Volume 9 Numbers 1/2

Winter/Spring 2000

 

Subversive Institutions: The Design and Destruction of Socilaism and the State
By Valerie Bunce

Mark R. Beissinger

Valerie Bunce has produced a wide-ranging, masterful, and eloquently written book on the demise of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. But its purposes go well beyond explaining the end of communist regimes and the various ways in which they expired. The book also seeks "to rethink certain aspects of the role of institu-tions in politics, the meaning and the causes of revolution, the origins and consequences of nation-alism, and the place of history and institutions in domestic and international regime transitions." Additionally, the author probes the larger "role of area knowledge versus theory in comparative inquiry" (p. 130). Such an expansive agenda hardly makes the reviewer's task an easy one: each of these topics could have readily been the subject of its own investigation. In this sense, Bunce's study is driven less by voluminous research or empirical richness than by comparative rigor and interpretive depth, and, concerning these latter two qualities, readers will find here a wealth of ideas. Subversive Institutions is an outstanding example of the possibilities of the comparative method as a mode of political analysis. Bunce employs an approach that she calls "cascading comparison" in order to address the series of embedded questions that animate her study. The power of these comparisons is that they permit the author to explore, strategically, the similari-ties and variations in the respective outcomes of a limited set of cases and, at the same time, to compare these outcomes with cases outside the set. The specific selection of cases is driven by the particular puzzle to be explained. Why did all these regimes, despite their diversity, collapse, and why did this collapse occur within such a compressed period of time? Why did some states break apart, as these regimes withered, while others did not? And why were some regime transitions peaceful even as others were violent? The answers Bunce pursues all revolve around the central role played by the design of communist institutions in undermining, quite contrarily, the insti-tutions themselves. As Bunce puts it, the "very design of these systems functioned over time to divide and weaken the powerful, homogenize and strengthen the weak, and undercut economic performance" (p. 131). In particular, European socialist regimes were committed to a late-nineteenth-century model of rapid modernization, had fused the conduct of politics with the practice of economics and party structures with those of the state, and were characterized by the extraordinary penetration of the party-state into society. But despite the advantages of such systems in dominating the societies they ruled, over a protracted period of time these same features led to high levels of intraelite conflict and periodic instability, a homoge-nization of experiences and interests within societies, and an inability to hide regime responsibility for unpopular outcomes. In short, these institutions grad-ually "deregulated the system-by pluralizing and thus weakening the party and by homogenizing and thus empowering society" (p. 32)-a process manifested, for example, in the redistributive tendencies that became more pronounced over time and further undermined economic growth. But because of the way in which these institutions were constructed, "[j]ust as virtually everyone was implicated [in these problems], so everyone would be threatened by reform-even when they claimed to champion it" (p. 35). Bunce goes on to argue that the tightly inte- grated structure of the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe also conjoined the fates of these regimes. Thus when crisis emerged, it quickly spread across these states. In this sense, Bunce says, European communism was fated to collapse; the only real issue was when and under what circumstances this would occur (p. 142). Bunce observes that the only communist states that broke apart when communist regimes collapsed were those characterized by ethnofederal institutions (the USSR, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia). She argues that ethnofederalism subverted these states because of the ways in which it consolidated identities and resources around ethnofederal units; linked the fate of the state with the fate of the regime; and created "states-in-the-making, complete with their own borders, elites, national communities, and a full array of economic, political, social, and cultural insti-tutions" (pp. 84-85). Concerning the extremely violent demise of Yugoslavia, Bunce roots this primarily in the confederal structure of the Yugoslav state, which pitted republic against republic (as opposed to republic against a center), underrepre-sented Serbs relative to other groups, and created territorially based militias and thus a confused chain of command for the military. As she writes, the "institu-tions that made Yugoslavia unique among the socialist federations in eastern Europe were precisely what guaranteed that the end of this state, unlike the end of the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, would be violent" (p. 125). Subversive institutions interacting with subversive opportunities toppled communist regimes and fragmented states, provoking nationalist violence on a massive scale. This summary hardly does justice to the rich-ness of the arguments and to the many original and perceptive insights readers will glean along the way. For instance, Bunce draws interesting parallels between the institutions of the Soviet bloc and those of ethnofederalist communist states. She notes the greater violence that occurred in the transitions of states whose militaries were not subject to Soviet-bloc control. And she provides a convincing explanation of why Yugoslavia-despite its institu-tional innovations-was even more vulnerable than other states to the institutional flaws inherent in state socialism. Of course, it stretches the imagination to think that the collapse of communism, the breakup of states, or nationalist violence could occur without political institutions being implicated in some way. Although Bunce emphasizes at a number of junctures that the