Preying on the State: The Transformation of Bulgaria after 1989

1. The Dysfunctionality of Post-Communist State Structures

1 The Dysfunctionality of Post-Communist State Structures The very existence of these laws, however, is at most a matter of presumption. Franz Kafka, “The Problem of Our Laws” After more than a decade of scholarly research and reflection on political developments in post-Communist Eastern Europe, a consensus has coalesced around the viewpoint that the transformative processes unleashed in 1989 precipitated a rapid and radical weakening of state structures. While debates about how to conceptualize and measure the decline of state power continue unabated, academic observers, policy analysts, and political actors readily agree that throughout the 1990s the infrastructure of governance was stricken by a grave malaise. It was primarily the failures of promarket reforms in early post-Communism that led World Bank officials to the conclusion that “an effective state is vital to the provision of the goods and services—and rules and institutions —that allow markets to flourish and people to lead healthier, happier lives.”1 It was the attempt to integrate East European nations in the European Union that compelled Brussels bureaucrats to insist that a special chapter on “administrative capacity to apply the acquis” be included in each country report on the progress toward accession—and until the end of the last century, these reports invariably acknowledged that “the capacity to implement and enforce the acquis is weak.”2 Astute 1. See World Development Report 1997 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, with Oxford University Press, 1998), 1. 2. This particular quote is from the Bulgaria country report for 1998, available at http://europa.eu.int/comm/enlargement/report_11_98/pdf/en/bulgaria_en.pdf. 2 Preying on the State champions of democracy singled out the syndromes of “the largely nonfunctional state” as a formidable obstacle to democratic consolidation in the former Soviet world.3 And advocates of liberal constitutionalism insisted that the general directionality of change after 1989 “makes excruciatingly plain that liberal values are threatened just as thoroughly by state incapacity as by despotic power.”4 That the state was “weaker” than before and “weaker” than it should have been was among the few empirical and normative claims about post-Soviet reality that did not provoke serious dissent throughout the 1990s. This book is an inquiry into the causes and concrete manifestations of the general trend toward increased dysfunctionality of state structures in early post-Communism. My approach privileges the analysis of structural factors and modes of self-interested elite agency over the examination of the ideological considerations and reformist visions that allegedly guided policymakers. My key argument is that the causes of state malfunctioning go much deeper than the policy preferences of “free marketeers” who deliberately dismantled the state. These causes should be traced to what we might label the historical specificity of post-Communism as an episode of state transformation—a phrase that encompasses the unique institutional legacy of state socialism, the unusual structure of incentives facing powerful elites, and the peculiar dynamics unleashed when fundamental social relations related to the collecting, managing, and distribution of resources were radically altered . The reconfiguration of state structures in post-Communism is not a development that might be attributed to ideas about what constitutes a good polity: rather, it is the outcome of a set of institutional and social processes that crucially—and negatively—affected the organizational basis of effective governance. It is to the systematic exploration of these processes—their multiple dimensions, their institutional implications, their political significance—that this book is devoted. But the Polish report, issued the same year—at a time when Poland was the undisputed “leader” among the all candidates for full membership—reached essentially the same conclusion: Poland has experienced difficulties in implementing planned public administration reforms which are needed to lay the foundations for further improvement of administrative capacity. . . . Efforts need to be made to enhance the capacity of Polish administrators to implement and enforce legislation in key internal market areas. . . . There is a need to consolidate the functioning of administrative structures in a sustainable way. See the Polish report for 1998 at http://europa.eu.int/comm/enlargement/report_11_ 98/pdf/en/poland_en.pdf. 3. Thomas Carothers, “The End of the Transition Paradigm,” Journal of Democracy 13, no. 1 (January 2002): 1–17. 4. Stephen Holmes, “What Russia Teaches Us Now,” American Prospect 8, no. 33 (July 1, 1997), 33. Dysfunctionality of Post-Communist State Structures 3 The State-Centered Perspective...