
defines "private" and "private sphere" as
"carried on by the individual independent of the usual institutions";
this definition can be applied to Soviet Russia if one replaces
the word "usual" with the words "party," "state,"
or "state/party dominated."
The domestic sphere is that realm which concerns
the household or the family. This domain is often perceived as
a sub-category of the private sphere, but it is not necessarily
so. If the family becomes allied with or subordinated to the control
of the state, then the definition of "private" as "carried
on . . . independent of the usual [state] institutions" no
longer applies. As the Bolsheviks endeavored to place the domestic
sphere under the tutelage of the party-state, the domestic sphere,
at least theoretically, became a sphere of the party.
No.11: Ethnic Bipolarism in Slovakia, 1989-1995
By David Lucas
Preface
Despite frequent assertions by Communist authorities
that ethnic tensions would invariably decrease with the successful
building of egalitarian societies, the decline of totalitarianism
in East Central Europe in the late 1980s revealed that they not
only persisted, but also constituted a major potential force for
destabilization in the region. Three primary axes of ethnic tension
afflicted Czechoslovakia. The Roma represented a large repressed
minority which has so far been unable to effectively assert its
interests in a political context. More significant in this respect
have been tensions between Czechs and Slovaks on the one hand,
and Slovaks and the Hungarian minority on the other.
While Slovak national sentiment targeted dissatisfaction
with the present Czech-Slovak arrangement as its primary concern
no later than mid-1991, this tension was largely abated by the
peaceful dissolution of the Czechoslovak federation, which resulted
in the formation of two new states-the Czech Republic and the
Slovak Republic-on 1 January 1993. This allowed for an invigorated
and mobilized Slovak political elite to redirect its energies;
and thus, by early 1993, the Hungarian minority became the new
target of its national populist rhetoric and legislation.
In the context of post-totalitarian Slovak politics,
a historically rooted anti-Hungarian bias among segments of the
Slovak populace and electorate first presented itself in early
1990 in the form of protests in Bratislava and Nové Zámky
against the alleged subversive designs of the Hungarian minority.
The Slovak National Party (SNP), an extremist right-wing party
which helped organize these demonstrations, subsequently performed
well in the June 1990 elections, winning twenty-two seats in the
Slovak National Council (out of one hundred fifty) and fifteen
in the Federal Assembly (out of three hundred fifty). The Movement
for a Democratic Slovakia (MDS), formed in March 1991 and since
the June 1992 elections the most powerful party in the country,
adopted a similar stance toward the Hungarian minority. These
two parties have governed together since the 1992 elections, notwithstanding
the periods when the SNP left the government for part of 1993
and when both parties were in opposition during the period of
the more moderate Moravèík government in 1994.
At the other end of the ethno-political spectrum,
the Hungarian minority obtained its political representation in
the form of three main political parties. The Independent Hungarian
Initiative (IHI), later called the Hungarian Civic Party (HCP),
was the first such party to coalesce. It was soon followed by
the Hungarian Christian Democratic Movement (HCDM) and Együttélés
[Coexistence]. Each of these parties embodied different political
priorities and goals, and adopted distinct strategies to effect
them. The Hungarian People's Party (HPP) formed in December 1991,
thereby becoming the fourth political party in Slovakia representing
the Hungarian minority. However, it did not become a significant
contender in the Slovak political arena, and could be expected
to remain in relative obscurity.
This study analyzes the effects of ethnic bipolarization
in exacerbating or alleviating ethnic tension on a political level.
My goal is to identify those systemic factors which have been
conducive to escalating conflict. As documentation I rely on party
documents, electoral programs, and press reports. I consider both
intraethnic and interethnic relations between parties in the Slovak
political arena. My general approach here is to examine ethnic
politics first from the perspective of the individual minority
parties, and then on the basis of individual issues. In the first
section, I give an overview of Slovak political developments from
the fall of totalitarianism to November 1995, with particular
attention to ethnic issues. The second section outlines a framework
for studying ethnic conflict in the context of an independent
pluralistic Slovakia. Sections three and four describe the histories,
goals, and tactics of the Hungarian and Slovak parties individually.
In section five, I analyze post-totalitarian politics on an issue-by-issue
basis. In my concluding section, I select examples with which
to explore the theory on ethnic conflict elaborated in the second
section. In my finding, I invert the direction of my study, considering
the centrifugal tendencies of an ethnically bipolar party system
in relation to the countervailing forces for dialogue, moderation,
and compromise. It is hoped that by understanding the roots of
ethnic conflict, we can begin to find ways to alleviate it, or
at least its worst symptoms.
No.12: Literacy and Reading in 19th Century Bulgaria
By Krassimira Daskalova
Preface
There have appeared, during the last 25-30 years, a number of historical works on literacy and on the modern transition to mass literacy in particular. The intensified interest in the history of literacy and of elementary education in general is largely due to the appreciation of its important links with social change and modernization. The publications on literacy result from either individual or team research and statistical analyses. A variety of documents used in the pursuit of this research: brides' signatures on marriage records, signatures on wills, petitions, job applications and applications for the granting of pensions, documents of land transactions, military recruit records and criminal records, and the official census data of more recent times. Following the initial enthusiasm over this type of research, revisionist critiques of the "literacy myth" have appeared, pleading for a more critical attitude and specification of the social context of acquiring literacy and education, as well as for a closer relation between theoretical sociological reasoning and detailed historical research. Research on literacy and education is associated with the interest in readers and reading, popular culture and literary history. Parallel research in these intertwined fields strives to create a more accurate picture of the level of education and the reading habits of the various social strata in different historical epochs and national contexts.
While Bulgarian historiography abounds in works on the history of education, research on the history of literacy is scanty. What is available is based upon a small number of sources and refers to limited geographic areas or particular communities. As far as the Bulgarian mediaeval kingdom and the Ottoman period are concerned, this omission may be attributed to the scarcity of sources. There is no valid reason for the subsequent period. Though official statistics about Bulgaria are available since the end of the nineteenth century, no systematic research has been carried out on the level of literacy of the population and the connections between literacy and the demand for books (and the use of books). One may only point to the pioneering publications by Georgi Minchev and Kiril Popov, in which literacy was discussed in other contexts, but no one has followed up on these preliminary considerations.
The present publication attempts to give a general outline of the level of literacy and the attitude toward books and reading among various strata of the Bulgarian population during the nineteenth century. In surveying this subject, I draw upon available statistics as well as upon literary sources; the latter, though fragmentary and "impressionistic", contribute to creating a livelier picture of the issues under consideration.
No.13: Critical Theory and the War in Croatia and Bosnia
By Thomas Cushman
Preface
Critical sociological theory emerged in the wake of World War II to offer explanations for the rise of fascism in Europe and the dissolution of the Enlightenment project in the twentieth century. The practical aim of critical theory was to understand how the modern project could be realized. Yet history keeps setting up barriers to such a project: at a time when the culture of Western liberal democracies seems poised to become the universal model for human societal development, Europe has been the site of a genocide against the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Genocide has been perpetrated, this time, against another defenseless population, this time in full view of the world, and this time without being stopped by those who witnessed it and who possessed the means to do so. At the very time when the Enlightenment project seems alive in the ethos of the new European Union, social processes within supposedly enlightened societies have contributed to the toleration of genocide and other manifestations of "anti-Enlightenment" in Europe itself. Theodor Adorno asked the question: how is poetry possible after Auschwitz? We can now ask the question: how is the idea of Europe possible after Bosnia?
In light of what has happened in Bosnia, another set of questions emerge for the critical theorist: how is it possible that in the midst of Europe - which recently unified around the very enlightenment ideal of a civilized Europe - a genocide of the magnitude as that which occurred in Bosnia could have taken place? How could this genocide have occurred when so much media attention was devoted to it? Why were so many Western intellectuals ambivalent about Western intervention to stop Serbian aggression against defenseless civilians? Why did so many Western intellectuals and political leaders adopt relativistic and equivocal interpretations which refused to assign primary responsibility for the war and mass killing to any major party in the conflict and instead chose to see the conflict as a product of "age old tribal hatreds" in which "all sides were equally guilty?" Why have so many prominent intellectuals and politicians taken positions that actually blame the victims of military aggression for their own misfortune?
Answers to these questions form the core of a critical theory of the war in Bosnia. What distinguishes these questions from those laid out by members of the Frankfurt School is that they focus to a large extent on understanding events outside of Bosnia as the key to understanding events in Bosnia itself. This is necessary, in the first instance, because the conduct of the war was directly related to the perceptions of local political elites as to what the West would or would not do in relation to concrete political or military decisions. Acts of Serbian aggression against Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, for instance, were clearly related to the subjective perceptions on the part of Serbian elites that the West would not intervene. Yet there is another reason why a focus on events external to Bosnia is necessary: the process of globalization, which includes the mass production and distribution of instantaneous news, has dramatically transformed the ways in which wars are waged. Knowledge about world conflicts is available immediately to politicians and publics through a plethora of sources and this knowledge has a direct bearing on political action and public opinion. The theorists of the Frankfurt School had little to say about the relationship between the rise of fascism and Western liberal capitalist societies. To be sure, the Allies could have intervened against Hitler long before they did and Europe's toleration of Hitler's rearmament and initial acts of aggression could be seen, in some part, as responsible for the carnage that came later. The core of their critical theory was the analysis of the internal social dynamics which gave rise to fascism, such factors as the authoritarian personality, the family fractured by industrial society, mass culture, and propaganda.
While the dissolution of the Yugoslav federal project and the subsequent war and genocide in the former Yugoslavia can best be understood by looking at social forces in the former Yugoslavia itself - class structure, resentment, ethnonationalism, the breakdown of community, the mass psychology of Serbian or Croatian varieties of authoritarian neo-fascism, the unequal distribution of political, economic, and military power -- critical theory must also focus on the analysis of the Western response to genocide in Bosnia, not only in terms of how that response affected concrete developments in the Balkans, but for what it tells us about the culture of the West itself. It is rather clear that Western political leaders and mass publics knew exactly what was happening in the former Yugoslavia, first in Croatia and then in Bosnia. Yet, for a variety of reasons, they chose not to use military force to intervene until most of the killing was over. The exploration of why this was the case is a central task for critical theory. The development of such a theory is fundamentally a reflexive exercise which sheds light on the central dynamics of late capitalist society as well as the intellectual's place in it. Some contemporary theorists refuse to decouple the analysis of events in Bosnia from the analysis of the nature of postmodernity: the analysis of the Western response to Bosnia reflexively leads them to a critical commentary on cultural trends in Western societies. The kind of unchecked aggression which has occurred in Bosnia has appeared and will continue to appear in other parts of the world; the cultural dynamics of Western modernity have in no way extirpated barbarism, but have and will exert a strong independent effect on international relations and political conduct far into the next century.
This paper is a first step in the development of a critical theory of the war and genocide in Bosnia. It focuses on one element of the conflict: the responses of Western intellectual elites to the conflict. In this respect, the critical theory developed here moves beyond the Balkans itself and makes the central object of study the objectifiers of the objective history of war and genocide in the former Yugoslavia. In this regard, the focus is on the sociology of knowledge produced by Western intellectuals about the war and the concrete relations between those forms of knowledge and Western political practices in relation to the war. The sociology of knowledge is not a usual complement to international relations theory, or even to political science more generally. Yet it is clear that particular types of knowledge produced by Western intellectuals about the conflict in the Balkans had a decisive, independent influence on the outcomes of the war in the Balkans. While there are many types of knowledge produced about the Balkan war, the focus of this analysis is the relativistic "styles of thought" that have been a central part of Western thinking since the beginning of the Balkan war in 1991.
There have been many bloody conflicts in the twentieth century and intellectuals have made much commentary on them. Yet the hallmark of the recent Balkan war is the prominence of equivocal or relativist positions among interpretations of the war. It might even be said that perhaps in no other conflict has so much "balance" in interpretation been demanded by so many Western intellectuals. A comparison of the present Balkan war with the Spanish Civil War is instructive. Because the facts of Franco's aggression were so clear to the world, it would be difficult to imagine in the moral context of the times a conference or a volume on the Spanish Civil War in which the points of view of representatives of the Franco regime were represented in equal measure to the points of view of the victims of Francoist aggression. Still more difficult to imagine would be positions in which Francoist positions were actually affirmed and ratified by prominent Western intellectuals. Even though western powers imposed an arms embargo on Spain, among Western intellectuals, there was a great deal of consensus about the moral dimensions of the war and most critical, liberal intellectuals distinguished themselves from apologists for fascism by adopting critical stances toward Franco. Similarly, if we consider the main bodies of intellectual work on the destruction of European Jewry by Nazi Germany, we would not expect that representatives of the point of view that the Jews provoked the Germans and therefore brought about their own extirpation would be given credence by serious scholars. One could not imagine, for instance, at a contemporary conference on the Holocaust that those who deny the Holocaust or seek to revise its proportions would be given any credence at all.
Yet in the 1990s, when the facts of overwhelming Serbian responsibility for the war and genocide in Bosnia are quite well known, when evidence for planned military attacks on civilians and systematic extirpation of people based on their ethnicity abounds, conferences, volumes, scholarly papers, media coverage, and editorials which comment on the war regularly feature empathetic accounts of Serbs as victims of such things as Croatian nationalism, Bosnian Muslim fundamentalism, and Western imperialism. The attempted systematic extirpation of Bosnian Muslims by Serbian forces surely represents one of the most significant acts of barbarism in the twentieth century. What is different in this case is the response of the West: perhaps in no other conflict in the twentieth century have Western intellectuals proven themselves so willing and able to offer accounts that occlude, obfuscate or even deny the central historical facts of military aggression and mass killing. Many Western intellectuals who ordinarily espouse quite liberal or even radical positions quite unproblematically echo the sentiments and political propaganda lines of individuals who have been indicted for the most prolific war crimes to occur on European soil since World War II. In some cases, prominent intellectuals go so far as to praise the actions of individuals who have been indicted by the UN war crimes tribunal for heinous war crimes and genocide. If in a previous age intellectuals were characterized by an almost overzealous degree of commitment to various causes, the present age is characterized by a stance of almost "aggressive ambivalence " on the part of many Western intellectuals. This is a trend which demands critical interrogation and concrete sociological analysis. It cannot be understood solely by examining the "objective facts" of the history of the war - a history which is admittedly complex - but also by examining the culture of late capitalist societies which frames intellectual activity and political policy. Critical interrogation of this trend toward relativism and equivocation is all the more important since relativist reinterpretations are likely to increase as the temporal distance from the Balkan war increases. In this respect, the task of critical theory is to keep relativist positions from receding to the political unconscious where they solidify and become taken-for-granted parts of the stock of knowledge about the origins and consequences of the war. Critical theory is thus an act of raising a certain variety of untruth to the level of consciousness and thus, it is an act of conscience as well.
No. 14: Nation, State, and Economy in Central Asia:
By Paul Kubicek
Preface
The Central Asian republics of the former USSR, like other post-communist states, are beset with numerous crises. These states must invigorate their near-moribund economies, remedy severe environmental problems, manage inter-ethnic relations, and incorporate new forces, actors, and demands into the political system. They are severely handicapped in accomplishing these tasks since they are politically underdeveloped, meaning they lack the political institutions capable of managing a diverse set of political demands and engaging in policy innovation necessary for modernization. Central Asians must build their new states from scratch, which means devising new constitutions and effective institutions within the state and autonomy vis-a-vis foreign powers. As the experience of post-colonial states demonstrates, this is no mean task.
Moreover, states need underpinning from the population, a source of legitimacy. In the modern world, most vividly perhaps in certain post-communist states, nationalism functions as this buttress, the glue that binds the population of a given territory together. In particular, the development of nationalism is indispensable for new states, ones that are not "historical nation-states" and therefore may have weaker claims to legitimacy. One Kazakh writer notes, "The independence of a young state depends upon the political stability of society, the unity of the nation in its aspirations, its devotion to a common national idea." These sentiments are echoed in much of the scholarly writing on nationalism, in particular the important role that cultural unity and national myths and symbols play for new, developing states.
Unfortunately, Central Asians, lacking well-established national traditions linked with any historical state or popular movement, as well as ethnic homogeneity, are handicapped on this score as well. In fact, it was the Soviets who carved out the current borders of these republics, and the Soviets who played an important role in the early stages of nation-building, including the construction of written languages, national myths, and educational systems. Despite these efforts, however, tribal or clan identities, in addition to the supernational identity of Islam, remain powerful as compared with a "national" identity based more upon sentiment toward those residing in one's own republic. Leaders in these states must therefore pursue state and nation-building in order to secure their own positions, as well as the position of their republics.
How can this be done? In order to answer this question, many Central Asian leaders have begun to search for and speak about different "models" of development. Particular attention has been given to the Chinese, Korean, and (contemporary) Turkish models. Without going into great detail at this point, what is notable is that each is predicated upon a strong state with a national base. Any serious effort to model contemporary Central Asia on these modern states, however, would be putting the cart before the horse because Central Asians lack the very prerequisite-strong nation-states-necessary for these developmental paths.
This monograph will suggest that one might find some answers to questions of state and nation-building by examining the reforms of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the modern Turkish Republic. This is not to say that Atatürk's reforms were a cure-all, or that his legacy did not create new problems. However, his was a success story compared with many of his contemporaries, and his efforts helped transform the "Sick Man of Europe," made even sicker by war, into a stronger, more developed state based upon Turkish nationalism. Among his accomplishments were the creation of a modern, secular republic and a political party as an agent of modernization, numerous social reforms, and the replacement of old forms of loyalty and identity with one based upon fealty to the Turkish nation. Despite these accomplishments, Atatürk and his state and nation-building efforts remain relatively neglected in the study of comparative politics.
The general issues of state and nation-building have also been given inadequate attention in much of the literature on post-communist transitions. The emphasis in the sage advice of the IMF and Western governments is that all states should liberalize and democratize, which, it is assumed, will lead to economic growth and stability. By this point, however, it should be obvious that this simple equation does not work out quite so easily.
One major shortcoming of this viewpoint is that it fails to take both state-building and the state itself seriously as a necessity for social stability and policy implementation. If there is no authority to manage the diverse demands unleashed by the collapse of the old system and capable of making and implementing authoritative decisions, there will be neither growth nor stability. Moreover, this authority need not be democratic. Borrowing from Samuel Huntington, what may really matter is the degree of government, not its type. In fact, one could raise questions about the feasibility (and prudence) of democratizing these largely traditional societies. A multi-party political system could easily degenerate into clan, tribal, or ethnic battles, a result not unlike that currently in Tajikistan. This is the argument made by authoritarian leaderships in Central Asia, and this claim needs to be taken very seriously because as of yet there are no other clear lines of cleavage in these societies that could form the basis for a multi-party system.
Moreover, while nationalism receives much attention as a divisive force in the post-communist transitions, it is often overlooked as a necessary source of political community and legitimacy. Nationalism, a political expression of commonality among the citizens of the state, must be cultivated in order to develop viable, secure states. Of course, nationalism can assume many forms, some more constructive than others. The point, however, is that rather than making a blanket statement that there should be both a smaller state and less nationalism, one should note that what is really needed is an effective, authoritative state that can claim to be representative of the national community. This is what Atatürk built in Turkey, and it is something that is urgently needed in Central Asia.
Before proceeding, two caveats are in order. First, foreign blueprints can not be imported wholesale into a new environment. Local contexts and traditions must be taken into account. This statement, while perhaps obvious to those sensitive to particular historical and cultural conditions, is not always heeded, most particularly by those pushing for the Western model of democracy for all. It is apparent that this would have great difficulty working in Central Asia, where conditions are very different from those that facilitated the gradual development of Western systems. However, states can learn from others' experiences and selectively adapt and adopt approaches that have been successful elsewhere. What is needed, therefore, are more careful comparisons that take into account the current conditions of Central Asian states.
Secondly, any comparison among countries-especially those divided by decades as well as miles-is fraught with problems. Conditions will never correspond exactly, and differences must be taken into account as much as similarities. Comparisons must therefore be used with circumspection, but they are necessary if one is to engage in comparative politics and learn from historical experience.
I hope, in what follows, to demonstrate that re-examination of Atatürk's Turkey, while far from providing all the answers, will nonetheless serve to inform the way we think about state and nation-building, both in general and in the Central Asian context.
By Alexander Agafonoff, Dilnara Isamiddinova, and Galina Saidova, editors
Preface
This monograph has been designed to bring together in one volume a comprehensive collection of data and information on the labor and income situation in the Republic of Uzbekistan. It was prepared under the auspices of the UNDP Macroeconomic Policy Analysis and Training Project. The contributors' team included Dilnara Isamiddinova (Chapters 4-7), Omon Ergashev (Chapter 1), Zavikhulla Nasritdinkhodjaev (Chapter 2), and Galina Saidova (Chapters 1-4). Statistical assistance was provided by Yulduz Abduganieva.
