Direct Political Control Research Articles

Ottoman supremacy and the political independence of the Balkan and Central European states

The article deals with the nature of the political relationship between the Ottoman Empire and the Balkan states. The various forms of dependency led to varied limitations on the functioning of these states, especially in the field of their international politics. The Ottoman Empire's relations with weaker, allied, vassal and subordinate states were shaped by the following factors: the historical period, the political and legal nature of the mutual relations, religion, the current political and military situation. On the basis of analysis of the sources and scientific literature, it has been shown that the Ottoman Empire was unable to prevent more or less official policy by its subordinate centres, as long as they had any state structures (even if they were only of a self-governing nature). In the 14th century, most of the Balkan states found themselves as allies and tributaries of the Ottoman Empire. The alliance with the Ottomans did not limit political relations with countries uncommitted against the Ottomans. In the 15th century there was a process of more and more clearly political subordination of the Balkan states which added two important elements to earlier financial and military obligations - investment and obedience. In the 16th century, it was extremely important to surrender to the King of Hungary John Zápolya under the authority of Sultan Suleiman. It also resulted in the Ottoman Empire taking over direct political control of the Romanian principalities: Wallachia and Moldavia. The Sultan was not able to fully control them, they often carried out independent political activities, connected with the Poland-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Holy Empire, and Transylvania. In the 18th century the process of building the Balkan nation states launched, albeit very slowly. In the 19th century, any independence, even very limited, was conducive to the rapid formation of their own independent statehood.

Tracing policy change: Intercurrent (de)politicisation and the decline of nationalisation in the 1970s

When faced with complex public policy challenges, policymakers grapple with a dilemma between assuming direct political control (politicisation) or creating ‘distance’ through arm’s length, often market-orientated governance arrangements (depoliticisation). We contend that both processes co-exist and operate simultaneously though empirically speaking, little is known about how they interact over time to inform policy change. We compare how the Heath and Wilson-Callaghan governments responded to this ‘recurrent dilemma’ in the Nationalised Industries during the 1970s. Drawing on new archival material, our research reveals that a desire to retain political control was repeatedly supplemented by attempts to embed depoliticising, quasi-market disciplinary mechanisms. Our focus on the ‘intercurrence’ of politicisation and depoliticisation, understood as the simultaneous operation of older and newer governance arrangements, reveals the long, complex lineage of privatisation, adding nuance to accounts that present it simplistically as part of a paradigm shift in the 1980s.

Public Management for Populists: Trump's Schedule F Executive Order and the Future of the Civil Service

AbstractFor over a century, the value of employee protections and limits on direct political control has been the sine qua non of a merit‐based bureaucracy for the US public service. Such assumptions are at odds with the desire of populist governments to exert control over institutions of governance. This tension emerged during the Trump administration. Trump's Schedule F Executive Order sought to transform much of the career public service into political appointees, allowing them to be removed if they were not performing according to the president's goals. In the chaotic last days of the Trump administration, the order was not implemented, but Schedule F offers both a glimpse of an alternative process for public management policymaking that excludes the field of public administration, as well as a potential harbinger for the future of the US civil service.

Backscratching in banks: political cycles in bank manager appointments

AbstractClose ties between politicians and businesses affect firms’ performance and political outcomes, and while direct political control over firms has been curtailed by tightened regulation, political connections remain ubiquitous in many countries. Yet, it is unclear through which channels these linkages are maintained in strictly regulated environments. I speculate that one such channel of political control over firms is politicians’ ability to influence corporate appointment decisions. To test the claim, I employ survival models that analyze chairpersons’ turnovers in 90 Spanish savings banks between 1985 and 2010 and find strong evidence for electoral appointment cycles: bank chairpersons are more likely to lose office shortly after regional elections and when new governments enter office.

