[Discussion] Political Institutions of Southeastern Europe in Historical Comparative
Perspective
Sule Tarakcioglu
suletar@bilkent.edu.tr
Tue, 08 Mar 2005 11:10:53 -0800
*Captive States, Divided Societies: Political Institutions of
Southeastern Europe in Historical Comparative Perspective (2005-2007)*
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CALL FOR CONFERENCE PAPERS & PROJECT PARTICIPANTS
Project: Captive States, Divided Societies: Political Institutions of
Southeastern Europe in Historical Comparative Perspective (2005-2007)
Center for Applied Policy Research (Munich), Romanian Academic Society &
Romanian Institute for Recent History (Bucharest)
Project sponsored by the Volkswagen Foundation
Workshop: July 07-09, 2005, at the Romanian Black Sea coast
The Center for Applied Policy in Munich and the Romanian Academic
Society in Bucharest and partner institutions invite papers for the
first conference in the Volkswagen Stiftung sponsored project 'CAPTIVE
STATES, DIVIDED SOCIETIES' The workshop will take place at the Romanian
Black Sea Coast in the second weekend of July 2005. Papers are invited
which deal with the institutional history of post-Ottoman Southeastern
Europe. Only papers discussing more than one country and using a
comparative methodology will be considered. Proposals by two researchers
who plan to work together on one of the chapters in order to broaden the
comparative scope are also welcome. Travel and accommodation will be
covered for authors whose papers are accepted. Abstracts (2 pp.) should
include methodology, outline of subject and the countries covered from
the region and be sent together with a short bio to both project director=
s:
Wim van Meurs, Center for Applied Policy Research, Munich & Radboud
University Nijmegen: meurs@lrz.uni-muenchen.de
Andrei Pippidi, University of Bucharest & Institute for South-East
European Studies in Bucharest & editor of the "Revue des =E9tudes sud-est
europ=E9ennes/Journal of south-east european studies": Pippidi@sar.org.ro
Abstracts are expected by *March 31*. Applicants will be notified in Apri=
l.
The purpose of the workshop in July is twofold: firstly, to rethink,
flesh out and consolidate the conceptual framework. Secondly, to build a
team of twelve researchers/authors and five reviewers who will produce,
together with the project directors and assistants, in the three-year
project an innovative politico-historical textbook on Southeastern
Europe and a policy paper informed by the textbook research.
For more information, see the project website (web address provided
below) or contact the project assistants:
Ivan Biliarsky, Romanian Academic Society, Bucharest:
ivanbiliarsky@yahoo.co.uk
Edvin Pezo (e-mail address follows)
What we expect:
* Ph.D. (or equivalent) in history, political sciences or area
studies and preferable some years of additional research
experience in/on several Southeast European countries
* Commitment to a team-based interdisciplinary project for a
three-year period
* Institutional affiliation with a relevant academic institution
* Fluency in English and preferably working knowledge of one or more
regional languages
What we offer:
* A unique opportunity to broaden your research expertise in terms
of multidisciplinary approaches, by developing research competence
for a new country or a wider theme.
* The corresponding funding: an author's fee and a travel stipend
allowing for several research trips in and beyond the region
* An inspiring team of like-minded researchers and several team
meetings
* Opportunities to present research results to relevant audiences
(in academia and in policy-making) via the envisaged publications
and workshops/presentations.
Project Objectives
* To develop a better approach to interpreting the history of the
region, leading to a clearer understanding of the present, and an
attempt at forecasting the future, of a zone of great political,
strategic, economic and social interest for Europe
* To offer a survey of the current situation of institutional
development in the region ("rules of the game") relevant for the
present process of transformation and integration; current
institutions will be studied in their historical evolution,
continuity and discontinuity, with a focus on causes of the
current institutional patterns operating in the Balkans.
* To increase public awareness to the need of sustainable and
informed input of the European Union in the transformation of
Southeastern Europe, an area missing from the first wave of
enlargement, but likely to feature in the next ones.
* To create a sound basis for the development of policy advice in
order to provide practical guidance for decision-makers, planners
and designers of policies from or for the region.
Major studies dealing with post-communist transition and European
integration tend to either marginalize Southeastern Europe as a whole or
pay scant reference to historical legacies and peculiarities.
Conversely, area-studies handbooks and national or regional histories
tend to focus on national or regional path dependencies. The Balkans as
a historical region will have to be identified by its similarities and
dissimilarities to Europe as well as to Eastern Europe as a whole. Due
to the complexity of the region, a truly integrative textbook will have
to overcome a number of structural problems to bridge the gap between
historical perspective and current policy relevance as well as the
numerous gaps between individual and mutually exclusive national
perspectives and narratives.
Taking 2007 as a symbolic target date, the applicants envisage an
ambitious textbook project. The first prerequisite is the focus on
political institutions a strategic choice and a preference for a broad
regional perspective without striving for comprehensiveness of
representativeness. The concept of "political Institutions" is
intentionally broad and encompasses normative arrangements - both formal
and informal - that provide order and orientation to society and
politics. The authors for a thematic chapter are challenged to come up
with a theory-driven narrative informed by cases from different
centuries and states or subregions, but without the obligation to
include each state for the entire time span.