The period covered comprises the years 1991 to 1995, inclusive; we also provide an indication of trends and developments during the first phase of transition by the Republic to a market economy. The study largely allows the facts to speak for themselves, and we have not, at this stage of the program, engaged in deep analysis on particular issues. Major issues have, however, been identified and listed at the end of each section.
Uzbekistan has adopted the gradual approach to economic reform. For this reason the effort has been made to bring about the necessary changes in the structure and conditions of the work force gradually and with minimal - although, in come cases, unavoidably serious - dislocation in the short term. Sufficient information is available to identify the following major issues deserving further research and analysis, and for the development of strategic and policy options for consideration by the government.
Statistical data and calculations are based on the information provided by Goskomprognozstat, which is the statistical body of the government of Uzbekistan.
Notes on terminology
The terms used in this study necessarily reflect the definitions of the State Committee on Statistics and Forecasting (Goscomprognozstat). Set out below are the main items.
Data regarding employment in the state sector and in large enterprises such as corporations, unions, associations and others, are based on comprehensive surveys and fully reflect the present situation. On the other hand, data regarding employment in the non-state sector, especially in small enterprises and in the sphere of individual labor activity, is imperfect. For these reasons, employment analysis in this report is based on both official data and unofficial estimates.
No.16: German-Bashing and the Breakup of Yugoslavia
By Daniele Conversi
Preface
Since the inception of the Yugoslav crisis, the major Western powers have been unable to provide adequate or united responses to the maelstrom of calamitous events. The EC decision to recognize the independence of Slovenia and Croatia on 16 December 1991, can be identified as the first coordinated attempt to find a way out of the impasse. According to its critics, this step was premature and precipitated the ensuing dramatic developments. According to its apologists, if anything, it came too late, only after the invasion of the JNA (Serbo-Croatian acronym for Jugoslavenska Narodna Armija, Yugoslav People's Army, also known as YPA) of nearly one third of Croatia and a ten-day war with Slovenia.
This monograph aims to consider and analyze both viewpoints. In doing so, it will try to answer the two main questions underpinning each position: Why did Germany exert particular pressure to recognize Slovenia and Croatia? Why did the notion of Germany's responsibility for these events gain widespread acceptance? The sources will be both primary, such as statements by political leaders and diplomats, and secondary, such as academic literature touching upon the topic. The latter is still at an embryonic stage and critical research discussing the topic is still relatively limited.
As is known, several countries had been pressing for recognition since the start of the war on 27 June 1991. However, it was only as a result of Germany's political and economic weight that the European Union found the will to move towards that end. This step was Germany's first bold foreign policy initiative since the end of World War II. Moreover, it occurred in the wake of another dramatic development, German reunification. The latter, although not openly contested by other Western powers, created a chilly sense of threat among some European countries, reviving far-reaching memories of a renewed German expansionism. Nowhere within the EC did this fear find such fertile ground as in the British popular press and in talk shows, where 'anti-Hun' rhetoric about the purported re-emergence of a Fourth Reich sprang up in popular political culture.
This monograph argues that such a political atmosphere deeply influenced and inhibited the debate over new developments in the Balkans, and in Eastern Europe in general, in the aftermath of the Cold War. Focusing on Germany's foreign initiative (often associated with Germany's Foreign Minister at the time of the crisis, Hans D. Genscher, who led the diplomatic initiative among his European partners) provided a convenient all-encompassing rationale to make sense of an international event -the war in Bosnia- which defied most received wisdom and accepted explanations.
Effective analysis has also been inhibited by another factor: a split between international relations in practice on the one hand, and socio-political analysis on the other. There has been a tendency, if not a will, to play down the internal socio-political factors within Yugoslavia in favor of grandiose international explanations about a new carve-up of the Balkans. This shortcoming is particularly evident in works by international diplomats, who, rather than focusing on the internal events leading to the war, give an exaggerated importance to external factors, in which there seems to be often a desperate apology of their profession's mistakes. Sociological and political interpretations of the war's domestic origins are often ignored. The result is that journalistic reports and other insider accounts have often conveyed the issue more reliably than analyses by International Relations scholars or practitioners. In the last two years, however, studies by a younger generation of scholars, not from International Relations, have started to analyze in depth the internal causes of the war, while providing a balanced consideration of external factors.
A brief chronological outline on recognition and its opponents will establish that the former came long after Yugoslavia had begun its slide towards disintegration, and many months after the war started. The role of Lord Carrington's initiative will be given a particular weight. The ensuing section will attempt to answer the question of why Germany apparently exerted more pressure for recognition than other European countries. Western responses to the German initiative are put in the context of a widening rift among - and within - the main European powers on how to deal with the crisis. A full section is dedicated to "German- bashing" as a resurgent Western - particularly British - malaise.
As used in this study, the term "German-bashing" refers exclusively to international reactions to the breakup of Yugoslavia. I will not imply that it refers to other dimensions of Germany's foreign or internal politics - even though I will mention the more general "anti-Kraut" hysteria pervading the British tabloid press and government milieux. This essay fully endorses the principle that Germany's postwar sense of guilt in the wake of the Shoa helped to shape and give direction to Western politics since the end of World War II. This sense of German guilt is central to the entire postwar effort of pan-European unification, and indeed, of world peace. On the contrary, by chastening Germany for an excessive concern over human rights in the Balkans, as happened during the pre- and post-recognition debates, German-bashers have played into the hands of neo-revisionists and in general, of those who argue that Germany has been unjustly framed for past misdeeds. What characterizes contemporary attacks likening post-German unification to a new Reich is the extreme unscrupulousness of the attackers. Neo-revisionists have been only too happy to use the cynicism of German-bashers against the bountiful evidence that points to the relative success of Germany's early initiative in the Balkans - as opposed to that of other Western partners - to extrapolate more generic self-victimizing sequiturs. In other words, the attacks have risked rekindling a kind of petty wounded pride which had supposedly been laid to rest.
The most extreme form of German-bashing can be identified as the belief in a "Fourth Reichconspiracy," which in Britain was occasionally reinforced by fumblings about a "Papist plot" to revive World War II alliances. German-bashing is ergo a form of anti-Europeanism. A subsequent section identifies the process of German unification as the main catalyst of this new fear of Germany, which disproportionately influenced British and French perceptions of the Yugoslav crisis. How and why German-bashing was finally utilized by the US State Department is the question which the following section attempts to answer. A particular Western weakness is then diagnosed in the lack of knowledge of internal dynamics and cleavages in the former Yugoslavia. This concerned particularly the misunderstanding of the sequel of events leading to the breakup: while most early analyses originally identified its main causes in Slovenian and Croatian nationalism, it is now increasingly clear that separatism was rather mustered up in Belgrade by duping the international community and deceiving the JNA's initial task of defending the country's unity. Finally, the marginalization of Germany's foreign politics will be identified as a critical factor impinging on the unfolding of the Bosnian war.
No.17: Romanian-Hungarian Economic Cooperation and Joint Ventures
By Erica Agiewich
Preface
As the institutional pillars of the Communist bloc collapsed one after another in the late 1980s and early l990s, the governing economic regime, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA), was among them. The CMEA, which had controlled inter-bloc trade for decades, decreed itself out of existence on 1 January 1991. Since then, bilateral trade among countries in the region has remained a fraction of what it had been in the CMEA years.
Why does inter-regional trade remain so low, especially between the Central European and Balkan countries? First, since 1991, trade has been conducted in hard currency rather than transferable rubles and the whole region faces hard currency shortages. Second, the countries desperately desire to reorient their trade to the wealthier west, with its large consumer and industrial markets. Third, it's a question of comparative advantage; many of the former Communist countries built identical economies based on heavy industry and agriculture. Now, few of the countries have attained the capacity to manufacture consumer goods to satisfy domestic demand, forcing them to run trade deficits with non-bloc countries. Finally, the political value of disassociating themselves and their countries from their Communist past puts pressure on politicians to focus their energy on building political and economic relations with non-bloc countries.
Despite these constraints, there are some unacknowledged benefits to inter-regional trade which are easily overlooked in the rush to put the Communist era and all its institutional trappings in the past. Due to the complicated history of Transylvania, Romanian-Hungarian bilateral trade and Hungarian investment in Romania are examples of how inter-regional trade and economic cooperation may be important not only in economic terms, but also may play a potentially positive and negative role in post-Communist social and political development. From the sixteenth century on, Transylvania was a province of the Habsburg empire in which the Hungarian minority was the landed upper class and the Romanian majority their peasants. The Treaty of Trianon at the end of World War I awarded Transylvania to Romania. A leveling process then began in which the Hungarian aristocracy lost much of its economic and political power. The Communist regime intensified the Hungarian disenfranchisement process; by the end of the Communist period, everyone in Romania was "equally poor."
Presently Hungary is the most politically stable and economically well-off of Romania's neighbors and could provide Romania, and especially Romania's ethnic Hungarians, with an opportunity to diversify its trading partners and increase its economic activities. Besides the financial benefits, cross-border cooperation could help to soothe tense ethnic and diplomatic relations between Hungarians and Romanians. If one assumes that many social ills are born out of economic problems and can be solved - at least in part - by economic growth, increased economic cooperation may assist rapprochement between traditional ethnic enemies and heighten regional political stability.
Without a doubt, the conditions for discrimination exist in Romania. Ceausescu's nationalist communist regime blatantly discriminated against Hungarians. At the end of the 1980s, ethnic Romanians dominated the country's political and economic apparatuses. After the revolution in December 1989, managers of the state companies successfully retained their positions of power as heads of the newly autonomous state companies and continue to maintain "connections" throughout the economy. If these individuals were inclined to discriminate against ethnic Hungarians or foreign investors of any nationality, including those from Hungary, they now would be in a position to do so. There is also a potential for backlash against ethnic Hungarians if they are perceived to be prospering in the midst of Romania's economic crisis. The question is, however, whether the traditional ethnic tension between ethnic Romanians and Hungarians has translated itself into systematic institutional discrimination and reluctance to cooperate together in the business world. Or, can the two communities overlook their traditional problems and do business together fairly?
An important consideration is that Romania, like its neighbors, does not have a "perfect market." In 1990, Romania had the most centralized economy in Europe and the second most impoverished population after Albania. It will take decades for a market economy to function properly. In the meanwhile, most Romanian citizens will suffer in the transition period and from the inherent inequities and fluctuations of a market economy while a small group will prosper. Throughout the former Communist bloc, various communities have been blaming their collective troubles on another group, be it the perceived "oppressor" or a "troublesome minority." For a society unaccustomed to a market economy, those suffering may wrongly put the blame on the so-perceived "oppressors" or achieve some sort of personal, social and/or political gain achieved by ascribing economic hardship to the majority. Conversely, a minority group sometimes becomes more assertive and "troublesome" as it advances economically. For example, it is sometimes, albeit simplistically, argued that Slovenia, the wealthiest republic in the former Yugoslavia, seceded in part for economic reasons. Moreover, in any situation in which there are majority and minority ethnic communities in a country, there will be a degree of tension and isolated or even numerous cases of discrimination.
After conducting interviews in three cities in three counties in Romania, each with various proportions of Hungarian residents, economic structures and geopolitical conditions, I have concluded that systematic institutional discrimination against Romania's Hungarian minority and foreign investors from Hungary does not appear to be a widespread problem significantly affecting the Hungarians' ability to participate in the Romanian economy. Two well-known maxims essentially explain the low level of ethnically-directed economic discrimination in a post-Communist world rife with ethnic problems: "money talks" and "don't mix politics with business." The majority of people are struggling financially in post-Communist Eastern Europe and, put simply, most members of the business community in Romania recognize it is not profitable to discriminate in business.
In fact, the Hungarian minority's familial and collegial relations in Hungary, the common language, and the promise of Romania's 22 million strong market for the relatively more advanced Hungarian economy have facilitated steadily growing trade flows between the two countries. This includes the establishment of nearly 2,000 companies in Romania using Hungarian capital investment. While the majority of Romanian citizens involved in these joint ventures naturally are of Hungarian ethnicity, some firms have ethnic Romanian partners and staff. In any case, businessmen from both ethnic groups claim that there are no "hard feelings" against Hungarian entrepreneurs and economic cooperation with Hungary is considered to be a way to get ahead and to learn from the experience of Hungary, which has had a head start in its economic transition to a market economy. Common opinion among both Romanians and Hungarians in the Romanian business community is that further economic cooperation can potentially contribute to the stabilization of economic and political relations between the two countries. In turn, this should help strengthen relations between the ethnic communities within Romania, thus benefiting all countries and communities involved.
Methodology
The material for this research project was collected over a 10 month period, from October 1995 to July 1996. Information came primarily, but not exclusively, from the following sources:
Using lists of joint ventures and foreign firms provided by the NTO and various Chambers of Commerce, I interviewed business owners and representatives in Cluj, Satu Mare and Miercurea-Ciuc. The study focuses on small and medium-sized enterprises where the majority of indigenous ethnic Hungarian entrepreneurs and investors from Hungary in Romania are concentrated. The semi-formal interviews were conducted using a standardized questionnaire. The names of the interviewees and the companies they represent are confidential and will not be disclosed in this report.
Following the completion of this study, Romanian national elections in November 1996 brought Emil Constantinescu and a reform government to power. The new government has already initiated a number of new laws that should further liberalize the Romanian economy and may attract higher levels of foreign direct investment in the country. In February 1997, Constantinescu's government proposed legalizing ownership of natural resources, including land, by foreigners in Romania.
These recent changes, however, are not addressed in this study and do not negate any of the conclusions drawn on the period in question, that is, the seven year reign of the immediate post-Ceausescu government of Ion Iliescu.
No.18: Energy and Mineral Exports from the Former USSR:
By Leslie Dienes
Preface
In the aesthetic experience of humankind, the quest for the holy grail produced works which truly are triumphs of the spirit. In the conduct of the species, that quest produced not only triumphs, but also evil and monumental blunders. Scholars of economic development and of the present transition (from state ownership and planning to market) never laid claim to a holy grail. Yet the tenor of their writings has often suggested the discovery of the philosophers' stone. Most economists today regard the import substitution strategy of development to have been a failure, while its extreme manifestation, the cul-de-sac into which autarkic socialist planning led the countries of the former USSR and Eastern Europe, has become obvious to all. It is thus ironic that the success of export-led industrialization in a handful of states at a specific period of the post-World War II era (mostly in East Asia) is transformed into the philosopher's stone of economic transition from central planning to free markets. That stone of the philosophers is supposed to yield gold, be it in Poland or the Czech Republic, Uzbekistan or Yeltsin's Russia, irrespective of political culture and historical memory. Such textbook certainty is doubly ironic when we note that economic development is not synonymous with transition from central planning to market. In addition, in specific stages of development during the post-World War II decades, export-led development was linked in most countries to the simultaneous protection of the home or regional markets and to state involvement.
The transition strategy promoted for Russia by international financial institutions and the majority of Western advisors prescribed, among other things, the almost immediate lifting of price controls and the swift liberalization of trade. The strategy also advocated the boosting of exports through the inflow of foreign investment into whatever sector attracts international capital. In large measure that transition strategy is isomorphic with the export-based growth model, applied highly successfully in East and South-East Asia, but with far less happy results elsewhere. In Russia's case, conflation of the transition and export-led developmental strategies has grave implications. That conflation has already produced social stress and policy conflicts which are fraught with more danger and unpredictability than is the case in Eastern Europe and China.
In Eastern Europe, the conflation of transition and export-base strategies has produced less glaring clashes among sectoral and branch interests and, by extension, among the political and economic elite in which group the former nomenklatura remains prominent. These state shave no comparative advantage in natural resources, with the exception of agricultural ones, and even here only with certain qualifications. Here the strains manifest from the conflation of the two strategies are as much the result of West European subsidies and protectionism vis-ŕ-vis Eastern Europe than from the inherent non-compatibility of the export-led model with the realities of the transition process. In China, the transition strategy has followed a different path with respect to the lifting of price controls, while the emphasis on boosting exports and attracting foreign investment has taken place in a very dissimilar milieu of facilitating agents and was not mirrored by import liberalization.
In Russia, however, natural resource endowment created a very different profile of comparative advantage and sectoral attraction for foreign finance capital. At the same time, significant investment in human resources in the socialist era had produced in society a spread of accumulated knowledge, skills, and expectations unapproached by the majority of population in those Third World countries for which comparative advantage lies in natural resources (and in most cases also of low- cost labor). The conflation of the transition strategy with the model of export-led development focusing on minerals, therefore, has produced tremendous social strain. It also produced momentous conflicts among sectors of the economy and members of the elite. Russia's mineral industries (particularly the oil and gas sector) was plunged into the midst of a fierce ongoing political struggle both domestically and internationally.
A growth path based on mineral exports is a more rational strategy for the newly independent states around the Caspian, provided the revenues are channeled into broad-based development and an increasing share of value added. While the historic experience from Latin America and Africa is not encouraging, the very favorable resource-population ratios in Kazakhstan, Azerbayjan and most of Central Asia should provide plenty of revenues for the development of some processing industries, agriculture and the social sphere. The shores of the Caspian Sea today represent the largest undeveloped and still only partially explored oil and gas reserves outside the Middle East. The region is similarly rich in gold and non-ferrous metals. Distance from markets undoubtedly makes some non-ferrous metal deposits uncompetitive, but this is not the case with oil, gas, precious metals, and even antimony and a few other non-ferrous minerals. Against these riches, the combined population of all the newly independent states between Georgia and the Altay Mountains add up to less than that of Turkey or Iran.
Kazakhstan and the states of Central Asia, however, are landlocked. Presently, their exports to the world market depend on the Russian transport grid and distant Black Sea and Baltic ports, again in Russia, Ukraine, or the independent Baltic states. The long hauls, when added to port fees denominated in convertible currency, will decrease the comparative advantage of a number of bulky commodities. Russia, for which similar commodities provide the main export revenues, has no interest in fostering competition. It has little, if any, influence on gold mining projects by Western companies, since the high value to weight ratio basically eliminates transport costs as a factor. For other minerals, however, Russian control of transport corridors and the geopolitical complexities of alternate routes are decisive. Substantial mineral shipments from the new states of Central Asia and Kazakhstan to world markets serve Moscow's interests only if Russia can acquire large equity stakes in project development, receive significant transit revenues, and maintain control over export routes. This applies particularly to oil and gas with their fixed transport modes and investment needs.
This monograph analyzes the issues which have entangled Russia's mineral industries, particularly the oil and gas sector, in policy conflicts among government agencies and ministries, commodity producers, commercial structures, and the oil pipeline monopoly. These conflicts are enhanced because the mineral production and exports have been enveloped in corruption since Gorbachev's reforms and, together with banking, have proved to be the most egregious sectors for ill-gotten gains. The monograph also examines the manner in which the oil and gas sector is caught up in the struggle of economic and strategic policy making between Russia and some of the states around the Caspian Sea. As noted, large equity stakes in projects and benefits from controlling pipeline corridors will be Moscow's condition for acquiescence in large scale fuel exports from these states. Such benefits, however, will not accrue equally to the different participants in Russia (ministries, other government institutions, parastatals, and commercial agents). The voices from Moscow speak with considerable variations, pursuing their own economic and political agendas.
No.19: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth Century Europe
By Norman Naimark
Preface
The historical enterprise contains any number of self-contradictory elements, not the least of which is the ultimate futility of trying to recreate the objective reality of the past. It is also the case that the conceptual language we use for understanding the past derives more often than not from the present or recent past. Even if some of the words we use - like war, tyranny, and rebellion - have an ancient etymology, their meanings change as new generations of historians approach politics and society from distinctly contemporary perspectives. The term genocide has a more recent derivation --- Raphael Lemkin's 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Toward the end of the war, Lemkin began to use the term to describe and understand the Nazi eliminationist attack on entire national groups. The United Nations General Assembly picked up the term from Lemkin in Article II of its Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 9 December 1948. Of course, since that time, we have also used the term in the case of the Armenian genocide, as well as many others that predated the Nazi experience. As long as scholars recognize the strictures of their language and perspectives and are ready to accord the past its own dignity and autonomy, the enterprise of using current terms can continue in a healthy tension - or "conversation," as E.H. Carr put it - between present and past.
It is in this context that we need to understand the way the term "ethnic cleansing" instantaneously burst onto the scene of press and government analysis of the Yugoslav war in May of 1992. The term began to be used with phenomenal frequency to describe the attack of Serbs on Bosnian Muslims and to indicate that the purpose of the attacks was to eliminate the Muslims from large swaths of Bosnian territory. The term also was applied to Serbian attacks on Croats in Eastern Slavonia and Krajina the year before and was gradually applied as well to similar, though less intense, actions by the Croats and Bosnian Muslims against the Serbs. Almost immediately, there was controversy about the use of the term itself as a euphemism for genocide. In fact, it became quickly apparent from a series of Serbian atrocities in the late spring and summer of 1992 and the revelations by Roy Gutman about the inhuman conditions and criminal acts committed against Muslims in the Serbian detention camps, Omarska in particular, that ethnic cleansing did have genocidal implications. But it was equally clear that the Bosnian Serbs' primary goal was to drive the Muslims out of the parts of Bosnia they claimed for their incipient republic.
