Criteria and prerequisites of consolidation

Five years after the collapse of the communist rule all countries under study have undergone considerable changes. Each of them experienced two peaceful national elections which entailed non-violent change or confirmation, respectively, of the governments; they have established parliaments, a competitive pluralist party system, administrative agencies under the control of the government, and independent courts. Private banks and the stock exchange are operating, basic institutions of social security provide their services; in none of them do we find major political forces which advocate the return to the old order, and none of them must be identified as a hybrid in which the new order is still heavily contaminated with elements of the old regime (Schmitter 1994). Yet, our analysis of the four countries under study provides a less straightforward answer to the question of whether the goal of the transition process – consolidated democratic institutions and the essential elements of a capitalist market economy – has been successfully accomplished by all of them. The gauge by which we measure success is the concept of consolidation as expounded in the first chapter,1 implicating such basic (though hard to individualize) pre-constitutional ingredients as a balance of conflict and consent, of particularism and common good orientation, and of self-interested competitiveness and trust.

Many observers of the transformation processes in CEE (including some of the authors of this book at the start of the project) were quite pessimistic about the ability and the chances of the post-communist societies to meet this standard and to establish a sustainable development democracy-cura-market economy (Elster 1990; Offe 1991).