Interview with Valerie Bunce, Part 2
This is the second part of my interview with Valerie Bunce. You can find the first part here and the third part here.
PART 2: Postcommunism
The End of Communism
Q: I wanted to take a slight detour here to talk about the impact of the fall of communism on your research trajectory. In your writing, you have pushed back on the idea that work on communism was rendered irrelevant by 1989 and I want to talk about that in a moment. But I first wanted to ask how the changes affected you personally and professionally. Did you end up dropping ongoing projects? Rethinking your career? Engaging with events? Do you view your career as two separate parts or does it all seem of a piece?
Bunce: It was really a fabulous experience. I was very attached to the opposition in Eastern Europe, and I was getting so bored with Brezhnev. It was just tedious. I like things to be happening, and I was much more prepared for regime change than a lot of people because I was a comparativist. I actually knew the literature on transitions to democracy, for example. One reason was that I was always inventing new courses to teach, thereby using courses to investigate new questions and new bodies of research.
It's funny. I was just working on a small project today. I'm doing a talk about transitions to dictatorship for a cluster of the alumni classes at Cornell, and I was remembering my interview in the fall of 1989 at Cornell. I entitled my job talk (which was given after the major political shifts took place in Poland and Hungary, but before communism collapsed in East Germany and then other countries in the region), “Transitions to Democracy in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.” When I gave that talk at Cornell in 1989, the audience was shocked. They were saying: “Oh my God! Oh my God, that's crazy. What are you talking about - democracy in the Soviet bloc?”
Interestingly enough, I got the same reaction when I gave my talk to the Cornell alumni thirty-six years later about transitions to dictatorship (the talk took place about three weeks after the 2024 Presidential election). I began this talk by saying: “We are transitioning to dictatorship in the U.S.” People were stunned. They did their versions of “Oh my God! Oh my God!”
There is a clear lesson here. Whatever its direction, regime change is a hard concept for ordinary citizens and academics to grasp (and apparently, most politicians as well). I was sticking my neck out in 1989 and 2024; people were uncomfortable with that; and I appeared to be right as regime change began to take hold. Of course, I am happy that I was right in 1989 and scared that I will be right again in 2025.
But getting back to the fall of communism. It was so exciting. I went right away to Poland for the June 1989 elections, where Solidarity did better than anyone could possibly expect. I also went to Yugoslavia on the same trip (depressing - everywhere I looked, I saw a prelude to secession and war) and Hungary. Later I went to Hungary for their first competitive elections and, subsequently, to other countries. Every trip, every development from 1989-1992 especially, was a fascinating, inspiring, surprising, energizing and often scary.
Q: Your career studying the postcommunist system has been very successful. But it is difficult for me to think of other scholars who produced major works both pre- and post-1989. What made you different? Or is my premise mistaken?
Bunce: I think you're right. I think the difference was that I was happy to leave communism and move on to post-communism. I always like to think about what’s next. In this case, the next was an unusually big deal. I “did” communism and when it was gone, I thought cool, something new to do. And it was very, very exciting, and of course because I knew the opposition so well, I was suddenly quite well connected with the government side of it. But mainly I was just curious as hell. I thought, wow, this is really something.
A lot of scholars retired or in effect retired when communism collapsed. Some of them stayed around, hoping in a way that postcommunism wouldn’t be so “post,” so that they could continue to rely on their old skillset. Tim Colton, who received his doctorate about the same time that I did, was more like me. He made a smooth and interesting transition. He got into public opinion. And he didn't look back. There were others. Mark Beissinger switched his interests to nationalism and social movements. I think the three of us thought that an unprecedented opportunity had opened up before us. We had hit the intellectual jackpot. So many things to analyze, so little time (especially since we needed to retrain ourselves, not just analyze events).
Q: It seems like the reason you could do it was that you were interested in comparative politics as well and that gave you some of the concepts and tools, and you could start to apply them. At least that sounded like your answer and maybe some of the others weren't as grounded.
Bunce: They weren't. They also tended to be single country people. They weren't interested in comparative analysis. And yet, if you do transitions to democracy, it's hard not to be a comparativist. It's funny because I read Dankwart Rustow when it came out twenty years before the transition. I liked the way he thought about democracy - though his views on “settling the national question” did not fare very well. Modernization theory was lurking in the wings.
Q: You begin your book Subversive Institutions, which we’ll talk about soon, with the claims that knowledge of communism has been considered deficient (because it didn’t predict the fall) and irrelevant (because we are in a new era). You challenge both of those claims. I wanted to ask more about those issues. What do you consider some of the successes of scholars of communism? I don’t think many of them are read much today. Do you think some of this work should be resurrected?