Diplomacia, negocios y política: Ensayos sobre la relación entre México y el Reino Unido en el siglo XIX

During the decades immediately following Mexico's emergence as a sovereign nation, and indeed throughout the nineteenth century, one of the country's most important political and economic relationships was with the United Kingdom. British recognition was a key milestone in the consolidation of Mexican independence, British investment shaped the finances and commerce of the early republic, and British power served, for a time, as a potential counterweight in the region to the rising might of an expansionist United States. Considering the extent of British influence in Mexico during this period, it is perhaps unsurprising that nationalist narratives have tended to characterize Great Britain as one of the rapacious, interventionist foreign powers at whose hands the country suffered so greatly over the course of the nineteenth century. Such an interpretation would appear to coincide neatly with a significant literature on the “informal empire” that Britain is said to have maintained over areas in Latin America and elsewhere that were not under direct political control from London but that were nonetheless subordinated to British capital and susceptible to British pressure.In Diplomacia, negocios y política, an impressive collection of essays by Mexican and British scholars calls this view of the nineteenth-century relationship between the two countries into question. Between them, the contributors to this volume explore various dimensions of UK-Mexican relations from the time of independence through the Porfiriato, with attention not just to high policy, the geopolitical concerns of the British government, and the interests of major investors but also to such topics as the contributions of British merchants to regional economic development (discussed by Sergio Alejandro Cañedo Gamboa), the activities of British consuls in provincial Mexico (covered by Flor de María Salazar Mendoza), and the experience of Cornish immigrants in the mining sector (examined by Anne Staples). In addition to broadening our sense of the range of actors involved in the bilateral relationship, these essays generally advance the view that British policy toward Mexico during this period was guided more by pragmatism than by an imperialistic drive to achieve dominance and assert control. For example, Marco Antonio Landavazo argues that while the British government felt compelled by circumstances to recognize the independence of Mexico and other Latin American countries in the early 1820s, and did so with considerable ambivalence, it nonetheless eagerly capitalized on the opportunity that recognition offered to open a vast new field for trade. Pragmatism ruled the day, too, when diplomatic relations were restored in 1884 after a long interruption; as Silvestre Villegas Revueltas shows, though the problem of debts owed to the British holders of Mexican bonds had not been entirely resolved, the Foreign Office was keen to restore normal ties so as to ensure British access to commercial opportunities in Porfirian Mexico. Despite its standing as a global superpower, Britain was not always in a position to impose its will on Mexico, as Josefina Zoraida Vázquez highlights in her discussion of Mexico's rejection of British pressure to recognize Texan independence. And, seen from a more balanced perspective, even the most infamous British capitalists made real contributions to the country's development, as Paul Garner argues in his examination of the career of oil magnate Weetman Pearson. In sum, Will Fowler concludes, while there may be some basis for the view that Britain established an “informal empire” in the Southern Cone, the concept fits the case of UK-Mexican relations much less well. One obvious reason for this is the relatively early rise of the United States as a competitor for influence in the circum-Caribbean region, a development that prevented Britain from being a more significant actor in Mexican affairs, but the point remains that the United Kingdom can be seen as having played a more benign, less exploitative role in nineteenth-century Mexico than some other foreign powers.For contemporary British and Mexican diplomats, it is fortuitous that the recent trends in scholarship on the bilateral relationship reflected here coincide with an uptick in interest in strengthening ties (particularly those of the economic variety) between the two countries. Indeed, it is striking that this excellent volume is itself the product of a 2015 conference held under the banner of a UK-Mexican año dual, proclaimed by both governments and marked by state visits—of Prince Charles to Mexico (where he sampled Cornish-style pastes in Pachuca) and of Enrique Peña Nieto to London. Perhaps it would not be overly cynical to suggest a connection between the designation of 2015 as the Year of Mexico in the UK and the considerable interest shown around that time by British oil companies in the opportunities arising from the liberalization of Mexico's energy sector. With Mexico now seen as an exciting field for trade and investment for a post-Brexit “global Britain,” this reexamination and reassessment of the legacy of the nineteenth century is timely.

Ancient States and Infrastructural Power: Europe, Asia, and America ed. by Clifford Ando and Seth Richardson

