Divide and Pacify: Strategic Social Policies and Political Protests in Post-Communist Democracies

7. Conclusions

CHAPTER 7 Conclusions The 1990s have been a high-charged, fast-paced decade in Central and Eastern Europe. These years have seen great hopes, widespread disappointments and, crucially, stunning accomplishments in reforming communist states into liberal market democracies. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the mass demonstrations at Prague’s Wenceslaus Square and the many other popular movements that precipitated the demise of communism in the heady days of late 1989 were followed by socially costly yet politically peaceful transition years. To many observers, this post-communist quiescence was theoretically unexpected and historically surprising. This book has put forward a new set of explanations for this puzzle. My focus has been on Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic, but the arguments and mechanisms proposed here have a wider relevance for other democracies engaging in costly reforms. The aim was to fill in macro-level contextual variables with intermediate sociological, political, and policy variables in an attempt to build a more fine-grained theory of social policies and protest politics. Key to this has been the analysis of how strategic social policies could split up core groups of threatened workers and thereby prevent large-scale disruption in the polity. Policy packages that split up threatened workers were likely to enhance governments’ success in implementing economic reforms in the early 1990s. While unlikely to have quelled society’s underlying discontent, these policies could help to reduce the capacity of reform losers to use violent and disruptive repertoires for expressing their discontent. In part, divide and pacify strategies channeled the expression of political opposition towards more orderly repertoires such as negotiations, public statements, petitions, and letters. In part, they sentenced aggrieved 134 Divide and Pacify groups to political “silence” until election time and to (anti-incumbency) voting in the polling booth (Greskovits, 1998). In so doing, governments proactively forced a degree of peace (non-disruption) and patience (intertemporal thinking) upon society as it was crossing the transitional “vale of tears.” This bought them the operational space needed to make substantial and frequently irreversible progress in consolidating democracy and in reforming the economy. The latter part of the book has assembled an array of evidence indicating that between 1989 and 1996, abnormal retirement policies have been implemented on a massive scale in Hungary and Poland, while Czech governments have prevented layoffs through pro-employment labor market policies and softer budget constraints . In the first two cases, divide and pacify strategies have led to unprecedented booms in the numbers of working-age individuals leaving the labor market in order to take up various forms of non-elderly retirement . Redressing an imbalance in existing explanations, I have argued that, far from being the sole result of external macro-economic conditions and non-intentional or “non-political” decision-making, these booms contained a degree of political rationality. This account has simultaneously acknowledged and circumscribed the roles of “structure” and “history” in explaining post-communist protest levels. Given the strong and pervasive effects of the communist one-party systems on Central European societies for over four decades, it would be unwarranted to dismiss these concepts entirely.1 But we need to move beyond highly aggregate concepts such as the novelty of democracy, the presence or absence of tripartite bargaining, or variables such as average population age, rural density, overall welfare spending, poverty, or income inequality. Rather, history and structure can be specified at intermediate levels and as partly subject to manipulation by governments, rather than inherited or invariant beyond strategic action. By this reading, macro-structural variables play a role in determining to what extent the environment could be conducive to the emergence of collective protests. But the theoretical baseline of explanations of protests must nevertheless reside in an account based on purposive actions, not just by members of the aggrieved groups,2 but also in the form of proactive policies by governments . Thus average population age was less important in explaining post-communist protest levels than the particular work–welfare set-up of society and the relative share of workers and pensioners within any given age group. Likewise, whether aggregate social spending could reduce protest levels depended on the particular groups the expenditures were Conclusions 135 destined for. Figure 7.1 indicates how the material incentives and the social ties resulting from divide and pacify policies provide micro-level mechanisms linking the social costs of transition to political quiescence and fast reforms at the macro...