Bunce: It's a funny thing, most of the literature on dictatorship leaves them out. Obviously, the academy gets tired of things. Issues and places are in, issues and places are out. But communism is important, and it did exit the scholarly agenda (with some exceptions, such as work on China, Cuba, Vietnam). Scholars outside of the field didn't want to think about those regimes, talk about them, employ them in their analyses. Their geography of authoritarianism skipped over one-fifth of the world’s land mass. The Soviet bloc became flyover country. Sometimes scholars would pay a bit of attention to one-party states, saying something to effect that - “oh, that's a different kind of dictatorship. “But I think dictatorships are dictatorships. and they run into the same dilemmas. Communist dictatorships, moreover, provide some helpful analytical contrasts - for instance, civilian control over the military, ambitious developmental projects, the fusion of politics and economics, ethnofederalism and dictatorships with ideological foundations. Talk about being different from, say, competitive authoritarian regimes!
Q: Are there works that you think should be resurrected, that we should be assigning in grad classes. This is my own curiosity.
Bunce: There have been some wonderful pieces. One is an article by Viktor Zaslavsky and Robert Brym, “The Functions of Elections in the USSR.” When I was co-teaching a course on authoritarianism, I assigned it. My colleague, who was very drawn to rational choice and who worked on the Middle East, fell in love with this article. I also like Stephen Kotkin’s book on Magnitigorsk - the excitement and chaos of building a brand new (and never before tried) system. My Hungarian colleague, Mária Csanádi, had a wonderful piece on the fall of communism, “Diary of Decline.” She details the end of communism in one party headquarters that involved, for example, fights over a file cabinet. Finally, you cannot go wrong with Alec Nove and Archie Brown, the latter on Soviet political leaders.
Q: You say in Subversive Institutions that the old guard mostly got the old regime right. But there were some relatively fierce debates at the time, partially because of the political issues at stake. The best known is probably between the totalitarian approach and the revisionists. How do you think about the field in that period? Were there more divisions or commonalities? And what were the key divisions and commonalities?
Bunce: We didn't have many commonalities. We did have divisions, and part of the divisions really had to do with how you assembled the meagre data you had and put your distinct imprint on it. I'll be cynical about it. We had a model a week. A lot of the totalitarian debates had to do with ideal types, mixing it up with empirically referenced kinds of modeling. And so everybody said - “But that’s not real!”, but of course it was never meant to be. We were self-indulgent, I would say. And every once in a while someone like T.H. Rigby would come up with this huge data on variations over time in Communist Party membership and recruitment drives, and that was like a breath of fresh air, even though for those of you reading this interview it sounds boring. It was a breath of fresh air, because it wasn't about these big debates, about these macro questions that we would never be able to resolve. Then there was work that produced trivial, but fascinating findings. I am thinking of R.V. Daniels, who once published something about how everyone whom Stalin killed in the 1934 Central Committee was taller than Stalin. I am also thinking about Jerry Hough’s comment that one of the clues about Gorbachev, before he became First Secretary, was that he had Danish modern furniture in his office. That was an eye-opener! Soviet offices always had heavy, Victorian furniture. They were depressing; apparently, Gorbachev’s office was cool.
Transitology
Q: How optimistic about the region did you feel in 1989 and the early 1990s? On the one hand, many felt triumphalist, most famously Francis Fukuyama. But scholars of the region like Ken Jowitt seemed much more pessimistic. Where did you fit on that continuum?
Bunce: I was optimistic, and I think that was because I was well connected to Hungary and Poland. But I thought right away that there would be a hell of a lot of variation in what happened (thinking more of variation across countries, rather than across time), because of the spade work that was done or not done under communism. The Russian case loomed large. The Baltic States, I wasn't sure about them either. But I had a notion, and I think a lot of Eastern Europeanists did, about which countries were more likely to get through this transition versus ones which would have a much harder time. But there were, of course, some surprising cases, such as Kyrgyzstan. Where did that come from?
Let me just add one point about Fukuyama. The end of history did not necessarily mean that democracy would triumph and achieve a global monopoly. What he did mean is that the structure of competition among philosophies and regime options would change, because the “main alternative” was no longer a viable option. I agree with him. What we have seen is new forms of authoritarianism and the rise of right-wing populism - that is, new challengers to democracy to take the place of communism.
Q: One of your articles that I have cited a number of times is your piece with Mária Csanádi on uncertainty in the transition. There you wrote that “fluidity is the essential characteristic of postcommunism.” Looking back on that early period, do you still see a lot of contingency or do the results seem more inevitable with time? Are there “what ifs?” - different choices or paths - that you still think about?
