THE Handbook of POLITICAL, SOCIAL, AND ECONOMIC TRANSFORMATION
the
handbook of POLITICAL, SOCIAL, AND ECONOMIC TRANSFORMATION
Edited by WOLFGANG MERKEL, RAJ KOLLMORGEN, and
HANS-JÜRGEN WAGENER
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1.
2.
10. Development Economics and Transformation Studies
Malcolm H. Dunn and Joseph P. Ganahl
11. Approaches to Transformation in Economics
Stefan Kolev and Joachim Zweynert
12. Political Economy Approaches
Frank Bönker
13. Political Steering Approach
Jürgen Beyer
14. Political Mobilization Approaches
Karl-Dieter Opp
15. Civil Society Approach
Grzegorz Ekiert
16. Combining Theoretical Approaches
Raj Kollmorgen and Wolfgang Merkel
SECTION III METHODS
17. Macro-Qualitative Approaches
Carsten Q. Schneider
18. Micro-Qualitative Research
Bruno Hildenbrand
19. Quantitative Methods in Transformation Research
Gert Pickel and Susanne Pickel
20. Ethnographic Methods
Tatjana Thelen
21. Discourse Approaches
Johannes Angermuller and Raj Kollmorgen
22. Economic Methods
Martin Myant and Jan Drahokoupil
23. Comparative Methods in Transformation Research: Political
Dirk Berg-Schlosser
SECTION IV HISTORIC WAVES AND TYPES OF SOCIETAL TRANSFORMATIONS
24. Post-absolutist Transformations in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
Raj Kollmorgen
25. State-socialist Transformations in the Twentieth Century
Dieter Segert
26. Transformation in Fascist Interbellum Europe
Alexander Nützenadel
27. Democratic Transformations after the Second World War
Wolfgang Merkel and Johannes Gerschewski
28. China’s Transformations in the Twentieth Century: Economic, Political, and Cultural Interdependencies
Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
29. Postcolonial Transformations in Africa in the Twentieth Century
Siegmar Schmidt
30. Islamist Transformations: From Utopian Vision to Dystopian Reality
Naser Ghobadzadeh
31. Democratic Transitions in the Late Twentieth Century
Peter Thiery
32. Post-socialist Transformations in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries
Raj Kollmorgen
SECTION V SPHERES
Hans-Jürgen Wagener
SECTION VI BASIC PROBLEMS OF TRANSFORMATION
Hans-Dieter
Herman W. Hoen
Katharina Pistor
Saara
Wolfgang
70.
Bruno
Hans-Joachim
Hans-Joachim
71.
Katharina
Timm
Brigitte Weiffen
Bernhard Weß els
List of Figures
2.1. The input–output model of the political system
17.1. Venn diagram: Luebbert’s sequence of democratic development
19.1. Scatter diagram, Bertelsmann Status Index, and Bertelsmann Transformation Index
23.1. Components of political culture in a system framework
23.2. Levels of analysis according to Coleman
41.1. Embedded democracy
41.2. Number of embedded democracies, defective democracies, and autocracies (BTI 2006–16)
41.3. Democracy scores in embedded and defective democracies by partial regime
41.4. Embedded democracies, defective democracies, and autocracies by region
44.1. The scheme of the first demographic transition
44.2. Live births and deaths per 1,000 people, 1841–2050, and age structure of the population in Germany, 1864–2050
53.1. Diminished subtypes of democracy and autocracy in a two-dimensional property space
List of Tables
3.1. Types of internal and external institutions
27.1. The democracies of the second wave (1943–62)
31.1. Ousted autocracies of the third wave
31.2. Systems of government in third-wave democracies
32.1. Types of political transition in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, 1989–92
32.2. Dilemmas of simultaneity 354
32.3. Types of post-socialist governmental systems (1995) 355
32.4. Strategies and results of economic reforms in selected countries—the first fifteen years (1989/90–2005) 357
52.1. Classificatory typology of legacies
