New Europe College Regional Program Yearbook 2001-2002

Communist Experience
SVETLANA STAMENOVA
The communist experience reinforced zero-sum social reasoning
through the shortage economic system based on soft budget constraints
and limited resources, material and symbolic goods (see Janos Kornai,
1985). That system bolstered the common understanding that resources
and goods are given in unchanged quantities, so that one person’s gain is
another person’s loss. It encouraged once again patron-client networks
based on the illegal exchange of goods and statuses.
The communist state was successful in the creation of a rationalized
etatic identity strongly dependent on the communist party-state as a
substitute for civic identity. The modernizing attempts of the communist
regime established a direct linkage of each person as an individual to
the state, allowing collectivities to exist primarily at the level of socialist
enterprises. Thus, the communist system did create a specific socialist
identity with its own career patterns and public achievements. Within
this type of socialist-etatic identity, each individual and community
directly depended on the state for the redistribution of both material and
symbolic goods.
Therefore, despite the forced modernization of the region during the
communist period, there were two factors which reinforced zero-sum
social reasoning. One is the shortage economic system, a limited goods
system that turned family and friendship circles and even the communities
of ethnic minorities into channels for the distribution of scarce material
and symbolic goods. The other factor determining the strength of zerosum
thinking under communism is the forced atomization of society and
the opaqueness of the public sphere over which the individual had no
control. Thus, the public sphere itself exercised power over the individual.
The fear and distrust created by the overwhelming ‘public’ sphere
represented by the party-state was damaging to the emergence of a civic
identity, a characteristic of developed democracies. Etatic identity was
accompanied by the total lack of civil society. Additionally, the forced
migration to the cities of large numbers of peasants, rather than dilute
their way of life and social reasoning, turned cities into semi-urbanized
areas (see Schopflin, 2000).
The unending zero-sum social reasoning typical of the region reinforced
in turn the existing weak civic identity and was supported by common
public distrust. Political distrust broke down only within close communities
like the family and friendship circles. Thus, the communist system, which
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