Veljko Vujacic traces the first uses of the term to the Serbs themselves, who complained in the late 1980s of the Albanian ethnic cleansing - etnicko cišcenje - of Serbs from Kosovo. Others have traced the concept to the Soviets, who indeed used the term etnicheskoe chishchenie to describe Armenian attempts to cleanse Nagorno-Karabagh of Azeris. However, if one looks to German usage, then the term, Säuberung, which can also be translated as purge, is used so often in an ethno-national context in Nazi and pre-Nazi German racial and eugenic theory that it is impossible to think of ethnic cleansing as somehow specifically Slavic. But in both cases, the Slavic and German, cleansing has a fundamentally dual meaning when it comes to a community of people; its implications are of both external and internal purging. One cleanses a body politic or a geographical region of a people; but one also cleanses a people itself of foreign elements. It is this latter element, which emphasizes a self-purging, which leads to fearsome up-close killing and brutal mutilation of neighbors and acquaintances.
Instead of developing a history of ethnic cleansing with an overly structured idea of what it is precisely, I would rather let the term take on meaning in the course of its historical explication. In fact, if there is a definition I find attractive, it is related to the definition of ethnicity provided by R. D. Grillo cited by Ronald Suny and Geoffrey Eley in their new compendium, Becoming National. "Ethnicity arises in the interaction of groups. It exists in the boundaries constructed between them." Moreover, "it is IN history, the flow of past events, that the emergence and variation appear, and only THROUGH history can we understand them." In short, ethnic cleansing contains the meanings that history has given it.
With this said, several further - and no doubt equally debatable - assumptions underlie this investigation. First of all, despite numerous instances throughout history of the expulsions of minorities and subject peoples by their rulers and conquerors, the kind of ethnic cleansing experienced in the twentieth century is distinctive, both in its ideological and political motivations and in its intensity. Thus, ethnic cleansing as experienced, for example, in former Yugoslavia, is a profoundly modern phenomenon, related to previous instances in the twentieth century (and no doubt to future episodes in the twenty-first), but not a product of "ancient hatreds," as so often suggested by politicians and journalists, who never tire of citing Ivo Andrić's essentially twentieth century novel, The Bridge on the Drina, to prove that the Balkans are forever violent. The pogroms in late nineteenth century Russia do not prefigure Stalin's planned deportation of Jews - a potential second Shoah - before he mercifully died in March 1953. Turkish attacks on the Armenian population in Sassun, Zeitun and Constantinople in the mid-1890s under Abdul Hamid II were profoundly different in scale, intensity and type from the Young Turk-inspired Armenian genocide of 1915. The extermination of the Jews by the Nazis was not simply the last phase and natural outcome of centuries of German anti-Semitism, Daniel Goldhagen to the contrary.
The foundational ideas of ethnic cleansing emerged from the development of European nationalism in the late nineteenth century. The articulation of political, ethnic exclusivism, and integral nationalism - the products of diverse thinkers and political activists from Roman Dmówski in Poland, to Francis Galton in England, and Ernst Haeckel in Germany - belong to the modern world, both in its post-Darwin and anti-Positivist intellectual phase and in its late colonial and pre-World War I nationalist incarnation. The genocidal potential of integral nationalism was already apparent in the Balkan Wars and in World War I. The important point is that modernity itself organized nations by ethnic criteria. As Zygmunt Bauman points out, this proved fatal in particular for the Jews:
Modern ideology cannot in and of itself explain the twentieth century impulse to attack other peoples. Modern state systems are critical for ethnic cleansing to work. The creation, the building, and the reconstruction of states, all of which require the mobilization of the state's resources, human and material, bring reasons of state to bear on the supposed dysfunctionality of heterogeneous populations. Modern technology, modern communications, modern media, modern transportation, modern school systems, and modern weaponry are all part and parcel of the phenomenon of eliminating nations within nations. Some scholars of Germany and of the Holocaust - Omer Bartov and Elisabeth Domansky, among them - trace killing systems to the industrialization of warfare that was developed and refined in World War I. Part of the relationship between ethnic cleansing and the modern state also has to do with issues of population control and management, census taking, and state intervention in reproductive policy. This becomes especially clear in the post-World War I German and Soviet cases, where the relationship between the individual and the state undergoes a remarkable regularization, characterized by the thoroughgoing attention to the ethnicity of the citizen. Even in the relatively backward Turkish state of Mustapha Kemal, the idea of Turkish nationality became much more regularized and bureaucratized than identities in the world of the Ottoman sultans, which were complicated by the relationships between the millets and the dominant Muslim religious nation.
To focus on the responsibility of the modern state for ethnic cleansing does not relieve political leadership of its responsibilities for the brutal expulsions and deportations undertaken by the state in the name of its interests. On the contrary, given the power of the modern state, ethnic cleansing of the sort that has permeated the twentieth century could not have taken place without the initiatives and connivance of politicians and responsible state officials. Arnold Toynbee recognized this clearly in witnessing Greek and Turkish atrocities in Anatolia in 1921:
No.20: Nationalism, Populism, and Other Threats to Liberal Democracy in Post-Communist Europe
By Vladimir Tismaneanu
Preface
No political dream has proved to be more resilient, protean and enduring in this century than nationalism. A comprehensive and potentially aggressive constellation of symbols, emotions, and ideas, nationalism can also offer the redemptive language of liberation for long-subjugated or humiliated groups. Conductor Leonard Bernstein used to say that whatever statement one makes about Gustav Mahler's music the opposite is equally true. This is the case with nationalism, as well. It is often described as archaic, anti-modern, traditionalist, in short reactionary. Other interpretations see it as a driving force of liberation, an ideology of collective emancipation, and a source of human pride. Whatever one thinks of nationalism, its ubiquitous presence at the end of this century is beyond any doubt. The problem, therefore, is to find ways for reconciling it with the democratic agenda. In other words: How can one tame that violent propensity which a Georgian philosopher aptly called "the illiberal flesh of ethnicity"? Can national symbols and sentiments become part of the ethos of a civil society?
The roots of contemporary nationalism can be traced to the early days of the ideological age: the myth of the nation was created by historians, poets and philosophers in the era when nation/states appeared to be the political units par excellence. If we take for instance Polish nationalism of the 19th century, it certainly had these romantic, salvationist, and redemptive components: deprived of statehood, Poles cherished an idealized vision of national community unified by unique traditions of heroism, martyrdom, and sacrifice. During that romantic stage, being a Pole was first and foremost a state of mind, not a biological determination. Referring to this persistent, though not unique component of Polish nationalism, Andrzej Walicki wrote:
Later, during the 20th century, this variety of romantic nationalism was increasingly challenged by a new concept of the nation rooted in common ancestry and ethnic bonds, primarily developed by Roman Dmowski, the founder of Polish modern, integral nationalism. But the myth of Poland's unique status within the international community and her predestined mission has continued to impregnate both political discourse and practice, from Pilsudski to Solidarity. Poles of course are not unique in celebrating this special link between their national destiny and the salvation of mankind. As formulated by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Russian nationalism had this strong Messianic dimension, linked to the belief that a nation has a predestined role in the relationship between God and humanity: "If a great people doesn't believe that the truth is only to be found in itself alone (in itself alone and in it exclusively);" Dostoevsky wrote in his novel The Possessed, "if it doesn't believe that it alone is fit and destined to raise up and save all the rest by its truth, it would at once sink into being ethnographical material and not a great people."
The nationalist myth owes its galvanizing power to its unique blend of scientific and emotional claims. It pretends to speak in the name of the nation "as One," as an all-embracing totality, to offer compelling motivations for action, and no less impressive visions of the enemy. The problem is how does one define nationhood: liberals emphasize the civic bonds, whereas militant nationalists focus on ethnic purity based on common origins and presumed common destiny. The former favor dialogue, tolerance and inclusion, the latter champion forced assimilation, segregation or exclusion of those with different ancestries. The competition between these visions cuts across every single political community and symbolizes one of the most tenacious contradictions of modernity. Furthermore, neither camp is homogenous. In post-Leninist countries, one encounters among the illiberal nationalists former communists, socialists, neo-fascists, traditional conservatives and populists committed to the search for a "third way" between communism and capitalism. What do all these groups have in common? Most likely, their hostility to democratic, liberal, modern values, plus a common conviction that individuals should relinquish their rights in favor of collective aspirations and interests. In the same vein, the liberal, or civic approach to nationalism is held by Christian Democrats (as in the case of Slovakia), liberal democrats, and even former communists converted to the values of an open society (as in the case of Hungary and Poland).
A point that needs to be emphasized is that these two paradigms are related to prevailing values, traditions, and the development of civic institutions and mentalities. This factor explains why liberal values seem to get the upper hand in Central Europe, whereas the Balkans have been prone to ethnic strife, populist collectivism and plebiscitary democracies. True, liberal and illiberal versions of nationalism exist in all these countries, but their impact is different in Romania and Serbia, compared to Slovenia and the Czech Republic. The problem is how do the political and cultural elites use the existing symbolic capital and how do ideologically distinct political formations co-opt the nationalist rhetoric to suit their tactical goals. The ultimate competition in the region is thus between those formations which share a civic-based conception of nationalism and those which adhere to confrontational, exlusionary ethnic nationalism. As tragically demonstrated in the former Yugoslavia, the revival of ethnonationalist politics has become a hindrance to civic-liberal development of the post-communist societies. In most of East and Central Europe ethnonationalism has warped, modified and fundamentally altered the left-right ideological spectrum. As Janusz Bugajski writes: "A nationalist-civic spectrum has intersected with the traditional left-right continuum, often making the ideological identity of specific parties confusing. Both the non-ethnic civic orientation and the collectivist ethnic-based option have been adopted by parties espousing either right-wing, centrist, or left-wing programs."
Usually, it is intellectuals who manufacture discourses that justify nationalist identifications and projections; then, in turn, the mobilized masses give these discourses the validation of practical realities. While in the 1960s nationalism appeared at least in the West as an extinct myth, the end of communism and the new era of international ethnic conflict that followed the Cold War have made nationalism the main competitor to liberalism and civil society. Its main strength comes precisely from its ability to substitute for the loss of certainties and to offer immediate explanations for failure, confusion, and discomfiture. Nationalism caters to painful collective anxieties, alleviates angst and reduces the individual to one lowest common denominator: the simple fact of ethnic belonging. Romanian exiled writer Norman Manea, who survived the Holocaust as a teenager only to be later persecuted because of his Jewishness and non-conformist ideas under the Ceaucescu regime, gave a powerful description of this ethnocentric temptation as the main rival to the civic vision of the community associated with modernity and liberalism:
Ethnic nationalism appeals more often than not to primary instincts of unity and identification with one's own group: foreigners are often seen as vicious destabilizers, dishonest breakers of traditions, agents of dissolution. Nationalism, indeed, sanctifies tradition which was once described by Gilbert K. Chesterton as the "right to vote granted to the dead people." Especially in times of social frustration, foreigners tend to be demonized and scapegoated. A Ukrainian nationalist, for instance, would see Russians (and/or Jews) as forever conspiring against Ukraine's independence and prosperity. A Romanian one would regard members of the Hungarian minority as belonging to a unified body perpetually involved in subversive and irredentist activities. A Croatian militant nationalist would never trust Serbs, while Serbian ethnic fundamentalists would always invoke Croatia's alliance with Nazi Germany as an argument against trust and ethnic coexistence. Estonian, Latvian, or Lithuanian nationalisms are colored by the memory of the Soviet (and previously Russian) occupations of the Baltic states. National discourses serve not only to preserve the sense of ethnic identity, but also to continuously "reinvent the tradition," regenerate the historical mythology, infuse an infra-rational, transcendental content to the sense of national identity. In the words of a contemporary Lithuanian writer:
With its shattered identities and wavering loyalties, the post-communist world offers a fertile ground for delusional xenophobic fantasies to thrive and capture the imagination of millions of disaffected individuals. National homogenization becomes the battle cry of political elites for whom unity and cohesion are the ultimate values. The Leninist binary logic ("us" versus "them") has been replaced by the nationalist vision that sanctifies the ethnic in-group and demonizes the "aliens." Those who criticize this trend are immediately stigmatized as a "fifth column" made up of "inside enemies." For Croatian president Franjo Tudjman, for instance, it is only the intellectuals supportive of the "national spirit and self-determination" who deserve the name of intelligentsia. All others, he maintains, are just "Pharisees." This continuous invention of enemies and hatreds aggravates the climate of insecurity and makes many honest individuals despair about the future of their societies.
The fact that almost everybody in the post-communist world pays lips service to democracy does not mean that liberal values are prevailing. Liberalism in this context does not mean a suppression of ethnic differences and group identities, but an institutional and cultural effort to diminish and organize these distinctions "just enough to increase the chances for peaceful coexistence and mutually beneficial cooperation." But radical nationalism opposes precisely these values of cooperation, tolerance and dialogue. In countries like Croatia, Romania, Serbia, or Slovakia, the mystique of the nation is used to justify the individuals' submission to an increasingly authoritarian state bureaucracy. This is a trend well depicted by Slavenka Drakulic, the Croatian journalist and novelist:
This monograph examines the dynamics of post-communist nationalism, the tension between liberal and illiberal, collectivistic definitions of national community and the intellectual struggles over which type shall prevail in each country. Contemporary ethnic nationalism is seen less as a resurrection of the pre-communist politics of intolerance, and more as an avatar of the Leninist effort to construct the perfectly unified body politic. To be sure, the past is often used to justify the resentful fantasies of the nationalist demagogues. This "return of history" is, however, more of an ideological reconstruction meant to respond to present-day grievances than a primordial, inescapable destiny of these nations cursed to continuously fight with and fear each other. As these societies move away from the Leninist order, nationalism has emerged as the prevailing ideological myth. Whether this post-communist nationalism will become civic or will turn into vicious chauvinism, is too early to forecast.
No.21: Formation of Post-Soviet International Politics
of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan
By Rafis Abazov
Preface
Introduction. In December 1991, Alma-Ata - the capital city of Kazakhstan - hosted a meeting of the eleven leaders of the Soviet republics. There, all signed a historic document. The so-called Alma-Ata Declaration formally ended the existence of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. This event signified the beginning of independence for all the members of the Soviet Union including five Central Asian republics. From that moment, the newly independent states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan started forming their own policies and sovereign state institutions and began to define their own foreign policy orientations. Establishing their foreign policy institutions, shaping foreign policy and searching for a suitable place in the contemporary system of international relations became top-priority tasks for the republics.
The successful formation of coherent, post-Soviet international politics, and sovereign political institutions such as Ministries of Foreign Affairs (MFAs) and coherent international politics appeared to be one of the most important challenges for the Central Asian elites. The Central Asian republics faced an uncertain future for a number of reasons, including the unexpected rapidity of the Soviet Union's collapse and the unpreparedness of the national elites to live in independent states. Immediately after the collapse, all the Central Asian republics confronted numerous challenging internal and external problems which needed to be resolved by their leaders.
Internal factors. For the Central Asian republics, one of the most immediate issues was the stabilization of the political environment, especially, the neutralization of extremist political groups, and the resolution of inter-ethnic tensions in the whole region. The bloody ethnic clashes of pre-independence years (1989-1991) had destabilized life in different parts of the region. The continuous escalation of inter-ethnic conflicts after independence threatened to slip out of control. Furthermore, the situation was worsened by the emergence of separatist tendencies that spread widely in these new multinational and multicultural republics. Meanwhile, the Central Asian republics' state institutions (which had been almost paralyzed by Gorbachev's inconsistent reforms, and by the power struggle between the Center and peripheral republics in the late 1980s), vitally needed reinforcement. Maintenance of stability in the rapidly changing political environment was impossible without a strong government policy. The status of the ruling elites, and the very existence of entire political systems, were challenged by the rising strength of numerous opposition groups that embraced a wide spectrum of views - from extreme nationalism to Islamic radicalism. Last but not least, there was a desperate need for the creation of national economic systems and the transformation of the former Soviet administrative-command management mechanism into a balanced and stable system of sound market-driven institutions.
External factors. Gaining independence radically changed the positions of the Central Asian republics in the international arena. As independent entities they entered a difficult international environment. At that time, the Gulf War affected not only the Arab world but also the Muslim community of the former Soviet Union, and led to the rise of some anti-Western sentiments. The Civil war in Afghanistan not only destabilized the regional security environment but also undermined prospects of the Central Asian republics' economic co-operation with South Asia, by blocking almost all the trade routes to the south. Additionally, it was expected that the Islamic Republic of Iran would compete with Turkey, India, and Pakistan for influence in the formerly Soviet controlled region, as a result of the destabilization of the regional security system, and the "power vacuum" created by Russia's military and political departure.
The next crucial problem was a need for the preservation of the territorial integrity of the Central Asian republics. The existence of overlapping territorial claims criss-crossing the artificial boundaries of the Central Asian republics, and also, territorial disputes between the People's Republic of China and the bordering states of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan made this problem quite complicated. Russia's post-independence foreign policy also proved to be extremely unsustainable, as it was greatly affected by personalities in the Kremlin's circle of power. It experienced several radical changes within the 1990s. Moreover, the Russian radical nationalists claimed the secession of a large part of Kazakhstan's northern territories (between 30 to 40 per cent of the republic's territory), mainly populated by the Russians.
Finally, the creation of cohesive foreign economic relations was a matter of survival for the countries that had previously been deeply integrated into the SMEA and had produced goods competitive only in the rapidly deteriorating Soviet market. The Central Asian republics had depended heavily on the external supply (mainly from the Russian Federation) of almost all goods including petroleum, grain, machinery, medicine, etc.
The profound uncertainty of the effects of both internal and external factors on Central Asian development demanded an immediate reaction. What measures needed to be implemented in Central Asia to meet the internal and external challenges? What were the trends in the formation of the Central Asian republics' post-independence foreign policy? And last but not least, what are the future prospects for independent development on the part of the Central Asian republics?
In this study, the author assesses the formation of the Central Asian republics foreign policy in the post-Soviet era and the evaluation by foreign policy specialists of the Central Asian republics of the main factors which have contributed to the formation of the independent international politics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan.
The first section provides a brief introduction to the political history of the region in general and to the cultural heritage of the Kazakh, Kyrgyz and Uzbek people. Special attention is paid to some important features of the development in these countries. The second section assesses post-Soviet political development in the Central Asian republics. It also identifies the political background of the rising modern Central Asian elites and the consequences of the USSR's sudden disintegration for the post-Soviet development of the Central Asian republics. The third section focuses on determining factors that effect formulation of national interests and security agenda in Central Asian Republics. The fourth section briefly reviews post-Soviet intellectual discourse on the position of the Central Asian republics in the international arena. It also briefly analyzes the public debate on possible "models of development", regional economic and political co-operation and collaboration with other countries. The fifth section discusses the perception of several crucial issues of foreign policy making and international development by the Central Asian republics' leading academics and policy makers. This includes the perception of the security balance in the region and the perception of external threats to regional security. The integration processes in the region are analysed in the sixth section. Section seven focuses on the establishment of foreign policy institutions in the Central Asian republics and also deals with the important results of a survey conducted among experts from Central Asia in 1997. The last section summarizes the findings of the whole research, and discusses important internal factors in the formation of foreign policy in the Central Asian republics. The author also tries to follow up on some important shifts in the foreign policy priorities and the possible implications of these changes in the future of international relations within and outside the region.
The empirical part of this research is based on a survey conducted in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan in January-February 1997 (See the Questionnaire: Appendix 3) and field studies of 1995-1997 which provided incredibly useful information and the opportunity to meet scholars and foreign policy specialists from Central Asia during formal and informal interviews. Although the author focuses mainly on Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, he extends his discussion to the political events in Tajikistan and Turkmenistan and their implications for the region. The reason for the exclusion of these two republics from the focus of the research is explained in Appendix 1.
No.22: The Serb Lobby in the United Kingdom
By Carole Hodge
Preface
The relative unity and stability which characterized Yugoslavia after the Second World War was largely contingent on a number of external factors, its international role as a halfway house between Eastern and Western Europe diminishing dramatically with the erosion of the Soviet Bloc in the late 1980s. At this point, the inherent contradictions within the state, exacerbated by the activities of political elites within and outside the country, combined to present a significant challenge to Yugoslavia's political, economic and social system, a development which went substantially unheeded in the West.
The suddenness of the actual break-up of Yugoslavia created many fissures within the international community, whereby lobbying became a potentially powerful weapon in creating new perceptions to favor proponents of very diverse interests. Britain, with a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, and as a leading member of most major international organizations, was identified, especially by the Serb lobby, as a prime target in this respect. Access was sought at all levels of society, including parliament, the media, academic institutions, national and local government departments, trades unions, peace movements and other organizations, and the Royal family. In few other West European countries has there been such a powerful and extensive Serb lobby during the recent Balkans war.
