Elites After State Socialism

This distinctive book presents valuable new research on the political and economic elites that have emerged in Central and Eastern Europe since the demise of state socialism. Integrating theoretically informed analysis with fresh empirical data, the contributors significantly enhance our understanding of the evolution and interplay of elites in the post-communist period. Leading experts explore the elite circulations, differentiations, and competitions that now underpin-- but in some countries also still inhibit--democratic stability and economic growth. A provocative concluding chapter assesses the century-long confrontation between elite theory and Marxism and where they stand today, after state socialismOs collapse.

The year 2011 marks the twentieth anniversary of the end of the Soviet Union. This may be an appropriate time to evaluate the adoption by previously state socialist societies of other economic and political models. The transition has sometimes been described in positive terms, as a movement to free societies with open markets and democratic elections. Others have argued that the transition has created weak, poverty-stricken states with undeveloped civil societies ruled by unresponsive political elites. Which is the more accurate assessment?David Lane examines a few of the theoretical approaches that help explain the trajectory of change from socialism to capitalism. He focuses on two main approaches in this volume - elite theories and social class. Theories dwelling on the role of elites regard the transformation from socialism to capitalism as a type of system transfer in which elites craft democratic and market institutions into the space left by state socialism. Lane contrasts this interpretation with class-based theories, which consider transformation in terms of revolution, and explain why such theories have not been considered the best way of framing the transition in the post-socialist states.While recognizing that elites can play important roles and have the capacity to transform societies, Lane contends that elite theories alone are inadequate to explain a system change that brings free markets. In contrast, he proposes a class approach in which two groups characterize state socialism: an administrative class and an acquisition class.

The collapse of the former socialist states has led to the transformation of their political, economic and social systems as well as a major change in international orientations. In this context, new economic and political elites of the former state socialist societies have emerged. How they have emerged from state socialism is a major component of this book which has two major themes. First, we consider the recruitment patterns of the new elites, among others the extent to which the new leaderships have been reconstituted from the former cadres of state socialism. Second we outline the consequences of transformation on the institutions, particularly the formation of markets and privatisation in the context of the dynamic of the enlargement of the European Union and the entry of the new states into the world system.This collection of papes is based mostly on two conferences out of six serial conferences under the general responsibility of David Lane, Cambridge University. The first conference was held in Budapest on 4-5 September 2004 at Corvinus University of Budapest (Institute of Sociology and Social Policy, Centre for Empirical Social Research) and organized by György Lengyel, the second on 13-14 May 2005 at University of Bremen (Institute of Sociology/Institute Labour and Economy) led by Jochen Tholen.

This book offers a selection of papers from the conference which was held by the Sonderforschungsbereich (Collaborative Research Center) 580 in Dornburg near Jena, Germany. International experts discuss key issues of contemporary sociological research on the late socialist societies, their power and functional elites, and their experiences of transition. In its first section, the recruitment and careers of socialist and post-socialist administrative and economic elites is observed. In its second section, the focus is on elites as creators and creations of social and political change. This book is an excellent analysis showing that elites play the decisive role in the multi-layered process of societal transition, just as they provided the key to understanding the societal dynamics and mechanisms of state socialism before the collapse of the system

"Who rules in Eastern Europe?" became a fundamental question for western researchers and other observers after communist regimes were established in the region, and it gained further importance as state socialism expanded into Central Europe after the Second World War. A political order which, according to Leninist theory of the state and to subsequent Stalinist political practice, was primarily a highly centralised and repressive power organisation, directed, as if it were natural, researchers attention towards the highest echelon of office holders in party and state. Extreme centralisation of power in these regimes was consequently linked to an elitist approach to analysing them from a distant viewpoint. It is one of the many paradoxes of state socialism, that a social and political order which presumptuously claimed to be the final destination of historical development and to be based on deterministic laws of social evolution, which claimed an egalitarian nature and denied the significance of the individual, was per ceived through the idiosyncrasies, rivalries and personal traits of its rulers. The largest part of these societies remained in grey obscurity, onlyoccasion ally revealing bits of valid information about a social life distant from the centres of power. It is debatable whether this top-headedness of western re search into communist societies created a completely distorted picture of re ality, however, it certainly contributed to an overestimation of the stability of these regimes, an underestimation of their factual diversity and a misjudge ment of the extent of conflicts and cleavages dividing them.

Since the beginning of the 1970s, democratic capitalist Western Europe as well as state-socialist Eastern Europe faced the double challenge of the third industrial revolution and the second globalization. The accelerated political, social, economic and cultural change did not lead to a crisis "of capitalism" or "of communism", instead challenging European industrial society as such. In 1989, after a long erosion process, state socialism failed at the task of solving the manifold problems of adjustment; yet a lasting solution is also not conceivable within the context of a neo-liberal "new spirit of capitalism".The present volume, which arose from the interdisciplinary cooperation of historians and social scientists, discusses the consequences of this "great transformation" for the economic elites in both "West" and "East": for their qualification profiles and their social composition, their options and their room for maneuver, their value systems and legitimization strategies, their self-perception and their public image. Economic elites in both systems saw themselves forced to adopt new strategies which very often seem quite different at the surface; looking deeper, they exhibit clear similarities. After 1989, the consolidation of the post-socialist economic elites has, all in all, been completed according to the Western example. The emerging convergences, which are being supported by the process of European integration, contributed to the internationalization of the European economic elites. The volume discusses the problem how strong this tendency was and if it has already created truly transnational economic elites more or less separated from the national context.The contributions, which are embedded into a coherent interpretative framework, are penned by internationally renowned experts and junior researchers from a wide array of countries, from Britain to Poland and from Norway to Portugal. The innovative value of the volume lies in its Europe-wide scope and, above all, in its comparative East-West perspective. A genuinely European community of researchers tackles a topic which is indisputably current for history as well as for the social sciences.

The Socialist Industrial State (1976) examines the state-socialist system, taking as the central example the Soviet Union – where the goals and values of Marxism-Leninism and the particular institutions, the form of economy and polity, were first adopted and developed. It then considers the historical developments, differences in culture, the level of economic development and the political processes of different state-socialist countries around the globe.

This provocative and groundbreaking book challenges accepted wisdom about the role of elites in both maintaining and undermining democracy in an increasingly authoritarian world. John Higley traces patterns of elite political behavior and the political orientations of non-elite populations throughout modern history to show what is and is not possible in contemporary politics. He situates these patterns and orientations in a range of regimes, showing how they have played out in revolutions, populist nationalism, Arab Spring failures to democratize, the conflation of ultimate and instrumental values in today’s liberal democracies, and American political thinkers’ misguided assumption that non-elites are the principal determinants of politics. Critiquing the optimistic outlooks prevalent among educated Westerners, Higley considers them out of touch with reality because of spreading employment insecurity, demoralization, and millennial pursuits in their societies. Attacks by domestic and foreign terrorists, effects of climate change, mass migrations from countries outside the West, and disease pandemics exacerbate insecurity and further highlight the flaws in the belief that democracy can thrive and spread worldwide. Higley concludes that these threats to the well-being of Western societies are here to stay. They leave elites with no realistic alternative to a holding operation until at least mid-century that husbands the power and political practices of Western societies. Drawing on decades of research, Higley’s analysis is historically and comparatively informed, bold, and in some places dark—and will be sure to foster debate.