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THE BUREAUCRATIC-PATRIMONIAL STATE IN GEORGIA: HAS THE “ROSES REVOLUTION” GIVEN IT A NEW LEASE OF LIFE?
David APRASIDZE
David Aprasidze, Ph.D. (Political Science), Hamburg University; lecturer at the Department of International Law and International Relations, Tbilisi State University (Tbilisi, Georgia)
Introduction
The post-socialist transformation phase that began late in the 1980s was a very special period in the context of the third wave of democratization that started in the 1970s. This was when the eastern military-political bloc headed by the Soviet Union fell apart. The post-socialist and especially the post-Soviet phases were marked by systemic transformations when the political system was undergoing the transition from authoritarianism to democracy and when the economic system was experiencing radical changes. The totalitarian institutions were not merely removed or reformed during the post-Soviet phase: new institutions were created. More important still, the social structures were involved in the process of complex transformation. As distinct from the post-socialist phase, the post-Soviet stage saw state development everywhere except the Balkans. Since 1990, the former Eastern bloc has acquired 22 new states. While Czechoslovakia fell apart peacefully, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union disintegrated amid bloody conflicts, the aftermaths of which can still be felt. These countries are developing under increasing pressure on the phenomenon of state as such from both the internal and external processes of globalization and fragmentation. It is generally recognized today that the state as an institution designed to regulate social processes is either “too small” and does “not have enough resources” to resolve contemporary problems, or is “too big” and “too clumsy” to deal with such global or universal challenges as international security, ecology, demography, etc. No state can handle these problems single-handedly. At the same time, the state institutions functioning in the radically changing social milieu cannot offer efficient mechanisms to deal with these issues. In these cases state (formal) institutions recede into the background to make way for informal institutions in the form of civil society or other informal public associations.
The Soviet Union was a totalitarian state in which the political system controlled social life. In turn the state institutions functioned under strict party control. This explains why many believed that the post-Soviet state should have “contracted its sphere of influence” and “retreated” from certain social spheres in order to move closer to the classical liberal state. The academic community eagerly discussed these ideas about state development across the post-Soviet expanse.
One cannot ignore the fact that similar comments were made about postcolonial developments. In the 1960s, experts favored “the strong state” as a moving force of social modernization and………………
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