Reviewed by: Ancient States and Infrastructural Power: Europe, Asia, and America ed. by Clifford Ando and Seth Richardson Walter Scheidel Ancient States and Infrastructural Power: Europe, Asia, and America. Edited by clifford ando and seth richardson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. 309 pp. This volume addresses the question of how—and how autonomously—the rulers and political elites of ancient states exercised power over the populations and territories to which they laid claim. The discussion is structured around Michael Mann's twin concepts of "infrastructural power"—the state's capacity to penetrate civil society and implement decisions—and "despotic power," which allowed its agents to act without consultation or negotiation with civil society constituencies. Premodern states are commonly considered to have been rather deficient in the first of these types of political power, and this is certainly true if conditions in more modern societies serve as our principal frame of reference. Yet, even many centuries ago, central authorities needed to be able to maintain a certain degree of control in order to sustain the force generation and extractive activities that were required for preserving their position and deterring rivals. This collaborative project is designed to explore state capacity empirically by means of a series of historical case studies that are theoretically informed by Mann's ideal types (as well as by some cognate theorizing), which have been largely neglected by students of the ancient world. It thus seems unhelpful that readers need to make it to chapters 2 and 4 to encounter actual definitions of Mann's key concepts, which Clifford Ando's introduction curiously withholds [End Page 447] (most notably on page 9). The geographic and chronological range is impressive: while the volume concentrates on western Eurasia—with seven chapters covering the Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, and Iran—one chapter each is devoted to early China and the Inca empire, an addition that is particularly welcome in view of the all-too-common exclusion of New World societies from what counts as "ancient history." Although one could always ask for more—early imperial China has much more to offer and pre-Islamic South Asia would surely have been worth a look – this is a promising start. If there is a common theme that runs through the volume, sometimes clearly developed and sometimes more obliquely implied, it is the evolution of infrastructural power over time. Seth Richardson, building on his earlier work on what he calls the "presumptive state," stresses the weakness of centralized state power in the Old Babylonian period: notwithstanding rulers' expansive rhetoric, territory was poorly defined and formal law was of little import. Even so, exaggerated claims to power helped build up real capabilities, which gradually surfaced in subsequent stages of Mesopotamian state formation. Emily Mackil paints a more optimistic picture for archaic Greece. Drawing on evidence that is centered on the island of Crete, she argues that early written laws that often concerned themselves with private property rights served to define territoriality and played a significant role in the emergence of small polities with growing infrastructural capacity. The historical record is (even) more tenuous for Western Zhou China, where—as Wang Haicheng maintains on the basis of elite-facing commemorative inscriptions on bronze vessels—direct political control was confined to the capital regions and most territories were run by aristocratic elites to whom power had been delegated. How this affected the scope of royal powers remains unclear. Turning to the much better documented mature Roman empire, Ando analyzes administrative attributions that drew rural communities into the institutional framework of nearby cities and imperial regulations that imposed road maintenance on local residents. These were among the mechanisms that extended the reach of the center by establishing both infrastructural and despotic power "in mutually constitutive ways" (p. 119). The evolutionary theme features very prominently in John Weisweiler's chapter in which he discusses the expansion of Roman governmental capacity in response to the shocks of the third century C.E. Marrying inclusive rhetoric with greater, if costly, penetration of civil society, a bundle of reforms amplified the despotic dimension of the emperor's persona, decentered established aristocratic elites, and drew in new constituents via fiscal, legal, and [End Page...

Adapting Accountability and Emerging Challenges: Contracting-Out in the Transport Sector in Switzerland, Norway and Sweden

Government reforms such as contracting-out continue to influence public service provision within infrastructure sectors. Contracting-out involves a detachment of the operators from political decision-making and the creation of intermediary procurement agencies. These reforms therefore tend to require an adaptation of how accountability is implemented. Previously, elected officials delegated their democratic authority (vested in them through public votes) to the public administration and thus more or less controlled service delivery. We address how accountability has been adapted in the context of contracting-out and the challenges that have emerged. We are primarily interested in assessing the ability of the political body to maintain control and the relationship between private service providers, citizens and customers. Using a multiple case study design, we select cases from the public transport sectors at the regional level in Sweden, Norway and Switzerland that represent different contracting-out models. We find that with increasing degrees of autonomy from the state (the two Nordic cases) there are both more adaptations to accountability and also more challenges emerge than the model with direct political control (the Swiss case). The central challenges arise between political- administrative and agency accountability with the involvement of a procurement agency. This has led to reforms to re-integrate the intermediary procurement agencies back into the country administration.