For the purposes of this analysis, the concept of lobbying is to be understood in terms of political and other activities by groups and individuals seeking or reaffirming access to lines of communication within the British establishment which might influence decision-making, either formally or informally, and contribute to shaping a particular view of events and circumstances relating to historical and contemporary developments in the region. It can also be understood as a propaganda exercise in revisionism and denial, including the historical justification of contemporary events, and the use of myth and legend, interwoven with historical fact.
In these terms, the Serb lobby had a head start in Britain due to well-established diplomatic relations with Yugoslavia, mainly through Belgrade, since its inception in the wake of the First World War and, earlier still, with Serb nationals who had wide access to the diplomatic fraternity. Serbia was perceived as being on the allied side during both world wars and, following the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941, the Serbian king and political leadership fled to London and formed its government-in-exile there.
Traditional connections
According to the Home Office, some 40-50,000 of the Yugoslavs of all ethnic groups would normally have visited the UK annually, in the years leading up to the recent war. As a direct result of hostilities, there were three main groups which traveled to Britain: (i)Bosnians, predominantly Muslims, including displaced people and those expelled in the "ethnic cleansing" campaign;
It is estimated that there are now between fifty and seventy thousand Serbs, including their descendants, in the UK, many of them bilingual, as opposed to under ten thousand from all other ethnic groups in former Yugoslavia combined, most of them recent asylum seekers from Bosnia, with little or no knowledge of the English language. Perhaps for this reason, official interpreting in Britain was undertaken, in the main, by Serbs, including the collection of personal testimonies related to the circumstances in which the refugees had been forced to leave Bosnia. These refugees were, therefore, direct witnesses as to the nature of the war and the way it was being prosecuted and, in most cases, their interpreters were their sole means of communicating these experiences to outsiders. A number of refugees, however, voiced concern over the coercive methods which were at times used by some interpreters at interview sessions with British officials and others.
Contemporary considerations
The ideological dimension would, on the other hand, have drawn in a different sector of the British political scene. The Yugoslav experiment with workers' self-management, its strategic position between East and West, internal liberalization and freedom of travel were perceived by many, in the turmoil of the dissolution, as being continued by Serbian President Milosevic in Belgrade. In consequence, sections of the British Left tended to align themselves on ideological grounds with Belgrade's policy, some presumably on the assumption that it was striving to maintain the socialist system, and the unitary state of Yugoslavia on those lines.
Strategic factors also assumed a new relevance. In the immediate wake of German reunification, and just months before the signing of Maastricht, concern grew about Germany's future role in Europe, with the likely concomitant diminution of British influence. It can probably be safely assumed that the Foreign Office would have considered Yugoslavia, with the fourth largest army in Europe, as a vehicle through which to retain British influence in South Eastern Europe. In other words, as the proverbial "guardian of the gate."
Kosovo 1999
The Rambouillet talks, initiated by the leading European military powers, Britain and France, represented a last-ditch effort to resolve the Kosovo crisis through an internationally brokered peace settlement underpinned by a NATO peacekeeping force, with the aim of bringing Belgrade back into line. Its failure, following Serbia's rejection of both the political and military terms of the proposed agreement to be drawn up between Serbian and Albanian representatives, created an impasse. Acceptance of the terms laid down at Rambouillet would have amounted to political suicide for Yugoslav leader, Slobodan Miloševic, who had ridden to power ten years earlier on the Kosovo ticket. The major powers could now either search around for a new approach while Serbian military forces proceeded to execute their scorched earth policy in Kosovo, both endangering, and further exposing the inadequacies of, the OSCE verification mission, or they could act militarily to end the onslaught. The Rambouillet debacle, together with the looming NATO anniversary summit, and the mounting threat of a wider regional war, persuaded the Alliance powers into accepting reluctantly the inevitability of a major NATO air offensive, to bring Miloševic back on track.
For Britain, this was also an opportunity to restore, through assuming a high profile role in the political and military campaign, some of the influence lost in Europe through its self-exclusion from the single currency, while bolstering its "special relationship" with the United States, which had been severely shaken during the Bosnian war.
The resolve with which British ministers entered into Operation Allied Force in late March 1999 presented a particular challenge to the Serb lobby in the UK, which had hitherto been required to play no more than a supportive role to British government policy. This lobby now came into full swing, adopting for the first time an offensive stance, pulling out all stops in an attempt to discredit the NATO campaign and its leaders, and secure a swift end to the bombing, receiving support from a significant cross-section of British society. And, as in the Croatian and Bosnian wars, rightwing isolationists coalesced with a number of left-wingers of all shades, this time with the primary objective of bringing the NATO bombing to a halt.
The Committee for Peace in the Balkans whose founder members included prominent personalities from across the political spectrum, and which had receded into the background after its ill-timed launch in 1995, just two weeks before the fall of Srebrenica, was now reactivated, and anti-NATO demonstrations, protests and benefit concerts were planned throughout Britain. Similarly, the Serbian Unity Congress in the United States co-ordinated protest activities, publishing through the Internet details of anti-NATO meetings and demonstrations across the world, while meetings were held by Socialist Workers Party members who, when probed, generally had little understanding of the deeper issues at stake in the region, apparently using the Yugoslav issue as a tool for recruitment to its ranks. Anti-nuclear groups similarly used the Balkans war as a platform for expounding their position on NATO.
In the House of Commons, the traditional bipartisan position which had held in the Bosnian war, also prevailed during the NATO campaign in Kosovo, but with a reverse effect, as the Conservative Party now officially endorsed the policy of large-scale military intervention. While misgivings were expressed from all sides of the House over aspects of NATO strategy, and queries raised as to its objectives, strong dissent was limited to the unofficial cross-party coalition which had adopted a pro-Serb position in the Bosnian war.
No.23: The Security Services and the Decline of Democracy in Russia: 1996-1999
By Amy Knight
Preface
As the year of the much-anticipated presidential elections in Russia, 1996 was marked by intense speculation in the West about Russia's political leadership, both before and after voters went to the ballot box to re-elect President Boris Yeltsin in June. Throughout this period the Russian media duly reported every detail of the corruption scandals, the dramatic confrontations between different political factions in the parliament, and the ups and downs of Yeltsin's health. To observers in the West all this excitement pointed to one thing: Russia was finally becoming a democracy. To be sure, given Russia's economic problems and its unsettled political environment, there was still a way to go. But Russians now enjoyed a free press and the ability to leave the country freely (if they could afford it), to pursue profits on the free market, and to vote in democratic elections. All this added up to the outward trappings of democracy.
As several political theorists have pointed out, however, free elections do not always produce liberal constitutional democracies, particularly when they are introduced in societies without a tradition of civic liberties and rule of law. Initially, elections in Russia brought new faces into power, suggesting that the old order was crumbling. But the new men-Yeltsin in particular-were more interested in legitimizing their claims to govern than in instituting liberal reforms. As one Russian political scientist has pointed out, the fact that Yeltsin was popularly elected, "made him confident that his authority was unlimited."
Instead of transferring state-owned property to private ownership by means of a regulated process that would lead to genuine market reforms, Yeltsin doled out the nation's vast economic resources to his cronies and their families, thereby creating financial oligarchs, who used their new riches to buy political influence. Instead of developing a real parliamentary government, with a system of checks and balances, Yeltsin increasingly disregarded democratic procedures and ruled by decree. As his authoritarian methods and seemingly capricious governing style led to a dramatic decline in his public support, he relied more and more on the traditional Soviet means of maintaining power - a strong police and security apparatus.
Indeed, the enthusiasm of the West over Russia's so-called democratic transition might have been less, if more attention had been paid to the growing role of the security services, the successor agencies to the KGB, in both domestic and foreign politics. Having ensured that officials loyal to him were in charge of the various internal security agencies, Yeltsin placed great reliance on them in his campaign to win re-election in 1996. The methods employed by these agencies raised real questions about the democratic nature of the election.
Developments in the area of foreign policy were equally disquieting. At the beginning of 1996, Evgenii Primakov, head of the Foreign Intelligence Service and a former KGB official, was named Russian Foreign Minister. To be sure, few in the West were pleased about this appointment. People worried that Primakov's background in the intelligence services, an institution which had always been hostile to democratic states, might make Russia's foreign policy less flexible. But Primakov, who had been a part of Russia's foreign policy establishment for years, was a "known quantity," who, rightly or wrongly, had the reputation of being practical and businesslike. His background in the KGB soon ceased to be an issue as he acquired the statesmanlike stature of a foreign minister.
What people did not realize was the extent to which Primakov's appointment signified the resurgence of the KGB in the political life of the country and the threat that this resurgence posed to Russian democracy. It was not simply a question of one former KGB official happening to get a top government job. More significant was that Primakov could not have received this job if Russians had rejected their Soviet past and rid themselves of the vestiges of an institution that epitomized the evils of the Soviet system-the KGB. Initially it had seemed that this was their intention. The KGB, it might be recalled, was such a focal point of popular anger against the regime after the August 1991 coup attempt that crowds even toppled the statue of Feliks Dzerzhinskii, chief of the first Soviet political police, which had stood proudly in front of KGB headquarters for decades. A month later Russian President Boris Yeltsin, responding to the public mood, spoke in sweeping terms about disbanding the KGB: "Perhaps we should leave, let's say, the intelligence and counterintelligence service, as in other countries, but all the rest of the tale-telling services-surveillance, eavesdropping, informers, and so on-needs to be abolished beyond any shadow of a doubt."
By 1996 Yeltsin's words had become an empty promise. The KGB had been divided up into five separate agencies with new names; several laws had been passed, enumerating the functions of the new agencies; and some of the former KGB personnel had retired or been dismissed. But a substantial number of officials had remained in their jobs, and, under Yeltsin's auspices, the KGB's successor agencies had resumed many of their former functions. Far from what might have been expected in 1991, the Russian security services had regained much of the power and influence which they had lost in the immediate aftermath of the coup attempt.
There are several reasons for the failure of the new Russian government to reform the security services. First and foremost is the fact that Russia's new leaders, Yeltsin included, were former communist party apparatchiks, who had worked closely with the KGB bureaucracy for years. They were used to relying on the KGB to maintain stability in the country and to suppress public discontent with the regime. Old habits die hard; so when Yeltsin and his allies encountered opposition from other political factions and criticism from the press, they reacted by cultivating the support of the security services.
Another factor was that the new leadership made no effort to address the problem of past injustices under the Soviet regime. With the exception of former KGB Chairman Vladimir Kriuchkov and four of his deputies, who were imprisoned for a time for their part in the August 1991 coup attempt, security official were not called to account for past actions. For several decades the KGB had deprived citizens of basic freedoms, imprisoned innocent people after mock trials, covertly murdered others, and forced millions to become spies and informers. Yet no one was punished for these abuses. It was difficult to reform the security police without any kind of reckoning.
Finally, the new Russian Federation had no tradition of legality upon which to build. Centuries of autocratic rule had deprived Russian people of any notion of the rule of law. As one scholar observed, "the beginnings of a civil society, that is, the government's commitment to the safeguarding of individual or corporate rights of person and property, were discernible only in the second half of the nineteenth century." The development of a civil society was cut short by the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the subsequent imposition of the Soviet system of justice. This system had some of the outward trappings of a democratic legal structure - judges, courts, prosecutors and even lawyers. But in reality it operated according to the dictates of the party and the police, who called all the shots and determined the fate of those who found themselves in the criminal justice process. The idea that individuals had rights under the law simply did not exist during the Soviet period. In order for a true reform of the security police to take place, there had to be an effective legal infrastructure with judges, courts, and lawyers who actually operated according to laws. There had to be a way to make the security police accountable for their actions, just as they are in other countries. Although efforts were made to build such an infrastructure, it could not be done overnight.
As time went by and the economic situation declined, people seemed to forget about the lofty democratic goals to which they had aspired in 1991. Disenchantment with the Yeltsin leadership and cynicism about the future set in. Economic woes became the primary concern. Few people had the energy or optimism to demand change. Thus, when Primakov's appointment was announced in early 1996, it barely raised an eyebrow among Russians. It was as if the inevitable had happened. Everyone knew that the KGB had never disappeared; so why be surprised that someone like Primakov would take over Russia's foreign policy?
Primakov's appointment was part of a more general trend which was taking Russia away from the democratic path upon which it had embarked. The war in Chechnya which had begun in December 1994 and resulted in the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians was already an indication of the Russian government's disregard for human rights. Yeltsin and his colleagues defended the invasion of Chechnya as an effort to keep the Russian Federation together by preventing Chechnya from asserting its independence, but most people viewed it as blatant aggression on Russia's part. Although the Russian army withdrew from Chechnya in 1996, the democratic rights that Russian people had gained after the Soviet Union collapsed continued to erode.
The purpose of this paper is to describe the growing influence of the Russian security services in Russia and explain how this trend has contributed to the decline of democracy. First, I discuss the role of security services in democratic societies and how their governments reconcile the need to ensure security without trampling on the rights of citizens. I then describe the different security agencies that emerged from the KGB and explain what role they play in Russian government and politics. Next, I consider the effects on democracy: the interference by the security services in the political process; their connections with organized crime; their attempts to curtail freedom of the press; their abuse of human rights in trials of critics; their imposition of a regime of secrecy and their efforts to curb archival access; the disproportionate influence that the Foreign Intelligence Service has had on Russian foreign policy; and finally the often arbitrary and lawless behavior of the security agencies in Russia's regional territories. In order to better explain these developments, I discuss them in the context of more general changes which have occurred in Russian politics from 1996 onwards.
I begin with the year 1996 because it marked the beginning of a new, regressive period in Russian politics. It is also a convenient starting point because it takes up the narrative of developments (with a few months' interval) where my book Spies Without Cloaks: The KGB's Successors left off. I should say that, in giving my prognosis for the future of Russian democracy at the end of that book, I was not as pessimistic as I should have been, given what has happened in the past three years.
No. 24: The Repluralization of Slovenia in the 1980s: New Revelations from Archival Material
By Leopoldina Plut-Pregelj et al.
Preface
Until shortly before the peoples of east-central and south-eastern Europe began the rush toward western-style democracy, a market economy, and "rejoining Europe" made possible by the collapse of Communist regimes in 1989-90, Yugoslavia seemed a sure bet to lead the pack. Titoist Yugoslavia's independence of Soviet constraints and consequent freedom to experiment with "market socialism," "self-management," and controlled political quasi-pluralism within a one-party framework, however limited and often aborted or at best marginally successful, had created a legacy of comparative advantages that seemed to augur quicker and less painful "transitions" than any other "post-communist" country could hope for.
These comparative advantages included enterprise managers and workers with more and longer experience with competitive domestic and international markets for goods and services (and to more limited degree for capital and labor) and literally millions of Yugoslav executives, members of technical and humanist elites, and Gastarbeiter with often extensive exposure to and experience with "western" ways of doing things. Many non-communists as well as communists had also become acquainted with the uses and abuses of quasi-democratic and quasi-competitive politics, "elite competition," and what some (especially in Slovenia) were learning to call "civil society," all of which Yugoslavia's comparatively relaxed communist system and its mentors periodically tolerated and in some years and places even encouraged. These advantages tended to be most pronounced in regions and urban cultural and economic centers, especially but not exclusively in the formerly Habsburg north (Slovenia and Croatia), which had brought similar head-starts with them into Yugoslavia.
With one exception, the Slovenes, the nations of Yugoslavia squandered these advantages, and much more, in the civil wars and other (mostly related) misfortunes which accompanied and followed the disintegration of their common state. Slovenes, in particular several of the pre-1990 opposition and 1990-1991 government leaders who play prominent roles in the developments analyzed in this Treadgold Paper, had been the first and most determined of the non-Serb Yugoslavs who took the exit road, some eagerly and others reluctantly, to escape Slobodan Miloševic's efforts to impose his own and Serb control over a re-centralized and Communist-ruled Yugoslavia. In the determination and haste of the exit strategy they adopted after the elections of 1990 brought the opposition to power, these Slovenes bear their share of responsibility for Yugoslavia's precipitate and elsewhere violent break-up and thus for what befell those who felt impelled by Slovenia's haste to seek independence sooner and at greater risk than they intended or preferred to avoid altogether. But Slovene political and military tactical skills and good luck (Slovenia's geo-political and geo-strategic marginality in Yugoslavia and almost no Serbs in its almost homogeneous population) permitted Slovenia to escape almost unscathed (its ten-day "war of independence" in June-July 1991 inflicted little damage and few casualties).
The Slovenes' top-of-the-scale legacy of Tito- and Habsburg-era comparative advantages were thus intact and usable for the kind of relatively speedy, painless, and successful "transitions" to "European" political, economic, and social systems and memberships that their other former compatriots were forfeiting in civil wars and collateral political, economic, and social damage. Moreover, during the 1980s a specifically Slovene web of interlocked developments and their protagonists, building on these historic advantages, in effect "jump-started" Slovenia's transitions. These developments and some of their consequences are the subject of this Treadgold Paper.
Utilizing newly available archival and other sources, including recently opened Party archives, the authors explore three overlapping dimensions of Slovenia's road to "parallel" cultural and political universes and toward political pluralism in the 1980s and 1990, to independence in 1991, and toward the "return to Europe" that is still a work-in-progress.
All three stories begin with Slovene responses to the retreat from the liberalizing economic, political, and cultural reforms of the 1960s which began with Tito's elimination of "nationalist" and/or "liberal" regional party leaderships in 1971-72, heralding "the so-called 'leaden' 70s" (see Gabrič's discussion) with their renewal of widespread repression of "dissident" views and activities.
In a central thread running through all three narratives, the authors describe four specifically Slovene factors driving Slovene developments and their outcomes in the following decade. The first consists of the increasingly deviant (more permissive and eventually even pro-actively liberal) policies, actions, and deliberate inaction (e.g., failing to prosecute for "verbal delicts") of the League of Communists of Slovenia (LCS) in the 1980s. The second consists of the increasingly political activities and aims of "oppositional" and initially "anti-political" elites which both induced and exploited these changes in Communist self-confidence, convictions, and policies. The third is a peculiarly Slovene conflictual/cooperative relationship between party and non- or anti-party elites with overlapping and sometimes inter-changeable memberships and a multitude of the familial, school, and professional links characteristic of elites in numerically small and both literally and figuratively interbred communities.
Underlying and eventually overriding all of these is the acute and historic sensitivity of almost all Slovenes to anything perceived as a threat to their cultural and national identity. This individual and collective concern and determination "to preserve their national identity," as Leopoldina Plut-Pregelj notes in this volume, is what led them into Yugoslavia in 1918 and again during the second World War, when the threat was perceived as German and Italian. It was also what led them out of Yugoslavia in 1986-91, when the threat was perceived as coming from first Yugoslav and then nationalist and hegemonic Serb re-centralizing and implicitly assimilationist forces.
Ales Gabrič's theme is the transformation of "cultural activities", initially limited to "pushing the envelope" of cultural freedom in a gradually and inconsistently more permissive Slovene political environment in the early 1980s, into directly and openly "political activities" by 1987-1988, where his narrative ends (and is carried on by Bozo Repe's previously parallel account of the emergence of political pluralism). His principal actors are writers (after initial resistance by the "older generation" particularly in the Slovene Writers Association), film-makers, other "cultural circles", and members of an emerging "youth subculture" represented by rock and punk groups and the controversial Laibach and Neue Slowenische Kunst group. The dynamics of the transformation he describes were also and increasingly in response to contrary developments in other parts of Yugoslavia - at first especially in Croatia and later primarily in Serbia - during which "cultural workers" from different republics continued to talk but decreasingly to listen to each other.
There is a striking correspondence between the "time line" of significant developments and many protagonists in Gabrič's account of "cultural activities" becoming "political activities" and in Repe's account of transformations in the political landscape. Both are describing how (in Gabrič's words) "[t]he 'Opposition' [as defined by the regime at the beginning of the decade] became a true opposition" by 1987. For both authors the crucial events of the 1980-1987 period, which also brought their respective dramatis personae together, were the founding of the "opposition" journal Nova Revija in 1982, its famous 57th issue (February 1987), and debates over proposed amendments to the Slovene constitution (with a now thoroughly "politicized" Slovene Writers Association playing a major role in drafting "alternative" amendments) in 1987-1988.
Leapoldina Plut-Pregelj's contribution is a brilliant "case study" of a previously unresearched instance, intrinsically important and bound to have wider repercussions because it concerned the hyper-sensitive field of education and the transmission of language and culture, of growing Slovene frustration with and alienation from membership in the Yugoslav federation they ultimately rejected in its entirety. Contesting the view that Slovenes were continuously if not congenitally uncooperative in federal matters, her meticulously researched analysis of Slovene participation in nearly a decade of debates over a proposed Yugoslav-wide "core curriculum" for primary and secondary schools, repeatedly discussed and re-drafted from 1979 to 1987, is a tale of perpetually ignored or outvoted Slovene pedagogical as well as "national" (linguistic and cultural) concerns and proposals. Agreeing that there was a genuine need for some "coordination of curricula" throughout the country, for practical reasons, Slovene participants objected to the detailed prescriptions (for each subject and often each course) advocated by educators and politicians in some other republics. Such "micro-management" was in their view an excessive and unnecessary infringement of each republic's constitutionally anchored right to determine its own educational system, including curricula, and of the historic as well as "national" peculiarities of each region's educational regimes and needs.