Bunce: I do see a lot of contingency, which is characteristic of big change and the direction it goes. The normal model - incremental change - is less shaped, I would argue, by contingency. Mária Csanádi is a very interesting example of innovative scholarship that came out of the region. She influenced me a lot as the transitions unfolded, in part because of her family story. Her father was a very important person in the Communist Party and he was jailed in the early 1950s, as was her mother. They were both very idealistic, very committed Communists. They were in Switzerland during the war. What's interesting is that her father got out of jail in 1956., as did her mother - but neither one of them knew for awhile that the other one was alive, let alone out of jail. This story is leading up to uncertainty. Mária’s father was very close to Kádár, Kádár was a family friend actually, and Mária’s father didn't want to hang around when the ugly stuff happened after 1956. He didn't want to be part of the purge that would clear the decks in effect for Kadar’s soft brand of state socialism. He went off to Brazil to be an industrial spy. He was an engineer by training. Mária spent a lot of her early years in Brazil. Most of her schooling was in Brazil. When she came back to Hungary, let's say 1964, something like that, she felt she was going to a foreign country. She had no background in Hungarian history or culture.
To make a long story short, in 1990 they began changing the names of streets and buildings back to the pre-communist originals. She couldn't find anything. She had no coordinates when she was given directions. Her experience of being lost in her own country without much of a compass captured the idea of postcommunist uncertainty. I once said to her, “Let's go to a movie.” She said, we can't. I can't figure out where they are playing, because they are using the historical names of the streets and the movie theaters. So, we would go to a movie theater that we knew existed and hope that there was a film that we wanted to see. Another example: when we walked down a street , Maria would often point to a building and say, “Do you remember that used to be that shoe store?” And I said, “Yeah,” and she said with a sad sigh, “It's gone.” And I said, “That's capitalism. It's restless. Marx told us that.” She hated that because the store was always there. It was a permanent fixture in her mind. A lot of people in the region felt that way, and I spent a lot of time with Hungarians during the early stage of the transition. I was struck by how hard it was for them. It was like someone who'd been in a camp, in prison for years, finally gets out and feels overwhelmed. This situation - especially not knowing what was next - is well-captured by Jerzy Andrzejewski in his book, Ashes and Diamonds - a novel about Poland at the end of World War II.
Q: You got into a fairly prominent debate with Philippe Schmitter and Terry Karl in the 1990s. They wrote a provocative piece critical of area studies scholars and argued that Eastern Europeanists should engage in more comparisons. You pushed back on that, both defending area studies and pointing out ways that larger comparisons could go wrong. How do you look back on that debate? Was it productive? What came out of it? Did it get personal?
Bunce: It was personal. I really disliked Schmitter at that time - though my relations with him eventually improved. I was on a panel with him once and he kept speaking in French without translating. So, I spoke in Russian without translating when I was responding to him, and he was so thick that he didn't get that I was making fun of him. I have a button about arrogant men, and he was the quintessential example. But the conflict had an intellectual/psychological foundation as well - the costs of judging without knowing. You see that all the time now in social media. It's a big problem. People rush to judgment. I think it was important to have that debate, to say, “You know, you should know some things before you rush to judgment. You don't even know what the field is like or the literature on the region and its politics. You need to educate yourself about places and the people who study them.” The other thing is that big events are hard to predict, except in retrospect. And that's an important thing. A certain amount of modesty is required when you're a social scientist, because we don't have great batting averages with regard to anticipating sudden, large-scale change. I was arguing in support of modesty - certainly one of the most underrated qualities in the academy.
Q: Your work also challenged some of the truths that came out of the transitology approach, most prominently that the opposition needs to go slow and moderate and compromise. You argued that going for the throat was the more effective tactic. Similarly, there was a claim that the type of transition mattered. How do you think of transitology today? Your later book returned to it in some ways.
Bunce: I liked the earliest work on it, which is to say, the whole idea of the uncertainty of the transition itself. I buy into that. I do. But when they started getting into consolidation, announcing consolidation at a certain point and so on, I had a big problem with that, and I still do for obvious reasons because we've watched what has happened in the postcommunist region and in the U.S. This mindset - a rigid understanding of when transitions start and when they are finished - is a big problem. As I said earlier, it is a hangover from the stages of development understanding of political, economic and social change. If my colleague, Ken Roberts were here, he would say - there are always democratic and authoritarian elements/forces in every democracy and every authoritarian regime. Sometimes one or the other is mobilized (often, ironically, by advances made by the other side), and the dominant force weakens in the face of powerful opposition. Democracy doesn’t get settled any more than authoritarianism gets settled. I also think that transitologists were very weak on civil society. They made everything about a bargaining process between regime and opposition. And they didn't give enough attention to all the spade work that went on for decades. There wasn't this understanding of the complex process of forming a large and effective opposition.