institutional flaws of socialism were necessary but insufficient conditions to produce these outcomes, at other points she falls prey to a pervasive institutional determinism-an accusation she readily acknowledges in her conclusion. In response, Bunce argues that "there are very good reasons to couch our arguments in a relatively deterministic framework," and that the decisions of elites were, in significant respects, "the product of the very institutional logic of the system itself " (pp. 141-42, emphasis in original). But the actions of elites and individuals are never subjected to detailed observation or analysis, so that it is difficult to judge the veracity of this assertion solely on the basis of the evidence presented. I find no problem in the argument that the ways in which communist institutions were constructed were deeply implicated in undermining communism. As Bunce rightly points out, this was one of the long-standing thrusts of scholarship within the field of communist studies years before communism collapsed. But the notion of "institutional design" implies choices and alternatives regarding institutions rather than predestination; this raises natural questions about which features of socialism could have been altered for different outcomes to emerge. Would modifying the party-state's monopoly over property ownership have changed the probability of collapse? Does institutional design explain why Chinese communism survived but Yugoslav communism perished? Had Stalin not incor-porated the Baltic states in 1940 (or, alternatively, turned them into satellite states much like Mongolia and later Poland and Hungary), or had the original practice of Soviet ethnofederalism in the 1920s been maintained (which differed radically from Stalinist practice in according non-Russians extensive autonomy and cultural rights), might not a different fate have been possible for the USSR? At what point in the evolving history of communism did the logic of institutions become so overwhelming as to make differing eventualities impossible? These and other like questions and alternatives lurk constantly beneath the surface of the book but are not explored. I have a considerably greater problem with accepting the argument that Yugoslavia's confederal structure "guaranteed" that Yugoslavia would experience ethnic cleansing and civil war, while Soviet and Czechoslovak ethnofederalism deflected violent possi-bilities. It seems wrong to interpret the extensive violence that accompanied and continues to accom-pany the Soviet collapse as a nonviolent outcome akin to Czechoslovakia's. But putting that issue aside, violence had occurred on a vast scale earlier in Yugoslav history, at a point in time when Yugoslavia was a unitary state and well before confederalism was even an idea. Why, then, should we believe that the choice of confederalism (as opposed to an ethnofeder-alism dominated by a single group or a unitary state structure) made violence inevitable in 1991? Moreover, was Milosevic an instrument, merely acting out the institutional logic of the system? And were the political options and opportunities that Bunce also recognizes simply opportunities for playing out an institutionally defined script? If there were real possibilities for avoiding violence, how far does the abstract institu-tional explanation actually take us? Nationalist violence is not uniformly characteristic of other forms of confederalism and consociationalism, and it certainly has occurred in numerous states characterized by unitary as well as ethnofederal structures. Bunce argues in some senses that it was not confederalism per se that produced large-scale violence but the specific amalgam of Yugoslav confederalism. Yet it is clear, at this point, that any sense of causality has begun to grow murky. Ultimately, causation cannot be proved or disproved with Bunce's comparative method. It can only be suggested. Much like the institutions that Bunce has studied, the strength of the comparative method she so deftly wields (in other words, its capacity to identify necessary but insufficient condi-tions) is the book's central weakness as well. This is not to say that her arguments are false; rather, it is to say they are only partially true. Bunce makes very persua-sive cases that the flaws within socialist institutions were critical to precipitating communism's collapse, and that ethnofederalism played an important role in conditioning the breakup of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and the USSR. But assertions that communist regimes "were fated to end" (p. 142) because of their institutional design, or that ethnofed-eralism itself "made a single-state project untenable" (p. 140), involve an inappropriate vocabulary of deter-minism, given that these conclusions were arrived at on the basis of a method capable only of identifying necessary but insufficient conditions. Parsimony here demonstrates a tendency to turn it into teleology. Despite these issues, Subversive Institutions makes an important contribution to our understanding of the end of European communism. It also contains impor-tant lessons for those attempting to shape the postcommunist world. It asserts, for instance, the "stickiness" of institutions-even as they are being dismantled and in the midst of revolutionary changes. Bunce argues that it is misleading to draw a thick line between socialism and what emerged afterward. Not only did socialist institutions structure the very chal-lenges that emerged and were ranged against them, these same institutions also became the basis for the construction of new states. But perhaps the most important lesson to draw from Bunce's study is the astute observation that institutions need to be under-stood "as films, not snapshots"-that is, institutions can have quite different consequences over the long run from those intended or immediately apparent to the leaders guiding these institutions. This is a message many contemporary rulers in the region have yet to absorb but undoubtedly would be wise to heed.

Mark R. Beissinger is a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of numerous works on nationalism in the former Soviet Union. Notes on Networking in Postcommunist Societies Venelin I. Ganev

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