Janine Wedel - Shadow Elite - How the World's New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market

Such informal systems of relationships and practices from the communist era—the under-the-radar dealings, dirty togetherness with a trusted few, playing on the margins of legality, and parallel ethical constructs that, through collective activities, moved the system away from its communist intentions—would spring resiliently into action. 16The upended societies of the “Wild East” were perfect environments for flexian precursors, whether they were savvy insiders, or outsiders testing their fortunes in a world now open to speculation. They would serve as a harbinger of things to come in the region—and beyond.

Flex Net Precursors

Togetherness, whether dirty or not, would prove to be a powerful engine of transformation, even in Poland, one of the best candidates in the region for adapting democracy and free markets after 1989. Poland’s “social circles,” informal political-economic support groups whose members had cemented their bonds in the face of adversity, would prove pivotal to an understanding of how the nation moved away from communism.

When, after several years’ absence, I returned to still-Communist Poland in the spring of 1988, I was surprised to find a heightened flurry of activity emanating from these informal groups and networks, aided by the new reality of glasnost wafting from the Soviet Union. Poles from all sides were turning their political energies into economic efforts, mostly still subterranean, and mingling them with apparently civic activities. Months before the revolutions of the autumn of 1989, I saw that entrepreneurship and private organizing were becoming tickets to influence in public life, and that leaders from the Communist government and Solidarity alike were jumping on the entrepreneurship and organizing bandwagons. 17

Solidarity intelligentsia circles had spawned a new economic elite. Activists who had honed their business skills in clandestine publishing houses in the early 1980s and had languished in jail for their deeds now launched limited liability companies to trade in computers, electronic equipment, and information. Some even ran into acquaintances from home in the streets of Singapore, where they were acquiring computers for sale back in the Polish informal economy. One day I invited such an entrepreneur, a doctoral sociology student in his late twenties, to lunch, intending to pay for it—in the tradition of the supposedly “rich American.” I remembered that, after being released from martial-law internment a half-decade earlier, he had returned to live with his parents in their tiny apartment. But now, as he picked up the bill, he confided that he had made $80,000 the previous month and hence could splurge.

Both Solidarity-and Party-affiliated circles were forming clubs and lobbies and financing them through entrepreneurial activities. I began following the voluntary associations that were cropping up everywhere, even in areas for which the state claimed exclusive responsibility, including housing, schools, and the environment. These were not headed merely by public-spirited people with good intentions and time on their hands, as they might be in the West. These organizations—no matter what their ostensible purpose—were, by their very existence, political; their leaders were, by their very leadership, political actors. The very act of forming an organization outside of state sponsorship was a political act and a risky one, despite the Polish Communist authorities’ toleration of these activities as never before—albeit inconsistently.

Because these novel initiatives sported their own independent financial bases, they were doubly threatening to the communist system. The initiatives intertwined civic and money-making activities, which were partly open, partly subterranean. Again, who was involved was more important than what the involvement was. A similar constellation of people, usually elites, often took part in multiple initiatives. The same loose circle of people typically created and empowered several efforts.

A case in point is the Economic Association, a flex net precursor. Formally an organization to support private enterprise, it was a seminal initiative of a Warsaw-based intelligentsia circle whose members also revolutionized what was possible by founding environmental organizations and private schools. Prime movers in this circle would later become prime figures in running the country. One such player was Aleksander Paszynski, who initiated the association. Years earlier he had been deputy editor of the influential official weekly Polityka (from which he resigned in protest after the declaration of martial law). He exhibited some of the prerequisite qualities of flexians: He was a risk taker and innovator, and, in founding the association, he tested adverse waters by experimenting with whether the communist authorities would allow budding organizations like his to gain legal status (circa 1988) by allowing it to be registered with the state. Paszynski’s efforts dramatized the mixed signals of an authoritarian regime losing its grip. After the Economic Association’s application for state registration had been pending for sometime, the Communist government—in an unprecedented move that revealed both the relaxing of the system and its own desperation—offered Paszynski a cabinet-level position, which he declined. Upon his return from a brief trip to West Germany, Polish authorities strip-searched him at the border, which seemed to indicate they wanted to put him in his place. But then, several days later, the government registered his association with some fanfare, and Paszynski appeared on the state-run news. 18

The explosion of initiatives such as the Economic Association had gone too far to be easily stopped. The Communist authorities were forced to agree to unprecedented negotiations with representatives of Solidarity. Out of this so-called Round Table came an astonishing deal: the first semifree elections in the Eastern Bloc. Solidarity’s subsequent landslide victory in June 1989 was the precursor to the revolutions that capsized the communist regimes of the region that autumn.

The Communists’ fall from power left a governing vacuum that would be filled by preexisting social infrastructure: circles like those of Aleksander Paszynski. Indeed, when the first postcommunist government came into office, Paszynski became minister of housing, with the Economic Association his informal political base. A handful of elite circles would serve as key pillars in the nation’s governance.

During this period of the early 1990s, sociologists Antoni Kamiński and Joanna Kurczewska observed the appearance of “institutional nomads” (from either Solidarity or Communist milieus), key players in Poland’s developing postcommunist system. Players in an institutional nomadic group move in and out of multiple positions and efforts at the top of political, governmental, business, and nongovernmental arenas, as well as Polish branches of international businesses, banks, and foundations. They do so to secure the resources and power necessary to further their group’s goals, whatever they might be. Like the flexians I would later identify, these nomads cannot be pegged simply as officials, consultants, businessmen, activists in NGOs, or academics. Their loyalty is not to the affiliations they juggle, but to their groups. Their roles, official and unofficial, are, above all, a means to an end. 19

Members’ loyalties are cemented not only by the access to resources and opportunities that their pooled efforts reap, but also by the awareness that they are all involved in dirty togetherness—and can blackmail one another. Thus they “willy-nilly must stay loyal and collaborate.” Loyalty to one’s network—and not to institutions—would emerge as a major theme of the coming era’s brightest players. 20