Conclusion: Quasi-Democracies as Fields of Corruption

Abstract

What we have defined earlier as“quasi-democracies” refers to specific patterns of voting behavior, election procedures, and institutional mal functioning that have shaped in the years of transition in most countries in SE Europe (but also beyond it). These transitory environments have generated own“critical mass”of corporate bound illegal control over state and public domains of power. The latter have deviated most Balkan societies from basic requisites of liberal democracy. They have shaped a culture of“oppressive arrogance”to differ from some“repressive tolerance”(Fetcher) relevant to modern societies. Resting on power-propelled voluntarisms of less rational (asocial) kind, this culture feeds on eclectically leased values of rest-totalitarism, irrelevant to the“embedded”norms of western democracy. Its“operators” perform in heterogeneous, volatile“fields of trust”and under different conditions. Though they behave in many ways like ordinary“quasi-particles”(in terms of modern physics) they have highly unusual properties. To brief here only but a few: — Qasi-democracies perform in the frameworks of parliamentary systems, this occurs however expressively;

• — They act through own networks of influence, which are not (necessarily) institutionally bound;

• — They inspire emerging NGOs, or even steer“grass roots”movements in their own public support;

• — They are hardly to be identified by conventional variables of representative democracy, as they feed on direct forms of influence.

• — They lack the“mass”of real politics, as generator of significant social change;

• — Still their“fields”control this societal change and propel it into desired directions (media and PR techniques);

• — Quasi-democracies interact with the public sector in“twisted”patterns (beyond mere asymmetry).

• — In their sociological sense (Weber) they spring from cognitive structures, which are irrelevant to the democratic mind.

The initial idea of“exhausted democracies”in the case of Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria and Romania have been very much inspired by W. Merkel’s theory of“defected democracies” during our mutual work at IPW Heidelberg (2000/1). The phenomenological aspects of some rapid loss of meaning of democracy in the post-war context of SE Europe has been later extended in a special chapter of“The Bulgarian Political Culture”, V&R unipress, Göttingen, entitled“Adjusting Quasi-democracies in SE Europe”(pp. 150-163) of which the essence is presented here.