Who Won the Contest for a New Property Class? Structural Transformation of Elites in the Visegrád Four Region

Zusammenfassung

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This paper analyses the transformation of elites in the Visegrád Four countries (namely the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia). Drawing on a process-tracing analysis, it argues that the emergence of foreign-led economies in the late 1990s was intertwined with political processes in which domestic forces linked to foreign capital were transformed into major elite segments with considerable influence. This elite segment, the comprador service sector, proved to be politically active within the states in Central and Eastern Europe and organized various mechanisms of representation within the state and beyond.

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Auszug

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Who Won the Contest for a New Property Class? Structural Transformation of Elites in the Visegrád Four Region

In their seminal contribution on capitalist class formation in post-communist Central Europe, Making Capitalism without Capitalists (1998), Eyal, Szelenyi and Townsley concluded that it was too early to say who had won the contest for a new propertied class. The outcome of the process of class formation was unclear, and there were three major candidates to form the new propertied class: the technocratic-managerial elite, foreign investors with their 'comprador intellectual allies', and the new entrepreneurs who had started their own small businesses and hoped to expand (Eyal et al. 1998:5). Ten years later, we are in a position to identify the winner. I will argue that it was 'foreign investors with their comprador intellectual allies' who gained the upper hand in Central and Eastern Europe. More specifically, I claim that the domestic comprador forces rather than their foreign allies had (and still have) a major role in domestic politics. The rise of these forces was intertwined with the emergence of foreign-led economies and consolidation of the competition state.

Below, I first introduce my approach to the study of elites and relate it to major perspectives in this field. The class perspective I employ emphasizes the ways in which the political and economic structures condition the composition and strategic preferences of the elites as well as the power relations among them. Then, I deal with the political-economic developments in the region that structured incentives, opportunities and constraints for individual elite segments, which in turn shaped the political-economic evolution. In particular, I describe political-e...

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