Will the Democrats save us in the United States? I don't think so, but the larger opposition to Trump, especially those that suffer the consequences of his radical policies, might. Trump reminds us about the importance of uncertainty, about looking at winners and losers, and about coming to the grips with the fact that every regime, authoritarian and democratic, is fragile. Transitional outcomes are provisional.
Q: You pointed out ways that a comparison of transitions in Eastern Europe and Latin America faced significant hazards because of differences in the international environment, the nature of the authoritarian regime, historical legacies, and diffusion processes among others. Juan Linz and Al Stepan came along soon after with a large book that tried to include all of these factors in a larger conceptualization. Do you think they succeeded where the transitologists did not?
Bunce: I like people sticking their necks out. I think the problem for me has been that too many academics are drawn to the idea of owning the region they work on. There's a certain amount of prejudice against outsiders who do not know enough. We have to balance that bias against the problem that something can be too different to be compared. Linz and Stepan both spent a lot of energy on the Spanish transition, which seemed to have been everybody's favorite transition. That was a funny transition because Franco just lasted way too long. Everything was changing around him, and it was just a matter of him finally popping off. Not every case has that very peculiar characteristic. By the same token Spain had the big burden of the military, which obviously Communist regimes for the most part didn't have. Yugoslavia had it to some degree, but the others didn't. There are some things that almost put you in a different category. Think about the old stuff on literacy. I'm sorry, but literacy was a very different story for all of us who worked on Communist regimes because everyone was literate. It didn't differentiate very well. But it could in Latin America. I'm not against big comparisons or the cross-regional ones at all. I started my career as a cross regional comparativist. It is possible, for example, that the way transition plays out is in fact strongly affected by the political position of the military.
Q: They put so much into it in the end. They put the military in there. They put civil society. They put the old regime. That's what worried me. It was like Talcott Parsons, this huge scheme where you could fit everything but where did it get you.
Bunce: I agree. Good analyses - analyses that are useful in the sense of identifying key factors, drawing conclusions and encouraging others to challenge their arguments - have to be based on a limited number of factors. Choices need to be made. Clarity is essential.
Subversive Institutions
Q: Your work on postcommunism initially culminated in your magisterial book Subversive Institutions where you took on many of the key questions of the time - why the regimes collapsed, why some states collapsed, and why some of these collapses were violent. How did that project come together?
Bunce: It came together long before it was written. It came together when I wrote “The Empire Strikes Back” because that was really about the unexpected costs, especially over the longer haul, of political-economic monopoly. Soviet leaders thought they were getting X from control over Eastern Europe, and they went to a lot of trouble to guarantee those benefits, but they got Z instead. And it was because of the very way the system was built. It generated growing, negative externalities. I understood that dynamic internationally (the Soviet bloc) before I understood it domestically - and the two were, of course, closely related.
Q: One of the striking arguments in this book is that communism created solidaristic publics and divided elites and this led to its downfall. This always struck me as counterintuitive. The stereotypical view of communism is that it was destructive of civil society and led by disciplined parties. How do you square those two views?
Bunce: I think that view of Communism - as a system that empowered elites and divided and demobilized publics - was embraced far more by specialists on the Soviet Union than specialists on Eastern and Central Europe. Eastern Europeanists were much more sensitive to the limitations, the problems, the contradictions of the communist experiment. As a part Eastern Europeanist, their views also affected me. I was always wearing those two hats. The Soviet hat had one story - state socialism was forever - and the Eastern European hat said - don’t bet on it. It was partly a question of what each group hoped to be true, but it was also a question of differences in access to society and opposition and differences in what was before your very eyes.
But let me also mention that a time-series view of these systems demonstrated time and again - and every specialist saw this, whatever their country of specialization - that communism was effective at doing some things (tackling the problem of literacy, building a nineteenth century industrial economy in a hurry, for example) and ineffective at other things (producing and distributing decent consumer goods, for instance). The easy answer was - the elite just could not carry out needed reforms. But why was that? My answer was that it was systemic. The costs of monopoly grew, not just because tasks changed, but also because of its consequences for the power of elites and the power of publics. For example, a discussion among publics about who was responsible for shortages lasted about one minute. Everybody agreed - it was the party. Eastern Europe provided a lot of evidence of the oddly redistributive nature of power in communist dictatorships (especially Poland). The same dynamics were going on in the Soviet Union, but it was more hidden.
