Janine Wedel - Collision and Collusion - The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe

Through “social self-organization,” these new standard-bearers of civil society sought to revive long-suppressed civic values and grassroots organizations. But organizing itself was often more important than a group’s stated purpose: The very act of bringing together like-minded colleagues and drafting a manifesto was sometimes the most essential activity of a group’s entire history. Although most of these groups were not explicitly political, their very founding was a political statement in countries that, at best, shakily tolerated them.59

In 1989, members of these elite cliques emerged to direct their energies simultaneously into a number of arenas, including business, government, the international domain, and also politics. Because the groups operated in many arenas beyond the political, it was misleading to assume that they were just another form of interest group, faction, or coalition—conventional categories often used in the fields of comparative politics, public administration, and sociology. The potential influence of the clique was much more widespread and monopolistic than that of interest groups, factions, or coalitions. Cliques served to mediate between the state and private sectors, as well as between bureaucracy and private enterprise. Ill-equipped to deal with such a phenomenon, conventional social science could not sufficiently explain the role of cliques in changing state-private and political-administrative relations.60

Another feature of these cliques—and another departure from conventional models—is that they, not the individual, typically chose how to respond to new opportunities. Economists usually consider individuals as the primary unit of response to economic opportunities, but in the new East, the more correct unit of analysis of response to economic incentives was often the clique. Operating as part of a strategic alliance enabled the clique’s members to survive and thrive in an environment of uncertainty.

With crumbling states and weak institutions, Central and Eastern European cliques had wide latitude and few restraints. They tended to pursue their own agendas, regardless of their connections to formal institutions. They were “institutional nomads,” because circumstances demanded loyalty to the group but not necessarily to the formal institutions with which the members of the group were associated.61 For example, a civil servant (dependent on the tenure of a specific political leadership, if not actually brought in or bought by it) was typically more loyal to his or her clique than to some weak “office.” Another result of this state of affairs was that resources and decision making in economic, political, and social spheres tended to be concentrated in just a few hands.

Like the “big men” of Melanesia, whose position depends on their ability to maintain personal prestige and the prestige of the group, figures such as Adam Michnik were larger-than-life institutions in themselves. Their standing did not stem so much from formal authority or title, but from abiding informal authority and reputation. They were more than the sum of their titles, and special access to Western aid compounded the advantages. Just as Melanesian big men accumulate wealth and regularly hold feasts and shower lavish gifts upon their less eminent tribesmen, Central and Eastern European big men were expected by those in their circles to carry out certain duties, among them giving to those less privileged. They offered their members perks such as Western contacts and business clients and trips abroad sponsored by Western foundations. This arrangement enhanced the clout, internal political standing, and symbolic capital of the privileged men, which in turn served to enhance their reputations in the West. Naturally, those who were indebted to these men also sang their praises abroad and reinforced their authority and mystique. It was a self-fulfilling and self-perpetuating cycle.

The initiatives of the big men were often more informed by politics than the donors expected. Western funding reinforced the ability of certain influential groups to shape all aspects of economy, politics, and society, undeterred by the rule of law. What did this portend for the efforts of Western donors, whose stated goal was to encourage the development of a civil society? Because many funds went to groups that were exclusive, informal, de facto political clubs, they helped to reinforce the clubs rather than to widen political participation or to “build democratic institutions.” Some funds empowered entrenched political and economic cliques and power brokers, in some cases undercutting legitimate state institutions and governance.

A critical civil society question concerns the capacity of these groups to expand beyond their originating circles. Would they remain exclusive or would they attract new members on the basis of common interests? Under communism, the groups and networks that made up “civil society” were, by their very creation, making a political statement. After the collapse of communism, “the public domain underwent a rapid bifurcation,” as Grzegorz Ekiert and Jan Kubik describe it: “Two separate (at least in Poland) domains emerged: a vibrant and growing domain of civic associations and organizations and a more torpid and elitist domain of political parties and ‘political’ interest groups.”62

Generally, voluntary associations and political movements form themselves around new leaders, issues, and interests, rather than around long-established relationships. Several social scientists point to the restricted capacity of voluntary associations to expand beyond their originating circles, a contention borne out by the behavior of many Central and Eastern European groups.63 Although their inability to expand limited the creation of a more extensive civil society, organizing around common interests continued to evolve, at least in some contexts.

The case of Poland, which before the fall of communism probably had the region’s most advanced “civil society,” albeit based on deep-rooted associations, suggests that building a civil society based on common interests was not so easily accomplished. In the early 1990s, there was little apparent coalition building among social circles; the creation of coalition movements with national political goals seemed especially difficult. Some circles were made up of members of the old communist establishment; others comprised members of the old anticommunist one, such as the Solidarity activists drawn from Poland’s intelligentsia-Opposition establishment. There was much antagonism among the latter: The divisions within Solidarity-Opposition64 were especially visible following the deep social conflicts among circles that surfaced during the presidential campaign of late 1990. The Warsaw-Kraków Opposition circle (from which was largely drawn the government of Prime Minister Mazowiecki) confronted Solidarity leader Lech Wałęsa, and his followers in a bitter social conflict that smoldered long after the election.

Scant research has been done thus far on coalition building in the region and emerging patterns of social organization. However, there is little in the legacies of communism and of the fragmented nature of postcommunist political systems to suggest that significant capacities for coalition building among cliques developed in the 1990s in many Central and Eastern European settings. In Russia, for example, nearly $1 million in U.S. funding from NDI and NRI to support “reformist” political parties yielded few results, according to the GAO: “Despite the institutes’ work, reformist parties have been either unwilling or unable to form broad-based coalitions or build national organizations and large segments of the Russian public have not been receptive to their political message.”65 Anthropologist Hann rightly determines that, despite multiparty elections and robust promotion of market-oriented economic policies, “it has not been easy to establish the rich network of associations outside of the state that comprises the essence of the romanticized western model of civil society.”66 Political scientists Ekiert and Kubik likewise conclude that “the postcommunist civil society represents a complex amalgam of old and new organizations and is often characterized by considerable fragmentation and political divisions.”67