Adapting Accountability and Emerging Challenges: Contracting-out in the Transport Sector in Switzerland, Norway and Sweden

Government reforms such as contracting-out continue to influence public service provision within infrastructure sectors. Contracting-out involves a detachment of the operators from political decision-making and the creation of intermediary procurement agencies. These reforms therefore tend to require an adaptation of how accountability is implemented. Previously, elected officials delegated their democratic authority (vested in them through public votes) to the public administration and thus more or less controlled service delivery. We address how accountability has been adapted in the context of contracting-out and the challenges that have emerged. We are primarily interested in assessing the ability of the political body to maintain control and the relationship between private service providers, citizens and customers. Using a multiple case study design, we select cases from the public transport sectors at the regional level in Sweden, Norway and Switzerland that represent different contracting-out models. We find that with increasing degrees of autonomy from the state (the two Nordic cases) there are both more adaptations to accountability and also more challenges emerge than the model with direct political control (the Swiss case). The central challenges arise between political- administrative and agency accountability with the involvement of a procurement agency. This has led to reforms to re-integrate the intermediary procurement agencies back into the country administration.

Curse on This Country: The Rebellious Army of Imperial Japan by Danny Orbach

Reviewed by: Curse on This Country: The Rebellious Army of Imperial Japan by Danny Orbach Richard J. Smethurst Curse on This Country: The Rebellious Army of Imperial Japan. By Danny Orbach. Cornell University Press, 2017. 384 pages. Hardcover, $39.95. Many writers on Japan’s road to war against China, the United States, Great Britain, and their allies have oversimplified the origins of World War II. Some writers see a Japan with a ravenous appetite for conquest in Asia; others see a Japan bent on [End Page 267] defending itself and other East Asian countries against Western imperialism. Danny Orbach has written a splendid book in which he complicates our understanding of the road to war by demonstrating how a tradition of insubordinate military actions from below led modern Japan from the Meiji Restoration in the 1860s to World War II in the late 1930s. He advances three main arguments: First, cliques of lower-ranking officers such as the shishi—or, in his translation, “warriors of high aspiration”—forced their late feudal leaders into actions that led to the overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate in the 1860s. Second, former samurai such as Saigō Takamori and Etō Shinpei in the 1870s led their forces in rebellions against the very Meiji state that they as shishi had helped establish ten years earlier. And finally, the descendants of these men in the 1930s attempted to carry out a “Showa Restoration” in which they seized nearby territories like Manchuria that were viewed as essential to Japan’s existence and rid the Japanese government of politicians who allegedly put the interests of their political parties and capitalist supporters before the needs of Japan’s “Imperial Way.” These bourgeois leaders, who compromised with hostile (and more powerful) foreigners, needed to be replaced by men who worked for the “good of Japan and its emperor,” as defined of course by the rebels. Another strength of Or-bach’s book is that he describes each of these events in lucid prose. His book is a gripping read. Orbach also writes about how and why the army rebels got away with their insubordination. One reason was that army officers at all levels believed the Meiji Constitution of 1889 gave the army and navy general staffs the authority under certain (ill-defined) circumstances to report directly to the emperor, not through the prime minister or even the army and navy ministers. To the rebel officers of the 1930s, a mélange of elite staff officers who graduated from the Army War College and of non-elite officers who commanded troops on a day-to-day basis, the emperor personally commanded the army, and they knew best how to advise him. The army’s top leaders, themselves often former rebel officers, put up with this pressure from below because it made the army more independent: better, they thought, to have insubordination from below than nonmilitary control from above. Another reason was that the army’s leaders agreed with the goals of the rebels and were willing to put up with insubordination, that is, a weakened chain of command within the army, to achieve these goals. In the 1920s and 1930s, virtually everyone in the Japanese army believed that direct political and military control of Northeast China (Manchuria) was necessary for the armed forces to obtain the natural resources and the means of production they needed to build a total war state. Thus, when colonels Itagaki Seishirō and Ishiwara Kanji, elite staff officers in the Japanese army stationed in Manchuria to protect Japan’s legitimate treaty rights there, planned an incident to allow for the military conquest of Northeast China, the Tokyo commanders quickly overcame their fears of insubordination and gave them their approval. Or take the case of Finance Minister Takahashi Korekiyo. He was assassinated by rebellious army officers on 26 February 1936 ostensibly because of “widespread poverty in the country” (p. 229), when in fact his Keynesian countercyclical fiscal and monetary policies [End Page 268] after assuming his post in December 1931 were bringing the countryside to the highest level of prosperity in its history. But superiors put up with, and in some cases even applauded, the rebels’ actions, because...