The second prerequisite is a functioning, experienced team of experts.
Apart from involving younger and more experienced scholars as well as
historians, sociologists, and political scientists, the project will
create and develop networks of institutions and experts to facilitate
individual authors' comparative research in other states or periods. The
networks should be driven by the common endeavor rather than by
institutional arrangements. Thus, apart from a broad regional expertise,
the authors and reviewers need to have demonstrated the capability to
work in a team. The incentive for individual authors is the possibility
to probe new aspects of a theme and to broaden the regional or
historical scope of the author's expertise. The project will provide the
resources for travel and, more importantly, local experts as
interlocutors, guides and commentators. Such an audacious strategic
choice combined with a lean, but effective setup seems to offer the best
prospects for innovative and challenging research.
Correspondingly, the team of authors, reviewers and editors will produce
a textbook on the past and present of political institutions in
Southeastern Europe. Apart from the academic textbook, however, the team
will also produce a booklet addressing the policy and media communities
dealing with Southeastern Europe. By 2007, the region will, most likely,
again be high on the European agenda (and Europe on the regional
agenda!) At that time, a synthesis that neither resigns to the allegedly
insurmountable legacies of the past nor offers optimistic generic
solutions to structural modernization deficits may be in high demand.
The institutionalist approach will highlight structural characteristics
and common traits of the region without precluding domestic and
international reform strategies today. Last, but not least, a research
network that has not been created on paper but emerged from a real
cooperative endeavor has the best changes of sustainability and growth.
With the support from the network, individual researchers and national
institutes might probe the national dimensions of the different themes
in the textbook further, providing younger scholars with alternative
perspectives to classic national history or generic transitology.
The papers should address one of the following 12 themes and will be
grouped in 3 sections at the July workshop:
1. The state
1. The captive state as the main institution of autocracy This
section examines the institution of 'autocracy' from Ataturk
to Milosevic. What accounts for this pattern of a state
permanently held captive by a person or group, be it a
military caste or an oligarchy? Beyond external conditions
favoring autocracy, how does autocracy work? What accounts
for, on one hand, the low resistance of these societies to
predatory elites, and, on the other, to the fight amongst
such elites as the main feature of politics? Once the
foreign environment becomes favorable to democracy, what are
the implications and legacies of the 'captive state'?
2. Center versus periphery. Constitutional arrangements and
informal practices Centralism is usually associated with
autocracy, but the con-federalism of former Yugoslavia was
also with some justification charged of being a 'subversive'
institution. Regardless the formal institutions, are there
any discernible patters of behavior that have emerged after
the region became independent from the Ottomans, and again
after 1989? In the end of day, what lessons from the Balkan
past are useful for the region's constitutional rethinking
in order to fit the European requirements?
3. The state as provider of law and order
The ineffectiveness of the rule of law is often denounced as
one of the main obstacles to economic and political
development in most countries of the region. Not only does
the weak rule of law deter much- needed foreign investment,
it also undermines efforts to build a meaningful
participatory political process and a clean administration
of both public and the private sector. Although many reforms
have been designed to strengthen the rule of law, they
mattered little, as they were implemented only to a limited
degree. Three legal traditions - Ottoman,
Austrian-Hungarian, and Communist - coexist due to regional
fragmentation. In some cases we find them in vertical
stratification, where Communism inheriting the old imperial
rule. The Habsburg legal state functioned quite well, and
scholars of the Ottoman Empire claim the same for the law of
Mahomet. What does then account for the poor state of the
rule of law in the Balkan states?
4. Particularistic institutions of governance. The role of
bureaucracies
To a greater or lesser extent, most parts of the
Southeastern European region have a history of governance
that has been more autocratic and 'corrupt' than its Western
counterpart. Balkan history suggests an antagonistic pattern
(the state versus the citizens, the urban settlements
against the rural background). Informal networking, 'gifts'
and bribes traditionally helped to attenuate the excesses of
exploitation and repression. The widespread administrative
and political corruption is often attributed to historical
factors. The underlying assumption is that a specific
'Balkan' culture exists which perverts any formal
institutions into practices of particularism, such as
cronyism or patrimonialism. The main question the section
will address is to what extent the considerable delay in
achieving performing administrations and functional market
economies of many Balkan states is due to the existence of
strong particularistic practices, which make the
administrators part of a 'predatory elite' thriving on state
capture instead on governing for the public interest. Did
this model originate before or during Communist times, and
how was it developed and transformed during transition to
fit the needs of 'negative' social capital groups? What is
the role of particularism as source of social exclusion,
setting borders between those who enriched during
transition, benefiting from freedom, and those who, due to
their higher distance from the centers of power have only
grown more dependent and parochial?
