Borders open, regimes fall

It is now twenty years since Communism trundled off to the dustbin of history. This makes for an exciting series of 20th anniversaries. The first partially free elections in an Eastern Bloc state were held in June 1989 in Poland, with Solidarity doing so well that the communists were thrown out of office (though a government was not formed until the 24th August).

Today makes for another interesting anniversary - it marks the day when Hungary began to stop policing its border with Austria. This made the country a conduit for East Germans who fancied heading to the West, setting in motion events that led to the opening of the wall and disappearance of the DDR.

More (all BBC):

How Hungary let East Germans go

Hungary marks 1989 freedom event

1989 - Europe's revolution

Communism Fail

The opening of the Berlin Wall on the 9th of November 1989 is probably the most emblematic moment in the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. A less remarked upon, but perhaps more ultimately significant, event took place twenty years ago yesterday. On the 17th of April 1989, the ruling communists in Poland agreed to hold partially competitive elections. The elections were meant to leave the communists in power, as 70 out of 100 seats in the Polish parliament's lower house were reserved for them and their allies in various front parties. When the elections were held (on the 4th of June), the communists were humiliated - they and their allies failed to win a single one of the contested seats in the lower house, while the communists only won one seat in the Senate (where all seats were contested). Although they still had a massive parliamentary majority, their political bankruptcy was exposed, and the opposition Solidarity movement was invited to form a non-communist government.

People still argue over what caused the collapses of communism in Eastern Europe. Whatever the cause, my own view is that once one of the Soviet satellites started unambiguously on the road to free elections the jig was up for the lot of them. Any one country's progress down the road to freedom made it apparent to oppositions and governments everywhere that the Soviets were not going to send in the tanks to shore up their allies. None of the communist regimes ultimately had the wherewithal to maintain themselves in power, and they all fell to the upsurge in oppositional activity triggered by developments in Poland.

Poland's history since the transition has been... interesting. Successive governments have had to grapple with the economic bankruptcy bequeathed by the communists, while the inevitable break up of Solidarity made politics somewhat chaotic. People like Lech Walesa, who were genuinely heroic in opposition, seemed somewhat less than suited for the nuanced world of democratic politics. Nevertheless, the country has made impressive progress, apparently weathering the current economic storm better than most.

Some interesting pieces on the BBC website:

How Poland became an aid donor (one of the more benign views of Poland's "shock therapy" transition to market economics).

Children of the Solidarity revolution (the human cost borne by those whose family members ultimately brought down the dictatorship)

1989: Key events in Europe's revolution (a series of pieces on the momentous events of 1989)

1989 - Europe's revolution (more on that great year)

Trouble in Wallachia

Wallachia is a little-known country in eastern Europe, about the size of Luxembourg. Its main export is slivovica, a potent plum brandy. While the rest of the world is gripped by the financial crisis, the good folk of Wallachia are more exercised by the political crisis that has engulfed their nation. A dispute over the country's future direction erupted between Wallachia's King Boleslav I and its political strongman, foreign minister Tomas Harabis. Boleslav has attempted to dismiss Harabis from the government, while Harabis has declared Boleslav deposed in favour of a new queen mother. All eyes are now on the country's national guard – its support will surely decide the day in favour of king or foreign minister, but if it splits then the country faces civil war.

Disputes of this kind are common in countries where monarchs have remained in place in a figurehead role but retain notional reserve powers. While the more democratic elements in such countries argue that the monarch's prerogatives no longer exist in any real sense, the monarchs often feel that they are still entitled to act in an absolutist manner. Wallachia's current travails point out the necessity for clearly delineating the rights and obligations of different actors in the constitutions of democratising states.

More on Wallachia

Semi-presidential definitions

This is a long reply to a question posed by Nicholas Whyte in a comment to my last post. He asked whether Cyprus and former Soviet states count as semi-presidential or not. This leads me into a discussion of what constitutes a semi-presidential regime. Unfortunately, there are several definitions of semi-presidentialism, so the answer has to be "it depends". The first English language definition by French scholar Maurice Duverger talked of countries being semi-presidential if they had a popularly elected president who had "considerable powers" but how faced a prime minister who led a government that was responsible to an elected assembly. The "considerable powers" business then leads to considerable debate as to whether a given president in a given country has considerable powers or not. It can also be difficult in practice to identify what powers a president actually has, given the divergence that can occur between a president's constitutionally granted powers and the powers they wield in practice (compare the limited powers of the French president in the constitution with the powers they have actually exercised). Nevertheless, despite these problems, Duverger's definition and definitions derived from it are probably still dominant.

