Main transition strategies and its logic: Actors, alternatives and prospects

Abstract

In the article author deals with ideological background of two transition strategies under the influence of three grand ideologies: liberalism conservativism, Marxism. Two prevailing strategies of shock therapy and gradualism are revisited with reference to the geopolitical context shaped after the fall of communism and vividly marked with conflict of liberalism and conservativism during the last 15 years in East Europe. Neoliberal strategy of shock therapy provides renewal of the conditions that this very strategy tries to avoid, namely condition of rise of socialism and conservativism. On the other hand, occurrences in East Europe in the same period, marked with failures in efforts to establish free market privatization and free flow of capital in economy, are unfolding in well known logic of confrontation of grand ideologies. In other words, after the fall of Berlin wall we could notice the rise of liberalism on the global scene akin to the form known from the XIX and beginning of the XX century. Ex socialist countries under the pressure of IMF and World Bank policies are disposed to the reiteration of neoliberal experiment that with its economic political and social effects paves the way to the renewal of left and right ideologies. Author maintains that enduring of ideological conflicts presents great obstacle to the rational politics. In addition to that, authors in the social sciences, due to their sharp divisions along ideological lines mostly failed in its historical opportunity to analyze and predict events. They were mostly pleading for democracy, regardless of concrete political and economic conditions, and were neglecting the care for institution building. But due to the lack in proper institutional frame transition amounts to one misfortune more in societies already ruined with outcomes of socialism. Without institutional background free market amounts to the black market, privatization turn into great robbery as a form of primary accumulation of capital, and instead of capital we see readiness of political elites to sold out the countries and their resources, including leading the people into voluntary serfdom toward the West.