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Subversive Institutions: The Design and the Destruction of Socialism and the State. By Valerie Bunce. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 206p. $54.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.
Postsocialist Pathways: Transforming Politics and Property in East Central Europe. By David Stark and Laszlo Bruszt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 284p. $55.95 cloth, $22.95 paper. These are two of the most important books on developments in Europe east of the Elbe since 1989. Both are based on deep knowledge of the region and are grounded solidly in contemporary social science theory. Most significantly, both present interesting new theories about what has transpired or is transpiring in postcommunist Europe.
Subversive Institutions explains the destruction of communist regimes, the unraveling of the Soviet block, and disintegration of the multinational states in the region as a product of the pathological design of communist institutions. What is positively pathbreaking about the book is the way in which it weaves together two heretofore disparate strands of the literature on postcommunist political development. Almost all other theories of the communist collapse have seen the disintegration of regime and state as different processes with different causes. Bunce's great innovation is to explain both with reference to the same independent variable, the design of Soviet-type institutions.
Bunce's argument is structured around a series of interrelated questions. First, why did Soviet-type socialism collapse? Why did the Soviet bloc as a whole collapse? Why did three multinational socialist states-the USSR, Yugoslavia, and Czecho-Slovakia-also disintegrate as states? And why was the disintegration in Yugoslavia so violent in contrast to the other two cases? Bunce explains all this with reference to two independent variables: Soviet-type institutions and changes in the political opportunity structures within socialist societies, or what she provocatively describes as "subversive institutions interacting with subversive opportunities" (p. 88). The method she uses is historical institutionalism, with a series of small-n comparisons providing the basis for logical inference.
Bunce begins the discussion of institutions with an assessment of socialism in its Stalinist incarnation. In this phase, the state was strong, society was weak, and the mobilization economy generated robust growth. Over time, these relationships changed-the state weakened, society strengthened, and the economy began to perform poorly. In brief, although I do not do justice to the subtlety of Bunce's argument,...