Robert Elgie attempted to produce a semi-presidentialism definition that allows for a more precise determination of whether a country is semi-presidential or not. He skips all that considerable powers stuff by saying that a regime is semi-presidential if it has a popularly elected president and a prime minister responsible to parliament. Using this definition, a semi-presidential country can have a very powerful president, or one who spends his or her time playing golf. Some find this kind of definition problematic, as it includes countries which in practice have politics so similar to parliamentary regimes as to make no difference; if you think the idea of bifurcated power structures is crucial to any discussion of semi-presidentialism as a regime type then Elgie's definition is not for you. However, even with that, a thing you do see in country's with figurehead directly elected presidents is that sometimes they can leverage their status as someone chosen by the people as a whole to exert pressure on the government in a manner bearing little relation to their paper powers. So even a figurehead president might be able to restrain a prime minister, in certain circumstances. Arguably, this kind of happened in Timor-Leste, where President Gusmao announced that he had lost confidence of Prime Minister Alkatiri, increasing the pressure on the latter that ultimately led to his resignation.

And so to the countries Nicholas Whyte mentions. I can't speak for Cyprus, as I don't know too much about how day-to-day politics works in either jurisdiction there. With the countries of the former Soviet Union, political systems there vary greatly. Many of the USSR's successor states are straightforwardly dictatorships. However, most of the ones that do still have some kind of democratic politics in place count as semi-presidential, with the regime-type being apparently more common in former communist countries than either straight presidential or parliamentary regimes. Or so I have read. I have my doubts with some of the countries. Take Russia – it has the prime minister and president you associate with semi-presidentialism, but the prime minister is only responsible to parliament in the most notional of manners. In practice (and probably in the constitution as well, given that it was written by a president who then had it passed at gun point) the prime minister is the president's bitch, someone he gets to look after tawdry day-to-day stuff for him.

Ukraine is more like a classic semi-presidential regime, where the prime minister and president are both powerful, but the prime minister is genuinely responsible to parliament; I think the relationship betweern the offices has changed over time, and the presidency lost a lot of its powers recently as part of the deal that saw Viktor Yushchenko elected to it. I gather that Lithuania is more the kind of country that scrapes into the semi-presidential category only if you use the Elgie definition, as its president is directly elected but aloof from actual politics. I think the rest of the democratic ex-USSR states are at least Elgie semi-presidential, except for Latvia and Estonia, which I believe to have adopted parliamentary regimes at independence, and Moldova, whose parliament changed it to a fully parliamentary regime, much to the chagrin of the then president who wanted things moved in a more fully presidential direction.

An East European Oddity

I have read a fascinating blog article on Latveria, one of the more unusual Eastern European countries: Latveria's Future. Alone among its immediate neighbours, Latveria escaped involvement in the Second World War and incorporation into the Soviet Bloc alliance system, though it did nevertheless succumb to authoritarian rule. It enjoyed a brief transition to democracy in the early 1990s, but authoritarian forces were able to stage a comeback; it is now something of an anomaly, the only self-declared non-democracy in Europe outside the former Soviet Union. The article discusses how the rolling forces of globalisation are starting to impact on this isolationist country and its eccentric ruler.

UPDATE: my old friend and quaffing partner Nicholas Whyte offers his own thoughts on the Latverian question, based on his own visits to the country and suchlike: Latveria and the EU

Spy School 11-2-2006

A new semester brings with it two new courses. First up there is one on Eastern European stuff. Not much has happened with this yet. A big thing with the lecturer is the idea that Eastern Europe is defined by its in-between-ness, lying between Western Europe and Russia. What's going on in Eastern Europe is then defined by whichever one of these two is in the ascendant (he seems to assume that Eastern Europe always goes on a winner-takes-all basis to dominant power). The interesting thing is that Eastern Europe has over the last hundred years undergone several major sets of changes en bloc, with all of the region's very different countries going through them more or less simultanaeously. This is a godsend for social scientists, as it allows all kind of exciting cross-cultural comparisons to be made.

And then there is a course on Latin America, focusing on the region's relationship with the wider world economy. | have no amazing insights from this yet, but it was interesting to look at various development statistics for countries in the region. It goes without saying that Latin America is a good bit poorer than some other parts of the world, but the spread of wealth between Latin American countries is quite striking. For example, Bolivia has a GNP per capita around 15% that of its neighbour Argentina. Another interesting thing was that Chile seemed to be the most successful country at reducing abject poverty among its people, but was also one of the country's with the most unequal income distributions. This suggests that maybe there is a trade-off between fighting inequality and fighting poverty, and that if you are serious about raising people from gross impoverishment then you have to accept that rich people will either stay rich or become relatively richer.

This is a truly disturbing prospect. I hate rich people - the very thought of them sitting in their mansions being waited on by servants while they drink the blood of working folk makes me gibber with incandescent rage. But I hate poverty more, and if the poorest of society can only be raised from abject poverty by letting the rich bastards live their lives of luxury, then that is a price I consider worth paying.