5. Foreign intervention and role models - shaping institutional
development in the Balkans
This section looks at the foreign influence on
state-building. The pattern of patronage, which used to be
so successfully present in the early modern societies of the
region and which remains even today an easily recognizable
feature of Balkan politics, can also be applied to the
relations between the Great Powers and the recently emerged
nation-states or statelets since the second half of the 19th
century. Even the present policy of some European states
towards the Balkans bears the mark of past allegiances and
favouritisms. Each intervention of the West in the Balkans,
on the other side, ends up in accusations of 'taking sides',
of cultural bias and exclusion. What does the experience of
intervention in state building in the Balkans teach us on
the risks and challenges of such attempts? What of this
large past experience is relevant for the European task of
assisting the present state and region building?
6. The role of the state in sustainable development
The importance attributed to dependence theories in
explaining the poor economic performance of the Balkans,
both by domestic and foreign scholars has led to an
underestimation of the role the state plays in fostering
economic development. Why does the performance of Balkan
states vary so greatly in terms of economic performance? Why
do some states fail in imposing and preserving an economical
order, hindering the emergence of sustainable development,
while others -the case of Slovenia- manage to reach levels
comparable to Central Europe? What has been proved
historically as the greatest challenge of the Southeastern
European states in bringing about the development of their
societies? All other things being equal, how much and in
what way has the state mattered for economic performance in
Southeastern Europe, and what lessons can we learn from this
experience? Which post-Ottoman institutions -for instance
property or taxation- mattered more for development and in
what way?
2. Political society
1. Formal and informal institutions of pluralism
Multiparty democracy has traditionally been severely limited
in the region by autocratic monarchs or military leaders,
populist or radical ideologies, foreign sponsoring of
parties and politicians. Nowadays, with the exception of
Greece, durable party systems struggle to emerge again, but
the collapse of the Turkish political establishment in the
2002 elections, as well as the victory of King Simeon party
in the Bulgarian ones show how far the target still is. What
accounts for the difficulty to build stable and coherent
party systems in the Balkans? Why do political elites,
regardless of their party of origin face so often problems
of legitimacy?
2. Challenges to the 'official' order: the role of subversive
political organizations In recent times subversive or
underground organizations which were so important in the
Balkans past played an important role again. Why do these
organizations prove able of better mobilization capacity
than formal, transparent ones? What social roles do they
fulfil and will this pattern change in the future?
3. The marginal and the excluded. Political destinies of
minorities and women
What was the legal framework and the practice concerning
political rights of the distinct, hard to assimilate ethnic
groups, like Roma (everywhere), Vlachs (in Serbia, Croatia
and Greece), Albanians (in former Yugoslavia), Greeks (in
Albania), and what of the current practice is due to a
certain tradition of regulating minority rights? The
enfranchisement of women is also to be taken into account,
as it was implemented in different conditions in Christian
or Moslem societies. The Western perception of Southeastern
backwardness was reinforced by the marginalization of social
or gender categories within the Balkan national communities.
Under the Communist regime, the label of modernization
formally covered (without being able to hide) the broad
differences and the internal tensions.
3. Civil society
1. Political illusions and delusions of the Balkan intelligentsi=
a
The serious dysfunctions provoked by the limited access of
graduates to professional careers became, after WW I, when
the Universities produced a much greater number of
postulants than the state jobs could nourish, a reason for
the intellectuals to criticize the structure of the society.
These criticisms rose to prominence as reactions to
modernization, i.e. Westernization. In public debates, the
attitude to the East vs. West confrontation served, and
still serves, as a mark to distinguish the camps. While some
thinkers deplored the backwardness of Balkan countries, some
others took pride in the originality of an 'organic'
development and denied the necessity of modernizing their
society at a quicker pace. Outside the state, radical
ideologies thrived. What of these legacies still matter today=
?
2. The Ruler and the Patriarch: the Church between state and
society
Does the Church play a significant role in explaining
state-society relations in these predominantly Orthodox and
Moslem countries? All other things being equal, does it
matter that a country is Catholic, Orthodox or Moslem in
Southeastern Europe in terms of its current political regime
and culture?
3. The institution of public opinion
The status of the press in Balkan countries has always been
ambiguous. Periods (generally short) of complete liberty
alternated, since the 19th century, with a vigilant
censorship over the news.. Hugh Seton Watson quoted often
the east European media as a symptom of 'civilizational
underdevelopment' of these societies. Freedom of media often
helped promote hate-speech, corruption and intolerance. For
the first time we plan to make an analysis going further
beyond formal aspects of media freedom, focusing on the role
of public opinion in general in the democratization of
Southeastern European societies. What formal and informal
arrangements- such as ownership of the media- seem to be
associated with a free and democratic press and where do
these arrangements come from themselves?
Edvin Pezo
Center for Applied Policy Research, Munich
Email: pezo@lrz.uni-muenchen.de <mailto:pezo@lrz.uni-muenchen.de>
Visit the website at
http://www.cap-lmu.de/english/projects/europe/captivestates/