From design to action: Papua New Guinea’s latest state-owned enterprise policy

This article addresses policy developments concerning the structure, operation and performance of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in Papua New Guinea. Of particular significance are reforms since 2014 which have highlighted important tensions between the country’s constitutional imperative of self-reliance and governance initiatives aimed at ensuring SOEs have a considerable degree of operational autonomy suited to their commercial objectives. The result of the reforms is a confused and contradictory set of institutional arrangements that have increased rather than reduced the possibility of direct political control over SOEs. While there are efforts to operate SOEs as efficiently as possible within current constraints, the political will to implement those parts of the reforms that have the greatest likelihood of improving the financial performance of SOEs appears to be lacking.

Analysing Chinese Civil–Military Relations: A Bottom-Up Approach

AbstractThis article examines Chinese civil–military relations using a bottom-up analytical approach and hitherto untapped sources, including interviews with military personnel in active service. It argues that traditional approaches to political control, which generally interpret the changing political–military relationship through military professionalism and institutional autonomy, miss out on important aspects and may generate erroneous conclusions. Here, focus is instead on the professional autonomy of the Chinese officer corps. Through an empirical study of the organization of military work at two of China's top military education institutes, the article illustrates how professional autonomy and direct political control vary, both between hierarchical levels and issue areas. This highlights the multidimensionality of both control and professional manoeuvrability and underlines the fruitfulness of including an intra-organizational perspective in order to reach better informed conclusions about political control and civil–military relations in today's China.

So close but yet so far? Labour Migration Governance in Italy and Spain

AbstractSouthern European countries have traditionally been perceived as weak immigration countries with inefficient legal entry avenues for foreign workers, high irregular migration rates and poor integration policies. In recent years, however, the adoption of more efficient control policies, new recruitment strategies and embryonic integration plans throughout the region has led to a change of paradigm in the governance of migration. And yet policy reforms do not seem to have produced the same results everywhere. The aim of this article is to enquire into possible explanations for the divergent paths of labour migration governance in Southern Europe, using Italy and Spain as comparative cases. As it will emerge, policy efficacy in the field of labour migration relates not only to the quality and consistency of policy design and implementation but also to factors that escape direct political control.

Hungarian-Russian bilingual schools in Hungary during the Soviet occupation (1945–1989)

Through the example of the establishment, functioning, and closing of bilingual schools during the Soviet occupation of Hungary, this paper aims to introduce this segment of public education in Central-Eastern Europe. In the period between 1945 and 1989, the learning of Russian as a compulsory subject was introduced, teaching other languages was restricted, and Hungarian-Russian bilingual schools were launched. The features of their establishment can be connected to political and professional power relations in different sub-periods within the structures of closed language policy. The objective in both states was the education of committed political elite. The first school was established by direct political control and closed because of the 1956 revolution. The second school was established in 1974, through professional and political compromises. The third school opened at the end of the period, as part of a top-down development project involving 14 schools. A number of European target languages (still including Russian) were introduced, which can be regarded as the opening up of language education policy. Relying on sources, documents, and personal recollections, the study aims to reveal the dynamics of the interrelations between controlled language education, University and the changes in Hungarian economic, social, domestic, and foreign policy in the given periods.

Political Control and Military Autonomy: Reexamining the Chinese People’s Liberation Army

ABSTRACTThe first part of this article discusses the most common theoretical and analytical approaches to the study of political control over the armed forces in China. It argues that the focus on professionalism and professionalization at the level of the military institution that is common in previous studies has certain limitations when analyzing Chinese civil–military relations. Against this background, the second part of the article suggests an alternative approach that places the Chinese officer corps and its professional autonomy at the center of analysis. Its benefit is demonstrated in a case study of quality control at China’s top three military education institutes. The study shows that autonomy and direct political control varies, which indicate a need for more nuanced discussions about military professionalization in China.

Political mosaics and networks: Tiwanaku expansion into the upper Desaguadero Valley, Bolivia

Ongoing debate about the expansion of the Tiwanaku state has centred on the extent to which it exercised direct political control over a continuous territory. Positions in this debate range from those that posit a unified Tiwanaku heartland comprising much of the Lake Titicaca Basin to those that conceptualize Tiwanaku influence as more circumscribed, and perhaps limited to the city itself. We engage this debate by assessing evidence for Tiwanaku expansion into the upper Desaguadero Valley, a region often argued to have been within the core area of Tiwanaku control. We present new evidence from four sites: Khonkho Wankane, Iruhito, Cerro Chijcha and Nazacara. These data suggest that Tiwanaku political influence was selective and focused on developing relationships with riverine communities in order to gain access to caravan circuits. Rather than a core area of continuous control, these processes created a shifting political mosaic rooted in fluid politico-religious webs.