Partly accepted and adopted in Serbia in 1987, the proposed core curriculum was ultimately ignored in Slovenia, by then increasingly taking its own road. As Plut-Pregelj concludes: "Although the core curriculum was not implemented in Slovenia, discussions, which were not always civil, diminished the trust of the Slovenes in a possible development of a democratic, multicultural Yugoslavia, and certainly affected their will to cooperate."
Bozo Repe examines the evolution of Slovenia's political landscape from "no noticeable opposition movements...in the early 1980s" through "alternative [social] movements" to the emergence of political but ostensibly non-party "Associations" (Zveze) and then of opposition political parties when these were legalized in late 1989. His narrative continues with the formation and victories of the "Demos" coalition that won the multi-party elections of April 1990, formed Slovenia's first post-communist government, and led the country to independence in 1991. His analysis of developments and their dynamics to 1988, where the other authors end their narratives, parallels and at times incorporates their findings and conclusions. It is in effect, and significantly, a summary of how dissent ("the 'Opposition'") among cultural and educational as well as political elites became a "true [and in 1990-91 triumphant] opposition."
Four points or arguments in Repe's contribution seem to this reader to merit particular attention for their often overlooked importance in the story he is telling.
The first is his point that attempts to introduce "political parallelism" in the early 1980s "meant that social issues began to be dealt with 'outside the established forms and options provided by our social system.'" The phrase Repe quotes here, a traditional Communist obfuscation and euphemism meaning outside authorized Party and Party-controlled forums, always and rightly represented the ultimate sin in Yugoslav Party establishment eyes because it constituted a vital threat to its monopoly of power. Grudging but growing toleration of such "political parallelism" by the LCS leadership, itself undergoing important personnel changes and loss of confidence in its right to rule because of its "correct" ideology, can be seen as the real beginning of the demise of Communist rule in Slovenia.
The second is Repe's view that "[w]ith the 57th issue of Nova Revija the initiative was in the hands of the opposition," a contention supported by Gabrič's analysis.
The third, more implicit than explicit in Repe's text, consists of his references to the specificity of the Slovene "political class" (both Communist and non-Communist) and its relation to the "intelligentsia" in a small country, society, and elite in which all of these people tend to have more or less intimate knowledge of and relationships with one another. This was clearly of special importance in often successful efforts by all parties to co-opt one another in the political battles of the 1980s - and since.
The fourth is his description of the special influence that the Slovene Democratic Alliance (SDZ) came to have within the Demos coalition, an influence that later enabled leading members of the SDZ to control much of Demos's political agenda. This seems to have been particularly true on issues concerning the "national question," how anti-Communist Demos should be, and the desirability and timing of Slovene independence.
Both singly and especially together, the three authors of this Treadgold Paper also make an important contribution to our analysis and understanding of Slovenia's place and role in Yugoslav developments in the 1980s and Yugoslavia's disintegration in 1991. They similarly contribute to our understanding of why Slovene developments since independence have taken the direction they have: relatively rapid and successful "transition" into a "normal" country and society - with "normal" usually meaning like western European politics, economics, and society and thus including disquieting as well as laudable dimensions.
By Brigit Farley
Preface
In the 1990s, the world witnessed the sudden revival of an old disagreement between Serbs and Croats regarding the future of the Yugoslav state. This had not been possible in post-war Yugoslavia. Josip Broz Tito had imposed a "brotherhood and unity" ethos, which suppressed the national ambitions of Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and others. With the passing of Tito's iron rule, Serbia upset the balance in 1989 by incorporating two autonomous Yugoslav provinces within its borders. The president of the Serbian Republic, Slobodan Milosevic, charged that Tito's removal of Kosovo and Vojvodina from the Serbian republic had cheated Serbs: these were Serbian territories separated from Serbia just to appease Croats and other nationalities, who feared a large Serbian republic.
When Serbs living in Croatia rallied to Miloševic's banner with a noisy campaign for autonomy within Croatia, Croats and their leaders saw a rerun of their old nightmare: an enlarged Serbia preparing to dominate post-Tito Yugoslavia. After two years of steadily escalating conflict, they followed the Slovenes in opting for independence from Yugoslavia in the summer of l991. When Miloševic used the Yugoslav army to attempt to stop this act of secession, an armed Serb-Croat conflict ensued.
When in 1992 the civil war engulfed Bosnia-Hercegovina, parts of which both Serbs and Croats claimed for themselves, this domestic quarrel acquired a vivid international dimension. Refugees fled Bosnia for neighboring states, carrying the civil hostilities with them. Journalist Slavenka Drakulic glimpsed fresh anti-Croat and anti-Serb epithets carved into cafe tables in Vienna, the war "creeping out of the cheap apartments near the Gurtel" and intruding into public consciousness. The prospect of fratricidal combat over Bosnia stunned European and American diplomats, who failed to agree upon a plan to prevent bloodshed until 1995. Only in that year were they able to prevail upon the exhausted belligerents to agree to the Dayton Accords and an international peacekeeping force for Bosnia.
As singular and horrifying as the 1990 Yugoslav wars might seem, this is not the first time that Serb-Croat difficulties have affected events outside of Yugoslavia. They made it impossible for interwar France, the sponsor of the 1919 Versailles order in Europe, to fashion the kind of effective opposition it deemed necessary to stop Nazi Germany's campaign to revise the territorial status quo between 1933 and 1935. France had an established relationship with the Serb leaders of the first Yugoslavia and generally supported them in their dispute with the Croats over autonomy, until it became imperative to make both Yugoslavia and Italy parties to a comprehensive anti-German security arrangement. Italy had territorial claims against Yugoslavia and aided unhappy Croats in attacks against the state; Yugoslav leaders knew this and became receptive to overtures from German diplomats, who encouraged them not to accommodate the Croats. Two French foreign ministers wrestled mightily with these contradictions, and neither resolved them. As will be seen, the Serb-Croat dispute had deadly consequences for France, for the European peace, and for the first Yugoslav state itself. Its story is a neglected aspect of Europe's road to war before 1939.
No.26: Poland and Germany, 1989-91: The Role of Economic Factors in Foreign Policy
By Randall E. Newnham
Preface
In recent years a number of studies have appeared on the key diplomatic events related to German reunification. The importance of Germany's actions at this time, particularly its efforts to win over its suspicious eastern neighbors, Poland and the then-USSR, seemed clear to scholars; winning the cooperation of these states helped not only to make unification possible but to facilitate the end of the Cold War. However, most studies of the reunification period have been limited to simply recounting the history of these crucial international events. An attempt to explain the diplomacy of this period in a way which will advance our understanding of the underlying nature of German-East European relations or of International Relations theory has rarely been made. This study will make such an attempt.
The underlying focus of the study will be on the role of Germany's economic strength in shaping its ties with Poland, a much poorer state. The disparity between the states is clear; recent figures from the World Bank, for example, indicate that Germany's GNP is some twenty times larger than that of Poland. Noted political scientists Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye aptly described such a condition as "asymmetrical interdependence;" the economic ties do affect both sides, but one side is far more dependent on the other. Often such an economic gap between countries facilitates the use of economic statecraft by the wealthier state. While other factors, including some German concessions on political and security issues, certainly played a role in influencing Poland and its other eastern neighbors at the time of reunification, it is the contention of this study that German economic strength also played a key role-in two ways.
First, the study will focus on economic linkage, the use of economic leverage to win political concessions. In particular, the role of "positive linkage" will be stressed, the use of economic rewards as a tool of influence. While all types of economic linkage are frequently neglected by scholars of diplomacy, positive linkage has been especially understudied, perhaps because it is often subtle and non-conflictual compared to negative linkage (the use of economic sanctions). Yet a close study of German diplomacy in the period before, during, and after reunification makes it clear that the promise of German economic aid of various types did play an important role at the time. Furthermore, by using rewards rather than punishments, Germany seems to have been able to influence Poland (and other East European states) while at the same time building friendly bilateral ties.
As in other such cases of "asymmetrical interdependence," though, German relations with Central and
Eastern Europe do not involve only outright economic linkage by the wealthier state. A second factor is also of great importance-the subtle role that the economic imbalance plays in shaping the poorer state's foreign policy preferences, even when the wealthier state does not initiate a clear economic quid pro quo. As we shall see, for example, the views of opposition leaders in Poland before 1989 on relations with Germany-and, in turn, the attitude of the new post-communist government after 1989-were shaped in part by their knowledge that Germany was vital to Poland's economic recovery. Germany was needed as a bilateral trading and investment partner, as a link to the rest of Western Europe and, eventually, as an advocate for possible Polish membership in the European Union.
However, it will also become clear in this study that a situation of "asymmetrical interdependence" does not leave all leverage in the hands of the wealthier partner. It is certainly possible for a weaker state to initiate linkages of its own-offering to make the smallest possible political concessions in return for the largest possible economic ones. Also, the economically weaker state can, of course, evade the bilateral "asymmetry" by appealing to other, stronger states. As we shall see, this dynamic was particularly important in the crucial German-Polish dispute over finalizing recognition of the Oder-Neisse border.
Why, though, has this study chosen to illustrate the role of economic asymmetry and linkage by focusing on German-Polish relations during the 1989-1991 period? This case has been chosen for several reasons. First, Poland was an important target of German diplomacy during the reunification period; indeed, it could be argued that Poland was second only to the then-USSR as an obstacle to unity. Certainly Britain and France also had some doubts about unification. Yet they were linked to Bonn by long-standing political and military ties and did not have any border disputes with Germany. Thus opposition to unification was less intense and easier to defuse in these states than in Poland or the USSR. As we shall, see fear of Germany led the Poles to attempt to disrupt the 2+4 negotiating framework, in hopes of bringing more states into the process and slowing it down drastically. Hence, understanding German-Polish ties is important to understanding the overall diplomacy of German unification, with all its implications for East and West Europe and the world as a whole.
Second, the scale of economic disparity between the states is similar to that seen in German relations with other states in Eastern and Central Europe; hence, this study may have relevance for these states as well. As we shall see, the argument can even potentially be extended to comparisons with other cases where economic inequalities have existed for many years, such as U.S.-Mexican relations.
Third, it could be argued that German-Polish relations represent a "hard case" for the role of economic influences in world affairs. While the clear economic disparity between the states seemed to make economic linkage possible, the political issues involved were very difficult. How could such tense ties be affected by the "weak" weapon of economic aid? Many Poles were fiercely opposed to reunification and deeply suspicious of cooperation with Germany on any issue, from border controls to the rights of the German minority in Poland. Bilateral ties seemed to be poisoned by memories of German atrocities in 1939-1945 and the Polish expulsion of millions of Germans after 1945. The lingering territorial dispute over the German lands which Poland had been given after the war remained formally unresolved until after German unity was achieved. Indeed, in early 1990 relations temporarily became so tense that the non-communist Polish government actually asked Soviet troops to remain in Poland to help protect the country. Yet despite these huge problems, Germany eventually succeeded in establishing a very close relationship with Poland, a relationship so close that many Poles now regard Germany as being not only their country's most crucial diplomatic partner but also its closest friend.
How was Germany able to achieve this astonishing result? This study will show that economic aid-in the form of loans, export credits, and help in facilitating Polish ties to the European Union-played an important role. Also, more subtle knowledge of Germany's economic role was at work. Generally, even when Poles were inclined to resist German initiatives, they remembered that Germany was crucial to their future, especially in the economic realm, and decided to be more flexible.
In this study, the transition to the new post-Cold War era in German-Polish ties will be examined in detail, with a focus on the often-subtle role of German economic strength in influencing Polish policy. The analysis will center first on the emergence of a new attitude toward Germany among the Polish opposition, then on the dramatic upheavals in Eastern Europe, which made it possible for the new ideas to become political reality. Next, three major events in German-Polish ties will be examined, in chronological order. First, the initial breakthrough in bilateral ties which took place in the fall of 1989-culminating in Chancellor Kohl's visit to Poland in November, 1989-will be discussed. The Joint Declaration accompanying Kohl's visit was a classic example of the kind of mutually beneficial positive economic linkage which has come to characterize German-Polish relations in recent years. Next, the period of tension which began with the re-emergence of the Oder-Neisse border issue in late 1989 will be examined. Although an awareness of Germany's economic importance to their country was important in inducing the Poles to moderate some of their demands on this issue, ultimately the crisis could be resolved only by German recognition of the border. Third, the negotiations which led up to the June 1991 comprehensive German-Polish friendship treaty will be discussed. Here there were clear signs that relations were returning to the economic linkage pattern of late 1989-but with one difference; in 1991, the crucial lure which Germany employed was not bilateral economic aid but a promise to help Poland enter the European Union. In the final section of the chapter, German-Polish relations immediately in 1991 will be briefly outlined, with a focus on cross-border cooperation and Poland's efforts to strengthen its ties to the EU and NATO. In each of these sections we will examine the goals of the two sides and the various strategies-economic and otherwise-which they employed to achieve their goals.
No.27: Eastern Europe and the Natural Law Tradition
By Sabrina P. Ramet
Preface
I have undertaken, in the pages which follow, to extend the argument first broached in my 1997 publication, Whose Democracy?, to the effect that moral relativism, nationalism, and capitalism all present challenges to the project of establishing, consolidating, and maintaining legitimate (and hence, stable) political systems, and to the effect that the standard for system legitimacy is Natural Law or, as I called it in my earlier work, Universal Reason.
Recently, there have been claims registered on behalf of certain notions about cultural diversity, to the effect that there are no universal standards, no universal rights, and above all, no such thing as Universal Reason, which is to say, no universally valid mores of human behavior. Moral relativists choosing to take up this particular banner may be overstating their case. "After all," Shashi Tharoor reminds us,
In order to insist on the nullibicity of universal standards of behavior, a would-be consistent relativist would have to maintain that murder, torture, the killing of infants, mass rape, pick-pocketing, lying, exploitation, slavery, cruelty, and other forms of hurtful behavior are not necessarily wrong or even morally problematic. In order to connect this with misconceived notions of cultural diversity, he or she would have to claim further that at least one of these behaviors is or could be considered a "local tradition" in some country or other. That said, it should be clear enough why I consider such relativists to be either unconscious of the import of their own words or, alternatively, driven by contempt for non-Europeans, (the typical charge against classical liberal notions of universal rights and mores being "Eurocentric", which, in practice, is not so much a charge as a claim ).
Yet far from being mere "Eurocentric" conceits, as the cultural relativists suppose, honesty, generosity, hospitality, loyalty, and mutual aid have been found by anthropologists to be generally held to be important virtues in societies at all levels of development, on all continents. No one (as far as I am aware) denies that there are variations in customs, traditions, and even mores from one society to another, from one group (however defined) to another. What Natural Law theorists insist on, however, is that not everything is arbitrary or relative or merely a feature of one or another religion or culture.
Natural Law has also encountered resistance among authoritarians of various stripes, because they are aware that it
establishes the concept that there is an external standard by which the conduct of state authorities may be judged.
As Heinrich Rommen put it in a 1945 publication, "…there must be a law from which all human laws derive their validity and moral obligation. There must be a right which is paramount to all rights of the state…"
The Natural Law tradition constitutes the single most important area of overlap between Catholic social teachings and the classical liberal tradition of John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Immanuel Kant. And in spite of recurrent announcements, from time to time, that Natural Law theory is "dead" or - worse for some - "old-fashioned", Natural Law continues to animate scholars and, in the past hundred years, penetrated deeply into international law. The Geneva Convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are but two of the better known incarnations in international law of the Natural Law tradition.
What is Natural Law? In a word, it is the argument that the moral law has universal validity, applying to all equally, and that the basic postulates of the moral law can be discerned by unaided reason. There are some variations on the theme, of course. St. Thomas Aquinas argued that beyond the "basic postulates", unaided reason might well run into difficulty; and hence, for Aquinas, the need for divine revelation. For Hooker and Locke, the most central postulates discernible by reason are the imperative to do no harm and the moral equality of all persons. For Hobbes, by contrast with Aquinas, Hooker, and Locke alike, the universal validity of the precepts of Natural Law derives solely from the command of God, who has equipped humankind with the faculty of reason in order to make compliance possible. For Kant, the door opened by reason is the categorical imperative, the rule of universalizability which, for Kant, is the fulcrum of the moral law.
"Post-modernists" are variously embarrassed, annoyed, repulsed, or bored by appeals to Natural Law. But, to my mind, Universal Reason (Natural Law) is the standard whereby to measure system legitimacy; and system legitimacy - understood triadically, as consisting of moral legitimacy, political legitimacy, and economic legitimacy - is the barometer of a system's stability, providing at the same time the key to understanding both its internal and its external behavior.
Moral universalism is the term which is appropriately applied to adherents of the Natural Law tradition. It may be distinguished in the first place from moral consequentialism, which seeks to assess the morality of an action not according to abstract principles (as both Locke and Kant would have it), but according to the actual or presumed consequences of the action. Moral conventionalism has also been a historic rival and consists in the denial that there can exist any standards or rules of behavior other than those laid down in law. As Hobbes puts it in De Cive,
I have insisted on identifying myself with the Natural Law tradition rather than with "liberalism-in-general", even though I consider myself a classical liberal, for three reasons: first, because my ideas about economic legitimacy (viz., that neither socialism nor capitalism is legitimate) derive, in the first place, from the encyclicals of Popes Leo XIII, John XXIII, and John Paul II, encyclicals taking Natural Law as their point of departure; second, because among the three strands of liberalism which have emerged - universalist-idealism (embodying Natural Law), conventionalist-realism, and consequentialist-relativism - I identify myself with the first, viz., universalist-idealism; and third, because the term "Natural Law" is far more precise than "liberalism" which, in any event, is all too frequently identified with the specific cultural dispositions, laws, customs, strengths, weaknesses, and proclivities of American society, even though not everything occurring in America should necessarily be interpreted as a pristine embodiment of classical liberal principles.
The twin themes of Natural Law and liberal idealism run as threads through the entire text. In chapter 2, I consider the challenges which capitalism has offered to the liberal project in East-Central Europe, noting, along the way, the insights of various scholars who anticipated the region's rough ride in the immediate "post-communist" era. It would be comforting to imagine that capitalism unbound - even, ideally, where out-and-out mafias are concerned - would somehow work, as by an "invisible hand" (to steal a phrase from Adam Smith), to foster the common good. But if, by capitalism, we mean a system premised on minimal government regulation, geared to the maximization of profits, and oriented toward inculcating in "consumers" cravings for the commodities offered for purchase, then capitalism may, in fact, be problematic for the liberal project (to put it gently). Capitalism, as Joseph Schumpeter put it once,
In chapter 3, I take up the concept of sovereignty, examining its development by two classical liberals - Hobbes and Kant - setting their views against those of Jean-Jacques Rouseeau, a non-liberal advocate of democracy and no defender of Natural Law, examining how the constitutions of the contemporary East-Central European states reflect perspectives expostulated in these theories about sovereignty. The chapter closes with a brief consideration of the common translation of popular sovereignty into claims on behalf of nationalism (an ideology profoundly at odds with the Natural Law tradition).
Chapter 4 picks up where chapter 3 leaves off, probing the alleged right of national self-determination and subjecting it to a moral critique. The idea of a right of national self-determination is, further, shown to be organically connected with the tradition of "realism" (which is to say, with the rejection of Natural Law, even though Natural Law is the only foundation upon which claims on behalf of natural rights may be coherently registered), and with certain misconceived efforts to introduce exaggerated and distorted notions about value-free science into the social sciences and humanities. From the analysis in chapters 3-4, it follows that neither ethnic homogeneity nor nationalist ideology has anything to do with the Natural Law tradition or, if one prefers, with liberal idealism. Quite to the contrary, whereas liberal idealism enumerates certain principles which are essential to the establishment and maintenance of a legitimate system, nationalism pulls one in precisely the opposite direction, toward illegitimate politics. Whereas liberal idealism holds that the state should be seen as a rational construct, designed to foster the common good and obliged to respect the limits set by Natural Law, "nationalism and racialism regard the state as the fruit from the mysterious depth of an irrational, national soul…[The] State, consequently, is not the creation of reason for reason," and cannot be limited by the dictates of Universal Reason, but is merely, for nationalists, the sword and shield of the ruling Nation. The nationalist principle obtained one of its earliest defenses in the writings of the Abbé E. J. Sičyes, one of five members of the French Revolutionary "Directory". It was he who advised that "[the Nation's] will is always lawful, for she is herself the embodiment of the law."
And, in closing, chapter 5 returns to the theme of legitimacy, noting that the high value placed upon it by liberal idealists distinguishes them from liberal realists, and provides an explanation of the more realistic analyses offered by idealists.
