Scholars and experts' disillusions as conceptual drive for social change dynamics recognition; post-1989 CEE in view of other post-revolutionary dynamics
Abstrakt
Thinking about the dynamics of hopes and disillusions regarding scholars and experts' perception of post-1989 developments we may, at more conceptual level, identify four distinctive waves and conceptual disillusions breaks in assessing the socio-economic changes taking place in CEE throughout the course of the last 30 years (Tomášek 2018). Each conceptual era (identified in the table below) implied a subsequent stage or ensuing implications resulting from the identified initial condition of ongoing socio-economic change.
The 1st era/wave may be associated with the term 'transition' (Linz, Stepan 1995). The next stage-implications within this wave of conceptualizing the socio-economic change is democratic consolidation.
The 2nd era/wave is connected with the term 'transformation' (Grapher, Stark (eds.) 1997, Chavance, Mognin E., 1997, Stark, Bruszt 1998) and the implication characterizing this wave is a path-dependency that extensively determines future development. In this wave the obstacles to changes are associated with communist legacies or are linked even to pre-communist cultural patterns.
The 3rd wave in thinking about the nature of the change is associated with such concepts as premature consolidation (Richard 1996), restoration (Wnuk-Lipinski 1999), incomplete transition (Myant, Fleischer, at. al., 1995) or, more globally understood, state capture (Hellman 1998, Hellman, Jones, Kaufmann 2000, 2003). With the deconstruction of real-socialist regimes frequently rather taking shape of collapse, the CEE countries have advanced relatively fast toward 'a free market without adjectives' which however suffered from a variety of structurally produced pathological phenomena that, in qualitative terms, was not far from the ones existing in many of the newly emerging democracies and regimes beyond Europe.
For CEE not proceeding much further from this rudimentary state the breaking point happened to be associated closely with reasoning in the direction of corrective effect of increased FDI and improved institutional environment due to the imposition of the EU law requirements. However, the developments in CEE, in the last years, show that this 'Europeanization' has not made the trick as the countries of the region tend to slide away from democracy toward populist or even semi-authoritarian regimes.
Throughout the last two decades, a discourse of 'varieties of capitalism' has achieved prominence in assessing the current unstable state and changes of long, steadily developing postwar welfare capitalism (Hall and Soskice 2001; Elsner and Hanappi 2008; Hancké 2009). As suggested by Lane and Myant (2007) or Norkus (2012), alternatively, Frane, Primož and Matevž (2009) the answer to the analytical dilemma may lie in identifying particular practices of CEE capitalism within this frame.
Can we recognize the current shape of capitalism in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia as having a distinctive and, at the same time, shared populist semi-authoritarian pattern? In overall, have these last 30 years witnessed, through various troubled stages, the progress to advanced free-market democracies in CEE, or was it, by now, closing in historical development in circle, beck to the semi-totalitarian populism in 30 years?