Political Transition in Myanmar: Prospects and Problems

Since 2011, Myanmar has been undergoing a political transition that, in keeping with the Myanmar government's own claims, has been hailed by many previously critical countries as the start of a process of democratization. Myanmar has become a substantially more liberal country, and in particular its economy has been increasingly liberalized, away from the tight restrictions of the past. However, Myanmar's economic liberalization primarily benefits its entrenched and usually military‐dominated or linked elites, while its political liberalization may be just enough to satisfy an appearance of democratization without the army giving up real power. This article looks at Myanmar's process of political liberalization set against some of the literature on political transitions, and highlights some factors that could militate against extensive reform, much less democratization. It concludes by noting that while Myanmar's military has started to step back from direct political control, it still retains ultimate state authority.

The Shield of the Crown in England and Australia: The Need for Statutory Interpretation that Applies the Principle of Legality

This article charts anthropomorphic muddle of English common law in dealing with the and then turns to Australian experience in understanding ambit of Crown personality. The antipodean colonial period saw creation of numerous corporate entities designed to perform public or governmental functions, but fabricated to be removed from direct political control. These bodies, variously boards, commissions and corporations created by statute, worked hard at personating Crown, because such status brought bountiful advantages at law claimed by Crown. The judicial (and social) attitudes of deference to the in half century prior to federation left a lasting legacy that new terms of Constitution did nothing to shake. The appreciation of how shield of Crown is assessed has rolled into 21st century in a blaze of 19th century assumptions and a corresponding lack of logic and analysis of Australia's constitutional structure and statutory interpretive technique, in particular with regard to assumption of equality under law, and principle of legality.

GIS in urban cultural studies: reflections from the project on Republican Beijing

This is a reflective report of our historical GIS project on Beijing's urban culture during a culturally transitional and transformative period when the city operated not under direct political and ideological control by a supreme sovereign authority as the capital of an empire or an effectively unified nation-state. It is between the fall of the imperial order and before the Japanese occupation, 12 years before the establishment of the People's Republic of China. In this article, we will report what the project is about but we also have an underlying concern of what more GIS can tell us about historical Beijing as a city. This question will be addressed by drawing from the experience of our project. The article discusses the benefits gained and difficulties we encountered and our reflections upon a number of more fundamental theoretical issues. The scholarship contexts pertaining to the application of historical GIS to modern Chinese history and urban history are provided, against which a case of legal cultural development, especially that of the newly emergent legal profession, is discussed to illustrate in a spatial perspective the complex interplay between the legal heritage and transplants in Republican Beijing.

The Failure of the Guardians: Central Banking Reform and the Financial Crisis

There was a quiet revolution in central banking during the era of liberalization, which led to the delegation of power to a class of technocrat-guardians who were carefully buffered from direct political control. The credibility of this new central banking regime has been damaged by its failure to anticipate the financial crisis and the quickness with which the technocrats' views about the appropriate role of central banks was abandoned during the crisis itself. Central banking is only one of several areas in which the financial crisis has raised doubts about reforms that empowered technocrats and imposed disciplines on democratic institutions.

The Good Book and the Good Life: Bestselling Biographies in China's Economic Reform

AbstractThis article looks at currently bestselling biographies in urban China as popular histories of the national self from 1949 to the present. In their retrospective narrations of the Cultural Revolution and economic reform, they identify a reorientation of life away from ideological community and towards market rationality. I locate this shift also in the history of the publishing industry that produces them and analyse how publishing practices and values have changed from Mao to Jiang, to argue that a reconstitution of the “good” has been effected by the deployment of old rhetorical goals under structurally new conditions. Extended into the broader political arena, this suggests that institutional continuity in contemporary China masks a reconstitution of governance itself, from direct intervention and political control to administrative regulation and commercial competitiveness. Communist revolutionary ambitions are now redefined and fulfilled through economic success in commercial enterprise. Contrary to the prevalent notion that such couplings are contradictory and unsustainable, I argue that a mutually generative relationship currently exists between the two.