No.28: Local Self-Government and the
State in Modern Russia
By Thomas E. Porter and John F. Young
Preface
The many challenges of post Soviet Russian state building and political transition are not limited to national institutions in Moscow. Two tasks critical to the overall political and social success of contemporary Russia include strengthening the reach of the state through effective local administration and empowering local governments with sufficient autonomy and capacity to address local concerns. These two tasks might at first glance appear mutually exclusive. But the challenge of reform is to resolve such apparent tension in a manner which could foster both the penetration of the state throughout its territory and the bridging of the gap between state and society. Both tasks are much more than consequences of the collapse of the Soviet Union. They are also part of a much broader historical challenge of modern Russia to achieve an effective demarcation and distribution of power. In this sense, the post Soviet Russian political landscape is by no means a clean sheet of paper upon which any institutional arrangement might be designed. The historical and cultural context within which the challenge of state building occurs is an integral part of the challenge, and therefore requires the attention of those who hope to understand contemporary Russia.
This study reviews the history of local government reform in modern Russia and highlights the repeated reluctance of existing power structures to foster the authority and capacity of local governments and the civic initiatives they spawned. This reluctance has inhibited the opportunity of Russian society to assume a significant role in the administration of its own affairs, and has repeatedly undermined the overall process of political reform. This is as true of the zemstvo experience of the nineteenth century as it was for the late Soviet reforms of local government. One primary burden of state building through Russian history is to reconcile local and societal movements with the requirements of both administrative order and central power. Why this burden has proven too onerous for modern Russia, and the consequences of failed reconciliation are outlined below.
No.29: Catholic Power and Catholicism as a Component of
Modern Polish National Identity, 1863-1918
By Konrad Sadkowski
Preface
The relationship between Catholicism and Polish national identity was a major issue in the multinational Polish Second Republic (1918-1939). The dominant question was whether independent Poland should forge a civic Polish nation on the basis of the legal equality of all citizens, or on the basis of the ethnic Polish core and its culture, including Catholicism. Recent scholarship has confirmed that, for their part, many Catholic priests and bishops worked diligently to build a new Polish nation around the ethnic Polish and Catholic core, attempting, for example, to Catholicize and Polonize the non-Polish Slavs and exclude the Jews from national life. But while the interwar Polish Church clearly was a conservative and nationalistic institution, the partition-era (1795-1918) Church is viewed much less critically. Scholars recognize that the Church actively participated in the national struggle and suffered for it; however, we know very little of just what sort of nation Catholic priests worked to build. The year 1918, then, is a deep dividing line in assessments of the Church's nation building activities. Concentrating on the pre-World War I Kingdom of Poland, this paper will show that already by the turn of the twentieth century, Catholic priests had convinced Catholic Poles that opponents of the Church or non-Catholics could not be "true Poles" - i.e., that only loyal Roman Catholics could be. Well prior to 1918, then, Catholic priests had begun to politicize Catholicism as an element of ethnic Polish culture. They did this so that through the Church-nation association they could maintain power in a rapidly changing and modernizing Polish society.
I assess this nation building by examining how priests presented the association between the Church and Polish nation over time in the half-century prior to 1918. Specifically, I discuss the January Uprising, the profound economic, social, and political changes of the late nineteenth century, the Mariavite sect, the early social Catholic movement, and the Ukrainian minority in the Chelm region. I use these specific events and issues to explore three greater and interrelated "modern" challenges that the Church encountered beginning in the final quarter of the nineteenth century: a new conception of the Polish nation based on ethno-cultural boundaries open to socio-political negotiation, Catholic Poles' opposition to traditional priestly authority, and nationally awakening ethnic and religious minorities living among the Poles. It was these unprecedented developments, I believe, which challenged the Church's historic position in Polish society and compelled priests and Church leaders to increasingly associate only Catholicism with Polish national identity. This study makes no claim to be a complete analysis or explanation of the "Polak-Katolik" identity but rather is a contribution to a fuller understanding of it, specifically regarding the role of the Church in shaping it.
I locate the Catholic Church and modern Polish nation building within a broader theoretical and comparative framework, and believe this framework can be employed as a methodology for illuminating the influence of the Church on nation (and state) building in other parts of Europe, especially Eastern Europe. My starting point is the fundamental intersection of the modern Polish nation and the Catholic faith (and Church) on the cultural plane. Specifically, in the nineteenth century, "eastern" European peoples defined themselves largely in cultural (i.e., ethnic) terms as nations and then produced their own states. As for religion, from both anthropological and sociological perspectives, it is cultural practice par excellence. Thus, I examine the role of the Catholic Church in Polish nation building by considering the content of priests' religious work (i.e., religious culture) and how it intersected with the cultural definition of the Polish nation. According to Robert Wuthnow, religious culture can be viewed as something "tangible, explicit and overtly produced," and does not have to be accepted as something "implicit or taken for granted." Religious culture can be examined through such things as religious rhetoric, discourse, texts, music, and other symbols. Extending this to the Polish context, we can, I believe, while acknowledging the historical and thus "natural" connection between Catholicism and Polish ethnic identity, also examine any uses of this relationship for political purposes. Specifically, I attempt to show that through their rhetoric and organizing, Catholic priests politicized Catholic belief for the purpose of constructing new identities through which they, and the Church generally, could maintain authority in Polish society. Finally, examining the Church and nation on their mutual ethno-cultural plane also facilitates a much more causal understanding of both why and how the Church attempted to fashion a specific Catholic Polish identity beginning in the late nineteenth century.
No.30: Structure and Exposure: The Dilemmas of Democracy in Russia's Television Market
By Ellen Mickiewicz
Preface
The relationship between the mass media and democracy has become increasingly important as a field of study and as an item on the public agenda. The various effects of the coverage of political campaigns, war, and other national security issues; of political advertising; of the portrayal of violence; of the concentration of media ownership; and of participation in civic life are all matters of interest to policy makers, commentators, and scholars in the United States. Elsewhere, too, these issues arise more and more frequently, and the center of most of the debate is television. Whether or not the widening circle of the perceived effects of television is a function of an "Americanization" of content and style, or rather of a deeply globalized "modernization" and "specialization" (of image consultants, political "spinmeisters", and public relations firms) is less important than the spread of a new way in which leaders, including democratic leaders, approach television.1
Post-Soviet Russia is home to a complex and turbulent political system in which television, more than any other mass medium, commands center stage. A vast territory of eleven time zones, Russia has a widely dispersed population, virtually all of whom have television at home. In a media market in which buying a newspaper may strain the limited disposable income of many, in which printing and distribution costs are rarely subsidized, and in which equipment is aging, newspaper publishers have seen their circulation crash from millions to thousands. At the end of 1999, for example, Izvestiia claimed a circulation of 260,000 - quite a change from the 10.4 million in 1988.2 Yet broadcast television is still free, and two channels are universally available, while two others are received by slightly over one-half to two-thirds of the population, respectively. I discuss below other features of the television landscape; here I wish only to say that the centrality of television is a fact of political life in Russia, a country in which financial constraints limit the broad consumption of relatively costly alternatives and in which constant crises keep the public interested in news and public affairs.
In 1993, the old-style state-operated and state-owned television system became a market. True, it was by no means a market with low-cost access or great diversity. But, for the first time, the state competed with commercially run networks. How a frankly commercial network, geared to profit-making and modeling itself on foreign organizations, could gain legitimacy for its news programs was a non-trivial phenomenon. News as the product of the profit motive was, quite reasonably, received with caution or distrust by Russians, who were indeed aware that privately owned stations did not claim, as did the state stations, to be run for the public good. It would be a difficult process for a commercial network (though it called itself "independent" instead of the more typical industry term "commercial") to acquire legitimacy as a trusted and credible news operation. Thus, to enter the news business credibly, a commercial news organization had to be perceived as bringing a new set of values and techniques to the Russian public. NTV, the largest commercial network in post-Soviet Russia, achieved this branding during the first Chechen war. Competition led the new commercial network to differentiate itself in terms of sophistication, balance, accuracy, and production values. The introduction of a genuine choice of news and public affairs programming also set in sharp relief the different norms and practices of journalists, some of whom retained elements of the old approach and some of whom appeared to follow other - sometimes quite foreign - examples.
The media are central to questions of generational change and cultural identity. Control over media, in turn, is seen as control over the fundamental shaping of Russian values and identity in the post-Soviet period, when the very definition of the country has been at issue. It is for this reason that channels of communication - especially those with the greatest penetration - have a particularly important status. The externalities associated with television - the capacity to "spill over" and affect the very shaping of the values of the polity, its sense of citizenship, and its cultural commonalities - put this medium, as no other, in the political spotlight.
In Russia, a host of basic issues remains unresolved precisely because the wrenching shift from the Soviet to the post-Soviet era required time and resources to develop shared values and institutions. Resolution was attempted frequently through national elections and referenda; in the eight years from 1989 through 1996, there were nine of them. Two more followed, in 1999 and 2000, making the score eleven critical national elections in twelve years. Russians went to the polls repeatedly and with relatively large turnouts to effect system-wide change, but the electoral process was not sufficient to create institutions; it would take time, even under the best of circumstances, to forge patterns of shared interests and interactions. The frequency of elections, which purported to alter the very nature of the political system and solve the continuing constitutional crisis, put enormous pressure on television, a medium which was accorded near magical powers of persuasion from the days of the Soviet rulers on into the post-Soviet period. Thus, election time was a time of particularly great pressure on the fragile pluralism of the industry, and sometimes - as in the presidential election of 1996 - the result was collusion among the main television channels and a drastic reduction of differing points of view.
The capacity of the television sector to provide structural diversity - a diversity of station owners - is directly related to the health of the economy in which the industry is embedded. Television is an expensive business. Even though new technology has significantly lowered the cost of newsgathering and production, mounting a convincing television operation still requires an impressive financial commitment. For Russia, the new technology must be purchased with hard currency, since virtually none of the equipment is domestically produced. In addition, many costs are unnecessarily high because the infrastructure is rapidly obsolescing or already obsolete. For example, because Russia is so large, the use of communications satellites is absolutely essential, and the monopoly supplier has been the state. Stations depending on state-owned communications satellites and transmitters are forced to pay a much higher price than they would have to if more modern facilities were widely available in Russia.
During the years of Soviet rule, television was a prized asset and funded lavishly. The medium was not held to account through cost-effectiveness or productivity measures. The ability of the government to pay for its expensive television empire was declining, however, and costs were high. The staffs of Soviet television stations were enormous compared to Western organizations.
Overall, the Soviet economy was badly suited to reform. Its state-owned production infrastructure was generally obsolete and uncompetitive in the world market. Its skewed dependence on military production had created numerous communities in which no other employment was possible. As this sector declined in the post-Soviet world, available safety nets were not even remotely adequate, and the effects of this dislocation on the health and welfare of the population went largely unmitigated. The break-up of the Soviet Union meant, too, that the regional specialization and division of labor necessary for much of the production and distribution now took place in foreign countries. The crash of the economy in 1998 exacerbated political and economic tensions in an already fragile society.
The failure of the economy and the legacy of the Soviet era fostered the growth of certain illegal or semi-legal practices in the media. The television industry - especially its music and entertainment components - as part of this economy was vulnerable to corruption. In some cases, the result of corruption was the "sale" of "news" stories favoring the political or economic interests of the buyer. In other cases, investigative journalists who came too close to uncovering corruption were simply murdered. And in even other cases, corruption resembled more the payola schemes so familiar to the music and entertainment industries elsewhere in the world. In these trying circumstances, the question was to what extent, if at all, could a news operation with professional and ethical journalistic norms take root in this environment?
For the media to function effectively as producers of news and public affairs, legal protections and the legal culture that supports them should be in place. Speech protections are, in fact, included in Russia's laws governing the press. However, they exist in a nascent, uneven legal culture in which enforcement is neither predictable nor uniform, and in which interpretation is far more variable than desirable. Thus, the media sector can depend neither on the weak judiciary nor on effective governmental regulatory structures, and the media market is left without rules which are applied impartially across the country. This weakness affects the granting of broadcast licenses, reporters' access to information, war reporters' access to war zones, slander and libel cases, and the protection of investigative journalists and their work.
Politics, economics, and law all affect the health of the news media. But, not least in the developing information market of Russia, it is the public which negotiates not only the product of its choice, but also the meaning of the message. Soviet and then Russian leaders often underestimated the public. In Soviet times, official theory dictated that the public was the target, not the co-creator of media messages; furthermore, the public was also presumed to be fully malleable. It is true that the public's choice of information sources was severely restricted and that most media consumers - unlike their leaders and the privileged - had fairly limited knowledge of Western political, economic, and social alternatives. They could compare what they saw and read with what they experienced in their lives, but they lacked access to each other's views. As Timur Kuran has shown, the expression of unpopular or politically unacceptable views depends very much on the ability to know that others hold these views too and are willing to express them. Large numbers of people may hold unpopular views, but they express them only when they know it is safe to do so. It is for this reason that there often appear to be sudden, very large shifts in public opinion when the tipping point has been reached. In Soviet times, Kuran writes, simply keeping quiet and failing to actively support the system was considered unacceptable, which is why the "spiral of silence" is a less accurate term than the "spiral of prudence".3 By eliminating secondary associations and controlling much of the content of large-scale mass media, this critical connection between individual attitudes and group attitudes could, the regime estimated, be prevented. One of the great changes made by post-Soviet Russian media has been to provide the public with a pluralism of views by reporting on public opinion surveys and by charting dissenting elite voices on political issues.
While the post-Soviet Russian public has gained something new from the media - a much larger information universe and knowledge of the views of others - it has also retained the culturally specific skills which, as Soviet viewers and readers, they have brought to the consumption of media messages for many decades. The legacy of their political culture has made them extraordinarily sophisticated media consumers, especially as television viewers. Their cognitive complexity is as impressive in high school as in college-educated populations. Though levels of information and numbers of sources differ, the heuristics employed are derived from a common experience.
Another way to approach this issue is through the lens of exposure diversity and exposure intensity. By this is meant the diversity of sources which are actually consumed by various publics. This is quite different from looking at the universeof messages that could be accessed, and it also counterposes the universe of messages or information which actually is received by any individual. Looking closely at how individuals view the news tells us much about the world of information they are able to extract from sources and the methods by which they do so.
No.31: Military Threats and Threat Assessment in Russia's New Defense Doctrine and Security Concept
By Stephen Blank
Preface
In October 1999, Moscow published a draft defense doctrine and, in November 1999, a draft of the national security concept. That concept was then revised and given official imprimatur in January 2000. A revised and official version of the military threat was published during the spring of 2000. Because those publications have an official and normative, if not juridical, character, their content and unusual sequence of publication possess crucial significance. They aroused considerable interest due to their provisions on nuclear use and due to the frank way in which the authors of both documents postulated that the United States and NATO are a source of rising military and political threats. Therefore, this essay focuses on those threat assessments that underlie whatever justification may exist for the use of nuclear weapons or for any other defense policy.
Because of the importance of these documents, their content (threat assessments) and their context merit careful scrutiny. The draft doctrine states its purposes in its very opening.
The important character of the draft doctrine and security concept - and the centrality of the threat assessment to them - ensure that both documents and particularly their threat assessment emerged out of intense political struggles over the definition of the threat or threats. These struggles, which are continuing, are highly charged for the simple reason that whoever wins them gains decisive leverage over doctrine, strategy, and policy.
Assessments develop through an ongoing "ordered ferment" that constantly assesses the nature of war, its characteristics, potential threats to Russian security, and desirable responses to those threats. Since this debate remains - largely, though not exclusively - confined to officers within the General Staff, the Ministry of Defense, and to key national security officials, the issues under debate are matters of high politics and political struggle within the military leadership and at the highest levels of the government. Indeed, today's debate over a national security and a defense doctrine to revise that of 1993 had begun by 1996. Therefore, once the government announces an official doctrine based on the threat assessment and ensuing policy requirements, that doctrine should then determine the policies and strategy to meet those threats and defend Russia. But discussion and controversy clearly continue since the draft doctrine was sent back for revisions in February 2000.
All these documents appeared under very inauspicious conditions. Russian military apprehensions have grown with the collapse of Russian power, the augmentation of the power of the United States and NATO, the Kosovo crisis, the Anglo-American bombing campaign against Iraq, the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), and the onset of information warfare and operations (IW and IO respectively). Kosovo was the last straw since it united many of the most feared military and political elements of threat. Authoritative spokesmen like Defense Minister General Igor Sergeev and Deputy Chief of the General Staff Colonel-General Valery L. Manilov, who chaired the doctrine's editorial "collective", admitted that the Kosovo crisis led to revisions of the draft doctrine. Manilov also admitted that there were enormous differences of opinion among those charged with preparing the draft doctrine. Thus, the published draft doctrine represented the fifth such attempt since 1997. Not surprisingly, Manilov claimed that the draft doctrine's "supertask" was to ensure unanimity among everyone concerning the threats, the nature of contemporary war, and policy recommendations presented there
It is important, therefore, to understand exactly what threats Kosovo presented to or ratified in the minds of the Russian military-political elite and what the final unanimity concerning threats signified. According to Harvard University Professor Celeste Wallander, Kosovo presented or confirmed the following negative assessments of NATO enlargement:
Unfortunately, NATO-Russia cooperation failed to address these concerns even before Kosovo. After Kosovo, it is difficult to see what kind of cooperative relationship NATO and Russia can have. For one thing, the air strikes [as viewed from Russia - author] violated several principles of the NATO-Russia Founding Act - primarily NATO's commitments limiting its right to use force and promising the settlement of disputes by peaceful means. Russians interpret the ongoing military campaign absent UN Security Council approval as NATO's drive for unilateral security in Europe. NATO's new Strategic Concept adopted at the 50th anniversary expanded the alliance's mission to include non-NATO Europe as a potential area for further NATO use of force. While the Concept recognizes the role of the UN Security Council, it does not require that NATO obtain [a] UN mandate for actions beyond the alliance's border.
Clearly these are largely political threats that would reduce and even potentially marginalize Russia's role in European and even Eurasian security processes. But they are not, for the most part, military threats against Russia or its vital strategic interests. However, this assessment, while correct so far as it goes concerning Russian perceptions of the importance of Kosovo, does not go far enough. In conversations, Russian military leaders and military-political analysts told the author that they perceived NATO's campaign in Kosovo to present serious military threats to Russia's military-political interests.
Indeed, already by 1999, Russia had come to see itself "as being under threatened or actual information attack, if not to the same extent as its friend Serbia. Western reactions to the 'anti-terrorist' operation in Chechnya are a case in point." But this perception preceded that operation. Military leaders and analysts also argued that NATO's Kosovo operation represented the template for future NATO operations against Russia or its vital interests in the "near abroad", as outlined in NATO's April 1999 strategy concept. Again, that perception preceded Kosovo, but the latter cemented and seemed to validate it.
A central element of that Russian perception is that NATO harbors designs of enlargement and unilateral out-of-area operations in both the Balkans and the Caucasus, areas that are regarded as more or less equally vital areas of Russian national interests. When the secretary-general of NATO, Javier Solana, told a NATO conference in September 1998 that both of those regions were troubled areas from which NATO "cannot remain aloof", he was not merely reiterating ideas he had already voiced publicly; he was confirming the expansive threat assessment held with increasing conviction in Moscow. His subsequent statement that "We are not condemned to be the victim of events that lie beyond our control - we can shape the future" seemed to prove NATO's and especially Washington's hegemonic aspirations.
The following examples show that while official policy as embodied in the documents under examination here had not yet fully crystallized by 1998, the trend was moving (at least in leading military circles) toward public acceptance of the expansive threat assessment found in the documents of 1999-2000. In November 1998, Colonel-General Yury N. Baluevsky, chief of the General Staff's Main Operations Directorate, argued that the Western military-political threat is growing and had to be met by military means. At the same time, he also urged that the Ministry of Defense not go beyond the more optimistic line enforced by the 1997 security concept. Baluevsky observed that
Yes, large-scale threats to Russia are basically hypothetical in nature. They can and must be neutralized by political means with reliance on the state's military might, and first and foremost on combat-ready strategic nuclear forces and general-purpose forces with precisely functioning command and control, communications, intelligence, and early-warning systems. At the same time, with a diminished probability of a major war being initiated and with the main emphasis of interstate contradictions [being] transferred from the area of ideology into the sphere of politics and economics, there has been a significant growth in the danger of outbreak of armed conflicts where escalation can lead to their expanded geographic scale, an increased number of participants and development into a local and then a regional war. Therefore, the Russian Armed Forces must be ready both to localize and to neutralize them as well as to carry on wide-scale military operations.
