THE UNWANTED ASPECTS OF GLOBAL REFORMS

Authors

  • Dragan D. Lakićević Институт за европске студије Београд

Keywords:

capitalism, socialism, constructivism, institutions of civil society, law, property

Abstract

The main aim of the paper is to show that the main reasons for unwanted consequences of global reforms of post-socialistic society lay in the ambition to remodel the reality according an a priori schema. The institutions of Western societies served as blueprint according to which the societies have been modeled in the process of transformation from socialism to capitalism. Those institutions have emerged as a spontaneous result of a long social evolution of human behavior: therefore it is understandable that any attempt to establish them in entirely different social frames leads to unwanted consequences. It can be shown that informal rules of behavior act much stronger than the implemented formal rules and that the first determine the second. The author explores the thesis that in the process of transformation in the number of post-socialistic societies a new social phenomenon has emerged, which we can identify only by name with an ordered civil society, but in reality it represents pure improvising.

The author analyzes two main fields of global transformation of the post-socialist society: economy and legal order. He focuses his interest on the main structural deviation that appeared as the consequence of these grandiose endeavors. Taking the Balkan societies as the point of reference this analysis points out that the process of privatization in many ways ruined the very base of national wealth. Namely, the transformation of state or collective ownership into private one lead to the destruction of many industries, their fragmentation and subjection to the interest of Western companies. The main point of the discussion is that in the very nature of this process there was a danger of social misbehavior: urge to transform the collective owners into individual ones has been accompanied with pure human temptation of acquisition of wealth at any cost. Since almost no citizen of these societies could afford to buy the capital goods (banks, factories, hotels, buildings) at market prices, the only possible way was through some kind of robbery: forgery of the real values of firms, fake tenders, deceiving small auctioneers, etc. Due to the fact that it was once-in-a lifetime opportunity for many to obtain enormous capital within short time, the new social strata of private owners completely lost any moral constrains. In the process of underestimation of capital goods and their sale at symbolic prices the corrupted state administration took a part becoming the allies in the process of transformation of society. The immediate result was the devastation of national wealth, mass unemployment, destruction of huge industrial systems, and emergence of new financial elite. The production of goods becomes fragmentized and domestic firms exposed to the competition of well organized Western concerns and cartels.

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References

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Published

2015-06-30

How to Cite

D. Lakićević, D. . (2015). THE UNWANTED ASPECTS OF GLOBAL REFORMS . KULTURA POLISA, 12(27), 9–20. Retrieved from https://kpolisa.com/index.php/kp/article/view/1028

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Original scientific work

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