53.1. Explanations of hybrid regime change 524
61.1. Military intervention, external oversight of political reorganization, and status of democracy (1990–2015) 567
62.1. Financial system structure, data as percentages of GDP 576
65.1. Changes over time in people’s satisfaction with democracy in Central and Eastern Europe from 1990 to 2009 594
67.1. Primary and secondary methods used 607
67.2. Quantitative importance of privatization (EBRD database 2015, latest available year) 608
71.1. Religiosity and churchliness in selected countries of Central and Eastern Europe, compared with selected Western European countries, 1990 (agreement in %) 631
71.2. Changes to churchliness in selected countries of Central and Eastern Europe, compared with selected Western European countries, 1990–2008 (agreement in %) 633
71.3. Changes to religiosity in selected countries of Central and Eastern Europe, compared with selected Western European countries (agreement in %) 634
74.1. Social class differentiation in the Czech Republic 1988–99 (share of labour force in %) 648
74.2. Total mobility rates: men (as % in comparison) (1948–93) 649
74.3. Development of income inequality (Gini coefficient) in transformation societies in comparison, 1980s–2000s 650
List of Contributors
Ágh, Attila, Professor Emeritus, Corvinus University of Budapest
Angermuller, Johannes, Prof. Dr, University of Warwick
Apolte, Thomas, Prof. Dr, University of Münster
Beichelt, Timm, Prof. Dr, European University Viadrina Frankfurt/Oder
Berg-Schlosser, Dirk, Prof. Dr, University of Marburg
Beyer, Jürgen, Prof. Dr, University of Hamburg
Bönker, Frank, Prof. Dr, University of Cooperative Education Saxony
Brückner, Julian, WZB Berlin Social Science Center
Bürkner, Hans-Joachim, Prof. Dr, University of Potsdam
Croissant, Aurel, Prof. Dr, Heidelberg University
Csaba, László, Distinguished Professor Dr, Central European University Budapest
Dabrowski, Marek, Prof. Dr, Bruegel Brussels, Higher School of Economics Moscow, and CASE Center for Social and Economic Research Warsaw
Dallago, Bruno, Prof., Università di Trento
Dorbritz, Jürgen, Dr phil., Federal Institute for Population Research Wiesbaden
Drahokoupil, Jan, Dr, European Trade Union Institute Brussels
Fritsch, Michael, Prof. Dr, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, School of Economics
Gabrisch, Hubert, Dr, Wiesbaden Institute for Law and Economics
Ganahl, Joseph P., Dr, Frankfurt a.M.
Gerschewski, Johannes, Dr, Humboldt University of Berlin
Ghobadzadeh, Naser, PhD, Senior Lecturer, National School of Arts, Australian Catholic University
Grimm, Sonja, Dr, University of Konstanz
Guglielmetti, Chiara, Dr, Università di Trento
Herrmann-Pillath, Carsten, Prof. Dr, University of Erfurt, Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies
Heyne, Lea, Dr, University of Zurich
Hildenbrand, Bruno, Prof. Dr, Friedrich Schiller University Jena
Hoen, Herman W., Prof. Dr, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
Inkinen, Saara, WZB Berlin Social Science Center
Kästner, Antje, WZB Berlin Social Science Center (previously)
Keane, John, Prof., University of Sydney
Kirchner, Christian,† Prof. Dr, Humboldt University of Berlin
Klingemann, Hans-Dieter, Prof. em. Dr, WZB Berlin Social Science Center
Kolev, Stefan, Prof. Dr, University of Applied Sciences Zwickau
Kollmorgen, Raj, Prof. Dr, University of Applied Sciences Zittau/Görlitz
Kubik, Jan, Prof., PhD, University College London
Lambach, Daniel, Dr rer. pol., University of Duisburg-Essen
Lauth, Hans-Joachim, Prof. Dr, Julius Maximilians University of Würzburg
Leininger, Julia, Dr, German Development Institute, Bonn
Lorenz, Astrid, Prof. Dr, Leipzig University