Q: Your book argues that communist institutions were subversive. Barbara Geddes has written about the stability of different forms of authoritarianism and argues that single-party regimes tend to be among the most stable types. How would you think of the relative stability (or subversiveness) of communist regimes compared to other types like military or personalist dictatorships?
Bunce: Anytime you have ideology and organization, you're going to be more durable than if you have neither. I think that's the real issue. Communist regimes are relatively durable because they have ideology and organization. But they are also not forever. They generate costs and tensions over time. It's just different kinds of costs and tensions in different kinds of regimes, and how quickly they come to fruition, how quickly they undermine the regime itself. Communist regimes accomplish a lot in their early years, because they are very good on concentrating resources and limiting corruption. The same is not true of other dictatorships. They rot faster.
As a democracy, the United States has been incredibly durable - though one can argue that democracy in the U.S. only lasted from 1965 (with the passage of the Voting Rights Act) to 2025.
But returning to the Soviet Union: in Svetlana Alexievich’s book about how citizens of Russia remembered communism, there is ample evidence that people found many reasons, some very surprising, to be attached to the communist system. My favorite one was the fellow who said he spent the best years of his life in the camps. He said: “The most interesting people were in the camps.” But generationally speaking, it became harder and harder to feel proud of what was accomplished for the simple reason that gain scores declined over time.
Q: One thing that I had trouble figuring out was who you were arguing against in this book. Which explanations of the collapse of the regime and of states did you think were lacking? Was it a version of modernization theory? Was it the transitology approach?
Bunce: It was a two-part argument. I agreed with institutionalists that institutions matter, but I countered that how they matter - and the degree to which they support the survival of the system - changes over time. I am thinking here of the U.S. in the era of Trump. Yes, the institutions will save us, and, yes, the institutions are a big reason why we are in trouble.
When I first started thinking about the book, I did not think about the breakup of states. That was not happening at that point. I had a hard time imagining such a situation. It was a weakness coming out of my interest in class. This is a continuing problem with many leftists I know. They have a tough time figuring out what to do with national and identity questions. Then I was in Yugoslavia throughout the 1980s, and I watched the state, the League of Communists, and the economy disassemble, virtually in unison. Ethnofederalism hit me in the face, and I began to see how domestic institutions and administrative boundaries within states were like the institutions and national boundaries that defined the Soviet bloc. It all came together, thanks to the tragedy unfolding in Yugoslavia, and that explains why the book took so long. Ethnofederalism was the missing piece.
On the national issue, I was arguing against explanations about conflict based on ancient hatreds.
Q: It is interesting that your first book emphasized actors and agency, while your second one was more structural. Did you feel a tension between them?
Bunce: Yes, I changed my mind - sort of. I see institutions as setting the table and actors/agency as pulling up their chairs. It took me a long time to put those elements together. My Michigan training was good at the latter, but deficient in the former. Expanding my interests into the field of political economy in the late 1970s made a huge difference in how I thought about politics.
Q: Do you take any policy implications away from the Subversive Institutions book? We’ll talk later about your work with Sharon Wolchik on Defeating Authoritarian Leaders, but do you think this book has any direct implications? I was thinking of China here and whether their regime learned from the conclusions you drew (whether directly or independently) and made their institutions less subversive.
Bunce: Chinese scholars were, of course, very interested in the book. They were lucky because they saw the movie before they had to act - that is, the fall of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Their institutions, I would suggest, were not as old; they were not an ethnofederation; and the CCP was far more willing to purge rebels and iconoclasts than the post-Stalin Soviet leadership. China also had another advantage. They knew the costs of great reforms from above (thinking of the Maoist reforms) and agreed - not again. But is that what you mean when you ask about the policy implications of the book?
Q: I mean which institutions are subversive and not subversive, and how you avoid collapse.
Bunce: One obvious implication: if multinational states are interested in survival, they should stay away from ethnofederalism. It creates proto states; generates corruption; and prevents the development of civic-based definitions of political community.
Q: It’s interesting that Arend Lijphart’s consociationalism is ethnofederalism, at least part of it.
Bunce: Consociationalism is a bad idea. It's odd that the people that really pushed it, Lijphart and so on, did not make the distinction between religious versus ethnic and ethno-linguistic differences as the basis for defining the internal geographical/ administrative boundaries of the state. I think it's fair to say that Belgium would not be a state still, especially given the inherent instability of a two-part state structure, if there were no European Union. Why go to the trouble of splitting if your key relationship is with the EU, not with the other part of your state?