These remarks clearly reveal the desire of the armed forces and the General Staff to have it both ways, conforming to policy at the same time they register the sense of expanding threats, the need for a large army, and the importance of the military factor as an instrument for resolving non-military problems as well as actual conflicts and wars. They just barely stay within the confines of the 1997 security concept, which the military resented because it stated that the main threats for now and the foreseeable future are not military but "are concentrated in the domestic, political, economic, social, environmental, information, and spiritual spheres." The 1997 concept also cited the particularly critical state of the economy. There is no doubt that this approach "unsettled" military commanders. General Leonty Kuznetsov, the commander in chief (CINC) of the Moscow Military District, publicly stated that the main provisions of the 1997 security concept underestimated the low probability of large-scale war within the next few years. Kuznetsov complained that civilians had reinserted the statement that Russia's army should be prepared only for conducting regional and local wars - a qualification that he had removed from the original draft. Instead, Russian troops should prepare for large-scale aggression. The Kremlin, he lamented, accepted the draft "without his amendments".
Worse than this was the fact that the 1997 concept expressly invoked the availability of numerous political mechanisms and avenues for resolving disputed issues. Thus,
This posture presented Russian armed forces as more of a burden than an asset, and one whose priority had shifted from preparing for the previous total war template to the more extreme areas of the spectrum of conflict, namely, nuclear deterrence, information warfare (IW), and space war at one end and preparedness for small scale, "local", and even internal conflicts at the other. While that posture met the desiderata of President Boris Yeltsin, his national security teams of 1997-98, and the defense minister, General Igor Sergeev, former CINC of the Strategic Nuclear Forces, it assuredly did not conform to the views of the General Staff on the threats facing Russia and the military forces needed to counter them. The General Staff's view emerges from the second example of pre-Kosovo threat assessments, one that also appeared in November 1998 under the authorship of lower-ranking but knowledgeable members of the General Staff.
This article, written as the crisis in Kosovo was nearing its zenith, lambasted NATO for desiring to act unilaterally out of area and to impose a new world order by bypassing the UN and the OSCE. It accused NATO and specifically the United States of trying to go beyond the Washington Treaty and to convert the alliance into an offensive military bloc that was expanding its "zone of responsibility" by punitive, military means. The authors charged that
The authors went beyond this to hint that today's war in Chechnya was already on the agenda. This was intended to forewarn NATO openly about what Russia's likely reaction to an operation against Serbia would be. Rather than accept a NATO-dictated isolation from European security agendas and the negation of organizations such as the UN and OSCE, Russia would act because this crisis provided NATO with an opportunity to project military force not just against Serbia but against Russia itself. This was because the main objective of NATO enlargement was to weaken Russia's influence in Europe and around the world. Therefore, the following scenario was possible: "Once our country has coped with its difficulties, there will be a firm NATO ring around it, which will enable the West to apply effective economic, political, and possibly even military pressure on Moscow." Specifically,
Moscow clearly sounded two warnings here: first, that it would intervene in Kosovo along with Serbia in the event of an attack and, second, that it was ready to use force in Chechnya not only to suppress secessionists and terrorists (or whatever threat Chechnya presented), but also to oust NATO from the Caucasus, an area that remains, insofar as these authors and those for whom they spoke are concerned, exclusively part of Russia. The fact that NATO went ahead and intervened in Kosovo - probably not even understanding such warnings, which were likely lost in the background "noise" of the Kosovo crisis - only confirmed the General Staff in its view of the threat or threats to Russia and the unilateral measures it had to take, e.g., landing in Priština and attacking Chechnya. It was essential for the General Staff that it do so to reorient threat assessments and thus subsequent defense policy in the direction that these documents then took. If one then adds the threat posed by the United States' pending decision about theater and national missile defense (TMD and NMD), which Russia regards as a threat to the very basis of strategic stability worldwide, then the reason and context for subsequent Russian statements and policies become much clearer.
No.32: Nationalism, Culture, and Religion in Croatia since 1990
By Vjeran Pavlakovic et al.
The rather muted celebrations for the tenth anniversary of Croatia's independence - unlike the festive and jubilant atmosphere in neighboring Slovenia, which had declared independence at the same time on 25 June 1991 - reflects the mixed legacy of Franjo Tudjman's regime and an independence achieved at the cost of a devastated economy and traumatized society. While there can be no doubt that democracy and market capitalism have firmly taken root in this ex-Yugoslav and ex-communist country, for most of the nineties Croatia was sliding towards authoritarianism and crony capitalism. Furthermore, most of the West characterized Croatia as a country ruled and inhabited by fervent nationalists, and few reports failed to mention a connection between the contemporary Croatia and the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) of the 1940s, which had been ruled by the Ustaša, fascists wanting to create an ethnically pure Croat state. It is true that Franjo Tudjman, Croatia's first democratically elected president, was a nationalist whose failure to understand the nature of Croatia's minorities (specifically the "Serbian question") contributed directly to the escalation of hostilities in 1990-91. Even though he tolerated the partial rehabilitation of the NDH's symbols and ideology, Croatia never became the reborn Ustaša state as claimed by Slobodan Miloševic's propaganda machine in Serbia.
During the war in Croatia between 1991 and 1995, both Serbian and Croatian extremists ran rampant, committed atrocities against civilians, and ethnically cleansed territories held by the respective military forces. Many Serbs blame the conflict on the Croat nationalist government, which was allegedly bent on eradicating or expelling Croatia's Serbs, drawing a direct line from the Ustaša to the Tudjman regime. Croats, on the other hand, viewed the war as self-defense against Serbian aggression, in which they were the only victims. The truth, of course, lies somewhere between those two versions. Most scholars and analysts have traced the roots of Yugoslavia's collapse (and the violent form it took) to the policies of Miloševic in the late 1980s, and "the abandonment, by Serbia, of the principles of equality, democracy, and tolerance."1 This paved the way for nationalists in the other Yugoslav republics to win elections when communism's collapse created a political and ideological vacuum. Just as Miloševic's attempts at Serbian hegemonism in Yugoslavia helped Tudjman come to power, Tudjman's nationalism allowed Croatia's Serbs to be manipulated by those in Belgrade chasing the dream of a Greater Serbia.
The end of the war in Croatia seemed like a victory for nationalism, since half of the Serbs in Croatia had either fled or been expelled, and Tudjman remained in power, seemingly stronger than ever. As Tudjman's government became increasingly authoritarian - characterized by attacks on the independent media, discrimination against the remaining ethnic Serbs and those trying to return from exile, and the enrichment of those close to the ruling party - Croatia found itself isolated by the international community. Did the events of the nineties mean that nationalism was the only viable political force in Croatia?
The authors of this monograph argue that the reality of Croatia since independence is far more complex. Firstly, Tudjman's party, the Croatian Democratic Community (HDZ), never won over 50 per cent in any parliamentary election; the HDZ won 43 per cent in 1990, 43.7 per cent in 1992, and 45.3 per cent in 1995.2 However, the majority rule, as opposed to proportional, system of parliament allowed the HDZ to control the government by receiving a greater number of seats than corresponded to electoral results, a system established by the communists in the months before the first multiparty elections in the hopes that this tactic would secure them continued dominance. Secondly, despite Tudjman's attempts to muzzle the independent press and political opposition, both continued to function throughout the nineties. Finally, non-nationalist parties received significant votes in both national and local elections, although it was not until Tudjman's death and the forming of a coalition (the Opposition Six) that the HDZ was toppled from power.
My own chapter on minorities analyzes not only the fate of Serbs in Croatia, but also the experience of the numerous other ethnic groups who live there. In particular I examine how the Italian minority (which had come into conflict with Slavs in the first half of the century) was able to find non-nationalist solutions to the problems generated by Yugoslavia's breakup, while Croatia's Serbian minority was unable to negotiate a peaceful resolution with the new HDZ government in Zagreb after 1990. Of course, the separate historical development of Italians and Serbs in Croatia influenced contemporary conditions, and the fact that Italy is part of the European Union played a role in the relations between the Croatian government and the Italian minority, but I still think the comparison is valid in order to expose the lack of a monolithic nationalist policy in all of Croatia. I also emphasize the absence of the rule of law in Croatia during the nineties, which enabled Croatia's political elite, empowered by the rhetoric of nationalism, to enrich themselves not solely at the expense of the Croatian Serbs (who were branded enemies of the state, regardless of their role in the war, by the government-controlled media), but all of Croatia's citizens. The election of a new government in early 2000 offered Croatia a chance to change its policies towards its minorities, particularly regarding the issue of refugee returns, and the chapter concludes with a discussion of the improvements which have taken place and problems which continue to challenge Croatia.
Gordana Crnkovic looks at the role of nationalism in Croatia from a different angle, in this case the attempt (and, as Crnkovic shows, failure) of the regime to transpose the exclusive nationalism prevalent in politics into the cultural sphere. By purging Croatian culture (films, music, literature) of any outside influence, particularly Serbian or Yugoslav, the government tried to replicate the ethnic homogenization that had taken place to a considerable degree at the political level throughout society as a whole. Rather than reject everything Serbian, many Croats continued to listen to Serbian bands or watch films from Belgrade, indicating that the "nationalist project" did not permeate Croatian society as much as the actions of the government made it seem. In other words, the "underground anti-nationalism" detailed in Crnkovic's chapter reveals that the characteristics of a government do not necessarily reflect the characteristics of the society as a whole, despite that government's deliberate attempts to exert its influence into the nation's culture. My own recent visit to Croatia confirmed the popularity of films from Serbia, and whenever I brought up the topic of movies with young people many of them immediately asked if I had seen Pretty Village, Pretty Flame [Lepa sela lepo gore] by Serbian film director Srdjan Dragojevic. The persistence of a heterogeneous culture in Croatia, in spite of the government's efforts at creating a pure Croatian culture, is evidence that forces other than nationalism were operating since independence.
The relationship between the Catholic Church and Croatian statehood has been a controversial one for the second half of the twentieth century. As Vjekoslav Perica argues in his chapter, Franjo Tudjman's efforts to create a Croatian state coincided with the goals of the Church, the symbol of Croatian cultural, ethnic, and religious continuity. However, like the HDZ regime itself, the Church has had to deal with the legacy of the NDH and the role of the clergy during the Second World War. Rather than promote tolerance and other liberal democratic values, the Church was aligned with nationalists and the right wing during the nineties, in effect condoning the increasingly authoritarian nature of Tudjman's government. Perica also discusses the Church's reaction to the defeat of the HDZ and its continuing flirtation with the radical right in attempting to dislodge the democratically elected government.
Sabrina P. Ramet discusses recent political events in Croatia in the afterword, along with some ruminations on the "murky" legacy of Croatia's first democratically elected president. Tudjman was definitely the leading figure who shaped the Croatia of the nineties, and the country is still experiencing what President Mesic termed "de-Tudjmanization". It is undeniable that Tudjman can be credited with defending Croatia's independence and securing the country's territorial integrity. His methods and ideology, however, threatened to unearth the specter of Ustašism, which had served as collective guilt for the Croatian people since the Second World War. Tudjman's policy of national reconciliation, rather than uniting Croats politically and ideologically, deepened the divisions by trying to gloss over the crimes of the past and rehabilitate fascist criminals. While it was absolutely valid that the crimes of the Ustaša needed to be separated from the Croatian nation, it was still necessary to recognize that crimes had taken place. The controversy over war crimes from the Second World War should be a clear signal to the leaders of the Yugoslav successor states to vigorously prosecute war criminals from the recent Balkan wars in order to avoid a repetition of collective guilt. Tudjman, who was quite likely to have been pursued himself by the ICTY had he not died in December 2000, and his political heirs obstructed cooperation with the war crimes tribunal, and this issue, as Ramet argues, will continue to be a controversial one in Croatian politics.
While the majority of people in Croatia clearly supported secession from the former Yugoslavia, few expected the sort of independent state which suffered from chronic economic crises, xenophobia, war trauma, authoritarianism, corruption, and such a decline in the standard of living that made one wonder why had they abandoned the "communist dungeon" in which they had been living for the previous five decades. This is not to imply that there is a widespread desire to reconstitute a new Yugoslavia, but rather that the consequences of a decade of nationalist policies have not delivered economic prosperity nor brought Croatia closer to the European Union, resulting in bitterness among average Croats, especially the youth. Furthermore, Croatia remains divided, between anti-nationalist liberals and radical right extremists; "red bandits"3 vs. "fascist black-shirts."4 The scars of the war will take many years to heal, more so on the local level, where the conflict was often very personal, than on the national level, where there has been at least some improvement following the election of a reformist government. The social impact of a regime which advocated ethnic intolerance continues to be seen, such as a recent survey among Croatian high school students which revealed that the most negative stereotypes were associated with Serbs, such as "vandals", "dreamers of a Greater Serbia", and "uncivilized".5 It will be up to future Croatian political leaders to reverse the policies of ethno-nationalism which led the peoples of the former Yugoslavia into violent tragedy in the 1990s.
By Robert O. Freedman
It has now been ten years since the Soviet Union collapsed and one year since Vladimir Putin replaced Boris Yeltsin as the President of the Soviet Union's most important successor state, the Russian Federation. Given this time span, it is appropriate to evaluate Russian policy toward the Middle East over the last decade. This paper will analyze the main thrust of Russian policy toward the Middle East under Yeltsin, and will also examine the degree to which it has begun to change under Putin, who, after becoming Prime Minister in August 1999, became acting President in January 2000 and then was elected President two months later.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991, its chief successor state, Russia, faced a far different strategic situation from that faced by the Soviet Union. With a host of new states on Russia's southern borders, six of them Muslim, the Russian leadership faced a series of new challenges in its dealings with the Middle East. This was to affect its Middle East priorities, as compared to those of the Soviet Union. In addition, while Soviet policy toward the Middle East was, at least until 1988, the mid-point of Mikhail Gorbachev's term as communist party leader, ideologically driven to a greater or lesser degree, the policies of Yeltsin were to prove far more pragmatic. It was also far more disjointed than those of his Soviet predecessors, as a number of often conflicting interest groups sought to openly influence Russian policy in the Middle East. On the other hand, Yeltsin's successor, Putin has brought some of these groups back under control. Third, to a far greater degree than in the Soviet period, Russian policy making in the Middle East became an issue in Russia's domestic politics as Yeltsin, in response to an increasingly right-wing Russian Parliament (Duma), sought to tailor Russian policy toward the region at least to some degree to satisfy his critics in Parliament. Putin, working with a much more supportive Duma through December 2000, did not have to face this problem although his nationalist policies were in tune with the majority of the Duma. After exploring these major changes, along with the economic and military weaknesses which greatly hampered Russia's foreign policy, this study will briefly analyze Russia's four most important regional relationships: 1) Iran (Russia's key regional ally); 2) Iraq (which has seen the greatest changes in Russian policy during the Yeltsin-Putin period); 3) Turkey (with which Russia has had a very mixed relationship); and 4) Israel (with which Russia has developed a very close relationship - quite the reverse of the situation in the Soviet era). This essay will conclude with an evaluation of the main Middle Eastern challenges facing Vladimir Putin, Yeltsin's chosen successor as Russia's President.
Background
New Regional Priorities
When the Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991, Russia suddenly found itself with fourteen new neighbors, six of them (Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan [in Transcaucasia] and Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan [in Central Asia]) directly bordering the Middle East. Since four of these states (Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan) and two other states bordering or close to Russia on its southern border (Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan) were experiencing a revival of Islam, which had long been suppressed under communism, concerns about Islamic radicalism were added to the geopolitical concern in Moscow about the future direction of these countries' foreign and domestic policies.1 Russia also had concerns about drug and arms smuggling, as well as creating a new defense perimeter along Russia's southern frontier (most Soviet defense installations on Russia's south now lay in the newly independent states) and, consequently, what happened in these new countries became of paramount importance for Moscow. While regaining at least a modicum of control over these countries became a primary objective of Russian policy during the decade of the 1990s, the Russian leadership soon found itself in a competition for influence with the United States and its NATO ally Turkey. It was also initially concerned that Iran's radical Islamic regime would seek to spread its influence in Central Asia and Transcaucasia. Thus, Russia's primary foreign policy foci in the Middle East became Iran and Turkey, as Moscow found itself dealing with them not only in such bilateral areas as trade and arms sales, but also in the geopolitics of Transcaucasia and Central Asia. These regions presented increasing challenges to Moscow given the two wars in Chechnya, the civil war in Tajikistan, the rise of the Islamic radical Taliban regime in Afghanistan, an Islamic insurgency in Central Asia, and the Russian-American energy competition over the oil and gas resources of the Caspian Sea.
If Turkey and Iran were Moscow's first priority in the Middle East, given their cultural and geographic proximity to Transcaucasia and Central Asia, the second main Russian priority was the Persian Gulf. In the oil-rich and strategically important region Moscow sought, albeit without a great deal of success, to balance its policy among Iran, Iraq, and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states. These countries, through much of the Yeltsin era (until the election of Mohamed Khatami as Iran's President in May 1997, which led to an improvement in Iranian-GCC relations), were often at odds with each other, as were Iraq and the United States, which put Moscow in a very difficult position. All of these elements created complications for Russia.
The third, and by far the least important priority for Moscow, was the Arab-Israeli zone composed of Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinians. During most of the post-World War II Soviet period this region was of primary importance to Moscow, as the Soviet leaders sought to construct an "anti-imperialist" Arab unity based on Arab hostility to what the USSR called the "linchpin" of Western imperialism, Israel. In one of the major transformations of its policy, Moscow now sees Israel as its closest collaborator among this group of states. Not only is Israel Russia's leading trade partner in the Arab-Israeli zone, it is also home to one million Russian-speaking former residents of the USSR who have kept close cultural ties with their former homeland. Additionally, Russia and Israel, despite serious differences over Russia's supply of atomic energy and missile technology to Iran, have developed a close collaboration in developing military equipment for sale to Third World countries.
In sum, Russia's regional priorities have shifted dramatically since the collapse of the Soviet Union, with Moscow's primary focus on Central Asia and Transcaucasia significantly affecting Russian policy toward the Middle East.
By Mark Tauger
Preface
The uncertainties of Soviet statistics on every aspect of the USSR's economy have been the subject of numerous books and articles. Yet while scholars - Western, Soviet, and post-Soviet - are aware that these statistics are inadequate, they have used them nonetheless, often drawing far-reaching conclusions from them. In a recent article, Stephen Wheatcroft, one of the leading specialists on Soviet statistics, even asserted that Soviet statistics were unique because they provided "a sophisticated first-world level of evaluation (and statistical recording) of third-world phenomena." In an article in response, Stephen Hoch questioned whether Soviet statistics were on a first-world level.
This disagreement derives in part from the differences in the validity of various Soviet statistics. The regime maintained overlapping networks of statistics gathering and processing agencies, and often prepared multiple sets of statistical data, with the more accurate or pessimistic compilations frequently classified. Agencies that gathered data often reached different conclusions about the same sectors, which complicate the evaluation of such data. Soviet planners and top decision-makers based their decisions for both short- and long-term projects on these data, so that often the apparent irrationality of their decisions can be related in part to the inadequacy of the statistics that served as the basis for them. All of these problems emerged in agricultural statistics, including the most important, those of grain harvests. Some scholars have questioned Soviet grain harvest statistics but have used them with adjustments on the basis of other Soviet data, such as rainfall or food utilization. Other scholars, while undoubtedly aware of the uncertainty of Soviet statistics generally and of harvest data in particular, cite official figures without even the slightest question.
The disputes over the validity and quality of Soviet statistics, especially those relating to the size of the harvest,
rely on certain assumptions about such statistics that are rarely expressed explicitly and almost never examined. In using the term "sophisticated" in the passage cited above, for example, Wheatcroft explicitly compares "first-world" statistics to Soviet ones while implying that they differ. In particular, he implies that "first-world" statistics are more reliable and not falsified, and that they therefore should serve as a standard and reference for evaluating Soviet statistics. Wheatcroft has repeatedly emphasized that historians using Soviet statistical data should try to determine how the data were gathered and processed, and by whom, in order to ascertain their reliability. Yet no published study has examined how Russian and Soviet authorities obtained their primary data beyond a superficial level, if that; only Wheatcroft's early work has addressed this problem, and then only partially. No scholarship in the Soviet field, moreover, has ever examined Western agricultural statistics and their methodologies to determine whether and why they merit being set as the standard, or compared them to Soviet statistics in any systematic manner to determine whether and how they differed. This paper presents a case study comparing one particular type of statistics used in the early Soviet Union and in two contemporary "first-world" countries. It seeks to make explicit and test, at least in this case, the comparison implied in the frequent criticisms of Soviet statistics as well as in the more positive evaluations of them such as Wheatcroft's. The paper employs new archival sources to examine the origins of the "biological yield" system of harvest estimates, considered one of the most notorious examples of Soviet statistical falsification, in light of harvest statistics in the United States and Germany in the early twentieth century. It also argues that the Soviet Union's shift to the biological system took place in the midst of a crisis analogous to crises in U.S. and German harvest statistics a few decades earlier. The Soviet regime introduced this new system, I argue, not in order to falsify harvest information, but rather to respond to problems similar to those faced by U.S. and German statistical agencies. In particular, Soviet statisticians sought to overcome what they perceived as the persistent falsification of harvest projections by farmers and local officials - a pattern dating back to the beginning of the Soviet regime, if not earlier - and also to end disputes between state agencies over the harvest. The regime resorted to the "biological harvest" because statisticians saw it as a more accurate method of harvest projection on the basis of pre-revolutionary Russian precedents. My aim here is not to present an exhaustive study but instead to raise certain issues that, while ordinarily not mentioned, inform and underlie conventional views regarding Soviet statistics. This paper employs archival sources and a variety of published sources, and it approaches certain familiar sources in a new comparative and critical manner. It concludes with certain cautionary points regarding the use of these statistics to draw historical conclusions.