Merkel, Wolfgang, Prof. Dr, WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Humboldt University of Berlin
Morlino, Leonardo, Professor of Political Science, Vice Rector, LUISS‚ Guido Carli, Rome
Müller, Katharina, Prof. Dr, Mannheim University of Applied Sciences
Myant, Martin, PhD, European Trade Union Institute Brussels
Newton, Kenneth, Prof., University of Southampton
Nützenadel, Alexander, Prof. Dr, Humboldt University of Berlin
Opp, Karl-Dieter, Prof. em. Dr, Leipzig University/University of Washington
Pickel, Gert, Prof. Dr, Leipzig University
Pickel, Susanne, Prof. Dr, University of Duisburg-Essen
Pistor, Katharina, Prof. Dr, Columbia Law School New York
Pollack, Detlef, Prof. Dr, University of Münster
Popov, Vladimir, Prof. Dr, New Economic School, Moscow
Roth, Silke, Associate Professor, PhD, University of Southampton
Rovira Kaltwasser, Cristóbal, Prof. Dr, Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago de Chile
Saliba, Ilyas, WZB Berlin Social Science Center
Schedler, Andreas, Prof. Dr, CIDE, Center for Economic Research and Teaching, Department of Political Studies, Mexico City
Schmidt, Siegmar, Prof. Dr, University of Koblenz and Landau
Schmotz, Alexander, Dr, WZB Berlin Social Science Center
Schneider, Carsten Q., Prof. Dr, Central European University Budapest
Segert, Dieter, Prof. Dr, University of Vienna
Stefes, Christoph H., Prof., PhD, University of Colorado, Denver
Sterbling, Anton, Prof. Dr, Saxon University of Applied Police Sciences, Rothenburg
Tanneberg, Dag, Research Fellow, University of Potsdam
Thelen, Tatjana, Prof. Dr, University of Vienna
Thiery, Peter, Dr, Heidelberg University
Thomaß, Barbara, Prof. Dr, Ruhr University Bochum
Trappmann, Vera, Associate Professor, Dr, University of Leeds
van Aaken, Anne, Alexander von Humboldt Professor, University of Hamburg
Voigt, Stefan, Prof., Institute of Law and Economics, University of Hamburg and CESifo
Wagener, Hans-Jürgen, Prof. em. Dr, European University Viadrina Frankfurt/Oder
Walker, Charlie, Associate Professor, PhD, University of Southampton
Weiffen, Brigitte, Prof. Dr, University of São Paulo
Weßels, Bernhard, Prof. Dr, WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Humboldt University of Berlin
Zweynert, Joachim, Prof. Dr, Witten/Herdecke University
chapter 1 Transformation and Transition Research: An Introduction
Wolfgang Merkel, Raj Kollmorgen, and Hans-Jürgen Wagener
Transformation is a scientific catch-all term. For where do we not observe transformations? Mathematics, biology, and electrotechnics use the concept as often as do economics, sociology, cultural science, and linguistics. It describes a change of form, nature, shape, character, style, or properties of a phenomenon. This includes, in most sciences, the determination of an initial and a final state of transformation.
In the social sciences, understood broadly to include politics, law, economics, and social development, the term was first used by Nikolai Bukharin (1979 [1920]) and later gained wide recognition through Karl Polanyi’s (2001 [1944]) classic The Great Transformation. As a Marxist theoretician and prominent actor in the Russian Revolution, Bukharin analysed the collapse of the old capitalist system and outlined deliberate organizational steps towards the construction of the new communist system. The original title of his book (in English The Economics of the Transition Period: Part I General Theory of the Transformation Process; part II was never written) already contained the two concepts that will be dealt with in this Handbook: ‘transformation process’, or intentional, radical systemic change; and ‘transition period’, or the historical path along which the change takes place.