It's always hard to manage ethno-linguistic and religious differences, particularly if they are geographically concentrated and correlate with economic and social characteristics. States in this situation will always have some bad years and some good years, as Canada, for example, reminds us. But locking in these distinctions discourages commonalities that cross these divides, encourages corruption within units, and creates incentives for other cleavages to play the same game - the costs are very high, whether we are talking about ethnofederalism or consociationalism.
Q: Branko Milanovic has argued that the postcommunist transitions were not really about democracy or even economics. They were always about national liberation and the nationalism we see today was always at the core of these regimes. How much would you agree with that argument? You certainly recognized the importance of nationalism in your book.
Bunce: I think it goes too far. I think the national issue is important, especially for states that developed national identity prior to the establishment of the state. At the same time, I think that we probably overstate the degree to which democracy is the issue, the only issue on the table, because it isn't. Nationalism was a way to get there, nationalism provided resources for making the journey. But what sense does Milanovic’s argument make for, say, Kazakhstan? What sense does it make for Uzbekistan? What sense does his argument make for Azerbaijan? It works better for the Baltic states, but what about Belarus? It is a very complicated story with Ukraine, as you know. The role of nationalism, in short, was over-simplified in some cases (Ukraine) and overstated in many others. Just take the fifteen post-Soviet cases. In the majority of them nationalism was not a very powerful explanatory factor. I know that a lot of people, when they privilege nation and nationalism in their stories of transition are thinking of Poland. But how representative is that case?
Q: You have argued that the concept of revolution is important for thinking about changes in the region. There were some back in the 1990s who disliked applying this concept. They argued that what happened was more a restoration of the past or an imitation of the West - i.e., that there was nothing really revolutionary. Do you think there was something genuinely new in these changes?
Bunce: I think it was revolutionary. It was a different kind, but it was revolutionary. We used to have definitions of revolution in which you had to have a violent break with the past. If that's your definition of revolution, then it doesn't work very well. And the cases where we had violence were not revolutionary. In fact, the violence spoke to resistance to change. Think here of developments in Yugoslavia and Romania. If anything, the less violence, the more revolutionary the consequences. But revolutionary has other meanings. It can refer to regime change taking place in a very short period of time, and it can refer to processes that involve ending a regime and, more broadly, destroying the old order. The destruction of the old order is never complete, as the French Revolution reminds us. I think analysts have often exaggerated how sharp the break is with the past in most revolutions, and I'm not convinced that violence is a necessary condition. If consequences are the key measure or the political distance traveled in a short period of time, then the transition from communism to democracy was a revolutionary process.
Economic Reform
Q: Economic reform wasn’t your main field of interest, but you wrote several influential articles on the subject. The big debate early in the transition was about shock therapy versus gradualism. What did you think of that debate at the time and now later? Were you a supporter of either side at the time?
Bunce: At the time I was spending a lot of time in Poland, and I knew the Balcerowicz family. I was really a fan of shock therapy. I think that a clear break with communist economic structure and processes was really important. I think what Leszek Balcerowicz and the people around him did was the right way to go. But Poland had an unusual situation that made shock therapy an unusually good approach to transitioning to capitalism. The government had enormous social support. I remember saying to a Polish friend, “What do you think about these high prices and extreme shortages? It must be traumatic.” He said, “But we're the ones that are doing it. That's all I care about. It isn't a regime we don’t support doing it to us.” Polish nationalism was so important in making shock therapy work. But you couldn't count on that in a lot of places. Obviously in Russia you couldn't count on it at all because it was a much more divided society, a much more confused identity (are we Soviets? Are we Russians?) and a much more complicated economy. I don't think my view is that shock therapy is for everyone. But I do think that Russia would have been in better shape had it, for whatever reasons, been able to sustain shock therapy, which it did not and, for that matter, could not. It got the worst of all possible worlds. To blame shock therapy for what went wrong in Russia is, I think, wrong. It wasn't sustained. The result was that the winners in Russia’s truncated version of shock therapy had strong interests in maintaining the halfway house approach to economic reform, as Joel Hellman aptly argued.
Q: I see your contribution to the political economy of transition as recognizing that market reforms and democracy were tied together and that this overturned the conventional wisdom (drawn mostly from Latin America) which was that reforms were so unpopular that they required concentrated executive power. Do you think that the conclusion of compatibility holds up or was itself determined by other factors? You mention in one piece that the key factor was whether the past produced a consensus about the successor regime. Is this again a case of the communist past being critical?