In sum, Russia's regional priorities have shifted dramatically since the collapse of the Soviet Union, with Moscow's primary focus on Central Asia and Transcaucasia significantly affecting Russian policy toward the Middle East.
No.35: The Land Question in Ukraine and Russia
By Stephen K. Wegren
One of the most important aspects of reform in post-Soviet states is the land question, as it is central to the marketization of rural society and broader economic development. Although international lending institutions have spent considerable resources both advising governments and analyzing trends in land reform during the post-Soviet period, there is much about the land question in post-Soviet states that we do not know. In particular, while individual country studies have been published, the literature lacks an integrated comparative analysis. To fill the void in the literature, this paper compares the land question in Ukraine and Russia, arguably the two most important nations, at least economically, in the former Soviet Union. The land question, as defined for purposes of this paper, encompasses two main issues: (1) the restructuring of large agricultural enterprises; and (2) the privatization of land and the creation of a land market. In each country, restructuring of agricultural enterprises is expected to make the rural economy more efficient and productive. Taken together, the privatization of farms and their land, along with a robust land market, are expected to lead to significant societal transformation. The central questions this paper addresses are: What has been the progress in farm restructuring and land privatization? What are the principal obstacles? How do reform policies differ? What are the prospects for success in each country?
Ten years ago, Ukraine and Russia shared a similar agricultural system. Since then, there has been significant divergence. To understand that divergence, this essay will begin with Ukraine and then analyze reforms in Russia, concluding that Russia is at the end of a decade of neo-liberal reforms, while Ukraine is just beginning. The Russian experience with neo-liberal agrarian reforms has been disappointing, and has not achieved its original goals. Ukraine essentially lost a decade, but has set upon a course of reforms that is much more liberal than that which Russia introduced ten years ago. As we begin a new millennium, Ukraine and Russia are pursuing reform in different policy directions.
No.36: Russian Regionalism: The Economic Dimension
By Steven Rosefielde, Shinichiro Tabata, Akira Uegaki and
Sadayoshi Ohtsu
During the nineties, it was fashionable to conjecture that global integration
would prove to be the key to Russia's successful post-Communist transition.
This optimism has been superseded in 2001 by the realization that while the
Russian economic system has changed, its new "eastern" market system does not
possess the desirable micro- and macroeconomic efficiency attributes of the
West, and consequently cannot be expected to be industrially integrated into the
global economy. Some, like the eminent Finnish economist Pekka Sutela,
expect Russia to survive, but to underperform the advanced industrial economies,
while others, like Jeffrey Tayler, boldly assert that "Russia is Finished!"
A primary cause of the initial post-Soviet optimism was the belief that
Ricardian "comparative advantage" would prompt regional authorities to
realign their trade and production with neighboring countries. The
economic theory was sound, assuming that the Russian economy operated on
generally competitive, Anglo-American principles, but alas the assumption
was erroneous. The papers in this collection document the failure of
Russia's regions to integrate themselves competitively into the global economic system, and to
illuminate the systemic causes of Russia's insularity, while collaterally
shedding light on the evolving ties between Moscow and the regional
periphery.
No.37: Regionalism of Russia's Foreign Policy in the
1990s: A Case of "Reversed Anarchy
By Mikhail Alexseev
It has become a conventional wisdom in the 1990s that
Russia's international interactions could no longer be understood by examining
debates and policies emerging in the Kremlin. Since the collapse of
communism, the constituent regions and republics of the the Russian Federation
and regionally affiliated Financial-Industrial Groups (FIGs) took advantage of
political and economic decentralization to articulate and conduct quasi-foreign
policies of their own -- suggesting that Russia had become less and less of a
unitary actor in the global arena. According to Russia's foreign ministry,
Russian regions in the 1990s signed 1,200 agreements on cooperation with
entities in 69 countries and had representatives in 46 countries. In
post-Soviet Russia, regional decentralization became a double-edged sword with
respect to Russia's foreign relations. On the one hand, regional economic
and political fragmentation, or perceptions that it could conceivably increase,
presented the Kremlin with the credible threat of, if not disintegration
Soviet-style, at least a considerable loss of influence and ability to govern at
the periphery of its own state. This threat has been most dramatically
illustrated by Chechnya's drive to independence and instability in the North
Caucasus.
No.38: Macedonia's Child-Grandfathers: The Transnational
Politics of Memory, Exile, and Return, 1948-1998
By Keith Brown
In June 1998, the Second World Congress of Child-Refugees was held in Skopje in
the Republic of Macedonia. Organized by non-governmental organizations in
Macedonia, Canada, Australia, and other Eastern European countries, the meeting
brought together members of a dispersed community created 50 years earlier, when
in the course of the Greek Civil War around 28,000 children left their homes in
Northern Greece for Yugoslavia and other East European countries. For many
who shared this experience and now live scattered around the world, 1948
represents a defining moment, the personal consequences of which they still feel
today. They are people who identify themselves as Macedonians and as
deca begalci -- child-refugees. Now older, ranging in age from 52 to
66 in 1998, most have married and had children and grandchildren, to whom they
have often passed on their sense of concern with this episode in history.
The 50th anniversary of what some call the "Exodus" has profound significance
for this community. For many, a particularly prominent issue is their
right to return to their birthplaces in Greece. They are also united by a
concern that as their generation ages and eventually dies the events which mean
so much to them will be forgotten.
Assistant Professor of History and International Studies
Chair, 1992-93 REECAS Speakers Series
Russia: Reflections on a Case Study
No.2: Religion in Imperial Russia
President, Eastern Nazarene College
January 1995
Christians in Imperial Russia
President, Eastern Nazarene College
State Duma, 1905-1914
Prospects in the Oil and Gas Sectors
Multi-Party Systems in Poland and Ukraine
Balkans Since the 19th Century
Does Ataturk Provide a Model?
* Although population growth rates are lower than they have been, further effort needs to be directed at family planning, particularly in rural areas.
* Employing organizations have had to carry surplus labor, so the real situation regarding the level and extent of unemployment in Uzbekistan is somewhat obscured. This raises at least two issues: the production of more accurate information on unemployment and under-employment, and programs for dealing with excess labor.
* Job creation programs need to take account of the need to both relocate and retrain surplus labor as well as to absorb net additions to the labor force. This is a particularly serious issue as it relates to the rural sector.
* So far, the authorities have attempted to deal with aspects of the labor market problem through special arrangements which have limited labor mobility and wage differentials, rather than relying on market forces to provide solutions.
* Income structure by source is being changed due to transformational changes. The wage influence as a source of income is decreasing. Relevant wage policies can improve disproportions and contradictions in both wage distribution and income formation.
* The income differentiation is deepening in Uzbekistan. It is especially significant in rural areas, and the main remedy of this problem is to develop an effective agricultural sector.
* The savings of population have been negatively influenced during the transformational period. Factors of instability, like banking situation, changes of national currency, inflation, decrease of living standards and others led to sharp contraction of savings which is the internal source of investment.
Industry - includes heavy and light manufacturing, power production and mining.
Material services - transportation related to production, communications, trade and commerce, information services.
Non-material services - refers to housing services, health, education, culture, science, finance and State administration, as well as public transport.
Construction - refers to industrial as well as housing construction. Construction of economic infrastructure is accounted within transport and communications.
Agriculture - conventional coverage, but includes forestry and fishing.
State sector - comprises state owned enterprises and organizations.
Non-state sector - refers to enterprises and organizations with other than state ownership, including collective, mixed, joint enterprises and individuals.
Employed - refers to persons who receive wages in cash or in kind for labor.
Unemployed - for definition see section 3.1 in the text, below.
Hidden unemployed - covers two groups of population: first, those who want to work but are not actively searching for work; and secondly,
Under-employed - people who are involuntary working part-time or those on involuntary leave without pay or paid partly.
Balance of money income and expenditure - is an official source of information on income and expenditure of the population. Until 1991 this balance was included as a part in the integrated macroeconomic balances system of USSR planning economy. Currently this balance is used as macro-level information source on income and expenditures of population and also for elaborating indicators and accounts of household sector. Total income comprises income of the population from different sources: as wages, money income from collective farms, income from sales of agricultural productions, income from transfers to population, and other income from labor. The amount of income and their sources are determined on the basis of macro-level statistical and financial information. Total expenditures include population purchases of goods including retail trade items and services: as rent and municipal services, transport and communications, health care, transfers from the population and savings, and other purchases. [Household Budget Survey data is a base for analyzing real income of the population, calculating consumer price indices and other calculations in regard to household sector. The survey sample is fixed and it includes 4,500 households on the entire territory of the Republic. Information on money income and expenditures is taken on a monthly basis.]
in Post-Ceausescu Romania
- Semi-formal interviews with indigenous Hungarian entrepreneurs and investors from Hungary in the Transylvanian cities of: Cluj, in Cluj County; Satu Mare, in Satu Mare County; and, Miercurea-Ciuc, in Harghita County;
- Statistical data from and interviews with representatives of the Romanian National Trade Office (NTO) in Bucharest and county level Chambers of Commerce, Industry and Agriculture in Cluj, Satu Mare and Harghita;
- Statistical data from and interviews with representatives of the Romanian Development Agency;
-Regional newspapers and economic publications.
Philosopher's Stone or Fool's Gold?
...Racism is unthinkable without the advancement of modern science, modern technology and modern forms of state power. As such, racism is strictly a modern product. Modernity made racism possible. It also created a demand for racism; an era that declared achievement to be the only measure of human worth needed a theory of ascription to redeem boundary-drawing and boundary-guarding concerns under new conditions which made boundary-crossing easier than ever before. Racism, in short, is a thoroughly modern weapon used in the conduct of pre-modern, or at least not exclusively modern struggles.
The issue in Bosnia, Peter Sugar makes clear, is ethnicity [racialism] not religion, as may seem the case. "Religion," he states, "becomes simply an identifying ethnic name tag."
This is an ugly possibility in all of us; but happily, even when the stimuli are present, atrocities are seldom committed spontaneously by large bodies of human beings... More commonly the rabies seizes a few individuals, and is communicated by them to the mass, while in other cases the blood-lust of the pack is excited by cold-blooded huntsmen who desire the death of the quarry without being carried away themselves by the excitement of the chase.
Not just political leaders, but those who are educated for the modern play prominent roles in ethnic cleansing. Medical doctors, in particular, were extremely important in the development of the Young Turks and their assault on the presence of Greeks and Armenians in Anatolia. Nazi doctors and medical researchers were critical to the development of the "science" of eugenics and of racial theory that led to the ideological justification for the elimination of the Jews. The fact that the Bosnian Serbian leaders of ethnic cleansing included Radovan Karadzic - a psychiatrist - and engineers, like Slobodan Milosevic, leads one to suspect that modern professional ethics are not inimical to mass murder.
"The dominant form of the Polish national ideology became romantic nationalism, conceiving nations as moral entities and agents of universal progress: a nationalism passionately believing in the brotherhood of nations and in the ethicization of politics, whereby it was hoped to put an end to such political crimes as had culminated in the martyrdom of Poland. The most extreme and best articulated form of the romantic nationalism was religiously inspired romantic messianism, which saw the Poles as the chosen nation, the spiritual leaders of mankind and the sacred instrument of universal salvation."
"The increased nationalism all around the world, the dangerous conflicts among minorities in Eastern Europe, and the growing xenophobia in Western Europe emphasize again one of the main contradictions of our time, between centrifugal, cosmopolitan modernity and the centripetal need (or at least nostalgia) for belonging. ... The modern world faces its solitude and its responsibilities without the artifice of a protective dependency or a fictive utopian coherence. Fundamentalist and separatist movements of all kinds, the return of a tribal mentality in so many human communities, are expressions of the need to reestablish a well-ordered cohesion which would protect the enclave against the assault of the unknown, of diversity, heterogeneity, and alienation."
"As the nation enters history, the word of the poet must acquire the properties of a narrative discourse, must grow to become a myth that could in some ways function like those of epic Greek antiquity, when they gave the people a soul, an identity liberated by time.... The present situation of the Baltic states requires a new approach to the myth of nationhood, one that would cut through the bourgeois sentimentalism of a small country and the reveries of the romantic era to reach back to the roots which were there at the dawn of history and before."
"In Croatia, nationalism that erases all differences and survives on the hatred of others is confused with patriotism, which is in fact the freedom to love your country in the best way you as an individual can. This is the juncture at which, in the best manner of the old Bolsheviks, the production of enemies began. As if it is not enough to have outside enemies, such as the Serbs, the `'good' fundamentalist Croats began to search for, and in their feverish search to produce, `'inside enemies'."
The new constitutions adopted in the post-communist states locate the source of state sovereignty in the majority ethnic nation, rather than in the individual citizen. They are ethnic-oriented and potentially discriminating against minorities. Because of these practices, for instance, more than one third of Estonia's population was barred from participating in the 1992 elections. Anthropologist Robert Hayden calls this variety of post-communist reification of the ethno-nationalist domination granted to the ethnic majority to the detriment of the minorities, constitutional nationalism. Constitutions are used to enshrine the sovereignty and privileges of the dominant nation, whereas the minorities' complaints are treated as anti-national behavior. In Romania, for instance, an education law adopted in 1995 forces ethnic Hungarian school students not only take mandatory Romanian language and literature classes, but also to take Romanian history and geography lessons in Romanian. Political commentator Andrei Cornea describes this approach as "the mentality of the main resident" that invests Romanian language with a liturgical authority.
At the end of World War II, the British had some 20,000 former Chetniks under their surveillance at a camp in Eboli in southern Italy. Although officially classified as "Surrendered Enemy Personnel," they were generally viewed as pro-Allied. Provided with British uniforms and non-combatant duties, they were posted throughout Italy. When screened in Germany in 1947, some came under suspicion as possible war criminals but none were returned to Yugoslavia. Eight thousand of them settled in Britain.
(ii) Croatians, comprising a small number of refugees following the fall of Vukovar in 1991;
(iii) Serbs from Serbia proper, probably the largest contingent, consisting mostly of young people, including economic immigrants, and those who left to avoid conscription.
In addition to the post-World War II Serb settlers and the well-entrenched diplomatic corps, there were firmly established financial and commercial connections with the UK, represented, in the main, by a number of Belgrade-based companies and financial institutions, such as Genex and the Anglo-Yugoslav Bank. Yugoslavia was also a good customer of UK military hardware, and close professional ties existed between the military of both countries, with the Yugoslav officer corps comprising up to 70 per cent ethnic Serbs. There was co-operation between the UK and Yugoslavia in intelligence matters conducted mainly through Belgrade, while before and during World War I, close Masonic ties are said to have developed between Serbia and Western Europe, particularly Britain and France. Already then, before the outbreak of the recent war, there was a culture of familiarity on various levels between Britain and Yugoslavia, and this for the most part with Serbs.
After the massacre at Raçak of over forty civilians in January 1999, it was no longer possible to pretend that the OSCE, through its several hundred unarmed monitors in Kosovo, was able effectively to ensure stability and security in that province. The Holbrooke/Miloševic agreement of the previous October was in tatters, with the situation spiraling out of control, and no international consensus on the way forward.
concepts of justice and law, the legitimacy of government, the dignity of the individual, protection from oppressive or arbitrary rule, and participation in the affairs of the community are found in every society on the face of the earth. Far from being difficult to identify, the number of philosophical common denominators between different cultures and political traditions makes universalism anything but a distortion of reality.
The words "found in every society" establish the universality of certain minimal truths; there is no need to insist on universal assent in order to establish the universality of a minimal moral law, any more than one would need to insist on universal assent to the laws of mathematics in order to establish that mathematics has a certain claim to universal and transcultural validity.
How many men have been killed by the erroneous doctrine that sovereign Kings are not masters but servants of society?…[H]ow many Rebellions have been caused by the doctrine that it is up to private men to determine whether the commands of Kings are just or unjust, and that his commands may rightly be discussed before they are carried out, and in fact ought to be discussed?…Since such opinions arise every day, anyone who dispels such clouds and shows by the soundest reasoning that there are no authentic doctrines of just and unjust, good and evil, except the laws established in each commonwealth,…will certainly reveal not only the royal road to peace but also the dark and shadowy ways of sedition…
Other moral understandings include moral contractarianism (which believes that morality consists in unwritten and largely implicit rules of behavior passed down from generation to generation, but, for the most part, not open to rational review or legislative correction), and theocracy (which argues that society should be modeled according to the precepts of divine law, as interpreted by the clergy of the self-declared "true religion"). Aside from these moral understandings, there is also the position of nihilism, which rejects all mores, codes, rules, commandments, and institutions as arrant nonsense. The only pure nihilist with whose work I am familiar is Max Stirner, author of The Ego and His Own, a book aptly described as an assemblage of meandering ravings.
…creates a critical frame of mind which, after having destroyed the moral authority of so many other institutions, in the end turns against its own; the bourgeois finds to his amazement that the rationalist attitude does not stop at the credentials of kings and popes but goes on to attack private property and the whole scheme of bourgeois values.
Russian Federation [RF] military doctrine (henceforth military doctrine) represents a systemized aggregate of fundamental official views (guidelines), concentrated in a single document, on preventing wars and armed conflicts, on their nature and methods of waging them, and on organizing the activities of the state, society, and citizens to ensure the military security of the Russian Federation and its allies. Military doctrine elaborates on the 1993 "Basic Provisions of RF Military Doctrine" and, as applied to the military sphere, concretizes guidelines of the RF National Security Concept. It is based on a comprehensive assessment of the status of the military-political situation; on a strategic forecast of its development; on a scientifically substantiated determination of current and future missions, objective requirements, and real capabilities for ensuring RF military security; and on conclusions from a systems analysis of the content and nature of modern wars and armed conflicts and of the domestic and foreign experience of military organizational development and military art.
For Russia all the hypothetical security concerns of the past decade are the threats of today. NATO is now closer to Russian borders, and is bombing a non-NATO state. Even before NATO's new strategic concept, the alliance's development of Combined Joint Task Forces offered ways for the alliance to employ forces outside the constraints of Article 5 (self-defense). NATO's changes, combined with its determination to use force against non-members threatens Russia because political turmoil in the former Soviet Union increases the likelihood of NATO involvement near and perhaps even in Russia. Moscow has long feared that expansion of the alliance could radicalize or destabilize neighboring countries, sparking internal splits or civil wars that could drag in Russia - a role it neither wants nor can afford.
A deepening of international integration, formation of a global economic and information space, and increased acuteness of the competitive struggle by world centers of strength for consolidating and expanding spheres of influence are among the main trends of the military-political situation. Views on [the] use of military force have also changed. Despite this, however, its role as an important factor in the process of achieving economic and political objectives has been preserved.
There has been an expansion in the commonality of Russia's interests with many states on problems of international security such as countering the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, settling and preventing regional conflicts, countering international terrorism and the drugs business, and solving acute global ecological problems including nuclear and radiation security. This significantly increases the opportunity to ensure Russia's national security by nonmilitary means - by means of legal treaty, political, economic, and other measures.
At the same time, it is not unlikely that NATO could use or even organize crises similar to that in Kosovo in other areas of the world to create an excuse for military intervention since the "policy of double standards" where the bloc's interests dictate the thrust of policy (the possibility of the use of military force in Kosovo against the Yugoslav Army and simultaneous disregard for the problem of the genocide faced by the Kurds in Turkey, the manifestation of "concern" at the use of military force in the Dnester Region, Chechnya, and Nagorno-Karabakh) is typical of the alliance's actions.
When analyzing the development of events in the Balkans, parallels with the development of events in the Caucasus involuntarily suggest themselves: Bosnia-Herzegovina is Nagorno-Karabakh; Kosovo is Chechnya. As soon as the West and, in particular, NATO, has rehearsed the "divide and rule" principle in the Balkans under cover of peacekeeping, they should be expected to interfere in the internal affairs of the CIS countries and Russia. It is possible to extrapolate the implementation of "peacekeeping operations" in the region involving military force without a UN Security Council mandate, which could result in the Caucasus being wrested from Russia [it bears mentioning that this applies as well to the independent states of the Transcaucasus, an involuntary hint of the continuing neo-imperial mindset of the General Staff - author] and the lasting consolidation of NATO's military presence in this region, which is far removed from the alliance's zone of responsibility. Is Russia prepared for the development of this scenario? It is obvious that, in order to ensure that the Caucasus does not become an arena for NATO Allied Armed Forces' military intervention, the Russian Government must implement a well defined tough policy in the Balkans, guided by the UN charter and at the same time defending its national interests in the region by identifying and providing the appropriate support for this policy's allies.
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