The Russian transition to communism is one instance of Polanyi’s Great Transformation, others being the transition to Italian Fascism or German National Socialism and the American New Deal (see also Schivelbusch 2005). Polanyi sees the collapse of the gold standard as the final blow to the utopian liberal market society of the nineteenth century heralding a new communal society along the line of Owen’s communities. As a matter of fact, his great transformation did not take place the way he had envisaged. In 1944, the very year when his book was published, the Bretton Woods conference was setting the stage for the international economic cooperation that would undergird the postwar resilience of the market. This is a reminder that transformation, although being a set of intentional policy measures, is by no means determinate. It may fail or its final result may turn out quite differently from the original intentions. Nevertheless, Polanyi’s approach remained
groundbreaking for transformation research and for postwar economic policy, since it reversed the strict separation of economy and society and advocated an integrated political-economic thinking together with an interventionist regulation of the market. Following this tradition, the present Handbook will approach its topic from various angles: the political, economic, social, and cultural.
Thus, the present Handbook explicitly opts for a multidisciplinary perspective focusing on the complex discourses in sociology, economics, law, political science, and history. Without further specification, one may be inclined to equate transformation with social change in general. Transformation research would thus amount to a new designation for any political, social, or economic research on development and change. Some scholars more or less explicitly adhere to this view (the most conspicuous example being Polanyi (2001 [1944])). We follow a different approach in taking into account the political and scientific semantics that has evolved after the historical break of 1989 and is dominant today. In this conception, transformation is a political, social, and economic change of a substantial systemic character that has been initiated in a revolutionary and target-oriented way by identifiable actors. As such, it has to be distinguished from evolutionary change that is also initiated by purposeful action, but is a much longer-term process often resulting in unintended consequences of those actions. Evolution is a continuous, gradual, incremental process driven by changes in the stock of knowledge (North 2005, 63). In contrast, discrete system transformations are historical exceptions quite often triggered by crisis situations. In the end, they generally level off into evolutionary development.
Basic Concepts
Social, political, and economic change has been a central issue of philosophy in Europe since the eighteenth century. Crisis, change, progress, and their evolutionary or revolutionary forms and stages have become important topics of intellectual and political discourse for thinkers such as, among others, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, the Marquis de Condorcet, Edmund Burke, Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Auguste Comte, and Herbert Spencer. They can be seen as important precursors of social science research on change and transformation.
Karl Marx (1818–83) was arguably the first to analyse political, social, and economic dynamics empirically and to formulate a more or less coherent theory of social development starting from an all-embracing construction that owes much to Hegel’s philosophy of history (Marx 1970 [1859], 1976 [1867]). He describes the economic ‘mode of production’ as a dialectical conjunction of ‘productive forces’ and ‘production relations’. Cognitive and technical stages of development require corresponding structural and organizational forms, while specific production relations, for their part, trigger particular dynamics of productive forces. From a certain point in history onward, the development of productive forces stands in contradiction to the given production, and particularly property, relations. New production relations and a new mode of production then become historically necessary.
At the same time, the mode of production as ‘base’ together with a corresponding ‘superstructure’ of political and legal institutions and social forms of consciousness constitute, according to Marx, a totality of social relations—the ‘social-economic formation’. As a result
of the dynamics of the base, social formations are subject to continuous internal change and replace each other historically (Marx 1970 [1859], 7–13). The Marxist view ascribes to cognitive and technical-organizational development and the corresponding interests and class relations an overriding importance for social change and transformation. It has become one of the most influential starting points for subsequent theoretical developments.
