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Privatisation: The case of Slovakia

1993; Routledge; Volume: 17; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/0191-6599(93)90096-9

1873-541X

Iveta Radičová,

Post-Communist Economic and Political Transition

The change that took place in Slovakia in 1989 may be called a conservative revolution. In the citizens’ minds it collided with two dominant types of expectations: those concerning perestroika expectations and social expectations. The people who took part in these changes concentrated their attention, first of all, upon the dismantlement of the system. A system’s dismantlement presupposes interventions into its basic spheres: the political, economic, social and cultural ones. The question is which spheres of the system were at the center of attention of these actors and why? The priorities for the actors regarding the changes were, above all, the abolition of political and cultural oppression, and the introduction of liberalism in the sense of a liberation from the existing political and cultural system. These priorities can be explained from the types of social actors who were active before 1989 in Slovakia. They were environmentalists, members of Catholic movements, and the (not very developed) intellectual dissent, the “islands of positive deviation”. In Slovakia, in comparison with the other countries of the Eastern Bloc, the economic crisis was not as evident in everyday life as in Poland or the Soviet Union. The economy provided a relatively “decent” existence of people. One important element that covered to a certain extent the real depth of the economic crisis, was the existence of social networks, of a strongly developed alternative economy with its own market rules. Needs could be met by means of illegitimate redistribution, by the existence of “sitting on two chairs at the same time”, making use of the advantages of the first economy as a basis for building up the second, alternative economy. In addition social welfare provisions, like free health care and schools were part of the “tacit consent” with the existing power. The wide-spread existence of “sitting on two chairs” has a broader cultural context in terms of ethical normality. It was a normality of double morals, of living in two different worlds, of a pragmatic post-hoc rationalisation of the “tacit agreement” with the official ideology and those in power. The result of this agreement was an increasing corrosion of the system. The social differentiation depended above all, on one’s position within the social networks, either “nomenclature” or user-oriented ones. The position within the “nomenclature”, was crucial, but so was the type, orientation and extent of the alternative economy that one was involved in.