Preying on the State: The Transformation of Bulgaria after 1989

2. The Separation of Party and State as a Logistical Problem

2 The Separation of Party and State as a Logistical Problem Who on earth is “the state”? Max Weber How did party and state separate in the aftermath of the dramatic events of 1989? In the literature on post-Communism, this question is almost completely ignored. Yet, such a neglectful attitude is unjustified. The separation of party and state was a major, large-scale organizational phenomenon that directly affected the “stateness” of the former Soviet satellites. The undoing of the institutionalized party-state axis sent shock waves through existing apparatuses of governance and diminished the infrastructural capacity of available bureaucratic machineries. It generated a transformative impetus that disrupted mechanisms of control in the public domain and decreased levels of governability in the fledgling post-Communist polities. Scholars who seek to situate the question of state dysfunctionality in early post-Communism in an analytical framework that is sensitive to historical specificity and to local institutional complexities should put the separation of party and state at the foreground of their inquiries. Current interpretations of the withdrawal of the party from the state should be amplified through the introduction of state-centered analytical concerns revolving around the issue of how the separation affected the state.1 The reason such a perspective is necessary is that the progressing 1. One of the very few scholars who had an inkling of the significance of this issue during the early stages of the post-Communist transformations was Kazimierz Z. Poznanski. In 1992, he wrote that “the disintegration of Communism has meant inevitable weakening of the state, since the Communist Party was also the state.” See “Epilogue,” in Constructing Capitalism, ed. Poznanski (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), 211. But he never developed this insightful observation into a more elaborate, empirically substantiated argument. 34 Preying on the State dissolution of party-state linkages was a process with a dual character. On the one hand, it shaped the behavior of the party, and was thus intimately linked to the democratization and pluralization of post-Communist political contests. Construed as an episode in the transformation of the hegemonic authoritarian political organization, the problem of the withdrawal of the Communist Party from the state lends itself to an easy “operationalization ” and may be conveniently compressed into a captivating narrative of how the party sustained its first electoral loss, conceded its defeat, and surrendered its power. On the other hand—and less obviously—this process involved a series of developments that transformed the state structures of incipient democracies. As the party left, what happened to the state?—this is the main question that informs a state-centered approach to the separation. My answer is that in each country in the former Soviet bloc the separation engendered debilitating logistical shocks that reverberated throughout local institutional landscapes. The end of the party-state regime necessitated the demarcation of two hitherto inextricably linked domains—the domain of state power and the domain of party power—which in turn touched off a process of competitive redistribution of information, institutional wherewithal, and logistical resources. That state structures were reconfigured as departing party cadres strive to retain control over various resources stored in what was hitherto a common power base is a distinct , shared structural feature of the incipient Eastern European democracies . This systematic effort to reconsolidate the power of party cadres precipitated the atrophy of the institutionalized interactions that formed the infrastructural basis of statehood; the dynamic reproduction of party power has as its downside the fracturing of available tools for democratic governance. Empirical evidence related to the separation bears on broader analytical questions regarding the integrity of post-Communist administrative apparatuses, the ability of democratically elected “principals ” to monitor incumbent bureaucratic “agents,” and the capacity of state agencies to mobilize people and resources in pursuit of policy objectives . The separation is linked, empirically and analytically, to readily observable fluctuations in the institutional capacities of administrative agencies. It does not stand at a tangent to, but is an integral element of, the transformations of stateness in the early 1990s. In addition to this broader analytical claim, the state-centered perspective may help us formulate and consider a comparative hypothesis centered on the outcome of the first multiparty elections and the way in which they shaped post-Communist politics. The intriguing contrast is between cases where the separation of party and state immediately followed this crucial event and cases where this process was considerably prolonged. What exactly are the differences between these two [18...