Four such developments between the 1880s and the end of the Second World War shall be mentioned here. In contrast to Marx, Max Weber (1864–1920) stressed the interrelations of ideas, interests, and institutions. Like Marx, he considers economic interests and their dynamics to be an essential explanatory component—one that has to be complemented, however, by a perspective highlighting the importance of formative long-term ideas (mind) and culture (conduct of life) as well as institutions (order) for all at least partly autonomous ‘value spheres’ of society (economy, law, politics, religion, arts, and sciences). Therefore, Weber considers Marx’s theory of base and superstructure to be too simplistic as would be a straightforward interests-action scheme (Weber 2001 [1920]).
Joseph Alois Schumpeter (1883–1950), in his Theory of Economic Development (1934 [1911]), explicitly takes up Marx’s basic idea of capitalist development. As with Marx, technical and organizational innovation becomes the driving force. Yet it is not the capitalist, but the entrepreneur who is Schumpeter’s central actor in the capitalist system. Today, Schumpeter is seen as one of the founding fathers of evolutionary economics. Up to this point, the concept of transformation is never mentioned.
Nor is it mentioned in another trend-setting approach, the theory of ‘social phenomena’ of the Austrian Carl Menger (1840–1921). Menger differentiates between social phenomena that come pragmatically into existence and those that come organically:
Some social phenomena are the results of a common will directed towards their establishment (agreement, positive legislation, etc.), while others are the unintended result of human efforts aimed at attaining essentially individual goals (the unintended results of these). In the first case social phenomena result from the common will directed towards their establishment (they are its intended products). In the second case social phenomena come about as the unintended result of individual human efforts (pursuing individual interests) without a common will directed towards their establishment. (Menger 1985 [1883], 133)
Organically developed social phenomena have to be clearly distinguished from natural organisms because they are based on deliberate human action, as are pragmatic institutions. The difference is that with organic phenomena, there is no actor consciously intending the ultimately emerging concrete phenomenon.
This idea originates from the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher Adam Ferguson, who held that ‘nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design’ (Ferguson 1782 [1767], 205). It became the vantage point of Friedrich von Hayek’s (1899–1992) evolutionary social theory, which sustained a deep distrust towards pragmatically constructed institutions: ‘We have never designed our economic system. We were not intelligent enough for that’ (Hayek 1979, 164). Democracy and the capitalist competitive order are undoubtedly results of long-term evolution. But whoever intends to introduce them today—replacing, for instance, a statesocialist system with a market one—would be substituting pragmatically the old regime with certain institutions that have been elaborated in scientific, ideological, and political
discourses as constitutive system elements. Such a transformation would then be effected consciously; it follows a given model and is thus imitative. Spontaneously evolved and consciously designed institutions as results of evolution and transformation entail each other and can never be sharply separated.
Menger’s examples of organically evolved social phenomena are the city, money, language, law, and others. These may well be appropriate examples. The city as social entity, which Max Weber (1978 [1921], ch. 16) vividly analysed, did not spring out of an integral master plan, but was formed over centuries in an evolutionary manner as a result of separate individual and collective decisions. Yet Baron Haussmann’s reconstruction of Paris or the introduction of the euro through the Maastricht Treaty are examples from the sphere of urban and monetary systems that clearly have constructivist pragmatic origins and can serve as examples for social transformation.
As already mentioned, the concept of transformation found its first distinctive formulation in the work of Karl Polanyi (1886–1964). In his book The Great Transformation (2001 [1944]), Polanyi describes the liberal market economy of the nineteenth century as a utopia that collapsed with the Great Depression of the 1930s at the latest. After the socially adverse institutions of the labour and land markets had been gradually eroded by trade unions, welfare state activities, and protectionism, the collapse of the gold standard sealed the demise of the market utopia. Its failure is ‘at the heart of the transformation’ (Polanyi 2001 [1944], 218). The concept of transformation, however, shows up rarely in the book and, when it does, serves as a synonym for secular social change.
