Preying on the State: The Transformation of Bulgaria after 1989

5. Weak-State Constitutionalism

5 Weak-State Constitutionalism What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow out of this stony rubbish? T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land The collapse of one-party regimes in Eastern Europe marked the beginning of ambitious constitutional reforms whose ultimate objective was to lay the institutional basis for democratic governance and the rule of law. These reforms constitute the archetypical form of “state-building,” a term defined by Francis Fukuyama as “the creation of new government institutions and the strengthening of existing ones.”1 Fukuyama’s definition is not perfect, but it does rest on a commonsensical proposition whose soundness is hard to dispute, namely that inquiries into statebuilding should encompass both dimensions of institutional change, that is, the deliberate making of new institutions and the revamping of inherited state apparatuses. Any comprehensive narrative about the engineering of novel constitutional configurations should embrace the statecentered perspective on the metamorphoses of existing state structures as a necessary component. Once the exploration of constitution-making is wedded to analysis of the transformation of nonconstitutional administrative and bureaucratic structures, it becomes possible to adequately depict the contradictory dynamic and complex outcomes of large-scale institutional change during the crucial first decade of post-Communist transformations. Such conceptually sharp and theoretically engrossing depictions, in turn, allow us to distill from the post-Communist experience a set of general hypotheses about what is likely to happen when constitutional experiments mimicking Western models are launched in a historically structured non-Western setting. 1. Francis Fukuyama, State-Building (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), ix. 124 Preying on the State By superimposing a detailed account of Bulgarian constitutional experiments onto the preceding inquiry of institutional change, I hope to make a two-pronged contribution to the study of the multiplicity of processes that might be legitimately subsumed under the category “state-building” in a concrete historical context. First, I offer a novel interpretation of the complexity of outcomes observable in the aftermath of constitutional reforms. As will become clear in a moment, I contend that all of the following statements more or less adequately depict various aspects of Bulgarian post-Communist constitutionalism: as a result of the dynamic of state-building after 1989, political elites were reined in; as a result of the dynamic of state-building after 1989 political elites retained their ability to engage in unrestrained predatory action ; institutional changes led to the solidification of the framework of governance—institutional changes led to the unraveling of the framework of governance; by the mid-1990s the political field was structured and stabilized; by the mid-1990s the political field was smashed. How such seemingly contradictory claims can be reconciled will become clear once we buttress them with a coherent conceptual analysis of emerging institutional configurations. Moreover, the two chapters that follow will examine the peculiar patterns of success and failure of constitutional initiatives. Some constitutional experiments in Bulgaria worked rather well, and others failed—a divergence of outcomes which is hard to explain by looking at the determining factors which scholars who analyze constitutional reforms habitually invoke. In sum, my exploration of the complexity of constitutional developments will pay heed to the empirical richness of observable outcomes without abandoning the ambition to situate such outcomes in a theoretically informed analytical framework. The second contribution that the following chapters will make is to explain exactly how and why the institutional context shaped the course of constitutional experiments. The general proposition that “context matters ” is fairly uncontroversial. But, as Kathryn Stoner-Weiss remarked, a similar consensus does not surround “more interesting questions” such as “how, why and what aspects of context are more important.”2 The statecentered approach articulated in the three previous chapters elucidates the dynamic characteristics of the institutional environment, particularly the palpable trend toward heightened dysfunctionality of state structures , decreased capacity of bureaucratic apparatuses, and ongoing plundering of the state domain, all of which constitute the relevant context in which freshly minted constitutional structures will have to survive . . . 2. Kathryn Stoner-Weiss, Local Heroes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 3. Weak-State Constitutionalism 125 or die. A corollary of this is that factors such as culture, levels of socioeconomic development, the nature of political cleavages, and the strategic calculus of constitution makers had limited impact on the coalescence of institutional arrangements. The combined emphasis on complexity and context bespeaks a methodological choice in favor of inductive examination...