Bunce: I think that a stable democracy with significant popular support creates a wellspring of resources available for building democracy and capitalism. It lengthens the political and economic horizons of the public. It makes for a patient public. When I look back, I think you could take a position on shock therapy in Poland, but could you take that position in other places? In the Baltics you could. Hungary was always a good deal more complicated because the communist regime had to some extent blurred the distinction between regime and opposition, communism and capitalism. You also had a lot more integration with the West in Hungary, so shock therapy was less necessary. In these ways, I would agree. The communist and in Poland pre-communist past were critical.
Q: I read those David Stark and Laszlo Bruszt pieces about Hungary that described a confusing system.
Bunce: The problem is the structure of the opposition wasn't helpful. The Free Democrats were divided on economic issues because many of them had positions in the old order. What you had essentially was the victory in 1990 of a rather incoherent group of people insofar as their interests in the new order were concerned. This ruralization of politics took place first in Hungary and from the get-go. The Democratic Forum formed the first government, and no one could figure out what to do about that. You didn't have a broad coming together like Solidarity. Again, Poland was rare because it had all the building blocks of a united opposition that almost no country has. Hungary had a split opposition. It was much more differentiated than its Polish counterparts.
Q: In one article, you make the point that few specialists on the region were surprised by the relative economic (and perhaps democratic) success of countries in the region. What theories would that confirm? Would it send us back to some kind of modernization theory? Political culture?
Bunce: The key issue for me was variation across the region in the extent to which the last years of Communism contributed building blocks to a rise of a more stable political order and a broad ideological consensus around democracy and capitalism. It just so happened that Hungary had a reaction to 1956 that puts key pieces in place - in particular, the political economy of Kádárism, beginning in the mid-1960s. Modernization theory says that if you have certain variables in place, like literacy and urbanization, you're golden. But I'm also talking about specifics of how hardline the communist regime was. How developed the opposition was. Whether there had been sustainable market reforms. A variety of things. Some of those things are specific to the communist experience as opposed to modernization theory. But let's just take one. How ready was the opposition to govern? How big was it? How united was it? How much public support did it have? Just on that basis you would do a good job of predicting which countries did better or worse in the first decade and one-half of transition. But of course you would not have been very successful in ordering transition “outcomes” in the region today. But then: we are now thirty-six years after the collapse of communism. Social scientists aren’t that good at forecasting, especially that far ahead.
Q: How do you see Western influence on the economic side of the transition - people like Jeff Sachs (disregarding his current views) and the IMF? Was the advice of Westerners beneficial, counterproductive, or less influential than other factors?
Bunce: I didn't mind him as much as some people did because I don't think he was so wrong. But there was a tendency of these “experts” to fly in and fly out and that bothered a lot of people. The question really got down to this, and I think it's an important question: how much did you have to know about the way state socialist economies worked to provide advice about the transition to capitalism and generate a reasonable estimate about its costs and benefits. A lot of those outsiders like Sachs didn't really know as much as they should have. On the other hand, I really agree with their point that you have to make changes quickly to get good information into the economy before it can even begin to work well. I think that's exactly right because I saw what happened when you had bad information.
Q: Let me put it another way. Do you think the Western advisors were influential? Or do you think these were mostly domestic programs?
Bunce: I don't think they were that influential because these countries had plenty of excellent local economists and sociologists. What the Western guys - the Poles liked to call them the Marriott brigade - did was to legitimate and empower a group of younger economists, such as Leszek Balcerowicz. They had the training, the language, and the knowledge of how communist economies worked to carry out ambitious and, let’s face it, unprecedented reforms. Obviously, János Kornai was important to all that. In Poland, Hungary, even Russia, there were a lot of first-rate economists who were grounded in economic reform and neoclassical economics. It wasn’t like, “Oh my God, they're coming and helping us and telling us what to do, and we'll follow their orders.” They were already ready to go, and the issue was that they were waiting for the opportunity. With Balcerowicz, the problem for him was he was pretty strict believer in the neoclassical model, but no one really quite knew what would happen if you made your currency convertible overnight, sold off state assets, and withdrew state subsidies (but not for everything). This was a very different situation than what you saw in other debt-burdened economies.
Defeating Authoritarian Leaders
Q: I wanted to ask a few questions about your work with Sharon Wolchik on the colored revolutions, entitled Defeating Authoritarian Leaders in Postcommunist Countries. How did that project emerge?
Bunce: It was an accident. Sharon and I have been close friends for years. We went to grad school together and we were at some conference, probably a Slavic conference. I said to her, “You know the weirdest thing happened.” And I started talking about the fall of Milošević in Serbia. And she said, “Well, that happened in Slovakia.” And then, right after the conference, the Rose Revolution in Georgia happened. We realized that we were looking at something that was very different than anything we had seen before politically - though it bore a family resemblance to the collapse of communism. This was before the Orange Revolution in Ukraine or the pivotal election in Kyrgyzstan. We said in virtual unison: we need to work on this run of elections that overturned authoritarian rule.