Let us briefly summarize. Social institutions and governmental regimes are systems of action structured by values and norms. Within these systems, self-conscious actors communicate with each other using different material and symbolic resources. The systems develop and change in response to new knowledge, altered allocations of resources, and changes in values and institutions. The accumulation of knowledge and changes in values can perhaps be explained only in an evolutionary way. Institutions may likewise have originated in an evolutionary fashion. But as far as formal institutions are concerned, their modification, as a rule, takes place consciously. In this context, we understand transformation as a substantial change of social systems, which may evolve spontaneously, but is mostly caused by the decisions of intentionally acting subjects. It follows that the Handbook, in treating transformation as a mode of system change, must in its first part elaborate the basic concepts of system, institution, and actors as well as theoretical perspectives emanating from them.
Theoretical Refinements
Beginning in the late 1950s, modernization theory highlighted problems of social change and of its control (Lipset 1959; Parsons 1966). This approach describes a multitude of social, political, economic, and cultural developments in the direction of modernity, but also within already existing modern societies. It rarely addresses explicitly discrete transformation events, but when these happen, they often contain elements of modernization. Two principles are characteristic of modernization theory: modernity is a product of Western development
and any development in this direction implies progress. Modernization entails an increase of individual freedom, the guarantee of individual rights, democratic codetermination, and economic welfare. Problems of Eurocentrism, a deterministic belief in progress, and a functionalist obscuring of individual action gave rise to critical assessments of this approach in the 1970s and 1980s.
What followed was a paradigm shift from a sociological functionalism of systems and modernization theory to actor-centred approaches to policymaking. It is not long-run socio-economic change that determines the direction and result of transformation towards either socialism (Marxism) or democracy (modernization theory); rather, the behaviour of identifiable actors affects the nonetheless contingent outcome of political transition to either democracy or dictatorship. At least three elements are introduced into what has now become political transformation theory: actors, decision, and contingency. Long-run perspectives on great socio-economic changes thus give way to the problématique of the shortterm behaviour of concrete actors that may lead to genuine transformation.
The paradigm shift was inaugurated by Dankwart A. Rustow’s (1970) ‘Transitions to Democracy: Toward a Dynamic Model’. In his ‘genetic theory of democracy’, Rustow accounts for the structural and socio-economic prerequisites for successful democratization. But democratic transition is no longer conceived as a linearly determined process of evolution with, at most, the middle class as actor. Instead, Rustow emphasizes a multiplicity of possible transformation paths and actors. The outcome of such a transition remains, in principle, open. Rustow thus established the basic elements of a theoretical programme that, together with the multivolume study Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Prospects for Democracy edited by Guillermo O’Donnell, Philippe C. Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead (1986), enjoyed unrivalled dominance within political science research on transformation for the next decade. This paradigm shift meant that in political science, the term ‘transformation’ was replaced by ‘transition’. The ensuing paradigm of transition research was wrongly accused of pursuing a deterministic research programme by focusing on transitions to democracy. The critique did not take note of the fact that the authors of the aforementioned study always spoke of ‘transition to something else’ (O’Donnell et al. 1986, 3).
Between the middle of the 1970s and the end of the 1980s, one can notice a marked increase in studies analysing complex social and, above all, political changes. The transition from authoritarian to democratic political systems and to capitalist market economies found a relatively consistent conceptual framework and research programme in the form of the extended modernization and transition approaches. The concept of transformation was rarely used at that time. As Eberhard Sandschneider (1995, 33–5) remarked, transformation remained a vague concept. Not being a recognized technical term, it led a shadow existence. This changed only in 1989/90 with the sudden collapse of the state-socialist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe. Not only did individual regimes fall, but the whole social system of communism. In addition, the new elites declared almost unanimously their intention to return to democratic and capitalist relations and with it ‘to return to Europe’. Things developed somewhat differently and more gradually in the communist countries of East Asia (like China and Vietnam), where transformation was concentrated in the economic system, in the end by no means less radically. The ‘unprecedented event’ (Wolf Lepenies) turned transformation into a keyword and a scientific term of its own.