The other thing that pushed the idea of a joint project forward took place before the Bulldozer Revolution in Serbia. I was in Budapest and met this American who had just come back from Belgrade. He worked for USAID (may it rest in peace) on democracy assistance. He started telling me about the things he was doing, which included spending a lot of time in Serbia. When I saw him again, he was coming back from Egypt and Tunisia. All these weird little pieces involving democracy promotion, the defeat of authoritarian rulers, and the electoral empowerment of opposition leaders started coming at me and congealing into what I increasingly came to see as a cross-national wave of electoral and regime change in the region that involved the joint efforts of local oppositions and civil society organizations and the United States.
Finally, when we were in graduate school our advisor, Zvi Gitelman, had written an article that had influenced both of us a lot. This would be roughly 1972, but it stuck in the back of our minds. The title was: “The Diffusion of Innovation from Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union.” It was about economic reforms moving from country to country. There were people who worked on the diffusion of other things in the Political Science Department at Michigan. We were exposed, in short, to the concept of diffusion very early on. I had also worked as a graduate student for Jack Walker on some project on diffusion having to do with the spread of legislative innovations among the American states.
Q: You argue for what you call an electoral model of change where opposition groups unite, they run ambitious campaigns, they cooperate with civil society, and they conduct parallel vote counts among other actions. This helps to create a sense that change is possible and can be achieved by voting. How do you think this model holds up in the years since you wrote about it? To some extent authoritarian leaders have responded to it and taken actions to make it more difficult, for example, in Russia.
Bunce: Before we get into the details, let me just flesh out a bit the main arguments in the book. First, in competitive authoritarian regimes, elections are useful sites for shifting from authoritarian to democratic government. Second, there are some key factors that shape whether an electoral model can succeed - for example, a precedent of successful electoral challenges at the local level, the ability of the opposition to unite and to work closely with civil society groups, and the institutional capacity of the opposition to put out electoral counts ahead of the regime. Third, the success of the electoral model also rests on the formation of a coalition among local politicians/parties, civil society groups, U.S. democracy supporters, and “graduates” of successful electoral efforts in neighboring countries. Fourth, of all these participants, the U.S. players are the least critical - but they play an important role in helping diverse groups come together and training local activists in electoral methods. Finally, the diffusion of electoral revolutions rested on three drivers: the appealing precedents set by neighboring states (demonstration effects), contacts and coordination between groups that carried out the model and groups in other countries that want to do the same, and the assistance offered by the U.S. and to a lesser extent, the Western Europeans.
Q: I occasionally get emails from people asking how they can contribute to the democratization of their country. Your book is one of the few things that I can recommend to them. Do you think political science needs more practical playbooks like this? Are there any that you recommend?
Bunce: Yes, playbooks would be a great idea. But academics are perhaps not very well-suited to writing these kinds of pamphlets, flow charts and books. Activists are. One great example is Srđa Popović’s “Blueprint for Revolution”. Srđa was a key member of Otpor (“Resistance”), the youth resistance organization that played a major role from 1998-2000 in the fall of Milošević.
Q: Your work has implications for democracy promotion attempts by the US government and civil society. What is your view of those efforts? Have we done a good job?
Bunce: I think the biggest revelation to me in spending a lot of time on the ground, mainly abroad but also in Washington, D.C. is not how important democracy assisters are, but rather the opposite. They help people come together and develop skills to win elections, for example, but they certainly do not call the shots. They also try very hard to understand what is going on, what is possible, what is needed. What I never found on the ground was what critics of democracy assistance assume to be the case - for example, arrogant, pushy know-it-alls who look down on local political activists and politicians. I am very critical of US foreign policy, but various American players, such as the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute, were much more modest, engaged, and informed than I anticipated. They were facilitators, they were listeners, not lecturers.
Q: My sense is that authoritarian leaders also got a sense of what was going on. Perhaps reading your book, or just seeing what happened. And they have taken a lot of actions to make this more difficult.
Bunce: There were temporal limits to the electoral model. Authoritarian leaders learned from threatening precedents and developed ways to diffusion proof their regimes. We saw this in Azerbaijan and Armenia, but also in Russia and China (as I argued in a paper co-authored with Karrie Koesel). As some critics rightly argued, color revolutions in the neighborhood can have the effects of both reducing repression in one country and increasing it in another. But parts of the electoral model are nonetheless useful - especially starting local and building ties between electoral politics and the political actions of civil society.